Laurel Love

Carol Greenwald

Spinning Designer Yarns leads spiners into the world of super-soft luxury fibers, textured effects, and the dyepot's miracles. Learn to apply dye to fibers in new and exciting ways, predict now novelty yarns will look in finished fabrics, blend fibers for color and texture effects, and spin singles and plied yarns in ways that will put more zip in your spinning-and your weaving, knitting, and crocheting. Corespun, boucle, snarl, knotted, and tufted yarns will become part of your spinning repertoire, and you'll rediscover the excitement of spinning all over again.

This is what Creative Spinning by Alison Daykin could have done, if it had been more focused. This is an excellent introductory guide to a number of advanced spinning techniques that is designed to inspire and make you curious to try new ideas and attempt the various options presented. Instead of providing patterns to pre-set designs, Varney gives you the tools to take the ideas presented and make your own designs, allowing you to express your own creativity. There was still a bit much of the basics for what I would consider a book with an "advanced" technique title, which wasted valuable space. Leave the beginner pages to the how-to-basics books and give us more of the good stuff we're paying for here! ( )

I appreciate this books technical details and brevity. I would have preferred a little more detail and a little more creativity; much of what Varney considers designer yarns seem fairly every-day to me (simply using silk and plying it with merino is not innovative in my mind, nor is spinning slub yarns). The suggestions on creating core yarns, and using commercial yarns as plies are welcome, as is the information on making boucles and on including bits of extra material in plied yarn. I appreciate Varney's recommendations to know the technical aspects of your spinning (angle of twist, tpi, wpi, and so on), and her suggestions on experimentation. The book has a fairly extensive section (relative to the total size of the volume) on dyeing for preferred effect. ( )