Can You Ply Commercial Yarn Together?

I am still learning how to crochet and I am finding that it can be difficult to work with my hand spun yarn because I am not always the most consistent spinner. Because of this, I like to use commercial yarn to practice. It is easier to use and much easier to come by! I received some relatively "free" wool yarn that I was using to practice making a hat. It was a four-ply fingering or baby weight yarn. I was getting rather frustrated with the yarn because it kept splitting and snagging and there were little pulls all over my project. It also looked terrible to boot! I ended up buying some bulky weight acrylic yarn in black and crocheted a hat quite quickly that I was very happy with. I still, however, had quite a bit of this perfectly fine wool yarn that I just really didn't like working with. I much prefer a thicker yarn and the splitting was driving me a little crazy. The yarn was "S" plied and I had heard that "Z" plied yarn can be easier to work with. It would make sense then, that I could double up the yarn and consider each yarn as a "ply" and make a 2-ply Z twist yarn. I asked a more experienced member of my spinning group if this was a reasonable assumption and she said that yes, I could definitely do this.

I used my yarn winder to make two cakes of yarn. (They were more equal in size than the ones pictured.) The original yarn was S plied so, working from the center pull of one of the yarn cakes, I spun the yarn onto a bobbin using the same "S" or counter clockwise twist. Basically, I over twisted it. My yarn cake filled most of a bobbin. I then did the same with the second yarn cake, winding it onto a second bobbin. It did take a while to over twist the yarn onto the bobbin but it was pretty relaxing and it definitely helped me to develop a rhythm to evenly distribute the twist. I did this process over two days but it probably took me about an hour per bobbin since I didn't have to worry about drafting at all, just pulling equal amounts of yarn and trying to get equal amounts of twist into my sections before I fed them onto the bobbins.

Once I had two bobbins of over twisted "S" yarn, I plied them together going the opposite "Z" direction or clockwise. I wouldn't call my end result balanced, but it definitely looked more like something that I could work with. Since I had never done this before, I wasn't sure how much twist to add. I also wanted to make sure that it wasn't so "splitty" when I went to crochet with it so I may have gone a bit overboard. I continued on filling another bobbin with my final yarn and then put one of my hanks into a warm bath to soak and bloom.

I left it in the bath for about a half an hour and then I put it through the "drain and spin" cycle on my washing machine. I thwacked it several times to set the twist and hung it up to dry overnight. I was quite pleased and somewhat surprised with the final result.

On the left is the hank that has been washed and thwacked a few times and on the right is the energized hank before washing and setting the twist.

Also for comparison, the original yarn was about 10 WPI or wraps per inch, and the new yarn is about 7 WPI.

The final test was to try and crochet with my new yarn. My original project was supposed to be a hat in rib stitch single crochet. Basically single crochet going into the back loop only. I clearly didn't get very far before I gave up.

For my new project, I wanted something similar that could be finished quickly. I decided on an ear warmer/ headband. The new yarn was much easier to work with. My picture here looks a little sad but like I said, I am still learning. I made, better yarn, not magic yarn.

Here is my final project. It worked up very quickly. I tried it on and I don't like it at all and I will never wear it. Not even to go feed the animals. But, now I know. And I still have a bunch of yarn left over, both the original yarn as well as my new and improved yarn. Maybe I will make a baby blanket later on.

I will say that I learned a lot from trying this. I would definitely do it again if I needed a thicker yarn or if I wanted to make a yarn more crochet friendly.