Eggplant Novelty and Strawberry Crush handspun

Here is the purple-green Eggplant novelty yarn.  (The color of the far one is truer to the actual shade of purple.)  It's almost 8 oz, and approximately 158 yards.

(As you can see in the front skein, some of my plying was less than perfect, but I love it anyway!)

There was also green that was carded into the purple (the roving was purchased at Paradise Fibers with both colors already streaked together), but it almost looks orange in every picture that I take of this stuff.  Kind of frustrating.  Ah well.


I spun green Angelica on it's own as laceweight singles, then plied them with the very very firmly spun bulky Eggplant singles.  A the end of every draw as I was plying, I ran the green sparkly stuff back up and down to make a sort of extra-wrap/knot. 

I decided it would be easiest to ply in this way if the singles were coming from either side of me, so I put together a tensioned DIY Lazy Kate (using this link). 


Super-cheap (everything can be bought at your favorite/evil big-box store) but effective, and it can be used for either bobbins or a cop slid straight off of a drop spindle.

Here is the green sparkle ready to ply:


And here is the purple singles:

(Spun extra firm so that it wouldn't just unspin with all of the extra twist needed for this kind of yarn.)

This is what my plying set-up looked like.


This yarn will probably be end up as a skinny, short version of a Crossover Scarf  (Ravelry link here) or something similar to show off the yarn structure.

My pink/red batts are spun, plied, wet finished and the new yarn dried in the sun this morning.


The red is, of course, from the batch of Romney/Falkland Cross locks that I dyed a few weeks ago, and the pink is some Punta that I bought from Paradise Fibers and then dyed with Strawberry Kool Aid (one package to about 1oz of combed top).  Carded in is a good handful of red mix sparkly Angelica for extra fun.


I haven't weighed the skeins, but it's about 138 yds of bulky two-ply.

The slubs and neps in the wool encouraged thick/thin spinning, so I went with the way of the wool and didn't fight it at all.

I was doubting myself with the combination of colors (especially since the vibrancy of the tomato red was a dye accident), but I'm really happy with it now that it's all done.  I look forward to knitting with this!

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Learning to dye

On Monday, I took a little "field trip" with my fiber friends to a nearby farm for a dyeing day/class.

For some reason, dyeing has always intimidated me (what if I get it wrong?  What if I waste material?  What if I don't like my results?  What if I just suck at it?)  Plus, it's fun to be a consumer and buy pre-dyed things just because they're pretty.  However, after spending an entire day with these ladies, fearlessly dunking pound after pound of wool into the dyepots, I think that I could get used to it.  Really, it's pretty fun!











We had such a great time that we decided to make this coming Monday another dye day!  While I'm there, I'm also going to use my friend's drum carder to make up some batts with what we produced from last week.  I'm feeling glitzy, so expect to see lots of sparkle.  (Does anyone remember how I was feeling all earthy and organic with Daisy?  Well, with this baby, it's a tiny bit of a different story...)

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Spinning batts

As I posted recently, I just purchased a set of Hanks In The Hood batts from Paradise Fibers, so this week I decided to finally break into them and see what they're all about. I decided that with the Cozy Stripes, I really wanted to produce bulky, felted singles.



This was a good idea in theory, except that between my wheel and the fiber, it was a battle hard won. My singles ended up far more thick and thin than I would have liked; I was fighting to draft smoothly. I don't think that the preparation is to blame, I think that I was just trying to force something on a fiber that it didn't want to be (with a less than stellar wheel...how I miss my Lendrum...)

I realized that I needed to pre-draft as carefully as possible, leaving almost nothing left to do when I was actually inserting the twist.

This is how I handled the batt to deal with the color changes. Here are the last two colors unrolled on the couch (so sorry, the photos were taken last night in artificial light, so please excuse the bad colors and crappy setting).



First, I split the batt as cleanly as I could just before the two-color overlap.


Then, I drafted that out lengthwise (in this picture I would have grabbed the top and bottom of it from this angle), making it pretty much as thin as I would need it to be for spinning the bulky singles.

Next, I split the batt where the color overlap ends and it becomes solid purple again.


I made this into a rolag, and drafted that out into a long continuous strip, pulling from both ends...



Until it looked like this:



Then I lengthened out the remaining solid purple bit, and rolled them all into tidy bundles:



There's probably other ways to do this as well, but that's what seemed to make sense for this particular project, and for the way that I wanted the colors to come out (with Noro-like transitions between the solid, rich tones of the individual colors).

Once I was done spinning, I gently felted the skein in a few alternating soaks in cold and hot water, with a little bit of squishing involved (enthusiastically executed by the three-year-old this morning).

Here are my results. Definitely knit-able (or crochet-able), but as far as consistency in spinning, not up to my usual standards.



I would love to crochet this into a flower-motif scarf (I find the vintage 70's combo is almost ugly, yet strangely inspiring), but I don't think that I have enough yardage for anything crocheted (this is just under 23 yards).



So....what do you suggest that I do with it?



Usually, I would have sat down immediately to knit this up as soon as it was dry, but instead, I got out my tiny Golding LeFleur spindle and spun some metallic thread out of some green blend Firestar (100% nylon).



(It's almost impossible to capture metallic colors on camera.)

Then I spun some fingering weight singles out of this stuff:



(The grey is actually a green, but...well, I'm having color troubles this week, it would seem.)

It's Hanks In The Hood "Moss", and I wasn't sure how I would feel about the layered colors.

As it turns out, it's alternating colors as I spin, which is quite fun!



I'm spinning this as fingering-weight singles on my Golding Celtic Knot, and I will then Andean-ply it to be a dk-weight two-ply.

The original plan was to three ply it with the thread, but....well, I don't really know what I was thinking. The colors are shockingly bad together, see?


Anyway, I'll use the thread as a binder for something else, but I'm not sure what yet. At the moment I'm really enjoying the color changes in the batt, and it's proving to be a much more enjoyable experience alltogether than the Cozy Stripes spun on my HitchHiker. Funny, I never thought I'd hear myself say that (or "see myself type that"?) about spindle spinning...

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