Corriedale Skeins

First off, I just want to say thank you to everyone who bought my pattern. Y'all know how to make a girl feel both loved and creative. I'm thinking I might have to hold a contest sometime in the future to celebrate the event. But I haven't quite come up with the right idea yet.

At long last, I have finally finished spinning my madder/cochineal dyed Corriedale roving. I do love Corriedale, I love how it can go from lifeless seeming to delightfully sproingy with just a quick bath. I love how it feels when you spin it. i did not, unfortunately, love spinning this stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'm mostly happy with the result, but I would have liked it a lot better if I could have spun a consistant single from it. There were so many un-teasable clumps, little burrs of fiber and bits of VM that eventually I just gave up and decided that if this stuff wanted to be rustic, it was going to be rustic. It kind of took all the joy out of spinning it. By the end, I just wanted to be done with the stuff.

My initial desire was to create a 3 ply yarn. Which I did. But I ended up with 1 empty bobbin and 2 that were about 1/3rd of the way full, so I used those to make a 2 ply. And then I had some single left over on one bobbin. It seemed like a made-to-order blogging opportunity.

The Three Skeins: Papa Skein, Mama Skein and...oh, Wait, Wrong Story

Thanks to my big bad Lendrum plying head and bobbin I have a 440 yard 3 ply skein. It's roughly DK weight (about 14 wpi) but it drifts into sport weight every now and again. 440 yards is definitely enough to do something with. After doing the washing-after-spinning thing I forgave this fiber a little bit for being such a pain to spin. It's great color and has lovely subtle heathery variations that make me think this yarn should do something that involves cables.

I even have a reasonable amount of the 2 ply skein -- about 200 yards of that (which makes it clear that somehow I didn't balance my bobbins very well). The single? Well, not very much left of that, which is okay, because I'm not exactly sure what I would do with more of that any way.

1 Single, 3 Yarns: Top: 3 Ply, Middle: 2 Ply, Bottom: Single

The more I spin 3 ply yarns, the more I like them. They are a bit more work than a two-ply, but I just love how they look. With a yarn like this, you get a lot more sense of depth and subtle heathering. Amazing that you can combine three scrawny looking singles to get a happy fluffy three-ply yarn. By the way, this picture is probably the best representation of the true color of the yarn.

3 Ply Variations

When you look at it this way, it almost looks like professionally spun yarn. I keep picking it up off my desk to squeeze it and admire the gentle blending of the colors. This project has definitely re-inforced one thing for me: I like spinning mostly solid colored fiber. Up to this point, I haven't figured out any real good uses for some of my wild colored hand-painted stuff. What that means is that I'm accumulating more yarn (even if I am not buying much) but not doing anything with it.

But this? This I can imagine knitting into something. I've been wanting to make that Flower Basket Scarf from Interweave Knits that everyone was making a season or so ago. I'll have to do a test swatch, but I think this may knit up pretty close to the recommended gauge. And at 440 yards, I should have just enough -- if the pattern is to be trusted. I need something to get me really insprired to knit something besides socks...