Yarn: August 2005 Archives
I'm spinning like a fiend right now -- all my drop spindles are whirling as fast as I can make them go. If I could make two spindles go at once, you know I would be. Dyeing wool is painting on an empty canvas, but it isn't a finished product, at least not to me. The real magic doesn't start to happen until the wool becomes yarn, and until the yarn becomes a fabric.
This weekend, my goal was to get the first of the Sunset rovings to a two-ply yarn and to get my Hawaiin Shore roving (which I have taken to calling "Blue Hawaiian" in my head) spun into a single. I accomplished both goals. Each is it's own story, however. And since the Blue Hawaiian remains to be plied, the Sunset gets to the blog first.
Unlike the spindle shot from Friday, this image shows off all the colors in this single. Truth be told, I wasn't really looking to have all that pinky stuff in the yarn. I also wasn't intending to concentrate it all in one place. I wanted a more random color distribution, but this happened because of the way I split pieces off the roving as I spun. I split the roving in half, width-wise and didn't realize that the sides weren't balanced very well. As a result, most of the deep gold ended up on one side and most of the pinky stuff ended up on the other. Lesson learned. I will now prepare the whole roving for spinning before starting and randomize the pieces a bit better in the future. I'll probably also stick to horizontal instead of vertical stripes. I dyed this roving this way as a learning experience, and i can definitely say that I learned something from it!
This is just another gratuitous pretty yarn shot. I thought it looks so nice and happy in that center pull ball. It also gives a better idea of where the individual stretches of color are concentrated.
Here's the yarn after being two-plied. I like the colors in this a great deal, but would like a little more gold, a little less pink. I did a wraps-per-inch measurement and get about 23 wpi , which makes it a fingering weight yarn. It doesn't really seem that fine to me, but I can see it knitting up nicely on US size 3 needles. Ninaclock asked on Friday what I was going to do with a mere .5 ounces. Well, intially I wasn't really planning to do much with it at all besides see if I liked the result. But this stuff calls out to be knit into something, I think. I'm wondering if I have enough for a small scarf/lacy neck warmer....
Makes me glad I took notes and know how to reproduce the colors!
So now I have to think about what I might knit up with it.
