Needles on the Move

It’s funny how you plan things, and then you somehow get taken in a completely different direction. I had thought to spend quite a bit of time practicing and playing with loop, coil, boucle etc. yarns, but then I bought a pair of fine cloth carders at P&M and suddenly I just wanted to blend everything in sight!

We did do a bit of fancy plying - some curly Wensleydale and knot yarns, I’m not sure what happened to the samples though. Maybe they’re under the sofa at Sarah’s still… In any case, we still had a lot of fun, and looking over the samples, we did do quite a bit - I hope you find them interesting!

Some of these are mine, and some are Sarah’s. She tied hers neatly into butterflies so it’s easy to tell the difference. We spun and plied them mostly on spindles, it’s definitely my favourite way of producing a bunch of samples in a short time.

Merino colour blends:

We were working on an idea here about achieving depth of colour with the blends. Abby’s tutorial on tweed yarns a while back got me thinking about the effects you get when you combine various colours. We followed a kind-of formula here by mixing complementary colours and then adding a teeny bit of a contrast for added depth.

Merino/Mohair blend:

This is about 50/50 I think, although I didn’t measure it really. Once again, the difference in the colours adds depth to a yarn that a solid-dyed colour doesn’t have.

Mohair/Silk blend:

This is the same mohair blended with some dyed tussah silk, once again, about 50/50. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but the yarn turned out lovely! I’d really like to explore this blend further.

Alpaca/Bamboo (?) blend:

Not quite sure, this was one of Sarah’s. I’ll have to ask her about it. Yummy yarn though.

Combed Wensleydale:

Just for fun, I combed some locks that I had brought with me. It was fairly hard going, and a lot of waste, as the locks were a bit matted. But the resulting prepped fibre was a dream to spin and made a lovely lustrous yarn.

I’ll definitely be doing this again, maybe I’ll have a sampling party at my house one day :-)