I did a lot of spinning this year, particularly during the summer (when the tour de fleece happened). The first yarn of the year was the blue-teal-pink sock yarn that I already posted about. Following that model, I started spinning up dyed roving for socks. I had these two rovings in my stash, with no planned project, both from Three Waters Farm, Green Sweetness ( a 80/20 Merino/Tussah silk blend) and Fiery Gems (85/15 Polwarth/silk blend). I really like Three Waters Farm’s roving-it comes in beautiful colors, and is a joy to spin. So, when I realized that these two braids wouldn’t last me long, I ordered up a whole bunch more. I started the ‘cluster of grapes’ Finn roving immediately.
My mom also dyed a fair amount of roving this summer, and I spun up 8 oz of a purple/yellow/green blend (blue faces Leicester) and am in the process of spinning a rainbow blend (merino). With these I decided to split the roving lengthwise into several pieces. I weighed each bit, and then tried to determine a spinning order that would result in the most matched yarn possible, by spinning segments of similar weights on two different spools. You can see the first roving all laid out waiting for me after I split it into twelve pieces (plus a bit of fluff that fell off the end of the initial roving). I’ve got quite a bit more roving from my mum, which should keep me busy for a long time! Particularly since apparently my wheel can be distracting in video chats because of the background noise, so I’ve switched back to mostly knitting.
After spinning up the colorful single, I then have been plying these with the same shetland/alpaca/nylon blend that I used in the last sock yarn. I do a two ply of the colorful and the grey, and then I chain ply that two ply for a final yarn that is six ply, half colorful and half grey. The result seems to be pretty sturdy and knits up very nicely for socks. I don’t yet have any long term data on sturdiness, but the more complicated pying structure (and also the nylon) should help with that. It’s also a fairly dense yarn.
My other spinning project was a blend of a whole bunch of fawn colored fiber that I was using up. The first ply was a 60/20/20 alpaca/silk/merino blend, and the second was 100% baby camel. I made a two ply, one of each, for about a worsted weight final yarn. I’m working on knitting it up into a shawl. The delay has been that a) I think I’m allergic to the camel fiber, and b) I determined that there was a much better construction to what I’m doing. Still, it’s almost done, just waiting for me to do the last 10% of knitting it.
