So, a quick recap. I have a lot of fleece, roughly graded into seven different classes of quality. Three of these classes might be suitable for spinning for a sweater to be worn at least partly next to the skin. I am reasonably confident that, given enough pots of tea and a large enough supply of old horror flicks, I can spin enough double knitting weight yarn to knit a simple, circular top-down sweater. (Top down sweaters are more forgiving of you not knowing your exact guage before you start, and my guage can vary from skein to skein). Is there anything further I should consider before I start spinning up samples?
One area I have really not got my head around yet is colour. When I first started to spin, once I had spun a few singles then I would ply them together, irrespective of colour. White, black, brown and grey yarn was mixed together and didn't actually look too bad. Whoever designed sheep clearly put some thought into not making them in clashing colours. But then I started to mess about with dyes. I tried dying skeins of yarn and got a lot of rather streaky, uneven cakes of yarn out of it. With careful colour combining, most of them were successfully made into hats, but a sweater is a bigger project and a poor use of colour can be disastrous.
I consulted more experienced dyers, who recommended I dye the fleece first and then spin it. I dyed about a kilogramme of fleece in various colours and learned the following:
a) Some of my fleece stash was badly washed and still contained lanolin, which acts as a resist to dye;
b) Some of my fleece stash had been felted during washing (whoops!);
c) Some more fleece got felted during the dyeing process;
d) Dyed fleece loses some of its softness, and
e) Even with weighing out the dye powder and the fleece, I couldn't hit the same colour in different batches.
I didn't want to increase the wasteage of fleece in this project any further by having to reject batches of fleece that came out of the dye-pot the "wrong" colour. I therefore needed a colour scheme that could include random quantities of fleece in wildly different tones and hues.
Given the fleece that I have, the simplest colour scheme is to make a lot of rolags,
each in one solid colour, throw them into a box and then pull them out at random and spin them. This gives a pleasing, if shouty loud, "bag of sweeties" colour scheme. But how to ply it?
Three possibilities sprang to mind. I could N-ply or Navaho ply it (i.e. make a 3 ply yarn structured as a crochet chain, which preserves the colour sequence, or I could ply two shouty loud singles together and get.......oh. It turns out you get a sort of nasty, mustard green.
I then tried plying a "bag of sweeties" single against an undyed white single. This had three benefits: the white calmed down the colours to a sort of pastel tone, the undyed wool softened the overall handle of the yarn, and it halved the total amount of dyed fleece I needed to use, reducing the overall cost of the project.
I spun and plied several bobbins of this "candy cane" mixture, and was pleased to find that the colour scheme stayed fairly consistent across the whole batch. It looks like this is a recipe that scales up quite easily.
Next post: spinning worsted, woollen or in-between?
No comments:
Post a Comment