Last Yarn of 2011

I've been working on a technique my friends Erica and Jillian have been encouraging me to try. Stop me if you've heard this one, but you take 2 different rovings/tops with at least one color in common, strip them down to about the width of your thumb and then hold them together while spinning. This creates a barber pole effect in the single that becomes dots of color when plied. 


It is amazing to me that when I search my stash I find some stuff that makes me think, "Why on earth did I buy this?!!??" Either my color sense has changed, or the fiber feels like something I don't want to spin anymore, or someone gave it to me and I didn't have the heart to rid myself of it.

Karaoke & Milk/Seacell/Wool fibers

Either way, I found these 2 fibers in my staff at the end of last year. 


On the left we have Karaoke in the Mermaid colorway. Karaoke comes to us from Louet and uses the leftovers from tofu production - yes, one more product made from soy. I had 4 oz and it cost me $11 for the bundle.


I don't know if you can tell in the photo, but the fiber takes dye beautifully. It is lustrous and rich. However, the Karaoke, it clumps like nobody's business. Stripping it will help with the clumpiness, but destroys the brilliant color by breaking it up. Since I was going to strip the fiber anyway, it was a great candidate for this technique.


The fiber on the right was dyed by Creatively Dyed Yarns (CD). This is made from 20% milk protein/20% seacell/60% wool. I found this amazingly soft, but the colors no longer spoke to me (too much white). I had 4 oz and it cost me $24. I figured the softness of this would counteract the clumpiness of the Karaoke and all the white would brighten it up. The common color is a deep purple that is a large section in the Karaoke and just random 1.5 inch bits in the CD.

First single

I split the fiber in half and set one half aside. Proceeded to strip the other half, making sure there were an equal number of nests. Then I started. Here we have the first single. Again, apologies for my camera, the left side of the photo seems to capture the colors the best. The deep green from the Karaoke really comes through in the single, although overall, I think it looks very, very purple.


I took up the half of the fiber that I had set aside, stripped it and spun it as another single. There's no need to show you another picture the second bobbin looks remarkably like the first. Although there was a lot more white in the second half of the bundle, so it was lighter than this first single.

2-ply yarn

The resulting yarn looks like this. Excuse the blurriness, but this shows the layout of the colors the best of all the pictures I took. It is quite soft and while overall the deep colors have muted to lavender there are several pops of deeper color peeking through. It's a serviceable yarn and I haven't decided what to do with it yet, it my be cast into the basket with other purple yarns to become something for my Sassy, the lover of all things purple.




fiber: 50% soysilk/30% wool/20% milk protein/20% seacell
weight: 7.6 oz
length: 336 yards
weight: worsted