Thursday, March 8, 2012

Spinning



Dear Mom,
After the Kool-Aid dyed wool had been rinsed and dried, I couldn't wait to spin some of it. I had a silk hankie from KnitPicks that I wanted to spin and thought the colors of the hankie would look nice plied  with the darker of the two batts I showed you in my last post.
I hadn't spun a silk hankie before, or anything 100% silk for that matter, and probably won't ever do it again. It spun nicely, but those fine silk threads wanted to fly away and stick to everything. Give me a good scratchy wool and I'll be happy.
To make the hankies, silk cocoons are stretched out and layered on top of each other and then dyed. They are squares and about the size of a ...... hankie. Each layer is tissue paper thin- well, even thinner, really. Very pretty.
Here is what my bobbin looked like after I'd spun a few layers.

Once that was finished, I spun the wool batt and then plied the two together. I thought the bobbin of silk was very pretty and the bobbin of wool was, too. 

But plied together? In my opinion, the sum didn't equal the beauty of the parts. Still pretty, but a tiny bit disappointing. One thing I seem to be VERY slow to learn is combining colors to their best advantage, foreseeing how yarn will look once it has been plied together. I'll keep learning and experimenting. 
Love,
Kim

3 comments:

Christine said...

Ooooh, but I like it! I love all the colors. It really is interesting how some of the colors change when you ply them. I just bought a super colorful roving that I can't wait to spin. Need to finish my batch of plain old grey first though.

Sassafras and Winterberry said...

I once invested in a very cool merino. Then I spun it up. Well, merino likes to be spun fairly fine...and the "colors" turned to mud. Spinning is a journey, isn't it? I do like your yarn though...the colors do show through!
Hugs,
Courtney

thecrazysheeplady said...

I am not a good color person, but unless you "fixed" this photo somehow, I think your yarn is pretty.