Apparently I’ve been spinning a lot! :o)  I’d better catch up on some writing or I’ll end up far behind!  Over the weekend I spun up another 2 braids but I’ll split them across 2 posts for easier referencing later.  The first one was this Shetland and Tussah Silk mix, again from The Shepherd’s Hut.

Here’s a rare photo of me actually doing the spinning as Amy was quite insistent on being a part of the process!  She seems to have decided that a slightly wobbly lap is better than not getting to sit on me :o)

The first half I just gave a little pre-draft and then started spinning.  This was really easy to spin and was making a very consistent thickness, even with Amy in the way!  The silk has a beautiful sheen to it and makes the fibre feel soft.  I split the half down the middle and spun both from the same end and you can see there are spot where the colours lined up – particularly that pink stripe in the middle :o)

For the second half I grabbed my blending board again :o)  I know I can get about 25g on my board comfortably so far, so I again split the fibre in half lengthways to make sure all the rolags had a similar colour mix.  I just added the fibre straight from the long length onto the board, putting the blue patches at the bottom, the bright pink ones at the top, and purples in the middle.

The resulting rolags have clear colour separation in them and somehow look nothing like the braid I started with!  I love how shiny these look thanks to the silk :o)

To get larger sections of the colours I opted to spin the rolags in alternating directions.  The first from blue to pink, the second from pink to blue, and so on.  This has given more clearly defined sections of colour in the final yarn.  Although at the same time, by blending them, the colours are more muted – the bright pink has been calmed down a little.  I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not ;o)  It was a little harder to spin from the rolags, but that might be because I’m not as used to them yet.  I was pre-drafting the rolags through habit, and tried spinning straight from them for the second half which was actually easier.

Here are both skeins before washing to show the difference in colours.

I had a little problem washing them with some dye leakage.  I had a very blue sink!  After 9 washes I think they’re okay now :o)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2019 at 11:15 am and is filed under Spinning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.