March has been a crazy busy month. Fibres West ran on the 17th/18th and the weeks (honestly, months!) leading up to it were packed with dyeing and carding. There were times where I questioned my sanity of running a fibre club in amongst this chaos! However, I was having so much fun, that it was pretty easy to do it!
This month, I took my colour inspiration from this photograph taken several years ago while out walking with friends. Brunswick Point is a really easy trail not too far from me. For me, this colourway is hopeful and filled with the promise that spring is truly just around the corner.
I chose to pick up on the slight yellow in the clouds, the blue of the sky and the green of the grass. This is approximately 50 grams of club, dyed on 100% Targhee. Targhee is one of my latest absolute favourites to spin. It’s just so bouncy!
This month, I decided that it would be fun to spin up each of my four little bumps differently! I started off by spinning the first bump worsted with a short forward draw. My goal was to try and draft a little bit from each colour, so that I would create the effect of a combo drafted yarn.
After I was finished spinning my singles, I wound a centre pull ball and since I couldn’t find my nostepinne, I grabbed the next best thing, a chunky knitting needle!
I then plyed from this little ball, using either end of the ball to make a 2 ply yarn.
And this was my worsted spun, two ply.
Next up, I decided to spin a singles yarn. When I was spinning this yarn, I just worked my way back and forth across the top of the bump. So I get very distinct sections of blue, yellow and green, with a few marled sections in between!
For the third bump, I split it into colour sections and then split each of those colour sections in half. I spun them in succession from blue to yellow to green.
In order to keep the colours as “clean” as possible, I navajo plyed this yarn.
And finally for my last bump, I thought it would be fun to spin it woolen! I used the same technique to make a centre pull ball as for the worsted spun two ply. When I was drafting this fibre, I pulled it straight from the tip, catching whatever colour came along. As with the worsted spun sample, this one has some lovely sections of marled yarn, but it also has some of the very distinct single colour sections that I got in the singles yarn.
I’ve always maintained that you can never judge a skein by the way it looks before you finish it. These are all the bumps fresh off the niddy noddy! From top to bottom, singles, navajo plyed, worsted spun, woolen spun.
And these are all of them, washed and skeined. You can see how much this yarn plumps up when it’s washed too! From left to right, singles, worsted two ply, woolen two ply and navajo plyed. I ran out of time to knit up swatches of these yarns to compare the end result. I’ll try to get it done in the next few days and will post the results when I have them!
How did you spin up this month’s club? I’d love if you’d share. We have a chat thread over the in Wool n Spinning group on Ravelry, which you can find here. Until next time, happy spinning!
