Growing up, one of my favourite places to visit was the Queen Charlotte Islands or as it is now called, Haida Gwaii. My mom was born on the island and grew up there. It was place we would visit to see our extended family and to enjoy the quiet beauty of the landscape. As a kid, I remember taking the long hike out to the Pesuta Shipwreck and being in awe of it. It’s a pretty amazing sight to behold as you walk along the beach to find this huge shipwreck.
This photograph was taken when Eric and I visited my grandpa back in 2007 and is one of my favourites of the wreck.
When I’m trying to figure out what colours to pull out for dyeing, I convert my images into a pixelated version of the original. This allows me to see blocks of colours, rather than the subject. For this colourway, I decided to focus on the browns, adding just a little bit of blue for interest.
This was what basic club looked like this month. It was dyed on Cheviot, which is known to make really sturdy sock yarn!
For the first time, since we started club back in February, we had a subscription to luxury club, which looked like this. It was dyed on our organic Polwarth/silk blend, which I blended with a little more silk and some silk noil. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.
For my Cheviot spin, I spun really fine singles with a lot of twist, and then chain plied them with even more twist. This was my first time spinning Cheviot and I really enjoyed it. It’s definitely a coarser wool than I typically spin, but it’s produced a really solid feeling yarn. I’m looking forward to knitting myself some socks with it.
I decided with the Cheviot that I would simply spin all of my rolags in succession, starting from the blue end each time. It was easy to keep the colours separate when I was chain plying, as there’s such a definition between the colours.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this knits up. I have about 150 yards of three ply from the 70 grams I spun, so it won’t be enough for a full length pair of socks, but I think some little anklets will be perfect!
For the luxury club, I only kept about 10 grams to spin. I’ll be the first one to admit, that I love a smooth spin, so there was a lot of letting go with this spin due to the silk noil. With this one, I decided that I would spin the rolag from one end and then make a centre pull ball and ply it back on itself. I knew this would create a really barber poled yarn, but I wanted to be able to show the contrast between a couple of different ways of spinning the rolags.
Can you see the difference between the two yarns?
I loved these colours so much, that I decided to make it one of my new hand painted braids. These were ready for ANWG back at the beginning of the month and were well received! They will be added to our Etsy shop soon 🙂
Have you spun up this month’s club yet? I would love your feedback.
Until next time, Happy Spinning!
~Katrina
