I’ve loved going through some of our old photographs to find inspiration for club. This month’s inspiration came from a trip we did as a family a couple of summers ago. I love the play of the green river running through the brown and grey of the surrounding cliffs. It’s just such a pretty contrast.
This month’s basic club was Perendale and I created gradient batts. I used two shades of each of the colours you see to create a little more depth in the colours.
For Luxury club, I blended the Perendale with cultivated silk and silk noil. I decided that I would only spin luxury club this month, so this was my batt.
When I went to spin it, I opened it up and decided that I would spin from one side of the batt to the other by striping off sections from one end and then ply it from a centre pull ball. Here’s how it looked when I opened it up.
I spun the batt using long draw, and not worrying about the little clumps of noils. I love how crazy it looks when it’s fresh off the niddy noddy with lots of active twist.
And then how calm it becomes after you’ve given it a good soak! Depending on how I spun my yarn and what I want it to look like when it’s done, I change the way I finish it slightly. In this case, I soaked the yarn in hot water for 20 minutes, squeezed out some of the water, gave it a quick snap and then thwacked it on the side of the tub for a couple of minutes. I’ve found this really causes the yarns to bloom and settle into their twist.
As I plyed from a centre pull ball, you can see that the yarn has become a gradient from the green to the brown to the grey and no longer reverses out with green in the centre. When you have a batt like this, a centre pull ball for plying is a great technique to make a two ply gradient.
A lot of this spin was me letting go of the need for “control” and “perfect” yarns. I typically spin really fine, worsted spun yarns and generally don’t enjoy a lot of texture in my yarns. However, I really did have a lot of fun with this one and I do love how the yarn turned out. The Perendale is a little on the coarser side, so it’s not next to the skin soft for me, but it may grow up to be a fun pair of mittens or something along those lines!
I hope you enjoyed club this month and are looking forward to what I have in store for you for March! If you’ve spun club, I would love for you to share what you’re doing over in this thread of the Wool n Spinning Ravelry group. You can also tag me on instagram with #craftyjaksclub or #craftyjaksboutique Want to get in on club, you can subscribe either monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annually over in our Etsy shop.
Until next month,
Happy Spinning!
Katrina
