I’m in the middle of a dyeing session, so this is a quick summary of some finished projects.
First up is a Mobius neck warmer/cowl (I’m not too sure how small it can be and still be called a cowl). This was knitted in garter stitch from my first coreless core spun yarn and is in Shetland and Mohair:
Second up is the crepe yarn, finally finished. On the right is the skein I finished months ago, and on the left is the skein I finished a few days ago:
Finally, is some more coreless core spinning. This time in Blue Faced Leicester and bamboo fibre. This started as some dyed Blue Faced Leicester tops (not my dyeing). The colours were perfect and the top looked lovely. However, try as I might I could not persuade it to draft. I tried fluffing it, attenuating it, stripping it down… but as soon as I tried drafting it the fibres refused to budge. In the end I concluded I’d need to card it before spinning it.
I’ve read about breaking tops into parts and sorting by colour to create a gradient. This is what I started to do, I stripped the top into thin lengths, then pulled these apart. I sorted them roughly into piles, then sorted through again, until I had seven piles in a range of colours. However, the piles were not all the same size, so I went through my commercially dyed BFL tops and found two with similar colours, that I added in differing amounts to the piles. Then I added black gold bamboo (which is a lovely charcoal colour) to provide a consistent base (and tone the colours down slightly) and some contrast colours in bamboo and BFL. I created 7 batts, on the drum carder, from these piles. I’ve been spinning them for a little while now, and finished them yesterday:
