One of the many reasons I am a biologist, not a chemist

I've recently been playing around with a couple of new colorways for the October update (as well as a couple of new fibers). One of my experiments resulted in this lovely Southdown - I think this will spin up into a really gorgeous, tinted yarn. I'm hoping the purples and blues and greys will blend together well with the undyed sections of fiber.

So I figured I had a winner, and set off to replicate the colorway on some Cheviot. I've been working really hard to keep good notes on all my colorways so they can be reproduced - this is one of my key selling points for custom dye orders - so I checked my notes and off I went. Sadly, the vagaries of chemistry conspired against me.

I don't know how well you can tell from these photos, but this fiber, while still very pretty, is predominantly brown, with hints of blue and purple.It is defnitively NOT blue/purple/grey with sections of undyed fiber.

WTF? I honestly have absolutely no idea why this dye job came out so completely different from the sample. I used the same dyes, the same dye pot, the same dyeing technique. The fiber was in the dye pot for longer because it was 350 gr instead of 100 gr and it took longer to get everything hot enough to set the dye, but as far as I can remember, that's the major difference between the two runs.

Since I have no idea how this happened, this is destined to be a one-off dye job. Which is too bad - I think it would make some really nice socks, or a lovely neutral-ish sweater. If only I could figure out what happened, I could add it to the list! The next shop update will be 15 October, so if this appeals to you, don't wait to snap some up - it won't be back!

Happy spinning,

Rachel (who is going to lie awake for some nights to come trying to puzzle out this whole thing)

Sampler packs, get your sampler packs right here!

I've just finished loading the update into the shop (after a couple hours of photo editing after the girls finally went to bed), and I'm really excited about the sampler packs. Each bag has half an ounce (approximately 14 g) of each color in my semisolid Vital Dyes series. There are three fibers available in the sampler packs: Dorset Horn, Humbug BFL (shown above) and Shetland. Grab one and let yourself play with some new colors!

Fibreholics unite!

This week has been all about finishing up the dyeing for the next update, and packing up a bunch of samples for the next round of sample boxes from The Fibreholics UK. For those of you not familiar with them, Fibreholics UK is a sampler box scheme (similar to the Phat Fiber boxes in the US) that gives customers the opportunity to try small samples of yarn or fiber from UK independent dyers.

The first set of samples I'm providing should look pretty familiar.

Leaf Peepers BFL

There will be larger bumps of this available in the shop. The other half of samples are in a similar, autumnal color range, and will also be available in 4 oz bumps in the shop.

Salamander on Wensleydale

I'm really excited to be part of Fibreholics, and I'm looking forward to the opportunity for a bunch of new people to try some of this stuff. Boxes go on sale 1 October.

Shades of Autumn

So, in the last month....I've moved house, unpacked and reorganized, gone to the Olympics, sorted out my dyespace, played with some new colors, gone to the Paralympics, and gotten the kids ready to go back to school. Next Wednesday is D-Day, after which I will have much more time to devote to playing with fiber. But I wanted to give you a little teaser...

Leaf Peepers Bluefaced Leicester

Since BFL is one of my favorite fibers, and autumn is my favorite season, it will come as no surprise that some of this stuff jumped right on to my wheel.

I split my 4 oz bump into three equal lengths to make a 3-ply. The first length I spun straight from the entire width of the top. For the second ply, I split the top in half, and for the third single I split the top into fourths. I ended up with a yarn that seems to be pretty well blended - I think any stripes that come out in the knitting will be pretty subtle.

I sometimes dream that I manage to split my fiber evenly enough and spin consistently enough that I run out of all three singles at the same time. Sadly, this was not that ever-elusive Spinning Nirvana. But that did give me an opportunity to use up the leftover singles in a 2 ply sample.

I love the way the colors blended together in the final yarns, and I can't wait to see what they look like knit up. I've only got about 25 yds of the 2-ply, but almost 100 yds of bulky weight 3-ply. It's calling cowl to me, but I've got to dive into the stitch dictionaries and find something suitably fallish and leafy for it. If I get my act together, I'll hopefully have a pattern for it to go with the fiber.

A bit more close-up fiber eye candy for you. I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Spun up colourways: playing with Oregon Green and YFP

Usually I end up with some leftovers after fiber has been weighed and bagged and tagged. These are perfect for spinning up as sample skeins, or for playing around with different techniques. Last month, before crazy vacation and moving plans hit in full force, I did just that with a bunch of scraps of Oregon Green and YFP Dorset Horn (currently available in the shop here).

I took the scraps from these two dyelots and spun up five different 2-ply sample skeins. The first two are the obvious: each colorway plied with itself. Then I did a skein of 2-ply using one single from each colorway.

Oregon Green 2-ply

OG/YFP marled 2-ply

YFP 2-ply

That was all well and good, and relatively straightforward. But then I decided to try another spinning technique to try blending the colors a bit more. I took a piece of each color of top and held them together while I spun, so that the single incorporated a bit of yellow and a bit of green. Sometimes there was more of one color then the other, but I tried to keep it as evenly distributed between green and yellow as I could.

OG/YFP blended 2-ply

You can see that, while it's still possible to distinguish yellow and green, they are much more blended together.

I did all these samples in a couple of days, and then put the experiment away for a bit. As any scientist will tell you, sometimes things need to sit and ferment for a while before you conclude anything. In the meantime, I started thinking about Tour de Fleece, and my goal of spinning up some yarn from raw fleece. This, of course, requires some kind of fiber prep, and my current tools include a pair of hand cards. It occurred to me that a nice addition to the first set of sample skeins would be some color blending by carding. And voila!

Before carding

Final blend

After 3 passes

Final 2-ply

The resulting yarn was a nice yellowy, in some places almost minty (!), green. This is a good demonstration of how it doesn't take much yellow to change a color - given the darkness of the Oregon Green fiber alone (see first picture of the hand cards above), you might expect this to be a darker final product. But a little bit of yellow goes a long way...

So what does this all mean from a knitting perspective? And why would you bother carding or blending during the spinning if you've got two different colors of fiber?

All five samples

I knit up a simple swatch with all of the samples, in this order: OG/OG 2-ply, OG/YFP marled 2-ply, OG/YFP blended 2-ply (colors held together during spinning), OG/YFP carded 2-ply and finally, the YFP/YFP 2-ply.

It's a bit hard to see the transitions between the middle three samples in this picture, so let's add some markers.

The change from OG/OG to OG/YFP is easy to see - as soon as you add any yellow at all, you get a yarn that, from a distance, reads as a strong yellow-green. If you look at it a bit closer, you can see the dramatic marl created by yellow and green singles lying next to each other.

However, the difference between the OG/YFP 2-ply yarn, the OG/YFP blended yarn (where the colors were held together during spinning of the singles), and the carded OG/YFP yarn is harder to distinguish (black line indicates the point where the yarns switched).

Marled to blended transition

Blended to carded transition

To my eye, the biggest difference between the blended and carded yarns is the uniformity of the carded color - there is much less variation since the fibers were thoroughly blended before spinning. The blended-while-spun yarn has much more variation, which may or may not be what you're looking for.

Finally, the comparison between the carded OG/YFP yarn and the YFP/YFP 2-ply.

No black line needed to indicate change in yarn, right?

So what does this mean for you as a spinner? Well, I think that depends...what a helpful answer! But really, it does depend on what your ultimate goal is. If you have a fiber that is dyed in a colorway with a lot of contrast, you can spin it to preserve and enhance those contrasts. Maybe you want very stripey socks, in which case you would chain-ply your singles. Or you think the colors would look great in colorwork mittens, in which case you can split the dyed top into its component colors and spin them seperately - just because it came to you as one piece of top doesn't mean you can't split up the colors just as you like!

On the other hand, maybe you want to blend the colors a little bit, in which case a 2-ply might work well. Depending on how you split the top, you can end up with sections of marled yarn, maybe some sections where the colors line up and enhance each other. A 3-ply will blend the colors even more.

Or maybe you really want to mix things up a lot, in which case you could spin two different colors together, creating a marled single that will further blend the colors with plying. Or maybe you want to create a yarn that is a totally different color then the top you started off with, in which case you could whip out the hand cards or drum carder - a word of warning on carding, however: if you are trying to blend colors that lie across from each other on the color wheel, you may end up with a whopping pile of brown yarn!

OG/OG, OG/YFP and YFP/YFP together

I hope this has been and interesting and useful post. Have you done your own color experiments? What effect do you like best? What's been an absolute disaster? Let me know in the comments, and we can talk about how to get the color effects you want, depending on your starting point.

I hope everyone is enjoying the (late-arriving but finally here) British summer, and happy spinning!

Rachel