Heathered Pink Angora Yarn

My friend gave me about 4 oz of grey English Angora fiber to spin that she had been saving from her rabbits. She doesn’t spin, but is an avid knitter, so she was looking forward to knitting with her own fiber.

I hackled the fiber to sort out all the short bits, neps, and hay, and was left with about 1.7 oz of prime fiber. She asked for pink in the batts, so I used 2 different shades of pink Tussah silk, and dyed some merino/silk blend top to layer in the batts.

1

2

I spun and 2-plied the batts into about 180 yards.Although I love the softness, I don’t care for Angora’s tendency to bloom and shed, so I spun the singles with a very high twist so that the loose ends have a harder time escaping the yarn.

4

5

Thanks for reading!

Advertisement

Prisma Loop Scarf – Naturally Dyed Yarn

Remember the Wensleydale wool I dyed with pokeberries and cochineal back in the fall?

batts

Once I carded it I then spun it into a 153 yd Navajo ply yarn.

 

But then I had to decide what to make with the yarn! I knew I wanted a pattern that would really highlight the gradient, so after trawling the Ravelry in search of a pattern I settled on the Prisma Loop, an Infinity scarf pattern. I got sidetracked a few times to knit last-minute gifts, so it took a while to finish but I finally did!

 

1

 

It turned out the perfect length to wrap around my neck twice. I did a crochet provisional cast-on, so when I finished knitting I unraveled the cast-on and grafted the stitches together to make a loop. And the coolest part was that when I made the batts, the last one ends in the same deep plum color that it begins in, so when the loop is formed the colors line up seamlessly.

2

Thanks for reading!

Tour de Fleece

I’ve been doing some spinning lately… here are the last few skeins I spun.

yarn, handspun yarn, handmade yarn, pink, green, pink yarn, green yarn, textured yarn, art yarn
coral, pink, yarn, textured yarn, handspun, hand made yarn, hand spun yarn,  In the spinning community there is a spinning competition during the month of July called the Tour de Fleece. It happens during the Tour de France bike race, hence the name. It was started in 2006, on a website called the Ravelry. So my personal challenge during the Tour was to spin a textured art yarn called Supercoil.

This is a plying technique that uses up a ton of yardage – the 20 or so yards of single yarn I spun shrank to about 6 yards after plying! To create any real yardage of Supercoil would use a lot of singles.

textured art yarn, supercoil yarn, plyed yarn, handspun, yarn, hand made, hand made yarn, yarn, rainbow