Fire in the Dark

I finally have pictures of what I have been doing. Mostly I have been spinning some yarn up to enter into North Carolina's State Fair, coming up in October. Fun stuff! I entered last year as a novice spinner (less than 1 year) and won several awards, including Best of Show, which shocked and pleased me. I had a great tutor, Robin. :-)

So, what have I been spinning? Wool from Finn sheep. Some of my favorite wool. It is soft like merino (23.5 - 31.0 microns) but is longer in staple length (3 - 6 inches). I love spinning it. If you are curious about other breeds, check out Oklahoma State University's Sheep Breed website. I buy Finn roving from Copper Moose, from either their Ebay store or their regular store. They always send me great stuff. I also buy Finn fleece from Misty Mountain Farm. They have beautiful fleeces. I bought part of one at Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival.

Alright, so what have I done? I spun a 2-plied natural skein, a 2-plied dyed by spinner skein, and a singles dyed by spinner skein. See them below.



I also started a project to make some novelty push and pull yarn. I decided to dye some of my Finn roving. I call it "Fire in the Dark." Take a look:



Here is how I dyed the roving: I use Country Classics dyes in all my dyeing, so use comparable colors if you use other dyes (a red, a yellow, and a purple). I steam most of my dyes into the fiber, so I use squirt bottles to apply the dye. I do this even with some of the solid colors, as I like the variation this technique results in. The following would make enough dye for 2-3 ounces, even though I only dyed 1.2 ounces of wool.

I mixed 1 tsp Tomato Red into 6 oz of water for full strength red, my fire red color.

I mixed 1 tsp Buttercup Yellow in 6 oz of water for the yellow in fire.

I then mixed 1/2 tsp Wild Iris, 1/8 Blueberry, and a pinch (dab really) of Tomato Red in 6 oz of water for the purple. You could also use a blue for that part of the flame.

I used full strength Raven for the black (1 tsp per 6 oz of water).

I then took 1.2 ounces of wet roving. Dyed 1/3 of it black and 2/3 of it like fire (bright red, bright yellow, and some purple). I split the roving so that I could dye the roving without folding it, so each roving length was about 30 inches long. I then laid the roving on a yard long piece of plastic wrap and squirted dye onto each piece of roving. I made sure the red and yellow overlapped so I had some orange in the roving. I then folded the plastic wrap, sealing the roving inside with the dye. I folded the plastic wrapped roving so that the lightest color was on top. I steamed them for 30 minutes. They came out great.

I partitioned the black roving into 3 different sized sections of roving and one of the fire pieces into two different sized pieces. I almost always split my roving into 8 sections lengthwise, so the picture above shows 1/8th of each piece of roving. I then rolled my roving into a ball, taking one piece from each section of roving, from left to right in the picture.

I'll spin it up soon into a DK weight single, then set the twist. I have some black rayon thread, 40 wt, that I will use to wrap the singles around in a push and pull technique. Then, I will ply the yarn back onto itself, making a type of boucle yarn. We'll see how it looks as this is pretty new to me.