Per usual, I write better at night.
Experimenting with a mystery blended top
Last Saturday, at a local knitting meet-up, a woman from my local Spinners and Weavers Guild called me over to ask if I wanted a bag of some spinning fibre. She said she couldn’t recall a thing about the fibre content, the manufacturer, or when exactly it went into her stash. What made me very enthusiastically accept her generous offer of giving me the 180-gram bag of fibre (for free) was her wistfully looking at it and wondering out loud, “Gosh I would love to see what it looks like spun up…”
(Tangent: The generosity of crafters and, in general, the people around me will be covered in another blog post soon to come.)
Colour-wise, this blended top is gorgeous. Deep turquoise-y teal is one of my favourite shades; in this blend, the strips of purple and orange set it off even more intensely. But boy is the top so compacted. It takes serious elbow grease to even pull out a handful to gauge the staple length (about 8-10cm, or 3.5-4 inches). The wool (?) feels toothy, like a medium corriedale, but there seems to be at least a touch of alpaca or llama in there too. Scattered through were heaps of black, kemp-like fibres. These are very stiff and would be unpleasant in the hand or in wearing the finished item.
I could already tell there was no way to spin the thing as is, so I went to work with a garment steamer, my Petlyn combs (recently acquired and about which I will write at length in another upcoming post), handcarders, and a diz.
My four samples were as follows:
- (1) Spun across the (steamed open) top,
- (2) Spun from the fold, pulled from the steamed top,
- (3) Spun from combed and dizzed top, and
- (4) Spun from carded and dizzed roving.
In this close-up footage, you can see a clear change in loft and openness from just steaming the fibre. Combing and carding, even with just one pass, further blended the different colours together into a more heathery, dyed-in-the-wool effect. The carded rovings (rightmost) still had some uneven patches, with some kempy fibres still in there, while the combed and dizzed fibre (second from last) was soft and evenly lofty. The combing had removed most of the kempy bits and the (innumerable) shorter fibres that would make the yarn pill more readily.
I decided to draft with my default style and singles’ thickness; that way I could focus on the feel of the different preps and make minor adjustments in my movements to get into a sustainable flow. (The voiceover volume in the video is quite low, so please turn your volume up.)
All the samples were plied from centre-pulled balls of singles, into a two-ply yarn, that finished up to be about a light-fingering (3-ply) weight. I gave the yarn a hot soak, then snapped the hanks before hanging to dry.
I did not enjoy the process of spinning up Samples 1 and 2, so those were clearly out of the race.
(Tangent: Have I told you I’m very much a process- and not at all a product-crafter? No? Well there’s another blog post idea, future Mia.)
Samples 1 and 2 have clear barberpoling in multiple spots; Sample 3 is the most evenly optically blended; Sample 4 is overall an even colour but with clear pops of the rougher orange fibre poking through.
Then of course, like a model experimental crafter, I had to knit up swatches.
The barberpoling and colour pooling in Samples 1 and 2 (the uncombed/uncarded samples) is very much visible in a swatch. It is a cool visual texture, but not something I want for this particular spin. I was moreso looking for the tonal look of Samples 3 and 4.
Between Samples 3 and 4, I noticed a subtle difference in the sheen/lustre of the yarn and especially the knitted fabric. Combing lends a sleekness to the yarn which then translates to a smoother “hand”, whereas carding gives a fuzzier, softer look. Held up and swished around, the combed sample shows amazing drape, and the carded one holds itself up a little bit more due to the bounce and loft of the yarn construction.
Well now I’ve always wanted a shawl in a deep teal, so–twist my arm–I’m going with Sample 3 (combed and dizzed). I want sleekness and as vivid a colour as possible, plus good drape. Might even be a lace-patterned shawl? All that’s to say, I’ll yammer on about my progress of spinning up the remaining fibre plus show pretty pictures in another post.
So, on a rather unsatisfying note: This fibre is still about 50% a mystery to me. I’m bringing a bit of it to my Fleece Friends next week so we could all have a squish of it and they can make more of an educated guess than me as to what the heck went into this blend. Fun times for all!
Project Diary Entry #1 (late October to November 5th)
Clockwise, from the project bag:
- Cabled knitting in a stone/ivory/bone colour: Beech cardigan (pattern by Marie Wallin), yarn is BC Garn Bio Shetland from my LYS (local yarn shop) Finzah Studio.
- Support spindle project: a purple/blue textured batt by Coven Collective (Melbourne-based fibre artist), my treasured Straddle Creek spindle that was sent to me by a destashing Raveler in the USA who so kindly sent along a whole bundle of Inglenook Fibers mini batts, as both padding and a gift because “[she knows] it’s so hard for you guys down in Aus to get your hands on it!!”
- Black/dark brown nests of combed top next to the sample spin control card: my mini-fleece project I started all the way back in July for Tour de Fleece, handcombed from fine merino (19.4 micron) off a ram named “Devil”, from Rani Smith in Queensland.
- Dark brown skein of yarn with flecks of colour: test spin (a very undisciplined one at that) from drumcarded batts of polwarth/merino/sari silk, which will go towards a jumper for my husband. More on that in the near future, but at the end of this post is a video I took yesterday of me stripping and predrafting a bit of rovings off of a batt, and spinning it using a minimally supported longdraw.
- A quadrant of a cardigan in a fade/gradient: Rose cardigan (pattern by Andrea Mowry), yarn is Dathliad Sock by Circus Tonic Handmade (Adelaide-based dyer and fibre artist). I cast on and finished the first quadrant in August of 2024, then set it aside and promptly forgot about it until this past Saturday when I was wracking my brain to find a knitting-while-socialising-type project.
And thus, I sign off for now, leaving you with this bit of footage of my spinning, as promised above.
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