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Monday 5 January 2015

Tweed Experiment

Happy New Year everyone.  Hope you all enjoyed the festivities wherever you are in the world.  Wishing you health and happiness for 2015 (and I'm sure a bit of wealth wouldn't go amiss either).

For a while now I've wanted to spin a tweed yarn, but haven't really known what to use as a base.  Then I found 500g of mauve merino that I'd been saving, mainly because I didn't really like the colour.  I ordered it from World of Wool thinking it was a nice lilac colour, but when it arrived it was actually a peculiar shade of mauve/purple.  I decided to card it with white merino and use that for the base colour.


Three passes through the drum carder gave me this :-


which was a little bit closer to the shade I expected when I bought it.

I also had a large bag of World of Wool floor sweepings (Botany lap waste) of various colours and picked these out to go into half of the mauve :-


After adding these to the drum carder, the batt looked very bright and garish, but I was fairly certain it would calm down with another couple of passes.


Fourth pass :-


Fifth pass, and the colours have almost disappeared :-


Time to add more colour to the fifth pass,


Which looked like this :-


The sixth, and final pass, gave the result I was after :-


Just enough colour showing to gave the yarn flecks when it's spun.

This is hopefully going to be a cardigan when it's finished, provided I have enough yardage.  I started spinning this on my new Majacraft Aura spinning wheel which has massive bobbins.


Tonight I spun the rest of this bobbin and then took it off and weighed it.  The full bobbin weighed an amazing 480g; an empty bobbin weighs 160g; therefore there is 320g of yarn.  I haven't finished spinning this ply yet, I still have another 140g.  So, if each ply weighs 460g, that would give me 920g of plyed yarn.  More than enough for my cardigan!

140g still to be spun
I was hoping to show you some finished yarn long before this, but it's taken forever to card this lot : 21 batts x 6 passes each = a lot of work!!  The next ply will be slightly different as I used all the red, dark blue and yellow fibre on this.  These are the colours I will use in the second ply :-


At my current rate of progress, the carding should be finished in about two weeks, so don't hold your breath!

6 comments:

  1. Thank you. Still not sure about the colour though . . . it's now an odd pinky mauve colour!

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  2. That looks' very nice i like the way the colour changed .Looking forward seeing your next colour mix.

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    1. Thanks Ella. I started spinning the second bobbin last night - should be able to ply some of this today. Photos soon.

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  3. that's really cool! You've inspired me to get tweedy with a fibre project soon. Thought I might chop up some bits of scrap handspun to throw into the batts to act like little tweedy flecks, too. Experimenting with colour is great fun, isn't it??

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    Replies
    1. Glad to be of service :-) Using scraps of handspun's actually a good idea, might try that myself next time.

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