Tweed 2

Yesterday I managed to squeeze in a bit of time during the day to start carding the fibre for my next ply.  I've cut down on the number of passes through the drum carder to 4 rather than 6 so expect to get through this lot a bit faster.

The colours aren't quite true in this photo - the pink isn't pink at all, it's a dark mauve. Also, I decided to put some more white in with the fleck colours, just because!  I won't bore you with lots of drum carder photos this time; the mauve and white at the top went through twice, then the colours were added and they went through twice as well.  The result looked quite promising :-

Yesterday evening was spinning time!  I spun these three batts and decided I had enough to ply my first skein.

The colours in this photo are much truer than the ones above.  I really like how this is turning out.

For plying, I used my Ashford Traveller, mainly because that gives me bobbins of about 80-100g.  I wasn't sure how my ball winder would cope with larger amounts.  I'm amazed at the difference in size between the Aura bobbins and the Ashford ones.  I'd expected to be able to ply all of the smaller bobbin (above) with some of the first ply and get it onto one Ashford bobbin.  Nope!  It didn't fit.  This is what was left when I'd plyed one Ashford bobbin's-worth :-

You can hardly tell any yarn has gone from the left hand bobbin!

Anyway, the finished result (before washing) :-

I just wish I could get a better photo of the colours - this is far too pink.  It's also quite a bit thicker than I usually spin, but I must admit I didn't pay much attention to that - I wanted some texture as well as flecks so it's a bit slubby here and there.

Hope to try knitting a swatch of this as soon as it's dry, then I can decide which sweater pattern to knit with it.