I acquired this braid of hand-dyed Polwarth fiber at one of the fiber events last year, though I didn’t have a plan for it at the time. I simply was attracted to the colors and was interested in spinning Polwarth again.
Since I’ve been spinning from my stash in a first-in, first-out kind of order (more or less), this one has been waiting for a while to come up in the queue. But once the big sweater spinning project was complete, I dug this braid out and sat down to try to determine what to do with it.
- Should I spin it as it comes, happy to be working with something colorful again?
- Should I split it up to mix the colors?
- Should I combine like colors and attempt a gradient?
I recently read an article by Jillian Moreno about an adventure with mixing a variegated braid of fiber so that the overall effect is of a consistent single color when the yarn is knit up. I say effect, because in reality the yarn is made up of several different colors when viewed up close.
So I decided to try the technique with this braid of fiber. I split the fiber into four pieces across the length.
Then I split each one into eight parts along the length.
I paired two lengths of fiber together to be spun simultaneously, keeping in mind that the goal is to spin two different colors at the same time. This will make a sort of barber pole effect in the singles.
Now I have 16 little bumps of fiber, ready to spin. I’m thinking I’ll spin three bobbins of singles, then ply them all together. I’m already in a 3-ply, DK weight yarn mode; I might as well run with that.