Two More Art Yarns from One Batt

So I was in the mood for a yarn that was plied, with regular little beehive-y type exclamations throughout.  Something with lots of colours, and plied with something solid for nice contrast.  Something like (actually exactly like) this:

But I also wanted to do something else, that would look completely different, with the same batt.  Something that wound up looking exactly like this:

Still in my purple celebration, I made another selection of colours including much purple, but venturing into other colours freely, and wound up with these -- you can see I'm still using the natural greys as well:

Most of these are my own hand combed or carded fibres, there's a little commercial top in there (which means a mill prepared the wool).  It's all dyed by me. I just dye and dye what I feel like and maintain a stash of colours to spin from.  

So I carded four batts, two for each skein, which as always you can't really appreciate from so far away as your computer screen, but this is something like what they looked like:

So first up is the two-ply yarn.  I spun the multicoloured single

and I decided to use a bright fuchsia-red Wensleydale top I had dyed some time ago for the other ply.  I thought it would look great with the colours in the batt, and really make the pinks stand out. This pic (at least on my monitor) has captured a bit of the textures of the different wools.

Wensleydale is a long-stapled fibre and spins into a wonderfully smooth, thin single. Not especially soft, but lustrous.  You can tell this top was mill spun, it's so tight and perfect.  My top is looser (well, easier to spin from too) and I treat it more carefully so it doesn't fall apart before I'm ready for it.  Commercial top can withstand a beating and it still holds together.

Here are my two lovelies, waiting to be married.

  So I plied them together ...

... and every here and there I put a little beehive, just pushing the multicoloured strand up and packing the coils together every 30 inches or so.

And then all finished

I like these colours - very circussy.  I like how the pink brings out the other colours.

And now, having made this beautiful colour combination, I wanted to corespin something as well, just to enjoy the colours differently, without the interplay of the pink Wensleydale.

So here I'm corespinning the wool, which is basically wrapping wool around a core, which in this case is no.10 crochet cotton.  It wraps on at a sharp angle and shows the colours a bit differently than with regularly-spun yarn.

So in the end

It really looks different than the plied yarn, even though the batts they started as before spinning were pretty much the same.  Here's a final look:

A pretty hefty skein of yarn, weighing in at 235 g (8.3 oz) 112 m (123 yards) long and bulky at 5-6 wpi
You can see it in my shop HERE

This skein turned out a lot smaller than the other one, as I only used the two coloured batts
without the addition of the Wensleydale - 60 m (66 yards), 98 g (3.45 oz) and aran weight, wpi 8
You can see it in my shop HERE