Two Art Yarns (with Grannie Stacks) from One Batt -- Colour Matching

Because I often get different ideas for yarns as I put colours together for a batt, I enjoy carding a few batts with the same colours and then spinning a couple of my ideas to see how they'll turn out and compare.  I can never spin ALL my ideas, but maybe that's a good thing. 

Sometimes it's fun to start a story at the end, so here is what I got from this particular set of batt ideas.  One ply from each of these yarns has been spun from the same multicoloured batt.  I chose different colours for the second ply, creating two completely different looks:

If you look closely, you'll see that each of these yarns has intermittent "grannie stacks,"
or piled-up twists of yarn, throughout.  These add concentrated colour, texture,
and definition to the yarn, and they just make me happy.

I was in the mood for yellow/peach/orange/pink, and I assembled different wools from my dyed stash and combed and carded them up.  This is what I came up with -- I didn't use a whole lot of the darker orange, in the end.  I'm hoping the picture reveals not only the colour differences but suggests the texture differences as well.

Fibre includes Cormo, Corriedale, Mohair, Merino, Romney x Bluefaced Leicester,
Border Leicester x Bluefaced Leicester, Lincoln Longwool,
and a bit of BLFxSilk top that I had leftover from another project

All spun up into my first single, it came together something like this:

Naturally, and true to my general way of doing things, I next forgot to photograph my lovely assembly of purples from which I spun another single to ply with the first.  And a "single" or "singles," dear non-spinning friends,  is one single strand of yarn made from twisted together fibres as is, without wrapping anything around it, just on its own.  For this yarn, I'm taking two singles and twisting them together, or "plying" them, to make a two-ply yarn.

I did manage to remember to take a photo of me making the second single, though, and you can get some idea of the different purples that went into it from the carded batt I'm spinning from -- well maybe if you enlargen the pic by clicking on it.

Here are the two singles before plying.

This yarn -- my inspiration for the two yarns I'm talking
about now -- is from a previous blog entry,  HERE
and you can find it in my Etsy shop HERE

What I decided to do was spin two-ply yarn with beehive grannie stacks, similar to the yarn on the right, but instead of those long even coils of colour, there would be stacked-up coils, and instead of using the multicoloured single for the stacks, I'd use the solid-coloured one.






So here I am plying the two singles, or twisting them together (in the opposite direction to that in which they were first spun).  I hold the two singles tautishly out ... 

... and then slide my hand up, allowing the wheel to twist them together.

After every three lengths of regular plying, I put in a grannie stack.  This is wrapping one ply (in this case, the purple one) around the other in the same small area, creating a little stack, and then continuing to ply normally.  So here I'm getting ready to make my stack, holding the purple single out to the side ...

... then I let the wheel spin it around in the same spot, angling my purple ply up and down a bit to spread out and stack the yarn.  I'm holding the other single way back with my other hand, because as I twist and wrap the purple single around the other single, the other single is untwisting, and if it untwists too much it will pull apart.  By holding it further back, I'm distributing the "untwist" over a greater length of yarn.

When I'm happy with my little grannie stack, I continue plying normally.  

Here it is on my spindle

My high-tech lazy kate is there on the floor.  A lazy kate is a contraption that holds your spindles
full of yarn and allows you to unwind them as you ply.  There are some
very gorgeous ones out there that you can buy.  This one is made from a cardboard box
with a couple knitting needles punched through the walls.  My spindles fit perfectly
on the needles.  The biggest trick is remembering WHERE the needles are when you want
to knit something with them.

And all finished.  The little stacks will make little purple shouts of colour in whatever it's used for.

You can see this in my Etsy shop HERE

For the second skein, I wanted to ply with yellows.  I used the same yellows that were in the multicoloured single - here they are again:

Carded into a batt and spun in the same way as the other yarn, this time with yellow grannie stacks, it came out like this:

This is also in my Etsy shop HERE

Changing the colour of the second single really makes a big difference in the overall look of the yarn.  If I'd had enough of those multicoloured batts, I would have plied another skein with peach/orange, and yet another with pinks.  Ah, so much to do, so little time...

Check it out in my Etsy shop

Check it out in my Etsy shop

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