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

What Went Into That Batt - Two Art Yarns

Bulky Two-Ply Yarn HERE

Corespun Yarn HERE on Etsy

 So I've been a bit less than productive recently for various reasons, and thus have fallen a bit behind in both spinning and blogging. Life can get complicated, as we all know.  I'm always appreciative of the calming influence spinning lends to my mental knots.














These two yarns have been sitting in my ready box for awhile.  You can tell they  came from the same family, can't you?  But a different feel, a different heft, different use, and all in the way they were spun.  The fellow up above was plied and one to the right corespun.  One day soon I'll do a little entry on corespinning but this blog is all about putting together the batts they came from.





I was dreaming about some purple yarn, and wanted to use these lovely fleeces, being as they were colours I couldn't resist.  My idea was not to card them, or hardly at all, just run them through the carder along with a bunch of other wool and hopefully keep some of the curl and lock integrity.

Border Leicester/
Bluefaced Leicester Cross

Border Leicester/
Bluefaced Leicester Cross

  

So for me, designing a batt for yarn involves my starting colour idea (in this case purple) and unloading all my bits of this and that in purple that I've dyed and put away, digging through it all and seeing what I like and what will work and what I feel like using.  Sometimes my idea changes as I find fleeces I'd forgot I had that overpower my initial impulse.  One bag of lovely I found in this exercise had some lovely purple dyed locks that had done me the wonderful favour of fracturing (I do believe that's what happened), which is when the dye kind of splits up into its composite colours. Aren't they great?

These locks were dyed in the same pot, but because I don't stir almost at all during the dying process, they came out very differently from different corners of the pot.  As for the fracturing, that's from the amount of citric acid I used, or the heat, or some chemical issue or other ... dyeing is still a brave new world of adventure for me - I love it! Taking some of the lighter and some of the darker and combing it all together produced the combed top up above.

After I collecting some purples, I cast about for some other colours I felt like adding, and came across some lovely Cotswold I got from Wooly Wool of the West and dyed this fabulous golden yellow.  And there's no coming across something like that in your stash and putting it back again, so into the pile it went.

It's combed into top on the left, and in its curly glory on the right

And then all of a sudden I was hit by grey fever, and absolutely needed some grey - natural grey, the kind sheep grow all by themselves, instead of those rendered grey by me through the magic of Jacquard acid dyes.  In fact, my grey fever was such that I'm going to have to make some grey yarns pretty soon -- all grey with this and that here and there.  But in this particular purple creation, grey will be a condiment.   

Shorter stapled (the staple is the length of each
individual strand of wool), super kinky (that's the crimp)
and oh so soft

Longer staple, more lustrous, soft but not as soft
as the darker fleece

These are both BFL (Bluefaced Leicester)--Shetland cross fleeces from Jody's Little Smoky Blues.  So for those of my friends who are kind enough to read this and don't understand what I'm talking about when I say things like that, a crossed fleece is the result of different breeds of sheep having offspring.  Their wool can have aspects of one or both of the parents to varying degrees.  Look at these very artistic comparisons:

Uncombed locks - quite a difference, even though they're both BFLxShetland

Woolen Fiddleheads - you can tell which combed top
came from which fleece - they're both soft and wonderful to spin,
but the left is more lustrous, and the right is softer

But oh my, because now your eyes have seen so much grey it's hard to remember what we're aiming for.  Maybe it will come back if you see all the combed and carded fibre ready to be put together into a lovely batt -- and a batt is made when you card (kind of like brushing) together wool so it more or less is kind of all running in the same sort of direction.  Not perfectly, but more or less.  You can do these with locks of wool to help open them up and make them easier to spin (like brushing your hair makes it easier to get a job, maybe) or with wool that's already carded or combed to mix together colours and amalgamate it all together.

Lovely purples nestled in amongst my golden Cotswold, some red Romney lamb locks and golden-orange Border Leicester x BFL (and now you know what the X means), my purple locks that started it all, and my grey-fever greys, which also includes some uncarded locks there on the left

This went only once through the carder
to maintain texture and colour integrity
to a certain extent

Now for carding fun - I wish batts were easier to see in photographs -- you can never see very much of a batt in one shot PLUS for me, I just have to touch everything so just looking can be very frustrating... At any rate, I got a lovely mix of purples for depth and subtle shifts in purpleness, plus kapows of other colours all throughout.

Now it's time to spin.  For my plied yarn, I spun one ply -- a thicker one -- from the batts I made here:

This is a strip from the batt (I just pulled away a strip of wool straight through the 
thickness of the batt) alongside my yarn still being spun on the spindle

The second batt, and the wools that went into it - I carded this twice, to blend the colours more.  The dark burgundy in the middle is actually a blend of BFL and silk - the only mill-carded wool I used

Then I needed a second strand of yarn to ply (twist together with) the first.  I wanted it thinner and less poppingly colourful, so I carded together the wools on the right to get the batt here on the left, and here it is below on my wheel being spun:

 Plied (or twisted) (or spun) together:

Fibres include Romney x Merino, Corriedale, Cotswold, Romney lamb, Border Leicester x Bluefaced Leicester, Bluefaced Leicester, Bluefaced Leicester x Shetland, Silk

And here below is the corespun yarn, a blog entry about this method of spinning is in my future.  Very quickly, in spinning this kind of yarn, the wool is wrapped around a central yarn (or core) of some type, so the angle of wrapped fibres is different than the twist of regular yarn, the colours show up differently and the yarn hangs and works differently.  

Now that you've seen where they came from, here are my yarns again, washed and dried and ready to go:

Plied Yarn available from my Etsy shop - a 47-yard skein, super bulky at 3-4 wpi

Super bulky, as you can see!

And here's the corespun with bright zinging colours - also in my Etsy shop
this one is  60 yards long, and chunky weight (5-6 wpi)