Yarns I've Spun & Loved

When I was tapering off spinning wool from raw fleeces and beginning to dye and spin silk yarn, I made a number of 2-ply yarns where one ply was medium to dark gray natural wool and the other ply was a brilliantly dyed silk. I haven't done this in a while, because I very rarely use raw fleeces anymore -- and, as I've learned from fiber suppliers, the naturally colored merino and corriedale sheep, which are the only kinds of wool I'll spin anymore, are culled and all the white ones sent off to be processed and DYED, so commmercially processed naturally colored merino or corriedale wool roving or top is virtually impossible to find.

But -- I've recently run across a merino/alpaca top in a natural brown/gray that fits the bill perfectly. The first photo shows raw fiber on the left and the merino/alpaca top on the right. You can see that they're close enough in color to work for my purposes.

The next photo is a yarn I made several years ago, charcoal gray merino plied with dyed magenta silk.

And this next photo shows samples of yarns I did a number of years ago using this technique -- those are on the left -- and a sample I just did up this morning on the right, showing the merino/alpaca blend plied with silk hankies I dyed a few weeks ago.

I love this technique because the gray really tones down the bright colors that I probably wouldn't use alone. Here's one last photo of a scarf I wove a few years ago out of yarn I'd spun thusly. The gray fleece in this case was a New Zealand roving that was quite a bit browner than the charcoal fleeces I used more recently.

Well, that's the creativity report for the day. A bit later I'll be looking at a possible studio space in Fortuna. (It hasn't escaped me that I'm moving to Fortuna -- possibly to find my fortune?)