Greenery

Do you know World of Wool? It’s a UK-based free shop with all kinds of beautiful fibre and wool. It is possible to create your own custom fibre blend there, comprised of up to eight different ingredients, with the option to blend them a bit or a lot. The minimum quantity is 500 grams, which seems like a lot, but it’s more or less a sweater quantity.

I’ve ordered and spun a custom blend from them before. That was a mix of purples, blues, and sparkle. After spinning that, I ordered a beautiful mix of fibre that should form a green blend after carding.

As you can see, not every fibre that I included is green, but I assumed that the blueish and yellowish fibres would suggest green in the final blend.

If you are curious, here are the items that I included in the blend. I decided on four blending cycles to keep some separation.

This is what I received. So exciting! I was very curious what the resulting yarn would look like. I especially liked the tweed-like bits of sari silk in all the colours of the rainbow that were scattered throughout. Yet there was no question: this was definitely green.

I created rolags, which took me quite a while. In the end, there were 53 of them, and they didn’t fit in the suitcase.

I started spinning at the beginning of September, but didn’t spin the whole time. I didn’t spin when I was on holiday, and in between I also knitted my Sylvan Tales shawl, the Stephen West Mystery Snowflake KAL, and a Vairisle hat for my brother. But I kept coming back to the Greenery spinning project. It was more fun to spin this than the purple project earlier this year. I think that it has to do with the bits and bobs that kept it interesting.

I was almost finished at Christmas, so I made a Christmas tree. The spindles look nice like this, don’t you think?

Then the singles were done. 25 spindles full of yarn. What an accomplishment. But it wasn’t finished yet. Time to ply!

I don’t like plying on spindles, it feels awkward. But fortunately, I have an Ashford Joy that does the trick well. And this spindle kate that you can see in the picture above comes in handy too! I chain plied the yarn.

During the plying phase I already noticed that not all the singles had the same thickness. The first third was significantly thinner than the last bit. I had misremembered the thickness. That’ll teach me not to double check after not spinning for a while. But oh well, it’s still nice yarn.

Skein 1: 151g/408m (270m/100g)
Skein 2: 183g/438m (239m/100g)
Skein 3: 161g/506m (314m/100g)
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Total: 495g/1352m

The yarn is sort of between DK and sport weight. I think that it’s still close enough to combine in a project. But I could also make a shawl of the thinner yarn and a hat and mittens of the thicker yarn or something like that. We’ll see.

I’m quite happy with the result and also that I have finished this project. I’m now free to start spinning something else. I think it may be the fibre from my advent calendar. I’ll tell you more about that in the next post.