Twisp of Fate

I have been spinning more lately, and this led to a flurry of drum-carding activity the last week or so.  The carder had fallen silent and forlorn for quite some time, so it was nice to get drawn back into it.

It all started when I spun up 4 oz. of a prepared batt from Crosspatch Creations in Montana.  This had some of her natural dark brown wool and a lot of dyed mohair – golds and rose tones, mostly.  When I had the singles spun, I decided I wanted to ply it with “something else” and not back on itself.  I started digging through the stash of washed fleeces looking for something dark, and came upon a dyed Romney fleece I bought a couple of years back from Heidi Dascher of The Artful Ewe in Port Gamble, WA.  In her inimitable way, Heidi had dyed the whole fleece rather randomly – a lot of jet black but with lots of red, gold, green etc. mixed in.

So I pulled off about 8 oz of that dyed fleece and carded it into 3 batts, one of which is now spun and plied with the mohair blend as a 3-ply (2 dark brown and 1 of the mohair blend):

Romney batt with final yarn (plied with mohair blend shown on bobbin)

While digging through the fleece stash, I ran across one of the first fleeces I ever bought – back in 2005.  It came from Whitehall, MT and was from a sheep named Temptation.  She was a Shetland x Corriedale cross “with some minor amounts of Romney, Border Leicester and Cormo thrown in.”  Her owner sent me a picture at the time:

Temptation the sheep

Here’s a picture of the fleece, which I then washed and stored away until now.  Lovely warm light grey/brown with blonde tips:

Temptation’s fleece before washing

Well now I have a big box of Temptation batts and a 3-ply sample spun up:

But back to the dyed Romney fleece from Heidi Parra.  I believe the fleece itself came from The Pines Farm in Maple Valley, WA.  It is really lovely stuff, super clean and almost no VM (vegetable matter) or second cuts, nice and crimpy.   I had over 3 lbs. of it left after pulling off some for the project mentioned above, and realized that if I just carded it up as before, as completely blended batts, I would lose all the color distinction that Heidi had put into the dyeing.  So, what to do?

On Saturday I laid it all out on a table and pulled it apart into 5 color groups, working quickly and trying not to “overthink” the process too much.  About a third of it was black (with some color still in some of the locks):

Mostly black

The next biggest group was red – from black with red overtones, to dark red through bright cherry:

Mostly red

There were 2 smaller piles of “gold and oranges” and “olive tones”:

golds and oranges

olive tones

Final and fifth category was “everything else” which wound up a rich brown color when carded.

I spent most of Sunday carding up the 5 color groups.  This is when I love, love, love my big electric carder which I bought from Judith MacKenzie (built by her ex, Nick McCuin).  It does nice big batts, and leaves my hands free to tease and/or feed on the fiber.  I did a first pass with each color group to tease out (loosen) the locks and then re-combined the resulting batts in a second pass to get fairly even color in 3 to 6 batts of each color.

Romney on the carder

The five color groups all carded

These were so pretty that I was tempted to leave them as-is!  But I did want a final fiber preparation that would spin up into a yarn that included, but did not completely obscure, each of the colors.  So on Monday I went to work on making multicolor batts using ideas from Deb Menz’s excellent book, Color in Spinning.  In order to keep colors distinct, she will make separate batts including some of the final colors in each, then stack them on top of each other to be pulled apart for the spinning.

So I made 16 batts, each of which consists of 2 smaller, layered batts.  The first one has a “thin layer” of black on each side, with 6 stripes across in the center, alternating gold/orange with warm brown.  The second one has a “thin layer” of red on each side, with 5 stripes across in the center, alternating black with olive tones.  And here is my lovely big box of 16 batts, each about 2.75 oz., with a little of the initial dyed fleece on top as a garnish:

The final product!