colors

Well. Here's the two rovings, plied. Pretty, but browner than I really expected.



Although here it is on a sheep brown, and it does make a nice contrast:


Years ago I fell in love with the colors of paint on a bridge on the University of Minnesota campus -- the school maroon, but very weathered & sunbeaten. This reminds me of that bridge (in a good way) but it's not at all what I was setting out to make.

I make a quick additional roving of turquoise, fuchsia, hot pink & bright blue, and spun that along with the second roving, then plied it with the original roving:



It's certainly perkier but maybe too much so. This is the second yarn with the same sheep brown. I think those blue bits are too bright.





I wish I had enough free time to wallow in sampling. Right now it's just making me grumpy. And tomorrow I will be going to the only fleece fair I'm likely to attend this year, so if I want to be looking for something in particular I need to know what it is!

My daughter has just learned to tie her shoelaces (so I will buy her a pair of Sketcher Twinkletoes) and wants me to make a video of it. How can I turn that down? But I want to fool around with wool, too. Here's hoping the responsible mama side of me wins.

update

I've been carding the supplement to the fabulous-but-limited roving.



The largest bump is the original roving. Below it are two items I pulled from stash that I have been carding together to produce rovings like the two smaller ones. One has an outer layer of purple, the other of red, but both are a mix of approximately one part purple to two parts red.

You can see that the original roving is much brighter. My plan is to spin the two rovings (old & new) separately and ply them together. That will give me about 24 ounces of sportweight yarn.

But is the new roving too dull? I am about halfway through carding, and I don't want to recard & get it too blended -- this is one pass through the supercarder and I think another pass would give me very bland results. I could make another thin roving, though, and hold it together with the new roving while spinning. Hmmm. Or maybe this is just fine as it is.

I think a few more samples are in order.

Two by two

Things seem to be lining up neatly around here:

Two spinning projects:
gray Corrie/Churro fleece
red/purple roving

Two knitting projects:
purple Pi Are Square shawl
blue & white socks

Two beading projects:
flowery t-shirt
seed bead necklace

Two weaving projects:
overshot on the Baby Wolf that has been untouched since early November
sampler band in doubleweave tablet weaving

Oh, and
TWO children
TWO stories to the house now
and
TOO MUCH to do!

Matching?

As I've thought about the roving I wrote about yesterday, I remembered another fiber that has been languishing in my stash. This is the one on the spindle below; on the bobbin is yesterday's fiber:


It's a dark picture, but you can see that the spindle fiber is more orangey while the bobbin fiber has more purple.

Here's a picture with fill flash. Surprisingly the colors are fairly accurate:


I could use one fiber for one ply and one for a second. I could recard the spindle fiber with some purple, then use it for a second ply. I could spin them separately but use them in the same sweater -- this is my least favorite option because the bobbin yarn is so much more beautiful, with all its different shades. At the same time, I don't want to dilute its splendor by plying it with something too mundane. But I think I'd really like to have enough yarn for something like the Giant Latvian Mitten cardigan (rav link).

Must run to the grocery store before it's time to get the children -- but wanted to get this up so I can get the opinion of those of you on the other side of the world. Would you keep yesterday's fiber pure? Ply them together? Modify the spindle fiber, then ply?