Same Fiber Yarn Surprise (Trust Me!)

A ball of roving, some jars of dye, a spinning wheel … so many possible endings!  My last post showed some turquoise laceweight yarn that I spun from roving that I dyed.  Today, I’m going to talk about a different yarn that I spun that started with the very same roving, but with very different results.

As it came to me, the roving was white.  I dyed it up in four or five different batches, in different colors.  There was the turquoise, a plumy/pinky batch, one the colors of autumn leaves, and another that I did in chocolate and kiwi green.  Here are pictures of the roving drying outside:

St. Francis watches over the turquoise, while the other rovings play on the monkey bars. 

One of the batches I got particulary experimental with, resulting in roving that looks like this:

Some of the colors seem a bit odd together… it doesn’t make you go “yummy, gotta have it” when you first take a peak.  But sometimes with handpainted rovings, those little bits of incongruous colors create just the right touch of spice in the finished yarn.  I spun this roving one ply thick and thin, one ply “regular” medium thick, then wound the thick spots into loose coils when I plied it.  All those jumbled colors actually played nicely together in the finished yarn:

 

Below is a picture of some of the roving from that batch with the finished yarn.  See how those colors get blended and mingled when spun up together?  Handpainted roving does that — so a subtly-painted roving (like my turquoise from the previous post) will look almost like a solid, and bolder colored rovings will level out (some even become muddy, especially if the colors are primarily complementary pairs like red/green, orange/blue).  Here’s that picture:

So there you have it.  Two very different yarns from two different dye batches, but spun from the same fiber.  In the last post, 2 1/2 ounces spun into 460 yards of laceweight.  In this post, 2 1/2 ounces spun into 98 yards of novelty coil yarn.  Like I said at the beginning, so many possible endings!