Plying

Things have been shutting down as social distancing has been enforced. Rightly so. We just need to stay away from each other . It means I have had time to get things done. I want to make a shocking pink doll for my granddaughter so I spun the acrylic in blue and pink and Navajo plied it. I then did some core spinning with the addition of white acrylic for the doll’s hair. I already have some Navajo plied white. Acrylic is easy to spin and I’d certainly recommend it for a beginner spinner and it’s easy to use when you are learning to core spin.

The other thing I got done was spin up the cold dyed wool plait I made the other week and I plied that with some merino mixed with tussar silk of similar colour. I now have two cakes of that. I had some of my dyed plait left over so I plied that with a nice naturally fawn Finn fleece. I really like the look of that yarn. Not sure what I shall be doing with  that. At the beginning of the year I knew I had to keep spinning because I didn’t have much of a choice in yarns I had spun. The current situation will fix that.

Plying

It is good to get a good colourway going with plying. It means the yarn you make is totally original. With my latest cakes I have used a wool plait I bought from The Felted Ewe – blue, yellow, green and fawn. One cake I made by plying it with my naturally dyed turmeric and avocado dyed English Leicester fleece. The other spool I plied with  my naturally dyed green tea and sage English Leicester.

It is cheerful yarn with good, bright colours and it reminds me of the parrots and colourful birds we get here in Australia. The cakes look similar but not the same. I now have to work out what I can spin that will go with these colours so I can make something.

Double twist cowl

The green double twist cowl is on size 5 round needles and 200 stitches. I am using honeycomb stitch because I do not have a lot of the green tea and sage leaf dyed wool. That is English Leicester which I spun after I dyed it. It is an olive colour and the phone camera does not pick it up so well. The other one is hand dyed merino tops which is a lovely green.  Cowls are good carry around knitting because you do not have to worry about shaping , bits and big quantities of yarn.

The blue cowl is a mix of hand dyed , spun alpaca and hand dyed spun blue Finn wool. It is very soft. This cowl has 220 stitches on size 5 needles because the yarn is a bit finer. I have used block stitch for that one and the pattern is the same both sides.

Natural dyes

This spool is made from naturally dyed English Leicester fleece. I wash the fleece in warm water and then drain. I used a cup of sage leaves and 6 green tea bags and a generous splash of vinegar to make the dye bath. I cooked that on barely simmering for 2 hours and left overnight. I added the fleece in the morning and slowly simmered for two hours. I could have added more sage leaves to get it greener. I then left that all day and then rinsed the fleece out and dried it. It is a light olive green colour and such an attractive colour which is easily obtained. I could have added a couple of drops of green food colouring to change the green slightly had I have wanted to. I don’t like using chemicals and avoid them where possible. Vinegar fixes colour and I tend to use apple cider vinegar but you can use white vinegar or even a bit of balsamic. If you use citric acid it dries the wool out and you have to condition it with hair conditioner or Argan oil spray.
The pictures do not capture the green. It is similar to the Pantone Oasis colour.

Cold Dyeing Fleece

For cold dyeing I generally use Earth Palette dyes which are easy and reliable. I prefer experimenting with natural dyes. They produce soft, gentle colours. For a colour burst I like to do small quantities of cold dyeing.
I was with the grandchildren in the toy section of KMart the other day and in the children’s craft section (can’t help myself!) they had tie and dye kits for $8 dollars. Worth a try so this is what I produced and now ave a plan for when I use them again. The reviews online were mixed so I didn’t know what to expect. I am more than happy . I got my $8 worth.

I washed the fleece. The plait was already clean so I wet it. I sprinkled the wool generously with white vinegar and patted it all in.

With the green I mixed water in the dye bottle and used all of it on a small quantity of fleece which has a light tan colour. I has come out as a strong colour.

With the plait I used the yellow and red and a little bit of left over green and did a half and half with a green bit which is more grey now. On white tops those colours have more of a fluorescent look.

The brown Corriedale I really like. it has splashes of the blue and purple (which haven’t photographed so well) and then bits of the left over colours in the other bottles. Not much. It hasn’t coasted the fleece because I used a lot. My plan was to highlight that brown and it worked.

I put each fleece in and ice cream container with a lid and left them for a day outside to cure. We didn’t have sun. I then rinsed them and dried them.

The $8 Anko dyes work perfectly well but I shall use them on darker fleeces to get a more normal colour without the fluoro effect.