Spinning and Dyeing, For Fun!!!

During the last part of the final day of the Master Spinner 6 class, I started spinning up some Polwarth leftover from class assignments, just for fun!   When I got home, I finished spinning up the bit of sliver that I had left.  When I wet finished it and hung it over the loom to dry, I realized that there were all sorts of skeins of white yarn just hanging there.   I dug out the acid dyes and coloured it up.   The blue is Navy, at two different depths of shades.  The pink is Fuchsia and ultramarine blue in an 80%/20% concentration and the grey is a .5 depth of shade in black.  It was the first time I'd tried the black and was quite pleased with the way the grey turned out.  It is a Merino, Cashmere, Silk blend and it looks like the silk took the dye a little differently than the other two fibres.   At anyrate, I kept the temperatures down to accomodate the silk, but cooked it a little bit longer to help the wool along.  The dye pot exhausted, so all was good.

Then I started spinning up a bit more of the Merino/Cashmere/Silk.  It's a mill end that I purchased at the Woodstock Fleece Festival.  The Black Lamb often has huge bags of mill ends for really affordable prices.  A friend of mine has some of this and was trying to figure out a way to spin it to make a shawl with.   I found it a little tricky to get consistent, so I played around different drafting methods both in the above grey skein and in this bobbin.   Re-carding didn't really work as well as I'd hoped.   In the end, I just took the mill ends, folded them over my finger to spin from the fold, using a point of contact long draw.   So far this seems to be both the most consistent for me as well as the fastest.   Since I was spinning more for fun that anything, I actually watched a movie while I was spinning - I will have to admit that Benedict Cumberbatch and Star Trek in one movie, works for me.