Last spring I took a Blending Board class from Sasha Torres of Sheepspot. During the class she mentioned she had an idea to do a similar project and after doing a few of my own blending board mixes in the class I realized that a project like that could be really fun and had a lot of potential. This was fresh on my mind when I went to the Great Lakes Fiber Show the next day, so I made a lot of my fiber purchases with that in mind. I brought home several small quantities (1 oz or less) of dyed merino in various shades from blue greens to purples and pinks. In this picture of that day's purchases you can see where I was going with this.
In addition to these bits and bobs, I had a couple pounds of mill ends to select from and some Targhee that was too compacted to spin pleasantly on its own but would still work fine once it was opened up in the blending process. Weighing a lot of little bits of fiber isn't the easiest, but I had at least a pound, probably more, that could go into the project. I knew I needed at least 8 oz more.
I wasn't in a hurry to get started with it though, I had plenty of other fiber to spin first and wasn't ready to take on that project yet. It was on the back of my mind though. I kept checking out fiber sales and trying to decide how much more fiber I needed and what colors I wanted and not making any moves because nothing was quite right.
Then about a week and a half ago I was checking out an Etsy shop (littlebeanlovesyarn.etsy.com) and I found fiber that I knew would work wonderfully in this project. I snagged 8 oz and when I received it earlier this week I set to playing right away.
My goal for this project is to have a yarn that is random but consistently inconsistent with color so that there is a lot of marling and optical blending going on, but the yarn is really interesting on closer inspection. To do this, I am making sure a portion of every board contains the same fibers, but then a portion of the fibers vary from board to board. I am also spinning the rolags at random and will ply the bobbins randomly as well to help mix everything up.
Knowing that I want to spin up approximately 2 lbs of fiber, and that my blending board can hold about an ounce at a time, that means that I will need to blend 32 times. I started with the 8 oz of merino and divided it into a total of 32 sections. I was able to do the same with some of the other fiber I had if I had at least an ounce of it. For the smaller bits and bobs, I sorted them into color families and then divided up all the fiber in those groups into at 32 little bits of fluff. Those groups helped me have a little variety in the fiber for each board while the larger quantities let me have that consistency in each board I wanted. It was an organized mess. I took pictures so I could share how I was keeping all this straight, but I was doing this at night so the lighting isn't terrific.
There is a lot of work here! I am about 2/3 the way through blending. My goal this week is to have all the rolags made up. The rolags are great though! They make me feel really happy when I see them in the basket waiting for me to spin them up.
Above are a few boards prior to pulling off the rolags, below is the basket of rolags as of this afternoon.
Best practice would be to sample though, right? Ideally I suppose I would have sampled before diving in, and I kind of did. While I was waiting for the fiber to arrive I blended a board of merino from colors I knew I wouldn't be using in this project and did a little spinning to see how I wanted to set up my wheel. Since these are rolags, I wanted to spin them longdraw. I also wanted to use my Flatiron because it is up in the attic where I am doing all this anyway and I wouldn't have to carry things around the house. I decided I could get a nice soft yarn with enough twist by using the 17.4:1 ratio. I probably should have plied and knit up a little swatch with that sample yarn, but then my real fiber arrived and I dived right in.
I thought it would be good to have an idea about how this was going to turn out before I got too far in though. I started spinning a bobbin as soon as I started blending. This worked out well because the nice rolags could go in the basket and the ones at the beginning and end of the board that were sometimes a little wonky or didn't want to stay together could immediately be spun up.
In no time at all I had a bobbin full of singles. I rewound them and plied and came up with a great skein of yarn. That first skein had a grist of 893 ypp, so with approximately two pounds of fiber I should have a safe amount of yardage for a sweater. I did start knitting up a little gauge swatch and I will share that when it is washed and blocked and I am ready to start talking about the knitting portion of this project.
The singles and plied yarn on the bobbin
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