Palette Cleansers and Play

Sometimes I like to spin yarn with no particular purpose.  I don't mean "here is a beautiful braid I am going to spin into yarn, but I don't have a project planned yet."  I mean that I take bits and bobs and combine them in ways that feed my creativity and then I just spin it up.  Usually I haven't done a lot of fiber, maybe 20-40 grams, so the resulting skein of yarn is low yardage. 

I tend to turn to these especially after completing bigger projects.  When I've been doing something very intentionally it is so freeing to just do whatever I feel like.  The smaller quantities are nice too because it is just enough to give me something different, something to play with, and then I can go on to the next thing.

As I finished up my big sweater spin I was needing exactly that sort of thing.  I had a few blending board rolags hanging around from a few months ago that became one skein, but this time most of my blending was done with my drum carder.  

I don't think I've talked about my drum carder here.  I have a Louet Jr. that I bought second (well, actually at least third) hand from one of my friends in my fiber guild when she needed to get a carder with a crank on the opposite side.  It has a narrow carding cloth advertised as "roving sized" at about 3.5" across.  I can get about 1-2 oz on there because despite the narrow width, the teeth are long and can hold a lot of fiber and texture.  I am not sure if it is a 72 tpi or a 46 tpi, Louet makes both, but comparing the cloth to my 72 tpi blending board and hand cards I think it is 46 tpi.  

Most of the time when I do things like this I don't bother documenting the process or measuring out the batts I make and what I put in them so I don't have much for that.  Except I did take a picture last time I was playing around.

The batts above were inspired by some Trish from Fiber Love Diary made a few weeks ago and showed on a live stream.  I don't remember exactly what hers looked like, but I made these with what I had on hand.  These batts were on the bigger side, about 45 g each so when I spun them up I ended up with basically a full skein of yarn.  I just did really basic measurements on the skein, but it came in about 90 g and 115 yards and I would say it is an Aran weight.  

I have four other mini skeins I've done this month too.  The first one is the green one.  These were blending board rolags I made as a warm-up for the big sweater spin.  Not only was I reacquainting myself with the blending board I was also trying to figure out the best way to spin these rolags on my Flatiron.  It is somewhat amazing the little skein turned out as well as it did.

My other three little skeins are all somewhat related and all a little experimental.  

The one that is mostly white with sari silk in was blending from the good quality/clean combing waste of the Corriedale I am trying to process.  I've had this idea of blending in sari silk with a clean fleece to get a kind of speckled tweedy effect that I think could look really great in a sweater.  I will want to swatch this up but I do like the resulting yarn.

My other little experiment was to play with optical blending and create an intentionally "muddy" yarn.  I took a bunch of the smaller quantity bits and bobs out of my bag of mill ends and just put them through the drum carder multiple times.  I created a few batts with this method.  It went from super ugly and colors that I would normally NEVER put together to something that was muted and nuanced and really kind of interesting.  I don't know that I would do a large quantity like this but I am excited to know that it is possible to create things I like out of stuff I might otherwise not know how to use.

My last little experiment was a combo of the previous two.  I took some sections of both the Corriedale sari silk batt and the mill end mixed batts and blended them together.  I wasn't particularly enamored with the results, but when I started spinning it up I felt like it was making a really great singles that could stand alone.  So this last skein ended up being single-ply, which is not something I do very often and in fact, I had not done it at all on my Flatiron.  This little skein gave me the confidence to do a whole braid as a single-ply yarn a few days later (see my post from a few days ago here.)