I've gotten very little knitting accomplished in 2018. I did, however, do some spinning.
I have a vision for a little red riding hood costume for Dragon*Con. I think it would be great to make the whole cape out of handspun. Ideally, I'd like the entire outfit to be handwoven, hand-knitted, crocheted, sprang-ed, and the like. I've been buying and spinning red. I don't have a plan. My thought is just to make a big pile of red yarn using my default spinning technique, then figure out what goes where. I also have some fleeces with locks, as I think an edging of locks on the cape would be dramatic.
I decided to spin some of the red Mountain Colors Bluefaced Leicester in my stash. Let me just pause right now and say, I adore Mountain Colors. Their colorways are rich, saturated, and vibrant. I had three bumps of Ruby River. Is there a better basic red out there? My original plan was to use all three bumps together, making 2-ply yarns for weaving. But I also noticed in the stash a bump of the Summertime colorway, which has red but also orange and blue-greens.
I'm on the e-mail list for Interweave, receiving the newsletters for knitting, spinning, and weaving. I no longer remember which posts I saw — probably at least one by Deborah Held — that recommended taming a crazy colorway by plying it with a solid or close-to-solid colorway. Jillian Moreno demonstrates this technique in her 12 Ways to Spin Handpainted Top video. This is also a trick to get a large quantity of yarn for a big project (sweater?) out of a stash filled with assorted bumps acquired after random failed Will saves. Basically, you can take a bunch of related but not identical colorways and ply them to a common colorway to make them look like they all belong together. And a solid colorway can also make something that would be way too loud and stripey calm down and look painterly and artistic.
So, that's what I did. I made one skein of Ruby Red on Ruby Red and another skein of Ruby Red with Sumertime.
They both look good.
The barber pole effect is more pronounced in the mixed colorway. But I also think it will play with a field of assorted reds.
Of course, now I am thinking they would also look great in a knitted project, shifting back and forth between the not-quite-solid and the barber pole. And, since I am also following Jen Arnall-Culliford's helical knitting posts, I am thinking this would be an interesting pair of yarns for helical knitting.
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| Mountain Colors Summertime + Ruby Red (above) Mountain Colors Ruby Red + Ruby Red (below) |
I decided to spin some of the red Mountain Colors Bluefaced Leicester in my stash. Let me just pause right now and say, I adore Mountain Colors. Their colorways are rich, saturated, and vibrant. I had three bumps of Ruby River. Is there a better basic red out there? My original plan was to use all three bumps together, making 2-ply yarns for weaving. But I also noticed in the stash a bump of the Summertime colorway, which has red but also orange and blue-greens.
I'm on the e-mail list for Interweave, receiving the newsletters for knitting, spinning, and weaving. I no longer remember which posts I saw — probably at least one by Deborah Held — that recommended taming a crazy colorway by plying it with a solid or close-to-solid colorway. Jillian Moreno demonstrates this technique in her 12 Ways to Spin Handpainted Top video. This is also a trick to get a large quantity of yarn for a big project (sweater?) out of a stash filled with assorted bumps acquired after random failed Will saves. Basically, you can take a bunch of related but not identical colorways and ply them to a common colorway to make them look like they all belong together. And a solid colorway can also make something that would be way too loud and stripey calm down and look painterly and artistic.
So, that's what I did. I made one skein of Ruby Red on Ruby Red and another skein of Ruby Red with Sumertime.
They both look good.
The barber pole effect is more pronounced in the mixed colorway. But I also think it will play with a field of assorted reds.
Of course, now I am thinking they would also look great in a knitted project, shifting back and forth between the not-quite-solid and the barber pole. And, since I am also following Jen Arnall-Culliford's helical knitting posts, I am thinking this would be an interesting pair of yarns for helical knitting.
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