Fiber Friday - Lantern Festival

One of the great things about joining the Hello Yarn fiber club has been getting fiber in colors I would never have chosen. Of the three packages received so far, only one (June) has been colors that I would have picked for myself. When last months fiber, Lantern Festival, came out of the box, I set it on the table and looked at it for a moment. Iron Man came in and said “Woah! That is bright!” I was very dubious about how it was going to look, and at a complete loss as to how to spin it without getting more cat barf.

After some introspection and input from other folks in the group, I split the top by color repeats, and then split each repeat into pieces about a finger wide (8 per repeat). I predraft the strips and wound them into two balls, hoping that I’d get the same weight in each (and therefore, theoretically the same length of singles from each).

Each ball was spun in the correct color sequence (purple to green to red to orange to purple).

This is the first time I’ve spun on the wheel after splitting the fiber down in to more manageable pieces, and not surprisingly my singles are a lot thinner. They’re getting more even too. I spun up both big fluff balls over the weekend while the kids were napping and in the evenings after they’d gone to bed, and started plying on Tuesday. I’m still plying. It’s going to take a long time to ply all of this stuff, and my hopes of having the color repeats more or less line up have been sorely dashed. I guess I’m not yet consistent enough for that.

But it is coming out pretty – I’m always amazed to see how different the colors look in the final yarn as compared to the starting fiber. I have no idea what this will become yet, or what the final yarn weight will be, but I hope to finish it up over the weekend. And the next Yarn Club package should be here soon!