New dyeing, new spinning, same old me

Silk hankies are the funnest thing to dye!!

I've been dyeing, spinning, dyeing, winding, spinning, fleece sorting, spinning, dyeing, knitting.   It's just a shame there needs to be time away from the wheels and fleece to go to work.  I mean, I like my job, but I can't exactly keep my wheel by my desk........or can I???

It's fascinating how different fibres take colour differently.  Silk sucks colour up like a thirsty kid with a milkshake.

Another thing I've found is that the colours I might think I need to make up a certain shade on fleece aren't necessarily the ones you'd imagine.  Colour is unpredictable and that's one of the reasons I love dyeing so much.

I just dyed up a batch of Shetland fibre for a shawl in a beautiful blue.  The shades of blue I was going for were heathery and kind of blurred.  I used two shades of grey and also black - no blue dye went anywhere near the pot - weird, right?

This is my favourite batch of hankies for the shop so far - it's like a Turner seascape.

 Another thing I've found is that the things I love dyeing are not necessarily the things I love to spin.  Wensleydale and Leicester locks are so beautiful to handle and to dye that I feel bad that I don't really enjoy processing them to spin, but the truth is, I don't. 

I'm going to snaffle some of this Wensleydaleto scatter into a few batts

I spin worsted yarn either from flicked locks or prepared batts or combed nests of fibre.  The effort it takes to open out the locks for preparing is just 'meh' to me.  I'm lazy, I admit it!

They're so pretty, though.  And I want to be able to appreciate them in my spinning in some way, so, this year, I think I'm going to open some locks out and sprinkle them into some batts.  I'm going to prepare some garnets for using in batts, too.  Garnets are little snippets of yarn that get scattered into batts and appear as tweedy little flecks in the  finished yarns.

I figure, why not get a bit adventurous in 2015??  This is a cold-sheep year for me, so it's going to be a time of working through what I have and finding what I love to make.