Saturday, September 27, 2008

My own hand dyed handspun

Many moons ago I decided to try my hand at dyeing my own fibre. I bought some bog-standard Merino rovings and fetched my steam-fix silk dyes down from the loft. After a bit of trial and error (mostly error) I came up with these:



I only dyed about 25g of each one. Then came the spinning:




The yarn is very fine, sort of lace weight. Really, really thin which, considering i was using 50g spindles, was a bit unexpected. I wound off the yarn onto 2 ashford bobbins and put them onto my lazy kate and plied them on my trusty CD spindle.
This is the result:


It only weights about 16g and it is 155 yards long - but its all my own work!!!!
I have learnt several things from this experience. Dyeing is addictive and very satisfying. Lacewight takes a looooong time to spin and never, ever only dye a little bit because you cant repeat the colour.

2 comments:

Julie Spriddle said...

Gosh, that's pretty! I love the way the colours have blended together in the plying. :)

Anonymous said...

Very pretty.
Is it for "keeping" and stroking, or is it for knitting?