This past fall, I lost my jacket. I don’t know how or where but it was my favorite jacket with a waterproof outer shell and a zip-in fleece. I wore it almost all year long and when I lost it I wanted one just like it. Unfortunately, Columbia had stopped making that particular model and so I started looking on Ebay for a used one. A woman in Seattle was actually selling one at the time so I snapped it up.
This whole situation put me in a bit of a dilemma. I was at the time spinning and knitting some lovely silk/wool fiber dyed in a dark plum/green/blue colorway for a hooded scarf to match my slate gray/black jacket. Now, half way through the process, I wound up with a sky blue pastel jacket. I went ahead and finished the scarf but realized that it did not match my jacket at all and that I wasn’t going to use it. So, I did the only reasonable thing and gave it to a friend.
Now that winter is over, I finally got around to dyeing and spinning up yarn to match my new jacket. I was envisioning a scarf that flowed between sky blue, aqua and light purple in long color changes. I dyed up some samples and settled on three colors that I thought would look good together. Then I dyed half kid mohair and half lovely soft shetland wool and carded them together in my drum carder. Finally, I took the three main colors (blue, aqua and purple) and blended one batt of each with one other color to make color transitions between them. I wound up with six colors: blue, blue/aqua, aqua, aqua/purple, purple and purple/blue. Here’s a photo of the mountains of fiber that resulted:
Next, I spun up the yarn. The colors in the ball of yarn are transitioning between blue in the center, to blue/aqua to aqua. The skein has aqua/purple, purple and purple/blue.
Blue yarn
Blue and purple yarn
Then I picked a pattern for the scarf. I wanted a nice cable going down the middle for some interest, and found one I liked in “Viking Knits” by Elsebeth Lavold. So far I’m very pleased with how the scarf looks and the colors. I’m only about a 8″ into the scarf, and I finished knitting one blue section and am in the middle of a blue/aqua section. I think the colors flow into each other nicely:
scarf
I’ll post more photos once I can find time to get some more knitting done.
kristyknitsbig said,
March 23, 2009 at 6:21 am
Your scarf looks great, the cable pattern is a really nice one and the colours are lovely.
How to dye fiber and blend roving for heathered yarns « Forestgnome's Blog said,
July 20, 2011 at 5:23 am
[...] In my experience, alpaca and mohair fibers tend to come out lighter than wool. Even though the photo above makes the mohair look darker than the wool, once you card it up and separate the fibers, it looks lighter. Mohair in particular also has a luster to it that makes it look very different from wool. Therefore, you can combine different fibers that are dyed the same color and often the result is a heathered yarn. Below is a photo from a hooded scarf that I spun and knit from shetland wool and mohair. They were dyed together, but you can see that the mohair is much lighter and lends the yarn a white sheen, making the yarn look heathered. For more information about the hooded scarf project and photos of the fiber preparation, you can go to: http://forestgnome.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/mounds-of-fiber/ [...]