Jobo Designs

I've been working on a couple of commissioned projects this month... trying to get things finished for the Holidays... and this is one of them.  The plan is to make a pair of Lined mittens out of handspun yarn for a young woman who wears a lot of blue jeans and a black winter coat. 

This is some super soft Merino Top (one of my favorites to work with, and also to dye with)  that I hand painted with some Jacquard Acid Dyes.  Basically I soaked the natural colored wool and then splashed it sparsely with shades of Black, Gunmetal Grey and bits of Teal Blue, then wrapped in Plastic Wrap and Nuked in the Microwave until set.  The places where the Black blended into the cream fiber created some nice brownish areas and the grays and blues are fading nicely from medium to light shades. 

It might look in the photos like there is a lot of brown, but it's actually not as visible as all of that... the Grays, Blues and Blacks dominate quite nicely.  These little "Nests" of predrafted fiber will become a nice bouncy, round, worsted weight 3-ply yarn to even out the colors and blend the shades together further.  The light pearly blues and pale grays that appear sporadically in the mix remind me of the shimmering shades in Mother of Pearl... I think these mittens will require buttons of the mother-of-pearl variety to be incorporated into the design :) 

Maybe next week's Yarn Candy will be the finished yarn?  One can only hope...

ok...  The title seems random...  But the color of this yarn reminds me of Caterpillars!  Greens, Greys, Black, and a hint of Rust here and there.  When we were little we used to see lots of fuzzy little many-legged creatures in the back yard while playing outside :)

This is only the first little skein in what will be a 4 skein series...  at approximately 160 yards of fingering weight, navajo 3-ply.  I am tempted to jump in and start knitting this guy up, but alas, I should probably keep on spinning before I do too much more scheming. 

The fiber here is some Hand Dyed Polwarth, in 4 ounce bags, from London-Wul over in Moncton.  I have 2 bags... so 8 ounces total.

I was drawn to the colors immediately but when I dug into the bag,  I found that there isn't really any kind of shade distribution in the roving.  Really, it's just random splashes of color - which I don't mind - but there are long sections that are only lime green, and others that are only black and really dark colors.  It would have been nice to have a more predictable variance maybe.  There were also a few felted bits from the dyeing process.  Overall I am pleased with the fiber, and the finished yarn is delectable... but I think I will ask to open up the bag and examine the roving next time I buy this product, just to get an idea of the dyeing pattern before I take it home.

I'll post some more pics when the rest of the pile has been converted from Fluff to yarn :)

 From this:

- London-Wul Polwarth Top

- Blues and Greys

- 4 oz

to this:

- super soft, bouncy

- 3-ply fingering weight yarn

- approximately 380 yards

I very much enjoyed spinning up this fiber... even though there were a few felted bits in places.  I chose to tear this fiber up into pieces since the colors were not distributed in any even pattern.  I used my handy-dandy postal scale to weigh the torn up chunks and try and make 3 singles of similar length.  In the end I decided to make 2 plies completely baby blue, and the third ply out of the darker shades of blue and grey.  I tried to randomly disperse the colors in the darker 3rd ply.  In the end, my weighing technique was pretty close.  There was a little bit more of the dark single than the others, which I navajo 3-plied just to use it up (around 15 yards)  You can see it in the centre of the skein, about 4 strands of yarn that appear to be all one color.

This skein is destined to become a pair of squishy wonderful socks for ME!  I am thinking maybe something with cables in it?  since the yarn is very basic in color...