Misty

 

Last night I started making more blending board 'rolags'.  There are three 'layers' to them.  I begin with an even covering of the grey, then do a layer of the hand dyed braid (primarily cyan and magenta) and then finish with a final layer of the grey.

The colours are bleeding through the layer of grey, and I'm interested to see how it will spin up - if the yarn will match my internal vision of what will happen as the fibres twist their way into yarn.

I'm hoping for a tweedy, heathery, effect but it may barberpole because I'm not blending the colours into a unified mass.

It looks like there is enough of the braid to make rolags to fill the little bin I store them in, which should then result in about four bobbins of single.  Those will then get plyed with a commercially spun yarn - to be determined.  I don't want to have the ply barberpole as well, so I'm thinking of using a grey rayon about the same grist as a 2/8 cotton (not quite, but close to).  The grey ply yarn will 'hide' in the grey bits, and may cause a barberpole stripe when there is cyan or magenta.  But I think that will look okay.  What I will do with it is anyone's guess at this point - I'm just playing.

In a way it's another form of 'sampling'.  Just doing stuff to see what happens, and then figuring out what to do with it based on the results.

The challenge will be to knit something that doesn't 'fight' visually with the effects of the colour in the yarn.  So probably something simple, no fancy stitches.  And right now?  That suits me to a T.  Knitting is my end of the day or stitch n bitch activity - not something I want to concentrate on.  Whatever focus I have is reserved for writing/developing the Power Point presentations for teaching or weaving. 

After what feels like months of grey dreary days we have had nearly a week of blue skies and sun and I have been walking.  (I took the weekend 'off'.)  Progress can be measured in inches, but progress IS happening, so there is lots of incentive to keep going.  OTOH, I have a pile of library books to read, so the strategy is to keep rotating through things, getting a little of this and a little of that done every day.  The old 'eating the elephant' kind of thing.

Reading Sharon Kay Penman's last book is bittersweet.  I think I've read every book she wrote - large sweeping historical fiction, based on facts, made 'human' - because 'fiction'.  I'm sorry she won't be around to write more books.  However, there are lots more books in the world and I'm quite sure my problem will not be too little to read, but too much.