Wednesday, November 22, 2006

swatching

I have been working on the design of a yarn from my SOAR purchases.

The chocolate polworth, the brown and orange silk - the cashmere/alpaca blend... what to do, what to do.

so I did something different this time. I sampled. I spun up a bobbin of the cashmere/alpaca, a bobbin of the polworth and a little bit of the silk. I tried plying the three together, that didn't thrill me - so I tried two plys of the three combinations. Didn't really care for any of those either. The silk was too much contrast to the polworth and got lost in the cashmere tweediness.

I went to the drum carder and blended some of the silk with the polworth and spun up a bobbin of that. Back to sampling. Plyed all possible combinations of the three bobbins and then knit a test swatch of each sample. This is a picture of the test swatch.

6 different yarns and I like the one on the right side the best. This picture doesn't show the silk shine, but the right hand yarn is the polworth plyed with the polworth/silk blend.



This skein is about 6.75 ounces and over 800 yards of pretty pretty yarn.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice colour mix for the Polworth, any ideas what you are going to knit /weave /crochet with it?

I'd never thought of mini samples like that, great idea! I usually do a quickie sample on the drop spindle and then hit the wheel when I know what I want.

Enjoy!

Judy

Anonymous said...

I'm a big fan of sampling. The Polwarth/silk yarn must feel really luxurious. 800 yds is a nice amount what will you use it for?

Unknown said...

You made the right choice to blend just a little bit of silk. It adds just a little bit of shine and makes for a rich colour. Yes, now the question: what to make out of it?