Questionable Blend number 7 - Libra | Craft me Happy!: Questionable Blend number 7

I’m writing a blog series this year, sharing several different ways of spinning commercially available, multicoloured blended tops. I’ve tried to choose blends that contain colours from more than half of the colour wheel. The kinds of blends that are a little tricky to guess immediately how they’ll spin up.

I’ll be using the word questionable to describe any blend that would cast doubt in the mind of even the most experienced spinner. A blend that would cause you to pause before ordering it and question how it might turn out.

Novice spinners are regularly attracted to the bold, multi-coloured stripes of a vertically blended top, but are frequently left disappointed when their beautiful combed top turns to mud on the wheel. In this series, I’ll be sharing quite a few techniques that can help reduce the amount of optical blending during spinning, so that some of those original colours still show up in the final yarn. By the end, the tops will almost certainly not be questionable.

Libra

Images of Libra reproduced by kind permission of World of Wool

The 7th blended top in this series is Libra.

Images Reproduced by Kind Permission of World of Wool

These are the fibres within Libra. All of the 'colours' are merino but it's comprised of 30% extra bleached tussah silk which is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this blended top.

I originally chose Libra because the first image on the website clearly shows a brownish optical blend and I was intrigued to play and experiment with it to see what I might come up with.

In reality, that first image on the World of Wool website sells this fibre a little short. Indeed, the fuchsia and jonquil, combined with the Flo Pink and Citrus would lead me to suspect that I would get a lot of muddy combinations within this fibre, but in truth, I saw very little evidence of these tricky optical blends.

The fibre on the left is the colour I got when I completely blended Libra together with my mini wool combs.

I also spun 8g of Libra to see how it looks when I allow the colours to mix together during spinning. I just drafted it out and then spun it from the tips. I then chain-plied it at the wheel to achieve a 3-ply yarn.

It's a beautiful, almost pastel autumnal peach colour. Combine this with a 30% silk content and this is a very pretty fibre.

Of all the Questionable Blends I'll be spinning this year, this one is probably the brightest and cleanest of all the blends and the least 'muddy' of all. It's very pretty!

I arranged all the yarns from the blends I’ll be spinning in this series, into a kind of muted gradient and I’ll be spinning them in this order. They have all been spun with no attention paid to colour management, they’ve simply been pre-drafted, spun, and then chain-plied.

Knitted with Libra that has been drafted, spun from the tips and then chain-plied

As I love the optically blended Libra yarn, but I'm less of a fan of yellow, green and fluorescent pink, I will prepare and ply this fibre in ways that give me subtle colour variations, but don't allow the individual colours to stand out too much.

I'm aiming for a little bit of colour blending with gentle shifts rather than bold, striping colour changes.

As a change from other yarns in this series, I spun the Libra yarns while beta-testing a prototype of a future Dreaming Robots e-spinner (affiliate link) - The Electric Eel Wheel Fold. This mid-sized, folding e-spinner will be available sometime next year with a Kickstarter hopefully planned for the end of 2024

Spinning Libra 4 Different Ways

Spun From the Fold (on the Fold) and Pre-Chain Plied

I'm still working on improving my long draw technique, and spinning from the fold is the ideal preparation for that practice. I've got to the point now that it’s become muscle memory and I can't spin from the fold now without it turning into long-draw; it's very pleasing!

To spin long-draw finely, I still have to go slowly so I thought I'd share this animated gif of my attempt at a fine(ish) long draw. I even managed to get a bit of double-drafting in there at the end, which is very satisfying.

The singles have a lovely speckled quality to them which makes a change from the usual ‘busy’ look I tend to get when I spin from the fold.

I went on to pre-chain ply the singles so that the marled colour sections were as long as possible. You can read more about how I pre-chain-ply my singles here.

From a distance, you see all the optical blends at once, but when you take a closer look you see a heathered mix of pinks, oranges and yellows that have been subtly toned down with the addition of a tiny bit of green.

Splitting the Top Vertically

To split the top vertically, I wasn't overly careful as I knew that I wasn't going to get too many muddy combinations. Any citrus green sections are very thin so it isn't going to overpower the other colours at all, merely shift them a little away from their bright spectrum hues. I also wanted to make sure that the fluorescent pink was well combined with some of the other colours as I wanted to tone that down too.

I broke the top up into small sections and then rearranged them so that similar color groupings weren't next to each other.

Sadly, I forgot to get a decent photo of my singles, but this screenshot shows that splitting the top vertically gave me some of the most definite colour sections of all the techniques I tried with Libra.

As yellow is not my favourite colour, but I like the effect it has on other colours, I went on to pre-chain-ply the singles so that the yellow would have more of a chance to barber-pole with the other colours within Libra.

The colour changes are subtle but there are definite fluctuations between pink and orange.

Dizzing off a Blending Board

I find this technique results in quite a well-blended yarn, especially when the fibre is already quite blended. I’m hoping that it will still give me some colour variation that will add interest and complexity to the final yarn.

I broke off 3 sections of Libra top that were the length of my blending board, opened them up, and then brushed them all down.

Using the smallest hole in my diz, I drafted off a thin continuous length, moving from side to side up the blending board. As it's prepared on a blending board, but drafted until the fibres are almost parallel, this is about as close to a worsted prep that I can get from my blending board. I find it very relaxing to spin this worsted style.

The colours are mostly optically blended with some subtle pink and yellow sections showing through.

Again, I pre-chain-plied the singles to encourage more marling but this is definitely the most blended of all the Libra yarns.

The colours are just a little more heathered than my original yarn that was drafted and spun from the tips.

Making Pencil Roving from Two lengths of the Blending Board

To make a kind of pencil roving out of Libra, I broke off two lengths the height of my blending board, opened them up, and placed them side by side on the blending board.

As Libra contains a lot of different colours and is quite well blended, stretching two layers across the width of the board should result in some very subtle colour variations.

Without drafting it, I rolled off one big, thick rolag.

It would not be fun to spin directly from this chunky rolag...

… so I drafted it from the end into a big mound of pencil roving.

When I rolled it into a ball I could see some very subtle colour variations…

… which showed up in quite long lengths in the singles.

Again, I pre-chain-plied the singles to tone down the yellow and fluorescent pink and achieve more barber poling.

This one looks very similar to the fibre spun from vertical strips but the colour sections are shorter and the colour transitions are smoother.

This fibre, and many others, make me very thankful to have started my Questionable Blends project as I would never have purchased Libra from the image on the World of Wool website otherwise. It's such a pretty blend in real life and, like Blaze that I spun previously, very difficult to get wrong.