Enabling

A couple of weeks ago, my sister asked me when I was going to teach her to knit so she could make herself a scarf to go with her coat.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Usually when I talk about fiber or knitting or spinning or anything fiber related, I can see the eyes glaze over. So I've learned to not talk about my passion, or at least, not very often, with anybody in the family, they just aren't interested.

So I set about coming up with a yarn for her to use. Her coat is a sort of olive green color. Black would go well, and I have some nice black roving from Elvis, but black is hard to see and not the best choice for a beginner.

Then I remembered that I have some merino wool/silk laps already dyed in an olive color. I dyed up some alpaca to go with it, and it ended up a lighter, more sagey, silvery olive color. I thought maybe one ply the olive color, and one ply natural cream would create a nice marled yarn for her to use. I blended the wool/silk and the alpaca on the drum carder, and ended up with this.

My sister has hazel green eyes with little brown flecks. Standing at the carder doing the blending, I was thinking that the green is just like her eyes. She was over on Saturday, and confirmed that it was a perfect match. If I were to cut up little pieces of brown yarn (leftover from the felted bag here), or maybe little pieces of brown felt? and sprinkle it through the green as I am spinning, it would create the fleck effect too. I also realized on Saturday that her coat has a brown collar. Hmmm. She liked the green, but I haven't run the brown fleck idea by her yet. I may have to do a mini skein and see if it turns out the way I have it pictured in my head.

Time to go do some experimenting. I'll show the results, good or bad.

UPDATE: Eeew, no, neither one of those ideas worked. The felt just disintegrated when I cut it up, and blended with the green instead of creating flecks. The yarn did better, but it was hard to get it to catch in when I was spinning. So I tried running it through the carder to blend them into the green, but no, that didn't work either. Then I thought, beads? Brown beads? So now I'm off to research how to add beads to spinning, which I know I've read about, but never done.