After such a long time spinning natural fibre I thought it was time for a change and I really wanted to spin some dyed fibre and have those colours drafting between my fingers.
Cormo, a blend of Corriedale and Merino fibre is new to me. Both Corriedale and Merino are New Zealand breeds and so the micron count (the unit we use to measure the diameter of fibre) is very low at 23. This means it is super soft and delicate enough to be worn around the neck of even the most sensitive of souls.
I'd love to make a handspun diamond twill gradient scarf. Having a stock of acid dyes still to use I've chosen to go with a brown to cream gradient.
I'll be honest with you, the first dye pot didn't go as I'd planned. I've dyed fibre for many years so this came as quite a surprise and I still haven't really got to the bottom of it.
I used 4g of citric acid to 100g of fibre, hoping for a deep chocolate brown. The dye would not exhaust at all and so after adding a little more of the citric acid and it still not dyeing deeper than a mid brown I left it and used the considerable exhaust to dye up some BFL high twist yarn which I'll use on weaving workshops
I've chose to use a forward short draw worsted draft for this spin as I want the yarn to keep the gorgeous sheen. Short forward is also my default spin and I love to watch the television when spinning and just relax so this will help me to keep my gauge
My singles came out at approx 36wpi with a plied wpi of 18 and I'm happy with that. As this will be a scarf for myself, I'm not overly worrying about twist per inch or getting anything perfect, I just want a nice chilled project
After asking for other people's experiences on Facebook groups I went back to dye my next lot of fibre and went for it with the citric acid. I put two teaspoons per 100g and poured liquid deep chocolate coloured dye in the pot. The fibre was much deeper but there was still quite a lot of dye in the exhaust. I'll always use up the exhaust for yarn now though so nothing was wasted and I'm much happier with this fibre which I think will work really well with the gradient yarn already spun
So of course, the actual spinning will take a little while but I'll post an update as soon as it's done and let you know what happens next
