blending colorful fiber with carders

I am enjoying a colorful day of blending wool fibers for a crochet project.

This stash is from Opulentfibers.com and is a blending of merino and silk. I love this combination and use it for making yarns that I wear next to my skin. As you can see I have a nice selection of colors. This makes it easy to create new colors as well as make my own colorways for spinning.

The inspiration for my new yarns is taken from my vintage candy tins. I was immediately taken with the lovely colors on the boxes and could see that they would go with my wardrobe. I found a crochet scarf/shawlette pattern that I wanted to use for this project. Since it was a variation on the granny square, it meant that I would need small amounts of a variety of colors in a laceweight yarn. This meant I would be spinning less than an ounce of many colors. To blend wool I decided to use a hand carder.

Using one hand carder, I pulled the fibers down the teeth, holding the tips at the top as I pulled and distributed the wool.

The next color was done on top of the yellow. Any successive colors were done in the same way.

Then I released the fiber by pulling up from the bottom. The wool lifts off in one piece.

Then I roll it up and decide if I want to blend it over again, or just pull or attenuate it to make it into a roving to spin.

Here it is attenuated, reading for spinning.

For a bit larger amounts, I can blend the fiber on the larger drum of my drum carder, using just a small footprint to blend the wool colors. Here I am only using about a 2″ width. I feed the wool right onto the drum, and pull it off as usual.

These fibers will all be spun into a 2 ply yarn that will be a bronzed brown color.

Here is the finished yarn. I was trying to emulate the metallic edging color on my candy box, and this wool had to capture the highlights and the shadows.

Here are more of the wools that I have finished for my crochet scarf. More to show you on the crochet part soon.

Thanks for stopping by ~ Karen