I had a crazy idea, quite some time ago now, to spin a yarn that was lime green and turquoise with sparkles and texture going on and to use some of the left over bits and pieces of Twilley's Goldfingering in the yarn if I could as one time I accidentally miscounted and cut far too many lengths for the fringing on one of the shawls and I don't want to just throw it away. It just so happens to be turquoise. I get lots of left overs of Goldfingering that can't really be used to make anything much so if I can incorporate it into my own handspun yarns that means less wastage and less going into landfill.
I already had a braid of merino fibre that was mostly lime green with a bit of turquoise but I bought a braid of turquoise merino fibre from the Wool Show that I went to just before Christmas. I also had some Trilobal Nylon in Colbalt and Tussah Silk in a lime green that I bought in years ago and then some Tussah Silk Noil in pale blue and Hemp in Tropical Green that I dyed myself a couple of years ago. I put these 6 fibres through my blending hackle in 4 equal lots, one lot for each ply of a skein and I am making 2 skeins. I can't put the lengths of Twilley's Goldfingering through the blending hackle, they will have to be added in as I go. My fingers did turn blue though and this was to do with excess dye in the turquoise merino braid, which was also ever so slightly felted in parts, not enough to throw anything away, it did all come loose eventually, but it was harder work putting it on the blending hackle than it should have been. I didn't have any problems with the other braid of merino, that just pulled apart as easily as would be expected.
The blue goldfingering was already cut into lengths and there was 15g of that. I then cut the lime green goldfingering into the same sized lengths but because there was only 6g of it I didn't get many pieces so what I did with the lime green was to then cut those lengths in half to give me more instances of when the green will be in the yarn. I split the number of the lengths of each colour into two, for each skein, and then split them again into two for each ply. I then put them into pairs of one blue and one green and then when I ran out of green I made pairs of the remaining blue. In total I had 30 pairs
I worked out that the total length of Goldfingering for each ply was around 60ft. The first fibre that I dizzed off the blending hackle measured roughly 30ft in length and the ones I dizzed off after that didn't quite measure that length but all I had to do was to work my way along pulling it out a bit thinner to get it up to 30ft in length. The reason for doing this is that I can then break off lengths that match the longer blue pieces and I can add in the two lengths of Goldfingering, whatever colours they may be, randomly whilst spinning the woolly blend and at least they will then be distributed throughout the yarn as evenly as possible whilst still being random, if that makes sense.
I did have a little trouble getting the ends of the Goldfingering to embed themselves into the fibres so that they wouldn't stick out or unravel but there were a few times that I had to go back and add a bit of fibre specifically over the join to try to help keep the ends in place. Plying has helped this even more but I have noticed that there are still one or two that are sticking out. I will leave them alone until I actually use the finished yarn to make something and assess what is happening with the those ends at the time of making something, because knitting or crocheting may bury any stray ends in anyway. It was a bit tricky and a little time consuming but I love the finished yarn.
My fingers kept turning blue throughout the spinning process due to the excess dye having not been washed out thoroughly enough from the braid of blue Merino that I purchased. When I soaked the finished yarn the water turned blue because of this and the finished skeins are now not as bright turquoise as I had hoped for but they are still nice. I was initially a little disappointed but these things happen sometimes, especially with blues and reds, you can rinse and rinse and rinse and think its all done but then someone with a different water supply with different salts and minerals in the water and a different pH level comes along and puts your fibre or yarn in their water and it can start leaking dye again. The vendors at the Wool Show had come from all over the UK so this is a possible reason, although it still shouldn't have gotten all over my hands.
So, the finished yarn? It is Double Knit weight with one skein being 119g/313m and the other being 114g/270m. The final fibre contents, rounded to the nearest half a percent is 79.5% Merino, 6.5% Metallised Polyester, 3.5% Trilobal Nylon, 3.5% Tussah Silk, 3.5% Hemp, 2% Tussah Silk Noil, 1.5% Viscose.
