Back in November I thought it was time for a new spinning project. I had something specific in mind and I just had to do it! I guess we all have those fits from time to time 🙂 I went to my local yarn store, knowing they also had roving there. I saw two 100% merino 100 gram packs; one in cream and one in a more brownish color and took those babies home. The plan was to dye one in a darker, and one in a lighter rainbow colorway, so that when I spun them, I could make a striped -insert item here- alternating the two colorways.

I started dyeing immediately and boy was I surprised! Silly me never thought about the lighter colors not getting through the brownish roving, so I ended up omitting all of the yellow and most of the orange.

When ‘the brown one’ was done I started on the cream one. I laid the roving on my countertop and used the same dye solutions for the other one, starting with little spaces of color. Next I added water to my dye solutions and repeated the process, so I would have 2 tones of each color.

Here is the dyeing result of the ‘candy-loving sister’!

Yes it feels as soft as it looks 😉 

And here is her ‘down-to-earth brother’!

Totally different, right?! 

I really love those purple and blue tones. They look so earthy and rich! 

Together they make a happy couple:)

I started right away with the ‘sister’, aiming for a two-ply fingering weight yarn. 

Halfway through the roving though, father Christmas was coming and told me I had to get busy with presents! My sister in law had her eyes on the darker roving and jokingly asked  if she could “have the yarn when you are done spinning it”.  Well, that’s exactly what she got ^^

She is more of an art-yarn person, so I plied a thick-and-thin single with a tread filled with beads, creating a boucle, shimmering kind of concoction. Because I had one long single to work with, I ended up with almost 250 meters of yarn!

I was glad she liked it and that I was done with it, because plying that kind of yarn is truly hell if you’ve never done it before. I don’t want to know how many times I ran out of thread or the thread giving up on me, spilling all the beads on the floor. To this day I still find little beads everywhere! In the end she loved it, which made me forget all the horrors 🙂

It was only last week I could finally get back to spinning the other half of my candy rainbow again and I finished plying and setting the twist yesterday!

The result is almost 350 meters of pure woolen loveliness

*swoon*

I spun it to be a very long gradient rainbow and can’t wait to pick out the perfect pattern for this perfect yarn 🙂

Of course the whole ‘two different rainbow colorways knit together pattern plan’ isn’t going to happen, but hey, I still have one whole skein left for myself.

Yay for a bit of selfish spinning, right? 🙂