Yarn Families

I have a confession to make. I fell off the 10 Minutes a Day wagon about 2 weeks ago. I have a really good excuse though - I broke a toe on my right foot. I did it in classic style falling down the stairs at my house when my feet slid out from under me. Not my best moment.

Because my last foot injury wasn't that long ago I didn't waste my time going to the ER. I looked at my ugly, swollen, purple, toe and banged up foot, knew the diagnosis, and figured that I could tape two toes together as easily as anyone else could. I stayed off my feet as best I could and enjoyed a great excuse to wear my Crocs to work. The only downside was that I really couldn't spin comfortably. Thankfully I finished some stuff right before it and I'll share it with you today.

This is the last skein in a series of yarns that I'm calling my BFL Family. You can see the rest of the family members below and on the right. The fiber is 100% Blue Faced Leicester that I dyed with Cushings dyes and spun over the course of about a year. I used blue, pink, and violet. The violet broke when I dyed that fiber and that created a super effect on that batch of fiber but the real color play came from the plying. I started by plying blue with blue, then blue with violet, violet with violet and so on. That's why it's a family - everything is related.

When I started this project I envisioned it ultimately becoming a shawl and thought that Hanami would be cool. I thought that using a series of related yarns that gradually moved from dark to light would be a nice match for the asymmetry of that pattern. I've changed my mind now and I think that something simpler would let the yarn speak for itself. Perhaps a simple feather and fan pattern or an EZ Pi shawl. That could be super cool and just as simple as I want. Any suggestions?

I feel like this yarn was a real accomplishment. With each effort the spinning becomes more consistent and the results more predictable. There is one factor that still screws me up each and every time - uneven amounts of fiber on my bobbins. One always has more than the other and I have to figure out what to do with the leftovers. Sometimes though, this can be a lucky thing.

Look at this pretty stuff. This is the remainder of the pink BFL plyed with some of the leftover shiny green singles. This could be the start of another yarn family because there is atill some of the shiny green stuff left on the bobbin. I'll wait to see what other leftovers I come up with and keep plying this against leftovers until I run out. I see a scarf that has bands of each version of the shiny green - plied against itself, plied against the pink, plied against everything. How cool would that be? Suddenly I'm looking forward to leftovers. Imagine that! Thankfully my toe is feeling much better so I may be back at my wheel again really soon.