Barcelona
Antoni Gaudi’s art and architecture of Barcelona is the inspiration for the first installment of the Fiber Study Club, which features French Charollais and SW Merino/Nylon in two colourways, vibrant Barcelona and warm Montjuic sandstone grey. I’ve spun a few samples with notes to give you a feel for what you can do with these lovelies. But there are so many more possibilities and I encourage you to explore and have some fun! Some caveats: I am not a spinning instructor and consider myself a novice but enthusiastic spinner. These are all quick and messy samples made rather hastily for the purpose of sharing in a timely manner.
Sample 1 is the Barcelona colourway on its own in merino/nylon. I separated a length of fiber that contained a full repeat of all the colours in the braid and spread those evenly but messily across a blending board, then rolled the fiber off into rolags. I spun two singles and plied them together, all on my Lendrum double treadle wheel. The resulting yarn has a subtle barber pole effect that I think could be made even subtler by blending smaller amounts of fiber on the board or dizzing the fiber into nests instead of making rolags.
Sample 2 is the same rolag prep as above but with a full colour repeat of Barcelona charollais. You can see how the charollais fiber is more matte and airy than merino and how the colours are slightly different. These differences make the barber pole effect much more subtle.
Sample 3 might be my personal favourite. This is a core spin using a thin singles of grey Montjuic as the core and a thicker singles of Barcelona, all in merino/nylon. To make the thicker singles, I separated two colour repeats and reversed one, then just held them together to spin. As you can see in the video, I held the Montjuic singles straight and fed the Barcelona singles at an angle to wrap around the core. Not only does the resulting yarn look cool, it has a fun bumpy texture. If you wanted these colours to pop even more, you could use a black singles or even a black yarn as the core. That would be stunning!
Sample 4 is spun entirely on spindles using charollais Barcelona. This yarn is even loftier because of the woolen nature of spindle spinning. I spun a full colour repeat without any fiber prep on a drop spindle for the first singles. The second singles is another full colour repeat, spun in the same direction, without fiber prep on a “Goddess” or Ladakhi phang spindle. Then the two were plied, keeping like colours together, on a Turkish drop spindle.
Sample 5 is equal parts by weight of merino/nylon Montjuic and a full colour repeat of Barcelona blended into rolags then spun as a 2-ply.
And here they are together, in the same order as above, left to right. There are so many ways to spin these colours. You could separate and spin each individual colour or make your own combinations of colours. You could spin a fractal. You could vary the proportions of the two colourways. You could spin a bulky, messy art yarn using both kinds of fiber. You could add in your own colours or different fibers. The potential is limitless.
Also pictured are the sample spins with the Barcelona SW merino/nylon yarn I created as a base complement. If you’re a new spinner and intimidated by using your handspun, adding a little as colourwork to a project with commercially-spun yarn is a great way to start using your handspun.
I enjoyed playing with these fibers and hope you do, too! As always, I would love to see your experiments. Happy spinning!
