Spinning Shetland Colour 2 ways

Originally, my plan was to spin 2 skeins of 2-ply Shetland from a single braid of orange from the 2nd Fibre Study Club, as pictured.

The top grouping of fibre would have a singles spun as is from the braid and a singles with all the colours blended.

The second grouping would have a singles spun as is and a singles spun as a gradient.

But, as I spun the singles, I really liked the individual colours that were pooling from the “as is” lengths of fibre (on the right) and I wanted to preserve that. The fade singles is on the left. So, I pivoted a little and decided to ply the two '“as is” lengths together and the fade with the blend instead. All of these were spun with a short forward draft with a 10:1 ratio on a Lendrum double treadle, scotch tension wheel.

Unfortunately, as you can perhaps see from the storage bobbins, I did not pre-weigh the fibre during the prep process and ended up with very different amounts of fibre in each singles. And I didn’t really think about this issue until I started plying those “as is” singles and saw how the colour sections were barber poling instead of matching up nicely. I did do a little fibre management at the wheel. I removed some colour sections into an andean bracelet and put them back into the spin when that colour came up again. But this was tedious and I eventually gave up.

Still, the results are beautiful, even if not entirely what I imagined. I finished the skeins with a long soak in warm water, spun them in my spin dryer, and thwacked them repeatedly to even out the twist and help the fibre bloom a little. I honestly don’t know if this is the best way to finish this yarn but I’m happy with the result.

The skein on the left is the “as is” 2-ply. The colours do stripe but they’re not as solid as I’d anticipated. I kind of like the mix of solid and stripe within the stripe though! Yeah, I’m easy to please. And the skein in the middle and right is the fade paired with the blended fibre. It will interesting to see how these knit up!

Long story short, weigh your fibre!!! And be prepared to embrace whatever result you get because a surprise can be nice, too!