Subtle Striping - Success or No?
A single braid of hand-painted fiber is a treasure, not only because it’s a beautiful piece of art and passion that someone is telling a story through but because it’s bursting with so much potential and you, the spinner, get to choose how to continue that story. This Sweet Georgia braid was called Hug and a Mug. It told a tale of a soft, welcoming place to curl up with a mug of marshmallow-topped hot cocoa on a cold winter’s day.
I like to treat each of these single, treasured braids as an exercise in creativity through constraint. You have just one braid. You aren’t thinking about spinning a sweater’s worth and wondering what kind of yarn would be best for drape, longevity, warmth or airiness? In fact, you aren’t thinking of its end goal at all. You’re just admiring its beauty and wondering what it wants to become, what it can become in your hands. It’s there just for the sake of being and spinning, no ultimate goal in sight.
Opening up Hug and a Mug and laying out the pattern repeats, I felt a need to contrast these colours a bit more yet make them even softer and to try to preserve that subtle stripe, like a soft rythmic hum. The fiber was targhee so I measured out an equal weight, 100g, of undyed Ashland Bay Targhee sock (targhee, bamboo, tussah). I grabbed a touch of brown peduncle silk, bright pink bamboo, and grey and white Paradise Fibers Sweetums (mulberry silk, flax, merino) and took these bundles to the blending board.
I split my fiber piles in half for a 2-ply, distributing the undyed targhee and a touch of Sweetums evenly throughout both piles. To the lighter strips, I added that bright pink silk. To the darker, hot cocoa bits, I added brown peduncle. Laying a brown-dominant pile on the blending board, I made 3 rolags at a time. I repeated with three rolags of pink-dominant fiber. I alternated back and forth between these two, laying the rolags in order for spinning. This process was repeated with the second half of the fiber.
I spun the rolags on my Lendrum Double Treadle wheel in the order I’d laid out, probably with a 10:1 ratio, though I can’t now recall. I do remember how easy this targhee was to spin! It was a dream, so smooth and even, and I think I easily could have spun it even finer. The stripes are subtle but visible in the singles.
With an e-spinner, I plied 2 skeins, the connecting ends knotted to mark where the stripes of one flowed into the other. The result, a 23 WPI, 2-ply light fingering, and about 1020 yards. The stripe had been diluted at almost every step but was still subtly evident in the final skeins.
I wanted to push this softness even further so I swatched with a white lace alpaca blend and a grey lace alpaca/yak blend. Altough both were very soft and pretty, the stripes seemed to almost disappear with the white. The gauge and grey swatch seemed perfect for the Narae Cropped Sweater by Aegyoknit. I began the ribbed neckline and knew this fiber, now yarn was indeed perfect for this pattern.
As you can see the Narae Cropped Sweater is a misleading name. It’s actually a shrug, a hug really. The story of this fiber continues every time I slip my arms in or out of this perfect between-season piece. And the stripes? I think they’re still there but you have to read a little closer to see them.
