You know I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work a bit of a rainbow into the year! I went for fall colors of rusty mum orange and gold, a rich green, a deep teal, and a very pink purple. It’s a little less literal than I typically do, but the colors seemed right, and I’m pleased with how it turned out.
Our fiber was the perfect one to make these colors really pop. Wensleydale is a fun mop of a sheep when allowed a full year’s growth. The long locks are wonderfully shiny, and feel softer that the 30-40 micron count suggests.
I dyed this in a long blended gradient, where the wool itself provided some resist, and was allowed to meander a bit for color blending. Due to the long staple length of Wensleydale, do keep your hands further apart when drafting. I do suggest worsted spinning for this, smoothing the ends into the yarn (this will also reduce any lingering scratchiness). You could split this lengthwise to spin two plies (this would make a lovely lace yarn), or ply it with something else, perhaps a deep brown or a color from the braid to tie it all together?
To mirror the lovely sheen in the wool, I chose Bengal as our sock yarn. Another long wool, Blue Faced Leicester (affectionately known as BFL) is the star. They are a very distinctive sheep with their long curved snout and long ears. The ‘blue’ comes from the grey you can see coming though around this animal’s neck. Their wool has a lovely crimpy curl to it.
I knew I wanted to give these colors a chance to pool up, because this many all random just kind of makes mud. So I went for a doubled down and back pattern, which you can see more clearly here:
I did a hot pour for this, and did not flip it to minimize color creep. Each batch (and sometimes even skeins within a batch) came out a bit different, with more or less of each color. To see if my plan for pooling worked, I did some swatching:
There’s two here, as I couldn’t see what it was coming out like while it was on the machine, and I wanted to fill in a stitch count upon seeing the results. The bottom left area with the widest pooling spiral stripes is 72 stitches. Now, at this gauge, that’s too big for my feet. However, I may try it with my Legare CSM (Circular Sock Machine) using ribbing all down the leg and top of the foot. However, the swatch to the right of this (under the ball) is 68 stitches and still stacks nicely, so that may be an option. My preferred 64 is in the middle on the left, and while it is striping (and how I originally planned), I like the wider stripes better. Again, I can work with a pattern to use up a little more yarn per row to get it. And the final top section on the left is 60 stitches, and could nearly pass for a striping yarn with the colors nearly horizontal. Another decrease of 4 or 8 would devolve the pattern into a more muddy random pattern, until it gets small enough around to puddle up again (and would spiral in the opposite direction).
Thanks for going along on this fall journey! There are spots open in all Tiger Sock Yarn and Spinning Fiber Clubs through October 15th if you’d like to get in on the fun!
