Stripes

Just like March was about playing colors off the natural cream of fiber and yarn, April was about playing the colors off natural white.  I chose as my inspiration a painting inspired by the water lily paintings of Claude Monet.  I love the different, yet simple, shades of purply-pink, gold, and greens, with the shift from lighter and more white in the upper right to ever deepening and blending of shades toward the lower left. To be our white canvas for fiber, I chose Falkland top, a special corriedale from the Falkland Islands where the sheep are breed to be naturally whiter.  You can’t quite see it in the picture, but the fiber follows a subtle gradient of lighter and less blendy to deeper and more blendy. I then considered my sock yarn, as I have several candidates, and had originally planned for Safari, since it is a corriedale based yarn.  But then I remembered the Tiger Tweed stashed in the closet of goodies, and it was the right choice.  Very white, and the single ply of superwash that takes the dye more boldly play nicely off the two regular plies for a very subtle and painterly effect.  I am quite pleased with these.  The dye technique used is a random one, for reduced pooling. And now it is time to look forward to May’s Tiger Club!  Once again, I have a new fiber planned.  If you’d like to join us, you can learn about the club and sign up here. Want to treat Mom?  You can purchase a subscription as a gift, simply use her address when you set up the club.

With all the excitement of spring and Easter and April Fool’s, I managed to forget to reveal the March Tiger Club…..and here I am dyeing for April!

March’s color is one I had made accidentally in the past, and really loved.  One of my goals in starting this club is to have recipes for everything, so I wanted to get this one recreated in Lanaset dyes (the original was Jacquard), and have it scaled for production.

The inspiration was Fairy Rings…..that phenomenon where mushrooms suddenly pop up in a ring….that gradually grows larger and larger every time.  It is a great color for spring or fall….pale pretty bits of 7 colors….greens, golds, browns, orange, gold, and red…all applied randomly.

The original yarn was Bengal Twist, and I decided to keep that, as I love the way it takes color….especially random splashes like this, and the natural cream color of the wool is complimented by the other colors.

For fiber, I rummaged in the closet of fun, and found beautiful cream Wensleydale. It, too, took the colors beautifully, and spinning it thin for lace will make something gorgeous.

For April, I’m busy on a colorway that makes the most of the white color of fiber and yarn…..so something nice and cool!

A new wool was offered to me this fall, and I jumped at the chance to send along something different.  This Portuguese wool is in the Merino family.  It is not bred to be as fine as what we typically think of as Merino, but despite being a thicker micron, it is really a lovely and bouncy wool with lots of crimp.

I found an article about this sheep breed (Click here to read the whole PDF.)

Portuguese Merino
Portugal maintains several varieties of Merino
sheep, among them the white woollen Merino
Branco (Portuguese White) and the black variety
named Merino Preto (Portuguese Black). Merino
Branco can be considered the result of the
breeding of the Merino in Portugal, highly influenced
by Spanish Merino and Rambouillet at
the beginning of this century. Since 1930,
French Mutton Merino was introduced in order
to direct the production towards early maturity.

As with any new wool, I had to try it out.  This time, I worked on making friends with my new True Creations spindle (it’s Mesquite, 1 oz).

I did a little checking with the lovely article written by Beth Smith in the Winter 2011 Spin Off about spinning to the crimp, and although I didn’t measure, I aimed for a good amount of twist and ply, since the fiber is quite lively.  This resulted in a lovely bouncy yarn, great for anything that needs on elasticity, such as socks and mittens.   I find it just barely itchy, of course your tolerance will vary.

For color inspiration, I looked toward something that gets me through every dreary cold winter here in Iowa…..the orange!   The orange that we eat is not a naturally occurring fruit, but was bred somewhere in the Far East.  It was brought to Portugal, where orange trees are everywhere…..even as street trees.

The Portuguese explorers and sailors distributed the tree widely to prevent scurvy during the 15th and 16th centuries.  As a result, the word for the Orange fruit is a derivation of ‘Portugal’ in many languages.  I chose one that I thought was pretty, so I present ‘Portogallo’ on Tiger Twist sock yarn, and hand dyed Portuguese Combed Top.

The colorway consists of three different greens, a brown, and two shades of orange.  For both the yarn and fiber, I needed to develop a new technique for applying color.  I wanted the greens to dominate, and the oranges to peek through more randomly.  I hope you agree it was worth it, and I’ll keep these methods in mind for future application.

If you aren’t currently in the Tiger Club, but like what you see, would you please take a moment to check it out?  We’d love to have you.  I’m busy cooking up samples for our March color right now, and you have until March 15th to sign up to receive it.  Thanks!