Monday, January 14, 2008

The first age of my Tolkien yarn

Here's my first handspun from my Tolkien project.
The white is a 2 ply with one ply alpaca and one play romney. The blue/grey is different shades of dyed and undyed grey Cotswold.





Here's another shot of the alpaca/Romney. I wanted something like a twilight moonshine for this yarn.
















The yarn all started like this:














Just as reminder, here's Tolkien's description of the elvish cloaks that were gifted to the fellowhip in Lord of the Rings that serves as one of my inspirations for this yarn project:
"...of the light but warm silken stuff that Galadhrim wove. It was hard to say of what colour they were: grey with the hue of twilight under the trees they seemed to be; and yet if they moved, or set in another light, they were green as shadowed leaves, or brown as fallow fields by night, dusk silver as water under the stars....Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under twilight of Lorien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make...they are light to wear, and warm enough or cool enough at need."

-p481, Lord of the Rings, Farwell to Lórien

So to achieve a 'Twilight' colourway, I threw three shades of grey Cotswold, some of the white Romney and a bit of the black Icelandic into a pot with some Gunmetal (jacquard dye) at half strength. I then topped it with half strength of Purple (jacquard dye) and brought it all up to a simmer. Towards the end, I dumped in another handful of light Cotwold to take on just a touch of colour. In total, about I ended up dyeing up about 1 1/2 lbs of fleece.
Here's what came out:














I took some of the lighter gunmetal and some undyed grey Cotswold and spun this:














I'm madly in love with how the gunmetal and purple danced and mingled together. It looks like nebula in all that fluffed up fleece.














Here are some of the lighter Cotswold that I dumped in at the end.














Batts ready for more blending and spinning.



























That's it for now. I've got a lot more carding, blending and spinning to do!








1 comment:

jeanius said...

just beautiful. I love how it is spinning, and look forward to seeing it all knitted.. amazing and inspirational :)iwvesuu