Fiber Exchange - Third Skein

The last skein of yarn I made for the fiber exchange project was spun from the two balls of roving.

I was surprised to find that my white roving was actually many short pieces instead of one long piece. There ended up being more participants than there were pre-prepared balls of roving, so we took a piece off of each long roving to make up an extra ball and I ended up being the one to get it.

I soaked the roving in warm water and vinegar for about an hour. Then I lined up the pieces into one flat square bundle on a piece of plastic wrap. I mixed turquoise and golden yellow Washfast dye from Pro Chemical Dye Company to get an avocado green. I sprinkled that and brilliant purple sparsely on the top of the roving, leaving areas of white showing. I only needed to sprinkle a few areas on the back side.  After rolling up the plastic wrap into a tube and sealing the ends, I placed the bundle in an enamel pot on top of an inverted pie pan with an inch of water in the bottom. I covered the pan and steamed it on low for forty minutes. Then I turned off the heat and went to bed. In the morning I rinsed the dyed fiber in running water in the sink. Then I soaked it in warm water with a little dishwashing detergent. Then again in another warm clean water bath. I put the roving in the washing machine and spun out the extra water using the spin cycle with no water squirting out. This  is what the roving looked like after it dried.

In order to keep shorter lengths of each color in the yarn, I split the roving into pencil size strips.  That also made the fiber draft easier after being put through the dyeing process.

It was really easy to spin a thin single ply because the roving was commercially processed and didn't have any VM in it.

The pink novelty roving was a little harder spin because it had a small amount of  VM like bits of grass, but it also had a lot of other little bits of debris that was put there intentionally to give "character" to the yarn. I liked the sections of contrasting purple and turquoise fibers and maybe even the metallic tinsel, but I would have left out the little pieces of fiber that looked like torn pieces of cardboard.

Here are the two singles ready to ply.

This is what the two-ply yarn looked like on the bobbin.

Here is the third skein for the fiber exchange project.

Here are all three skeins ready to take to my U-Spin, spinning guild meeting next week.