Storied Color

Every month the Spindlers group on Ravelry hosts a spinning challenge based on a theme.  The goal is to start and complete a skein of yarn (at least 1oz/28g) between the first and last day of the month.  All entries must, of course, be spun on a spindle, and the "winner" gets to pick the theme for the next month.

Since Jara was free at the end of August, I decided to give the challenge this month a shot.  The theme this month is Storied Color.

This project is an adventure story, the story of my fiber crafting.  I pick something new to try, and then I just give it a shot even if it's considered hard or scary or whatever.  I don't let anything scare me.

So I started with 1.2oz of delicious merino from my Nerd Girl Yarns 8oz sampler pack, that looked like this:

On September 1st I spontaneously decided while I was dyeing sock yarn that I would try handpainting the fiber.  Understand that my last hand-dyed fiber turned out partially felted, and I'd never tried handpainting before.  I settled on a blue-purple-red gradient using food color gels.  I'd never dyed with gels and I'd never tried a gradient.  So this was all very new.

I think it turned out pretty well.

My original intention for this fiber was to fractal ply it.  But it was so pretty as a gradient I wasn't sure I wanted to break up the colors.  So I decided to split it lengthwise and do a two-ply that goes in order from red to blue and back again.

In my excitement to start spinning, I forgot to split it.

So what I'm going to do is just spin the whole thing as a continuous single (hopefully my cop-building skills will be up to this), and do a two-ply from both ends, and the finished yarn will run from red to blue.

A week into the challenge, here's where I stand:

That's 0.9oz left in the braid, so 0.3oz on the spindle (theoretically).  I know that's 1/4 of the fiber spun, and I know there's 4 weeks in a month, but I need to get just a bit ahead so I have time to ply and finish the yarn before the 30th.

So far I'm looking pretty good!