This is my very first handspun

My mom’s friend, Susie, dyed up the roving for me and I spun it out in one long, uneven length and then folded it over and plied it on itself.

For my next bit of experiment I decided to dye some wool roving and see how that worked. There are a lot of dye options out there, but I was concerned about their toxicity. A lot of the commercial wool dyes have mordants that can be dangerous (like copper sulfide or arsenic). I decided that any dye method that warned me not to use near food just wouldn’t work. After some investigation I found that Wilton icing dyes were very popular and relatively inexpensive. You can also use unsweetened Kool-Aid but apparently that is not always colorfast.

Using the time honored method of closing my eyes and picking a color I ended up making green! This is one ounce of roving in the crock pot with hot water, Wilton Kelly Green dye and some vinegar

Once it cooled to room temp I washed and rinsed it gently. You have to be careful not to felt it or you will surely end up hitting someone in the face with a fist of fury!

Hand it up to dry, don’t mess with it, just let it dry.

This is Chester trying to flash you a little peener. He’s a dork.

The next step is to spin it up. This is Maddie with my awesome handmade spindle. Dawn made this for me with a dowel, a cup hook, 2 CDs and a rubber grommet. Later this week I hope to get some real drop spindles in different weights for different kinds of yarn.

Maddie wants to be a spinner but she doesn’t have thumbs. Evolution has screwed Maddie yet again.

This is a pile of unspun roving from Border Leicester sheep along with my spindle and some already wound laceweight yarn that I made from it. This roving is so soft! I want to slam my face into it!

This is the final product! the green roving spun up to an aran weight (more or less). I dyed the roving in four 1 ounce batches and a couple batches I tried to make a little splotchy to give the yarn some depth of color when I plied it together.

This was made with roving from Montdale sheep. It’s definitely coarser than Leicester or Merino, but it was cheaper and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on the practice wool.

This is Chester with my burgundy yarn. For this I spun up the yarn first and then dyed it. I found I just did not appreciate that process as much.

Chester can think of nothing more awesome than staying still withh yarn on him!

Sadly, the color in the photo is not as nice as the actual color. The variations in color are not so gloomy grey but nice shifts in tones