Dye Day 2012 Follow Up Post 1

I spun some samples and spun up one of the 2 oz braids that I painted on Dye Day.

The samples turned out like this:

Actually, the most left one is a cabled Romney from Abby Franquemont's sock class. The 2nd one is the macchiato/purple sample spun up. Third is some test cabled SW merino from Spunky Eclectic. Forth is the other sample that I dyed. The blue/green combo really worked well for this

The randomly hand painted braid I spun into a loose single and plied with a loosely spun white merino single as suggested by GLASG's president Spinsomniac. The result is gorgeous. I was doing a "quickie" so I didn't bother to spin it well since I wasn't planning on using it... then the singles were done, I saw how gorgeous it turned out, and swapped out the Corriedale I was going to ply it with to Merino. I'm thinking I'll make a hat or something out of this to see how it knits up. So gorgeous. I kind of wish I did a tighter single, but I'm sure it'll knit up just fine. Hats don't get a lot of rough use anyway. 

Here's an original for comparison:

I also decided to go back and face my pathetic failure, the attempted kettle dyed SW merino pencil that turned out like a mess. Turned out my own husband is a genius at untangling what he calls "rope." Supposedly any of your local sailors possess this special talent as they apparently receive ropes for their ships in a giant box of tangled mess, then five or six sailors would get assigned to the mess to untangle it. My husband untangled my entire mess of merino silver for me! If you see breakage it's because I got frustrated and yanked them apart. All the continuous strands are thanks to the hard work of my husband:

I rolled them up into balls to prevent more "OMG I hate this shit! (yank)" from happening.

I decided to take PandaWriter's suggestion on test spinning the fiber before declaring them failures. I took her suggestion and carded some, then spun some straight from the silver, to see how they turn out and which one I like better. The samples turned out like this:

The left one is spun straight from the silver, and the right one was carded first then spun woolen. I think I like the left one's definition and the slight variation is kind of interesting. I'm going to do that and see how it goes. Worse comes to worse I always have the option of dyeing the Finished Object...

I'm thinking a Brandywine Falls with this.

We will see how everything turns out. More updates to come once I knit up a hat or spin up the merino/tencel. I'm planning to spin a tight lace weight and ply it with a strand of white tencel.