Adding Pizazz to Your Yarn

That title is the name of a class I took at the Iowa Sheep and Wool Festival last month. I kept meaning to blog about it but you know how things get in the way. The class was designed to teach us how different fibres can be added to the wool that you are spinning to create different textures and effects. We started with very "ordinary" cream and brown fleece which we spun into small skeins. Everything else was the same base material, hand carded with some additional fibre, in order to create a blend, and then spun into a small skein which could be compared to the originals.

Here is the whole set of skeins that I made. From the top, going clockwise, the fibres are:
Natural cream and brown wool skeins
Cream and brown skeins with mohair added
Cream and brown skeins with soy silk added
Cream and brown skeins with tussah silk added
Cream and brown skeins with "Flash" added
Cream and brown skeins with turquoise acrylic added
Cream and brown skeins with Ingeo (corn fibre) added

I really enjoyed seeing how all the fibres made a difference from the original yarns, and it made me more confident about spinning with some of the more unusual fibre choices on the market today. I really liked how the soy and tussah silks added sheen and an almost luminous quality to the yarn. The "flash" is a metallic thread that, to my eye, looks like it is different colors when you mix it into the cream and brown skeins. It's pretty hard to show that in a photograph, but here they are.
My favourite fibre, I think, was the Ingeo. I didn't think I would like it, but it added a lot of loft and smoothness to the yarn. Here's a close up of the brown with the Ingeo.

So, I decided today to add some of my own pizazz to my spinning. I had a turquoise single ply that I had handspun, and also a darker blue single. I decided to try a three ply yarn by plying those two singles with a commercial yarn by the name of "Featherwisp" in the "seasprite" colour. The Featherwisp is 100% nylon and has a sort of fluffy or hairy appearance, and has a tiny narrow ribbon running through it. I really like the way this yarn came out in the end. It's 2/3 handspun, and all hand plied.

Here is my "lazy kate" which is used for the plying.

Here's the start of my new yarn....
...and the end!
I set the twist in hot water and it's now outside drying. If the humidity keeps up, it might take a week!