I have some new spinning to show, and I was going to start out this post with a definition of what I was trying to do, which is to spin a marled yarn.
Imagine my surprise when I Googled “marled” and the first few links were all about the soil mixture called marl! I finally found the definition at the bottom of this page.
Amusingly enough, if you Google “marled”, all the images that come up are actually for marled yarn.
For those of you who don’t want to follow links, a marled yarn is a yarn where the individual plies are different colors and/or fiber content, creating textural interest in the final yarn. This is different than a heathered yarn, where different colors of fiber are blended together before being spun.
Now, the source of this project came from the fact that I have small amounts of different fibers, but usually not enough to make large projects. I had four ounces here, eight ounces there, and often in similar colors, but I didn’t want to just make everything striped just because I didn’t have enough to make a sweater or a large shawl.
So, I picked a project, the Danish Tie-Shawl (Ravelry link) from the Spring 2008 issue of Spin-Off. Then I picked the fibers out of my stash.
I had a batch of Calico Dream from Fae Ridge Farm, which is a wonderful mix of fine and long wools and mohair in several purples, a touch of pink, and several greys. Using that as a base, I further searched my stash for purples that would go with the variegated Calico Dream, and I found a dusky grey-purple from Enchanted Knoll, which is the Storms colorway, and a Targhee-Rambouillet roving in a full-on purple from Katrina’s Wool World. Finally, I wanted something that would be soft, puffy, and would tone down the overwhelmingly purpleness of the other colors I was using. For that, I used a milk-chocolate brown Romeldale lamb’s fleece and carded it up into rolags.
As you can see in this picture, I have Calico Dream on the left, the brown Romeldale in the middle, and Storms on the right, in the middle of plying.
The result, as you can see here, is a gorgeous marled yarn with a subtle striping.
I’ve since finished this yarn, and a second batch that used the purple Targhee-Rambouillet as the third ply. They both turned out to be about a heavy-worsted to aran weight, and are next-to-skin soft, in my opinion. In my next spinning/knitting post, I’ll show you the progress that I’ve been making with the Danish Tie-Shawl and both of the finished yarns (if I haven’t used them all up by then).
