Directions

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1. For my first yarn, I decided to lean into the colorway and the strength and durability that the tussah imparts to the Polwarth. I spun a chubby low-twist, woolen-drafted single. I used my Matchless and the whorl I call the Salad Plate (the slow speed whorl with ratios of  6:1 and 7.5:1) in the smaller groove.

   The finished yarn flows from color to color in clear stripes. The colors are deep and matte; the yarn is soft and light. It doesn’t bias when knit.

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1. For my second yarn, I chose to do the opposite: mix up the colorway without adding additional colors. Many spinners would mix the colors as much as possible in the ply, making a marl or barber pole yarn. I wanted the colors blended and mixed, to layer the marling. I would make a marled pair of singles, then ply them together.

2. To marl the yarn in the single, I drafted the colorway on itself, a technique some spinners (including Felicia Lo) call combo drafting. Here’s how I do it. I divide the fiber vertically into strips about one finger wide.

3. I hold 2 strips together with each starting at a different spot in the colorway. (Sometimes it works just to flip one of the strips and start at the opposite end of the original flow of colors.)

4. I like to line up my pairs of strips and roll them into nests before I start spinning, so I can just keep spinning rather than fiddling with fiber preparation. I divide my nest into piles for each ply. I spun a 2-ply yarn, but you can use this technique with as many plies as you like.

   When I spin, the 2 strips of fiber overlap slightly and draft together as one fiber.

5. Sometimes one of the strips falls away when I’m not paying attention. I just pick it up and put it back beside the other strip and keep drafting. The idea overall is a randomness of color, so if one strip is absent for a few inches of yarn, it’s really fine.

   What happens in the spinning is the 2 strips, as they draft together, create a marl or barber pole in the single.

6. When these singles get plied, the marl in singles combine into a double marl in the ply, with colors combining in speckles. The yarn looks like confetti, especially compared to the singles yarn. I like this style of mixing up colors better than just letting the colors barber pole in the ply: with a layered marl, the colorway gets shaken up like the snow in a snow globe, with an organic randomness.

7. When I knit these skeins, the magic really happens. The singles are airy and look like saturated velvet, with the colorway striping clearly. The doubled-marled swatch is tweedy, striping with much less clarity. The colors swirl and dance, the dots of color giving the surface visual motion through their random combinations.

   I like both of these yarns equally, but what I love is that they look so wonderful side by side and could be combined flawlessly in a single project.