Snail Spirals

I ordered some commercial top a couple weeks ago because I'm thinking about considering the possibility of perhaps offering batts for sale in my Etsy shop. Maybe. Depending on how long they take vs. what a reasonable price would be that people would actually pay. The plan was to dye some pretty colors, blend in some interesting things like silk, and have the carder start paying its way.

So I dyed some top this weekend, amongst all the rest of the fibery things I did: carding sweater batts, dyeing yarn, carding undyed test batts for the shop, making Emma a summer dress, and repairing the torn ruffle on her pink princess dress-up dress.

Each of these wheels is 4 oz. of superwash merino.



The blue-green-purple one came out with more white than I was planning for. Superwash wool soaks up dye FAST, even when the dye is poured on at room temperature, and it didn't distribute evenly. It will still be lovely when spun, as the fiber is gorgeously soft and the white will tone down the colors and even them out. I'm still in the development stages of this batts-for-sale plan, and I think this bundle of fiber is going to be blended with silk for sock yarn batts. It will be interesting to see what that does to the colors. Maybe I'll dye the silk, too. I don't know. What do you think?

The next wheel of fiber is completely un-replicable. I was concocting a couple custom colorway skeins for someone last week, a lavender-beige combination and a deep coral, and during the course of those experiments, I ended up with leftover dye. Purples, browns, reds, oranges; a real mishmash. None of the leftovers was enough on its own to dye anything, but I didn't want to just empty them down the drain (dye costs money, after all, and I also don't want to dye Ladd Marsh) so I poured all the dregs into the dye pot together. None had acid in them yet, so they were stable enough to wait a few days. Finally on Saturday I stirred it all around, added some water and citric acid, and tossed in some superwash top. The mishmash of leftover dye turned out to be a gorgeous cranberry wine color.



I'm trying very hard to justify keeping this for myself.