Unicorn vomit makes pretty yarn

During the weekly family phone call with my parents, my dad suggested that I spin and knit something for my mother for mother's day. My "official" gift was finally finishing some blueberry placemats for her but as I'm now a big time spinner, I was happy to rise to the challenge. While we were chatting about it, my eyes glanced over to the bags of fibre I had bought from Loop sometime ago. I was humming and hawing over whether my mom would like the pink/orange/sparkle combination or if I should stick with the safety of mint green/aqua/sparkles. I sent her an email and while waiting for her reply I started on the orange/pink (just in case). Since I'm loving the spinning right now, having to spin more is not really a bad thing.

So I took out the spontaneous spinning cloud in Tea Rose and got to work. The "cloud" is a nebulous as working with cotton candy (I presume). I kind of separated the chunks, or took the already separate chunks and carefully drafted them into more of a roving preparation. Once I got to the larger portions, I split them roughly into largish strips before drafting them into roving. Similar to how I dealt with spinning a batt.

While working with the fibre I decided this is exactly what unicorn vomit would be like: super soft, luxury fibre with sparkles. Everyone knows that unicorns poop rainbows and marshmallows, but few know of their vomit. Unicorns eat nightmares, bad days (hair included), insecurities and mean people. Hence they need to release extra hair via vomit in a cat hairball/owl pellet sort of way.

I prepared a bit of fibre, spun it up and then prepared some more. I prefer to alternate rather than prepare all the fibre and then spin it all up. I like having a break from each of the activities but still advancing things.

I was originally thinking of 2-plying this bad boy. Spinning the singles, I noticed there were pretty large sections of fairly distinct colour changes which would be very difficult to control in the fibre prep (they're barely perceptible in piles of pure unicorn vomit). So I did a plying test. I worked up a bit of 2-ply and knit a swatch.

Though the feel of the yarn was right, the colours were too muddy indistinct and truly vomitous.

I thought maybe knitting with the singles could work but really there's just too much twist. It could be a thing, but not what I was aiming for.



So the answer was chain-ply. I was hoping to get a finer yarn out of this fibre, something much more laceweightish but I think it's near worsted weight. I really have to work on being able to control that better. And I should start measuring WPIs and all that. But I think the yarn turned out quite nicely and I think there's a decent amount of yardage to make a scarf of some sort for my mom. I was originally thinking the Morning Surf Scarf but now I'm wondering if this would make a nice Queen Anne's Lace Scarf. I have to knit some swatches before settling on a pattern.

Chain-ply
'Tea Rose' Loop
Alpaca, merino, llama, faux cashmere, nylon, ecospun, silk, bamboo, banana silk, and angelina
4 oz.

Needless to say my mom will love and brag to everyone she comes in contact with regardless that the yarn isn't exactly what I planned.

Comments

craftivore said…
I did not know about unicorns pooping rainbows and eating bad dreams and all that. They're way more magical than I realized. The yarn looks pretty cool and all those funny ideas are spun into it.

Popular Posts