This is the long part. Not sure if you realize how long it takes to make a skein of yarn, but it’s a long process. And making this gradient yarn didn’t include the skirting and washing parts (search earlier blog posts for details on those steps).

So…we start…once again… with…..calculations! My drum carder holds about a 60g batt, so I typically start by figuring out how many batts to make. I wanted a 2 ply yarn of about 120 grams (2 batts), and needed to evenly blend my black and my white Jacob-alpaca fibres. To get a decent gradient, you need between 10 and 20 mini blends made up of the two end colours of the gradient. The more divisions of mini blends that are done, the smoother the gradient. That means 2 x 60 g strands, divided into 10 parts of 6 g each, changing the black and white amounts in the blend for each of the 10 blendings. Phew.

So I make a little chart that shows me the weights of black vs white fibre needed in each of my 10 sub sections. They all get weighed out in little piles of black and white. Gotta blend ‘em. In comes the drum carder - a spiky hand cranked machine that blends fibres together. You feed the black and white fibres in a bit at a time, layering while cranking, and then remove the fibres from the teeth. Each time fibres are passed through the carder they are split and layered as they are cranked through the machine. Each time the fibres go through the carder is called a pass. With each pass the fibres blend a bit more. The photos below show the fibres on the carder, followed by 3 passes. Note that the drum carder can hold a total of 60 g of fibre, but each part of the gradient was only 6 g, so I only used a small part of the drum to card the fibres.

So to make a really smooth gradient, it’s best to split up the 10 roving nests just made and combine them some more on the carder, and get more in the range of 15-20 roving pieces to spin with. The top photo from this post shows all of the nests after a whole bunch of blending.

All of that took about 2 hours. And it has to be repeated 3 more times to get two skeins of two ply gradient wool.

Are we at spinning yet? Yeah I suppose we are. This part is fairly easy and reasonably quick compared to blending. Just grab the rovings in order and start spinning. Staying at a consistent yarn weight and twist is pretty important so that the gradients line up.

Once the fibre is prepped, I spin up two plies (single yarns), then ply them together. It takes about an hour and a half per ply, then you have to let the bobbins rest for a while (several hours to a day). Resting the bobbins lets the twist set a bit so plying is easier as the yarn isn’t twisting up too much. Plying is super quick compared to the rest of things, taking about 30 mins or so. Hurray one skein down, one to go!

In my plans for weaving, I know that I’d like to have some quicker transitions back and forth from black to white so that each purse I make gets a good show of all the black and white goodness. For the second skein, I split the fifteen rovings into 3 sections, and then spun the gradient in order from white to black to white to black. Time to make another two single plies, let them rest, ply them together….Skein two!

So that only took 8000 hours… time to weave!