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The result of the experimental purple-pink-orange dyeing had been a disappointment — for a moment, I considered not spinning it at all. It might turn out alright or it might turn out awful but, either way, it just wasn’t me. Why spend the time on it?
But, I wasn’t brought up to waste, so I spun it anyway — and I was even more disappointed when I did. The first bobbin was passable, with its gaudy-but-cheeky bright pink sections that really lifted the overall colour combination, and the long sections of pale pink that added softness…
But the second bobbin was just awful. Awful. It came out purple then orange then purple then orange. There was no bright pink at all, and the pale pink was almost totally lost in the spinning. It came out looking like a sweaty, stinky high school football uniform…
I despaired. I had planned on Navajo plying them but, whilst that might work passably well with the first bobbin, it would simply exacerbate everything that was wrong with the second. No, the key here was damage limitation — I’d have to try plying them together in the hopes that that could do something to make it all a bit less awful.
To my surprise, it did. It really did. In fact, plying them together created a yarn that was so beautiful, so sublime, and so amazingly gorgeous that I can’t stop looking at it. It has the colours of a stormy sunset. I just want to stick my faced into it and rub it all around. I am in love!
Yardage:
Large skein — 58 yards, 20 inches
Small skein — 32 yards, 26 inches
When I first tried it, I wasn’t expecting Navajo plying to produce a completely different yarn from regular plying, but it does. I tried it on my drop spindle, using multi-coloured singles (where I had spun a little purple for a while, and then switched to a little blue, and then green, and so on).
When I plyed these singles in the normal way, I got a barber-pole effect across the whole yarn like this:
But, when I Navajo plyed it, the yarn came out multi-coloured in sections, like these two:
Both from the same singles, but what a difference!
It’s logical, of course. In regular plying, you are bringing two separate singles together and, if they are different colours at the point where they ply together, then that barber-pole striping effect is what happens. Whereas in Navajo plying, you are taking one single and doubling it over on itself (well, tripling it over, actually) so, in a multi-coloured single like I was using, you are plying like with like for a while, then switching to another colour and plying a new like with like, and so on.
I find the difference really intriguing, and I can’t decide which result I like better. Which do you like more?
