Yellow? Orange? Green?

So waaaay back in January I said that one of my resolutions was going to be to spin something other than just worsted 2 ply wool. To that end I decided I was going to spin my own sock yarn. Luckily I had just the perfect thing on hand (it was a Christmas gift from my mom):

4 oz of superwash roving, Cider Moon colorway Banana Cabana

I did a little research and found out that a lot of sock yarns are spun 3ply. Also with a little careful preparation it’s possible to spin multi-colored roving in such a way that you get stripes. Spin your own self striping? I’m so there.

I took the roving out of the bag and laid it out to see what I had:

If I just started at one end and worked to the other end I would end up with the green and orange pieces at random in my yarn. Then whey I plyed the two together I would have no way of knowing how to match up the colors. So what I did was I separated the big, fat, strip of roving into 3 skinnier strips. One for each ply.


To illustrate the theory (crudely):



I also figured that I would be easiest to make stripes by keeping the color repeats as long as possible. That way there was a better chance of them lining up between the plys. So I didn’t want to rip the roving apart any further width wise – instead I wanted to draft everything vertically to create long stretches of the same color.


So at this point I just made center pull balls out of my 3 roving strips with the plan to pre-draft them vertically as I spun them up.

Also I weighed my balls to make sure that they were at least in the ballpark of being the same. They kindof were.

Then I didn’t do anything for 3 months because I was distracted by malabrigo. This week, however, the spinning bug bit me hard. Something about it being so nice outside made me uninterested in knitting. Instead I putzed outside and spun up all 3 of the roving balls:

I tried to keep things nice and even and all the same thickness.

Which is key in getting the color repeats to actually line up.

But I’m not the greatest spinner in the world so it’s a bit lumpy.

Tonight I’m going to ply it and we’ll see if my self striping experiment worked!

In other news… check out this crazy fruit!

It was easier to find at my friends grocery store than garlic. She lives in a very yuppie area. And obviously we had to buy it. Taking it through u-scan was almost a big fat FAIL (although hilarity ensued while trying). Luckily a very helpful bagger informed us (and the cashier who thought we were all sorts of crazy) that this lovely fruit is a horned melon. He did not know, however, what color it was inside. I guessed green and the other two guesses were orange and red. What do you guys think?

Still life with horned melon and friends watching an ANTM marathon.

I just think it’s cool looking. More melons should have horns.