spin in a touch of 'art'

Art yarn. aka a beginner's yarn. Or, yarn that is artfully decorated with unevenness and bright colors. Personally, I find yarn to be more beautiful when it's smooth, thin, relatively even, and soft. However, art yarn is a lot of fun to spin. Especially if you're trying to make a smooth, thin, relatively even, and soft yarn that ends up able to be placed only under the title 'Art Yarn.' Then you can say you did it on purpose.

So this morning, I was thinking, I want to spin, but I want to spin with lots and lots of colors. So I'll just cut little bits of roving and stick them all together in a skein of yarn and ply it Navajo style. Then I was like, well what about making little batts? But how do I make batts without a drum carder or hand cards? The answer? Dog slickers. Two of them.

In our roving supply, we mainly have white, turquoise, lavender, and gray. We do have other colors of course, but these are the four that we can use and not regret it if the yarn doesn't turn out, because it's not the nicest roving in the Universe. So I stuck little bits of these four colors on a dog slicker and made a tiny little batt. And spun it. I was very happy. So I kept on making more and more of these batts. 

I laid my roving on the dog slicker... 

And came out with a little ball of fluff,

after much combing and tangling and moving around. 

cool, huh? I don't know how many I ended up doing, but it was a lot. I think my favorites were where I had all four colors on there and had this big, bright batt. 

There's the yarn. It's gorgeous, isn't it? But I wasn't stopping there. I was going to, as I said, practice my Navajo plying skills, but I loved this yarn so much I didn't want to use it as practice. Then I remembered some sparkly thread that we had in the Magical Basket of Spinning Supplies, perfect for plying with boring singles to add a bit of... um... sparkle. I hate using such an unprofessional, unsophisticated word twice in the same sentence. But anyway, I plied it with the... shimmering silver thread. And the result was fantastic. 

I made this picture really big so you could see the absolute wonder of it and be even more jealous than you already are of my outstanding talent. I would have made it x-large, but that isn't compatible with the aesthetics of my blog's layout. it's approximately 86 yards, and I can't wait to knit or crochet something out of it. maybe a light scarf...