Rainbow rolags

In the past month I have not been spinning much, and I have not been knitting at all. I did however spin some of the fibre from the Schaap & Draak advent calendar. The included rolags looked like a nice combination of colours, so I decided to spin them on my The Spindle Shop Dyavols. How delicious they were!

The warm rainbow colours spoke to me as a happy contrast to the bleak, too-warm winter weather that we’ve been having lately. No frost, no snow. Foggy days when it should have been cold. I have not really used my shawls or gloves yet, because it just isn’t necessary. Birds are singing, snowdrops are blooming, even the crocuses are already up. It’s unsettling to me to see climate change progressing so fast. What will the summer be like? I can’t really do anything about it, though, and I try to not let climate anxiety get the best of me.

The rolags were great to spin, and looking at the warm yellows and oranges was a treat. I love my Dyavols, and really enjoyed using them all for this project.

As you can see, the colours are semi-solid. Some combinations are quite out there. The second colour from the left is a mix of yellow and purple, and the fourth one is dark orange with green. They blend pretty well!

I chain plied the singles on my wheel, as usual. The resulting skeins were quite close in yarn weight, so I could definitely use them together in a colourwork project in the future. After spinning these, I felt like continuing, so I took out my blending board and converted six mini batts from the advent calendar into more rolags.

This time I chose a cooler colour spectrum. The rolags are all different fibre blends. Some are BFL, some are merino, some include silk. I’m going to try and keep spinning the same yarn weight for all rolags.

The first rolags were already a joy to spin. They were a mix of fine merino and silk, and it was very easy to spin thin singles. The colour is beautiful as well.

I’ve just started spinning the pink BFL rolags, and they are a completely different beast. Very nice too, but the fibres are much thicker, so getting the same singles thickness is a challenge. But it’s fun! After these six, there are twelve more colours to go in the advent calendar.