Spin Your Stash

I got LOTS of ideas from the Stash Reduction Weekend I spend at Claudia's.
Claudia is a great teacher/facilitator, and I sat at the feet of some wonderful
fiber people and soaked in even more. It's sort of hard to say exactly what
I learned, but it's safe to say that I have expanded my way of thinking about
blending and color.

Once I saw what everyone else was doing, I really wanted to buy more colorful
fibers to blend. Except for the autumn cardigan
I'm working on now, I've shyed away from the brighter colors, mostly because
I was never successful in spinning into anything but garish or muddy colors.
But the easy way doesn't always teach you as much, so I went with what I had
(mostly).

The first thing I wanted to do was to use the mohair
combed top that I found to be way too slippery for me to handle. I also
had close to a pound of Ashford Bay top that I
wanted to blend with it. Since I have about 8 pounds of a grey roving (I sent
out a bunch of washed romney from various sources to Ohio Valley and had them
blend it all together) I thought it might work with that.

Here are some of the working ideas we came up with:

	The variations in this green Ashland Bay top weren't showing up in the brown, I tried it with the grey and like it better, but now I'm thinking I might try it with white. Yes, I do have POUNDS of white also. I have a small amount of an angora, silk, merino blend in an off white, so I may add that too.
	This is brown roving, mostly romney, that I had blended and carded at Ohio Valley I bought a little of the pumpkin Ashland Bay to spice it up and used a tannish variegated top I had. I also used the mohair top in this blend, but I still think the brown is taking over. I had planned on plying this with a single brown, but unless I change the proportions, I might get a better yarn double plying.
	Here I just finger teased up some romney locks that had been washed, but nothing else done to it. Then I VERY quickly spun it up and plyed it with a some of the grey roving I had previously spun. This was hard for me to do because I wanted to control it more, but I think I like the rustic quality of the yarn. It's little too fuzzy in places, but I think I'll flick the tips and cut end before I finger tease it and that should even it out a bit.