Questionable Blend 7 - Libra from World of Wool. Dizzing Pulled Top off a Blending Board

This video accompanies my blog series on various ways of spinning ‘Questionable Blends’. I’m using the word ‘questionable’ to describe any vertically blended top that contains colours from more than half of the colour wheel. The kinds of blends that would cast doubt in the minds of even the most experienced of spinners and have them questioning how it might turn out.

Most of the blends I’ve chosen for this series are likely to spin up to be ever so slightly grey or brown if no attention is paid to colour management, and the colours are allowed to optically blend together.

This particular fibre is Libra from World of Wool. It contains 70% merino wool and 30% Extra bleached tussah silk. I chose this blend as the image on the World of Wool website clearly shows a brownish/beige optical blend. I actually saw very little evidence of muddiness in the 4 yarns that I spun using Libra. It blends together into a very pleasing, slightly autumnal, peachy colour.

In this video, I break off 3 strips of Libra and lay them on my blending board without drafting them at all. I then brush them down to attach them to my blending board. This allows me to then use a diz to draft off a kind of pulled top from my blending board. Although a blending board is carded prep, the fibre that I pull off is about as close to a worsted prep as is possible on a blending board.

Most of the yarns in this series were chain-plied at the wheel but this yarn was pre-chain-plied so that I achieved much longer colour sections and a lot more barber poling than if it were chain-plied at the wheel. This fibre contained yellow, green and fluorescent pink and I was trying to minimise these colours appearing on their own while still spinning a variegated yarn.

You can read about the two ways to chain-ply here - https://www.craftmehappy.com/2022/11/...

You can find the Libra tops on the World of Wool site here - https://www.worldofwool.co.uk/product...

Most of the yarns in this series were spun on the Electric Eel Wheel 6. However, I spun Libra while I was beta testing a new Dreaming Robots e-spinner, the Electric Eel Wheel Fold. There should be a Kickstarter for the Fold towards the end of 2024 and it will be available for sale next year. (Affiliate link) https://www.dreamingrobots.com/?affil...

To read more about how I spun this particular blended top, you can find more information on my blog here - https://www.craftmehappy.com/2024/08/...

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Timestamps: -
0:00 Introduction
0:18 Opening up the Libra top to spread it across the blending board
1:32 using a diz to draft pulled top from the blending board
4:00 Showing the final dizzed off Libra fibre
4:10 Time-lapse of a Fold bobbin filling
4:20 The final yarn spun from Libra fibre dizzed off a blending board