Rainbow Yarns

I've been making rainbow yarns! The first one was a custom order for someone who wanted an Over the Rainbow art yarn with lots of sparkle and some bird charms and beads, to make into a wall hanging for her grandson.

As I was working on the custom order, someone else asked me whether I've ever spun a rainbow coil / beehive art yarn, like the Tentacles one. When I thought about it I couldn't really understand why I'd never done that, or, in fact, why I never spun any rainbow yarns at all. I did think about it now and then, but somehow I never got around to actually doing it. So, when I forgot to put the sparkles in the batt for the requested rainbow yarn, I ended up with another batt and I did turn it into a beautiful coiled art yarn. I love the in progress photos, with all the rainbow fibres, and want to show you:

 This was the second batt, which became the first yarn (the one with the birds), with lots of glitter.

 This was also taken while preparing to spin the custom yarn - I made four rainbow repeats and layed out the fibres accordingly.

This is the second yarn, with lots of coils (though without sparkle), which I spun in rainbow order from red to purple and then back from purple to red.

 And the finished yarn. I really need to take better photos, but there wasn't time yet. I really love this, and I am very in love with coils and beehives at the moment (not for the first time) :-)

Venomous & Beautiful

I'm talking about the inspiration for my new supercoil art yarn: the Portuguese Man o' War, also known as Bluebottle or blue bubble. The binomial name is Physalia physalis and the jelly-like creature is, in fact, not one, but many - a colony of polyps and medusoids. I've never seen a real one (they're not native where I live or where I usually go on vacation), but I am fascinated by the beauty and the stunning colours of these creatures. I vaguely remember reading about them as a child, in some kind of children's book about what kind of things you can find on the beach, and I always thought they were definetly deadly. Now, years later, there's the internet ;-) and I found out that though they are venomous they rarely cause death, but the stings are very painful. So - I still don't really fancy meeting one of these beauties directly ;-)

Anyway, I've been wanting to spin a yarn to do their beauty justice and I've given it a lot of thought. Somehow, a simple yarn didn't seem fitting, so I decided to go for supercoils once more, which I haven't done for quite some time. I think it was the best choice, I am very pleased with the outcome. I realised that I tend to forget how much work this technique is, this skein of 30 m/60 g took me three and a half hours. But it was worth every minute, the yarn is spectacular! I really love the colours (though I could never wear them, they don't really look good on me) and their distribution. And I sooo like the texture of supercoil yarn! :-)

Meet the Supercoils!

Aw, I wanted to do these for a long, long time. And they turned out so beautiful! Gosh, I love supercoil yarns! And finally! I spun some of these beauties.

Somehow my first attempts failed terribly. I still don't know what I did wrong - perhaps there was not enough tension on the single or the plying thread had just too much grip, I really can't remember, but I DU remember that I ended up entirely entangled and close to tears.

I think the yarns I finally managed to spin really make up for the trouble! ;)