Every now and then we spend a day preparing some fibre to make some art yarn together. We decide upon a theme for the colours, then go through the fibre stash to see what we have in complementary colours that match our chosen theme. This time, there was some wool that we had prepared on a previous dyeing day, some natural brown wool, and a multitude of small amounts of wool, alpaca and mohair, some bright and some not.
We toss all the fibre together on a large table, everyone grabbing handfuls to pull apart to get all the different colours and fibres mixed together. There’s always lots of friendly chatter during this part of the process, with wool jumping around the table and alpaca fibres floating up our noses. Next we use the picker to separate all the fibres and get some air into the mix. There is less chatter during this part of the process because nobody wants to get their fingers caught in the picker!
Once all the fibre is done we take a bagful each and spin chunky singles, then a couple of us normally volunteer to ply with something suitably fine, and voila! We have some gorgeous art yarn to sell at our next exhibition.