Spinning Painted Roving!

Recently I spend time at the John C Campbell Folk School in North Carolina, USA, where I taught a class on spinning for Fair Isle with Martha Owen. We started with Shetland fleece in white, light grey and fawn which we dyed - natural dyes, of course - then carded, spun, and lastly each student knitted a sample swatch of their own design, with the yarns they have produced. An ambitious class but all good fun.

After all that hard work I though some fun was in order, so I took a class - spinning, of course, what else - with a good friend of mine, Melissa Weaver Dunning. A very different type of spinning for me. Not from my normal raw fleece and not Shetland fleece, but painted roving, and Merino and silk!!! 

It was a great week. The 'thinking hat' had to go on to begin with to decide on the colours I wanted, then after the first few exercises, how to continue to get the result I wanted, and also what I was going to do with the yarn when it was finished. I did most of the spinning and started the knitting during the week class and finished it at home.

Here is the result. I knitted a simple square with garter to mark where the changes in the yarn is. It can fit on either a single bed or a double (just), or round my shoulders, it looks nice over a chair or on the back of the sofa.