The quest for tweed

I’m a big tweed fan. Surprisingly, I haven’t found many bloggers talking about spinning tweed. Let me clarify: I’m not talking about streaks of contrasting colour simply carded into a batt. I’m talking about those pretty little bits of complementary colours sprinkled regularly throughout the finished yarn. Nice, discrete neps.

Carding and spinning up my own tweed has been in the back of my mind for awhile, but I’d been putting it off for several reasons. I’m told it’s tricky to make a solid tweed – that is, to keep the neps from falling out. But really, I just wasn’t sure about the neps. I once tried chopping up waste yarn into the little bits and carding it in, but was less than thrilled with their appearance once spun. It was clear that they were kinked yarn bits and not the delicate little sparks of colour that you usually find in tweed. The word ‘felt’ has come up a few times, but this concept eludes me.

So in the end I dyed this:

merino & silk hankies

And carded it together, spun it, and got this:

handspun tweed

Yuck – not my favourite colour. The silk hankies do a pretty good job of catching on the card teeth to form the neps, but you need really high contrast colours so the tweedy bits don’t get lost in the fibre, like mine did.

Now: jam-making time!

strawberry bath

Variations

plum & coffee silk, merino, and superwash merino

Every time I dye I learn something new. Recently, I thought I was very clever when I cut a hank of undyed superwash yarn into little 2 gram skeins. The plan was to throw a mini-skein into every pot of dye so that I could save it as a record of my colour recipes.

I dyed a pot of silk hankies. The colour on the mini-skein came out fine, but the silk was, well, ugly. I dyed merino roving – the mini-skein came out plum but the roving was a weak magenta. After three confusing tries, I came across a vital little bit of information in a book: dye strikes faster for superwash. Oh.

I think the dye was mostly being sucked up into the mini-skein, leaving very little for the items in the pot that I had intended to dye in the first place. So I re-dyed the roving and got the plummy colour I was hoping for, but no more fancy dye samples for me. From now on I’ll just cut a little corner off the roving after it’s dyed.

Hanami

I feel like I’m a little behind the curve – Hanami has been knit by everyone and their dog, but rightly so. I’m not that big on flowery, pretty lace most of the time, which is why the geometry of Hanami’s basket weave pattern attracted me. It’s a strong pattern without being too girly, and even the cherry blossom end has a minimalism that I find pleasing. The beads? Those, I can’t explain. I guess even I can’t resist a bit of sparkle.

Hanami basket weave

The yarn is Fiddlesticks Zephyr Wool-Silk, a yarn I’ve worked with before and liked. This is my first large-scale lace work, so the first dozen rows were slow going. But I’m picking up speed and confidence, so look out world! Another Hanami is on its way.