vaneramos | Colour portions

The first day of the Tour de Fleece, I didn't actually do any spinning. But I spent about three hours preparing fibre to be spun, which counts. The time was spent dividing the merino/cashmere/silk into packets, which will be individually carded and spun for the weft. I did it this way in order to design long colour gradations. There are seven colours—dark green, bright green, gold, yellow, pink, maroon and light orange-brown—combined in different proportions, usually two colours per packet but occasionally three. Altogether there are 300g of fibre for the weft.

Yesterday I wasn't sure about the warp. Last night I tried spinning a sample from a combination of the dark green merino/cashmere and some dark brown alpaca. I used a more worsted preparation and gave it more twist for strength and smoothness. I was pretty happy with it, and it will show off the brighter colours of the cashmere nicely. It will end up being alpaca/merino/cashmere/silk (60/37.5/7.5/5). I don't have a photo of the sample, but these are the fibres I'll use (the dark brown alpaca in the top right predominating).