I’ve had this idea for a while: dyeing wool nepps that I bought years ago in a wide variety of colors, and then spinning white wool with these colorful nepps tucked inside.
And then it hit me: is this how tweed is made?! And the answer is… YES!
So, it turns out I didn’t actually invent the process for making tweed… because it was already a thing. 😛
Oh well… I finally gave it a try! My main concern was: would the nepps actually stay inside the wool?
I dyed the nepps purple, pink, green, turquoise, yellow, and red, and then blended them with white Merino wool.
Here is where I made a bit of a mistake: I decided to place the nepps in vertical lines on the blending board. My goal was to create a yarn that alternated between plain white and a few meters of “tweed” nepps.
Unfortunately, this meant the nepps were clustered too close together. It made it difficult to draft properly during spinning and created pockets consisting of almost entirely nepps. Next time, I would definitely scatter fewer nepps all across the blending board. That would give me a better chance of creating a yarn with a consistent width and less shedding.
Here are two pictures of the rolags I made:
As for the nepps falling out during spinning—I was actually amazed! A few did drop, but not nearly as many as I had expected. They fell out more during the fulling stage (is that the right word? When you wash handspun yarn and “thwack” it against the wall to balance the twist).
Here is the final result. I believe this is the first time a handspun and hand-dyed yarn I’ve made has turned out so close to what I had envisioned 😀
Now, I just have to decide what to knit with it… 😉
Leave a Reply