One of my October Resolutions was to get started on the rainbow fibre. I described this in more detail on the podcast – you can find the episode here. I am so, so excited to say that we have completed round one of the fibre.

Wait, who is ‘we’? Read on…!

Rainbow Fibre

My friend Melanie, an Aussie and found through Ravelry, is currently in London and came to hang out when we had the PicKnit at the PM headquarters. I showed off all of my spinning fibre (protoyarn!) and told her my plans for some of it. I also expressed some concern at spinning the nylon sparkly unicorn tail fibre – I had never used this before.

Melanie was a superstar, and got started with the fibre – within a couple of days I had overcome my fear and spun it all into a single.

I also had some merino tops in the seven colours of the rainbow, which I wanted to spin into a single as a gradient. Excited by this, I laid out all of the fibre last week and spun it up – with the assistance of Melanie, who did at least half of it! When we were halfway through the first red top, we decided to split it in half as there was a lot of it – so we ended up spinning only half of these colours.

Meanwhile, Melanie had been scheming, and had gone to Hobbycraft to pick up some beads. She had also watched tutorials on YouTube on how to spin with beads – you can guess what happened, right?? With all of these strung onto sparkly blue rayon thread, I nominated Melanie for plying first, and I was in charge of the beads while she did so. We ran out of nylon towards the end of the yellow – so we had to run back to the shop and get more. Melanie spun this up, plyed it with the rest of the beads and merino, and we ended up with three skeins of glory that will make a rainbow when used together!

As Melanie is leaving for Australia soon, I made her take these skeins – we had originally thought we would split it in half, but gradually realised that we would each only have half of the rainbow if we did this, and chopping each colour into sections was not an option. Luckily, because we had split the merino, I still have half of the fibre left and I can spin up more of this glorious yarn!

It is soft, sparkly, absolutely beautiful and such a wonderful project. We crammed as many techniques in as we could (a common utterance being “it’s art yarn, it doesn’t matter”) and I can’t wait to start on the next lot. I’m also really looking forward to seeing what Melanie knits out of it – we are not yet sure of the yardage, and will measure it next week sometime.

Much love,

Corrie xx