the unblackberry

The UnBlackberry

Whilst collecting blackberries to make jam a couple of weeks ago, I was struck with inspiration about what to make with the final 40g or so of brown Jacob’s sheep fibre that has been hanging around since Unravel in February. It was the perfect opportunity to try out my new hand carders, mixing this fibre in with some merino to make the briars with lengths of purple for the berries themselves.

Blackberry Rolags

Despite what I’d heard, hand carding turned out to be a lot of fun, if hard work. Only thing was, try as I might I couldn’t get the purple dark enough to still stand out from the browns of the briars. Partly because I didn’t have enough dark to blend in, partly because I wanted the colour to pop and it just blended in too much. That’s why I ended up going a lot lighter than anticipated. Not so much of a blackberry colour at all. See what I mean?

Blackberries, close up by Martin LaBar. Used under Creative Commons.

Now, I know what you’re thinking… what about the lush greens of the leaves too? Well I was trying to get away from green a little bit. Green is my favourite colour, my go-to colour and I already have another spinning project in which I’m using it currently (more on which later). Despite it not really looking like my original plan for blackberry yarn anymore I really liked what I had blended and went ahead and spun it.

Spinning it up (whilst showing off new spindle)

I planned on the yarn being self striping and had worked out by weight to get both singles to have similar colour lengths for plying. It even almost worked! I ended up with some overlapping of a metre or so, but it looks great so I’m happy. I spun 110 yards of aran weight yarn and it is destined to be a pair of fingerless gloves. Whilst taking the photograph at the top of the post I noticed that it was exactly the same colour as the Canterbury Bells in the flowerbed, and thought about renaming it thus. It doesn’t sound right though. It remains the UnBlackberry.

ETA: I started knitting it up and found it wasn’t DK after all, it knits up to aran gauge.

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