It seems very appropriate that I was spinning festive red merino over Christmas. This was the stuff I carded using Lisa’s drum carder. The original fibre was merino top in scarlet and crimson. There was slightly more crimson in the mix than scarlet because it turned out I wasn’t very good at estimating equal quantities.

I spun a 3ply, DK weight, 11 wpi, and have 146g which is 298m. Here is a (rather blury) closeup.

I had some of the uncarded merino left over, and thought it would be interesting to spin the singles in separate colours and then ply them together, and compare how this differed from the fibre that had been carded. So I spun two singles in the scarlet, and one crimson (luckily I had almost precisely twice as much scarlet as crimson), and plied them altogether in a 3ply.

Again DK weight, 11wpi, there is 53g and 116m. Here is a closeup where you can see the different coloured plies.

These are going to be part of my handspun leaves waistcoat. I am looking forward to seeing how the two different yarns knit up. The carded yarn is definitely lumpier (due to my lumpy carding), and wasn’t as nice to spin as the uncarded top. The uncarded yarn looks stripey in the yarn (although because the colours are quite similar it looks less stripey from a distance), but the colour mix is more even than in the carded yarn, and I will be interested to see whether they are a lot more similar once knitted.