Stripe Kit

If you've been reading for any length of time you know that I'm in the Gritty Knits Merino of the Month club. Each month I get a braid of beautifully dyed Merino from the lovely Natasha and add it to my fiber stash. Sometimes, of course, it isn't my favorite colors but it's a club and that's bound to happen. I love the versatility of Merino and I really enjoy spinning it so I stick with this lovely, very reasonably priced club even though I often have more than 10 braids of Merino sitting around waiting to be spun at any given time. (That's probably a low estimate but I'm not going to reveal the truth about the stash.)
Every so often Natasha will use her lovely color sense and come up with an idea. Sometimes, being in the club gives us a chance to test it out for her and such was the case in January of 2012. I got this lovely big package in the mail and ripped into it to find...a Stripe Kit. It was 6 ounces, rather than the usual 4 and was in 2 ounce pieces. Each piece was dyed differently and the idea was to spin them and chain-ply for predictable, gradual stripes or alternate for a random pattern or anything else. The idea created a sort of stir in my Knitting and Spinning groups and lots of people spun 3 different-colored braids together. The results were gorgeous and I recently realized that I had never spun my Stripe Kit. It seemed like a great time to practice double drive on my wheel so I changed things up and got to spinning.

As you can see the three braids are very different, although the third one (on the right) has elements of both of the other two.

It was hard to get an idea of how they would spin up together though. So I dove right in and started. A traditional 3-ply all the way.

It turned out to be a very unusual yarn. It's all different and it's so hard to tell in the photos about the subtle shifts in color on each section of the yarn.

It's about a fingering weight but dense. Only about 420 yards from the 6 ounces.

Maybe here you can see a little bit better how the colors shift slowly in each part of the yarn. It's really unusual and I really can't wait to see how it looks knit up. I'm thinking after I finish some socks I have on the go, this might need to become some socks. Even though it's 100% merino, it has a nice tight twist and will be dense and tightly-knit so I think it will be okay. I'm not too worried, I have enough hand-knit socks in the drawer that I can afford to experiment a bit.