Pretty Perendale

This gorgeous braid of fibre is my newest spinning project. It wasn’t going to be - I had been toying with either an undyed Shetland or some green Southdown for socks but I just couldn’t decide.
I asked some knitting friends to browse my spinning fibre stash online and make some suggestions, and one friend suggested laceweight using this blue fibre.

The braid came from a fibre club run by Fibre Hut in the West Midlands. It was my first experience with a fibre club and when the first parcel arrived at my door and I ripped it open, I was delighted. The colours are just so me! I’d never heard of the Perendale fibre it is dyed on, though.

According to The Field Guide to Fleece, the breed was developed in the 1950s in New Zealand as both a fleece and meat sheep. Reading other sources online, I found out that the wool has a medium staple length of around 6” but that the crimpy bouncy fibre spins up into a lofty yarn, full of air, regardless of how much of a worsted draft you use. This bothered me, as I prefer the smooth, sleek look of worsted spun fibres to the fluffiness of woollen spun yarn. Also, my friend challenged me to spin a laceweight yarn from it.

That last point was what captured my imagination though. For all that I loved the blue tones of the fibre, I had no idea what to turn it into. Could a fibre that tended towards a haloed soft-textured yarn make a laceweight yarn that woeful give me the clean lace stitches I like? If I could spin it thin enough, it might.

The braid has various shades of blue, from sky blue through to navy, but not dyed as a gradient. For yarn for knitting lace, I want a 2-ply construction, and that gave me an idea. I decided to open up the braid and split it all the way down the middle lengthways to give two identical lengths of fibre.

Each of these bumps of fibre will form one singles of the final 2-ply, but if I spin both in the same way I’ll just be recreating the original braid and I wanted something that would really accentuate all those beautiful blues. Instead I’m spinning one half from the top end down to the bottom, and the second half in the other direction so the two resulting bobbins will start from opposite ends of the fibre when I come to ply them. I am hoping that that reversing of the colour sequence will result in some areas where the colours of the two plies match and others where they don’t, blending to form new shades.

I have already started spinning, at my wheel’s highest ratio (19:1), aiming for a very thin singles. The fibre drafts beautifully and a very fine yarn is not proving hard to produce so far. And just look at those blues!

A quick ply-back test already shows the slight fuzziness inherent in the yarn produced by this Perendale fibre though. I’m very pleased with it so far, small quantity though it is, and it is taking all my self-control to finish my knitting project instead of throwing it aside and spending hours spinning this gorgeous fibre!