Morning Glory Batts

Last week I dyed up some fibers to blend on my drumcarder. This is the first full batch of blended fibers that I have worked on, and I'm really pleased with my results. I started with 4 piles of fiber, each one containing 1/2 oz. BFL (blue-faced leicester), and 1/4 oz. each of alpaca and silk. The BFL and alpaca had some purple as well. I had hoped for a bit of a darker color, but since it was my first time dyeing as well, there was quite a few areas that didn't get dyed. It made me glad that I used light grey alpaca instead of cream! I think that it added a bit of depth to it. I also added a sprinkling of blue and bright pink firestar in the last pass through. To blend the three fibers and the colors, I started with one pile of fiber and carded each one in the same way. I started with a thin layer of BFL, then I made a "sandwich" of alpaca, then silk, topped with BFL, and fed that in all at once to keep the silk from bunching too much. I carded each pile into two batts, and then split them in half and carded them with each other. Then I took one of these batts and blended it with half of a batt from one of the other batches to make sure that I had a fairly even blend. I added just a hint of dyed firestar (a few grams) to the last pass to give a bit of depth and shine.
Cary saw a picture of these batts and said that they reminded her of Heavenly Blue morning glories, and I just love those, so the name stuck! I ended up with 8 batts and have spun half of them, and hope to ply what I've spun tonight. They were are dream to spin, and I actually decided to draft from the fold, which I don't do often, to add a bit of loft to the fiber as I was spinning it. Holding the bit of fiber over my index finger didn't work as well as I would have liked, so I placed it over my thumb instead, which worked surprisingly well. I was aiming for a fingering weight, so we'll see how well I did with that tomorrow! I'll be using this to knit one of my shawls for Journey to a Shawl.