Oh! Natural

I had a very lovely weekend with some friends away, at White Point Beach Resort.  Wow, the weather was nice, the water looked amazing (too cold to swim in), and we spent 2 hours outside.  What were us indoor cats up to?  The same thing we do every year...scrapbook and craft together.  We roll into the place we choose (specific criteria MUST be met, most revolves around food), unload our packed full cars, and get right down to business...supper.  After supper we start.  My friends use their time to keep up-to-date on their scrapbooking.  I use the time for whatever I feel like that year.  Some years it was scrapbooking, some years it was quilting, maybe knitting.  This year, I spun wool.

I finished the second ball of my mitten wool, which I will post about soon, because I will be starting to knit the mitts.

But, oh!  I had a vision of mittens with the yarn designed to be gradients of natural wool colours, from the finger tips to the cuff.  There is math involved.  I got to work and spun the singles for a test, to see if I liked the idea, plied them, then knit in the round.  I loved it.  Then I tried to figure out the math.  I weighed the test piece, and added 10g, because the test piece would have been a bit short for mittens.  Then I calculated how much of each colour to use.  This is what I came up with:

5g of White Southdown, 5g of Shetland, 5g of brown Corriedale, and 5g of black Welsh.  The second ply is a blend of oatmeal Blue Faced Leicester and Gotland.  I am just spinning a bunch of it, because I plan to make several mittens out of this (if it all works out like it does in my head).  I spun it up, it went really quickly, and plied it last night.  After wet-setting the ply, this is what it looks like:

The mittens will start from the black welsh, blend into the brown Corriedale, into the grey Shetland, and finally the white SD.  I am trying to decide what colour the thumb will be, so I can quickly spin it up.  I can't wait to knit it!  But oh darn, I have to knit those llama-wool mitts first.  Or....maybe not.