Spinning Panda

7 April, 2009
Posted by Felicia Lo

Two weekends ago, we had a dye class here at the studio and I did my very brief demo on direct application of dyes on wool roving. It was Panda fibre, to be exact… a scrumptious blend of superwash merino, bamboo, and nylon… a perfect blend for making sock yarn or baby things or anything, really. We had sort of randomly mixed up some reddish orange and emerald green colours and I just randomly applied the dyes to the fibre, not entirely sure if I liked the colour combination. It was mainly to demonstrate the idea of the technique. But in the end, I loved the colours. They reminded me of cactus flowers, for some reason.

Panda 2-ply. So scrummy.

Sleek, drapey, and buttery soft.

Singles on the bobbin.

One variegated, one solid.

I took the variegated Panda fibre demo (50g) and split it lengthwise into many, many narrow strips to basically create very short intervals of colour in the singles yarn and plied it with another 50g of semi-solid Panda fibre that had been dyed red. One solid, one variegated, to sort of even out and break up the colours… overall dominating the yarn with red. The resulting 2-ply yarn, most likely a dk or light worsted weight, will make a nice little baby sweater… or hat… or, I don’t know. Right now, I’m happy just to look at it on the shelf.