Testing Three

Okay, so now I'm going to get really brave, and spin up some bright red/pink and see what that does. I don't have any. But I do have some orange/red mohair -- it will have to do. This is the skein I got:
And this is the knit swatch:
Quite different, isn't it? So much can change just by which colour is used as the background. Actually, I can't tell which is background and which is the main colour!

Now, that I've done this much, another idea strikes me. Okay, more spinning to do.

Testing Two

Since that last sample tended to produce a rather dull lack-luster over-all tone, I needed something that would pickup one of the colours in my original, without being too strong. I do have some dark blue and spun up a small bobbin, and plied with my purple/pink single. This is the skein I got.
I then knit a swatch to see what it looks like. You can never tell what will happen just by looking at the skein!
This is better. I notice a bit more brightness in the colours now.

Hmm... now I wonder what would happen if I used something a bit brighter. Okay, one more test.

Some testing

There hasn't been an update for some time on the spinning I've been doing. So much has been happening that I have neglected to tell you the latest. So here is a bit of what I've done.

When I was spinning this roving, with all these colours in it, I kept thinking of how to ply it. I didn't want to ply with itself, since I would lose some of the variation of colours. I felt it would all blend together. And, because I only had a limited quantity, I wanted to stretch it as far as I could. At first, I thought I would use another strand of the purple/pink colours, to use as one of the plys and to tie the whole together. But that is not quite a colour that I would use. I had no plans for this yarn either, so what colour it was really didn't matter much!

I did think that a darker neutral colour would work well, since it would not overpower the subtle colour changes in what I was spinning, and a darker colour would tend to let the colours stand out a bit more. A white would make it all quite pale, I felt.

So I was able to spin up a little bit of grey alpaca to ply a small bobbin. The results are below.
I did knit up a small swatch with that skein. I am not quite sure whether this has achieved what I intended. The gray does blend it all together, but the colours are not as bright as I would have liked.

Obviously, more testing is required!