The Purple Vest Project

Progress is being made on the purple project. Fiber loaded on combs.

Fiber being combed.

Two batches of blended top, with uncombed locks. The purple looks so much more faded when blended than the intense color of the dyed fiber. Perhaps when it is spun and twisted together again, the darker color will come back.

Knitted swatches. Leftmost is just brown (unlabeled), others are blends. From left, number 2 & 3 use the .75 purple, and it looks noticibly darker to me (tho not so much so in the photo). 4 uses .25 purple (lighter), 5 & 6 use .5 purple, and 7 uses .25 purple. There are different proportions of brown and purple in each swatch, so that's another factor going on. Swatch 5 is half purple, half brown, using .5 purple.

I thought these would be the ones I would use, but they look like a better match in reality than in the photo. These are samples 1, 6, 7. I think I will swap out 7 and use 5. No photo of that option.

Now that I have yarn swatches, I can calculate how much I need to comb for each section of the vest. The vest pattern calls for 1200 yards, but it has a really funky (ok, downright ugly) collar, so leaving that off, I need about 1000 yards, or 250 of each color. My goal is to be knitting on this by next weekend, so I will start by combing the solid brown and then I can alternate spinning, knitting and combing of the other colors. It's almost a chunky weight yarn, so the knitting should go fast.