A few years ago, inspired by a blog post from Ashland Bay, I bought four braids of fibre with the thought of spinning a gradient three-ply yarn, changing out one strand at a time as I worked from the first colour to the last. My plan was to pick up a coordinating solid and then use the resulting yarn to make a sweater like this Painterly Pullover.
But the green on the left stood out too much. And I couldn't find a solid that I liked that would coordinate well with all four colours.
So... I replaced the green with a pinky-purple blend, and I like it a lot better. The coordinating solid is a pale pink, which unfortunately arrived smelling of cigarette smoke and Febreze, bleah! I put it in a plastic tote with some paper towels soaked in FreshWave IAQ (that stuff is a miracle) and then let it air out in the sun and breeze, and fortunately got all the stink out of it.
Here it is all together:
I can use the green fibre as the test-spin for the bigger project, approaching the whole thing as scientifically as possible. My general dislike of loosely plied yarns has led to some really dense, overtwisted yarn in my handspun stash, so I'm going to do some swatching of twist angle and plying twist before I start spinning another sweater quantity...
