Spinning the aurora batt

I rarely take on commission spinning projects. Given the amount of work involved, it’s very difficult to charge a fair price (for me) that is also not astronomical for the customer. Once in a while, however, something comes along that is too special to pass up. When my friend Shireen over at The Blue Brick asked if I would spin up her aurora borealis-inspired batt, I couldn’t say no.

This is the kind of batt that could easily end up a muted, muddy mess if spun randomly. A lot of batts and roving lose their intense and saturated look if the separate colours are blended together in the final yarn, a bit like how certain variegated yarns look gorgeous in the skein but more like unicorn vomit when knitted up. My goal is to preserve the colour changes, so that the finished yarn will knit up into a scarf that resembles the original aurora photo as much as possible.

To do this, I split the batt into one long strip divided along the lines of the separate colours, with a bit of overlap to allow for a gradual shift from one colour to the next. The single is very fine, as it will be chain-plied (making a 3-ply yarn), again to keep the colours separate.

The entire batt is about 80 grams, so it’s a fair bit to spin. In the upper left hand corner of the photo above is what I already spent a good chunk of my commission on–raw qiviut from Quebec! More on that, and the progress of the aurora yarn, to come.