Mixed BFL | All Kinds Of Knitting

A spinner simply cannot have too much fiber. It’s impossible. I just added two new braids to my fiber stash. They are from Spunky Eclectic, and are part of the Club Remix, which celebrates the tenth year of the Spunky Fiber Club.

One braid has gorgeous coppery browns, dark browns, and hints of gold.

This color way is called Kitsune, but I think it should be called Calico Kitty. 🙂

The fiber is mixed BFL (Bluefaced Leicester–pronounced “lester”). Mixed BFL, aka Swirl BFL, is a (usually 75/25) mixture of natural white (actually cream) BFL with natural black (actually brown) BFL, which adds a lot of depth to the dyed colors when the fiber is spun. BFL (say “biffle”) is a gorgeous fiber, a fine longwool that combines softness and luster. It’s fun to spin, and it makes a yarn that is wonderful to knit with and that produces next-to-the-skin soft garments.

The other braid is Shetland wool, which is one of my favorite fibers to spin.

State Park is the name of this color way.

It gives me a lot of peace of mind to know that I’m not in danger of running out of spinning fiber. 🙂

Spinning is an adventure. When I started spinning this fiber,

Mixed BFL from Woolgatherings

I had a picture in my mind of a 4-ply sport-weight yarn with long color repeats. I divided up the yarn so that the colors would be in the same order for each bobbin of singles, I made a reference card for the singles,

A piece of singles taped to a small string tag for reference

and I actually used the reference card frequently to check the size of the singles I was spinning. A reference card isn’t worth the effort to make it if you don’t use it. 🙂

I was hoping to get a yarn where there would be long stretches where the color would be the same on all four plies. I knew that there would be stretches where the colors would not match up, but I was hopeful that there would be long sections of solid color.

The plying got off to a great start. All of the bobbins began with red, so I started off with yarn that matched my hopes and dreams for this fiber. But it didn’t take long before I realized that I wasn’t going to get long stretches of one color. For some reason, throughout most of the plying, I had three strands of one color and one strand of another, or two strands of one color and two strands of another. It was only at the beginning and the end that I had four strands of the same color. ::sigh::

Okay, the yarn didn’t turn out the way I had planned. But it still turned out great.

A bobbin full of 4-ply handspun BFL

The mixed BFL makes for a heathery yarn with deep, rich colors, and because I was careful to check my singles against the reference card regularly during the spinning, my singles were consistent and thus my 4-ply yarn is quite uniform throughout the skein.

When the first bobbin ran out during the plying, there was very little yarn left on the other three bobbins.

The bobbin on the left is the one that ran out first.

Pretty amazing, eh?

Although the yarn didn’t turn out quite as I had planned, I love the yarn I got. The mixing of the colors gives the yarn a lovely tweedy look that should knit up into something spectacular. And now that this project is off the wheel, I’m all set to start the Tour de Fleece. I may have a Lendrum DT Complete coming to me today on a FedEx truck. 🙂