Red and Yellow make...Raspberry Lemonaide

I love Bella the Sheep. She has such nice wool. I need to get a picture of her...

Bella Wool in Raspberry Lemonaide

Now that I have no other fiber to play with, and I realized I only have about two months until I move back to Bella's neck of the woods and four until Christmas, I decided I really need to get going on my gifts to Bella's owners.

Bella was saved from the butcher by a former student of mine. She pleaded with her parents to keep Bella as she was a favorite sheep. I'm not sure how much time the now 11 year old girl spends with Bella, but it worked out well for me.

Drying in the shower. I guess it does read a bit orange.

As I said in a previous post, I was given Bella's fleece, and the mom was just happy to give it to someone who could use it, but I figure that if I didn't pay for it, I should at least make something for the girl who kept this sheep with the lovely wool from becoming lamb chops...and something for her older sister who was also a student of mine.

It all started with some previous experimenting with Kool-Aide dying that you can read here. Then as I started combing out the dyed locks, I realized they weren't as red as I had hoped they would be, there were red sections, but also all shades of pink. Since it wasn't what I had planned, I thought I would try something completely different.

I wanted to know how the yarn would read if I plied the red/pink singles with another color, in our case yellow. Would it come out orange as the colors wrapped around each other so much and so tightly that they blended from afar? Would they keep their individualism and produce a tweed kind of look? It was an interesting question, so I went for it. I used the same method to dye some locks yellow, spun everything up and started plying.

Close up of the lovely Barber Poles

The result was a bit mixed. At first I thought it was just a tweed look, albeit a nice one as the pinks and yellows made a nice summery combination, but as I moved farther away and looked at it, it does have a bit of an orange haze. Go figure.

I'm calling this yarn Raspberry Lemonade and plan to use it for stripes and maybe some flower accents for a couple of hats for the girls. It's only about 120 yards in a fingering/sock weight, so there is no way that it will be enough to make much of anything on its own, though I could check Ravelry...well lots of baby items, or I could make one glove or something, but I think I will stick with the hat plan.

Raspberry Lemonaide skeined