In Terry Gross’s All I Did Was Ask, she opens the interview of writer Mary Karr with a brief comment on memoirs in general. She writes, “My motto has become a line spoken by Dennis Hopper in the movie Search and Destroy: ‘Just because it happened to you doesn’t make it interesting.’ ”

Ever since I read it, the quote jumps to my mind whenever I start composing a new ‘blog entry.

—

I was so pleased with the results of my hydrangea-inspired dye job that I was a little reluctant to card the mess together into something spinnable. What if it got neppy in the carder? What if the colors didn’t blend well? What proportions should I use for each color? Well, no more tiptoeing around, I bit the bullet this morning.

Each tuft of wool was opened up carefully by hand to “unlock” the tips and butt, I removed the few bits of 2nd cuts and vm that I found. The angora was teased into a translucent waft of fiber. I carded layers of each color (everything except the pale yellow green), pulled batts off, and carded each batt 2x. With the second carding, I added a dusting of Angelina fibers. I peeled small sections of each batt off, one at a time, to make mini roving bundles.

Here are some of the finished batts (about 4.5 oz in total, and I did not use all of the dyed fibers).

Have you ever worked with Angelina before? It is an amazing fiber. It appeals to the magpie in me. The closest way I can describe it is if Tinkerbell tapped her wand over the batts and left little colored sparklies everywhere. Because it is so thin, it won’t make the yarn scratchy. I regret that you can’t see the sparkles in the batts, it is too gloomy outside, and the flash washed the colors out of the fiber.

Color blending is an art form where I have sadly little experience. One of Deb Menz’s principles that she mentions in her dyeing books is mixing color values in a single yarn to give it a greater complexity. With that in mind, I blended pale shades of blue and lavendar angora and wool with a medium green wool and a dark purple wool. I didn’t want to overblend and make it a homogeneous bluish-purplish-greenish-sparkly-halo yarn, I wanted distinct regions of colors. There are proportionally more dark colors than light in these batts, and I can’t decide whether that was a good thing to do.

Another thing about color blending – you don’t quite know how colors interact with each other when you are looking at groupings of solid blobs. When I started blending, I found the light purple angora began to look grey when superimposed onto dark colors. The yellow overtones in the green seemed to clash with the purple.

Overall, I’m not sure what I think of the results. Doubtless my opinions will morph again after it is spun. At least the batts are wonderfully soft. They should turn into really nice yarn, even if the colors aren’t quite right.