Diana just finished a Koigu shawl, and has a number of scraps as small as 2 inches. She’s thinking about knitting a landscape wall hanging, and using the snippets to embellish it. She commented that the short lengths of yarn from the sample card in my last post could be used in the same way.
Her comment reminded me of ‘Confetti’ yarn, which I learned to make when my friend Hazel taught a workshop on the technique several years ago at the Hallamshire Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers in Sheffield, England.
For some reason I don’t remember, I had cut one-yard lengths of many kinds of pink yarn, and then never used them. So I cut them smaller and drum-carded them in with natural white wool and some dyed wool to enhance the color. Here’s the pink yarn that I spun. I plied it with pink sewing thread. That gave it even more pinkness, and kept the yarn from being too bulky.
If you’ve used a drum-carder, you know that the fiber from the big drum is what you spin. The smaller drum catches the very short fibers and snarls. Well, when you add short pieces of yarn and stuff to the carder, the small drum gathers a great many of the small bits.
After carding a more colorful batch of scraps, I just couldn’t bear to trash the fibers on the small drum. So I took them off and spun them into this nubbly yarn. It’s still waiting for the perfect project to come along.
No matter which fiber you use, you end up surrounded by a halo of little scraps on the floor around you and your spinning wheel.