A Love of Textured Art Yarns
As a fibre artist I love creating unique and interesting one-of-a-kind yarns. This is where I get to play with gorgeous fibres and textures and really be creative!
Art yarns are those fun fabulous yarns that are lumpy and bumpy, super bulky, full of unusual add-ins such as beads, buttons, shells, sequins, sparkly Angelina and wool locks. With art yarn anything goes!
As a trained artist I am instinctively drawn to colour and being able to hand dye and blend fibres to create beautiful colour ways to make my art yarns pop, is something I love to do.
Blending boards and drum carders are great for combining fibres and it's a joy to create wild art batts and jumbo rolags. If you don't have these tools, that is not a problem because you can still create art yarns by laying out fibres one on top of another to create a fibre sandwich which you can then spin from.
Art yarn techniques I love to use include, corespinning which is where fibres are allowed to twist around an existing (usually commercial yarn) to create a textured yarn and spiral plying, where you use a thin yarn and allow your wild spun single to spiral around it to create coiled yarns.
With art yarns the possibilities for creating wild funky yarns is endless. I get inspiration just looking at berries on a branch or the way the lichen forms on the trees and falls to the ground during a storm.
People always ask what can you do with such bibbly bobbly yarns! My answer is what can't you do! From free form knitting and crochet to woven wall hangings and wearable art you are only limited by your imagination.
This blue hand woven scarf was hand spun from a combination of corespun and spiral ply yarns on a rigid heddle loom. Rigid heddle looms are so portable and easy for a beginner to get started with weaving. I love warping my little sample-it loom from Ashfords with some art yarns and taking it out into the garden on sunny day.
The green scarf in progress used corespun art yarns and a commercial gold eyelash yarn as the weft (vertical threads) and a combination of a 2ply fine green handspun yarn, art yarns and a gold commercial yarn as the weft (horizontal threads).
Another great way to use art yarns is in circular woven hangings which I experimented with recently.
I used an old embroidery hoop and some cotton weaving yarn as a warp to create a wall hanging inspired by the sea.
