Spinning Beaded Yarn

I took some time a few weeks ago to spin a beaded yarn for our January Challenge in the North Dakota Spinners Ravelry group. I used some roving I had dyed a couple weeks ago. We dyed it with food coloring, red, blue, yellow, green and purple. The yellow ended up blending in with the other colors and creating an orange and a brown color, but it is beautiful. I strung the beads on a piece of thread and plyed it with my two singles and it went pretty good, but I did spend a bit of time untwisting when the yarn and beaded thread decided to have a fight once in a while. I used clear beads with hopes that it would blend with all the different colors and it seemed to work quite well. This is one yarn I do plan to try again in the future and maybe test our a new technique for adding the beads.

 

You can see all the difference colors we had in our yarn. The beads look like little water droplets.

This shows the beads in the yarn pretty well. They are spaced about every 12 to 18 inches.

 

Here we have the yarn twisted into a skein. The beads seem to blend into the yarn more in this shot.

This really was a lot of fun once I figured out how to to ply everything together.  I think the next time I do this type of yarn I will use a smaller bead size.  If there was more of it I know this would make a wonderful shawl.