For those of you who are not spinners, ready-to-spin wool and other fibers come in several forms: batts, roving, top, rolags, punis and many other preparations, each with their own peculiar name. Roving is a method of cleaning and preparing fibers which results in a long, thick, cottony strip of fibers which are ready to be spun. It's rather hard to describe, but if you think of a giant cotton ball which has been stretched out into a strip several yards long (and sometimes weighing several pounds), then roll it back into a ball or braid it, you'll have a general idea of what roving is.
To the left is a photo of a ball of grey Lincoln longwool roving. You can see the end of the strip coming off the ball of roving. The end is the part of the roving you spin from, and you unroll the ball as you spin the fiber.
A couple of years ago, a knitting friend of mine approached me with seven different braided rovings of wool, each about seven feet long, and each a different blend of fiber and a different blend of two or more colors. She had purchased them at various vendors at the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival. They were all discounted rovings, and one look at them made the reason obvious - they were horrible color blends. Sometimes the best ideas in hand dyeing go horribly awry, and Ann had purchased the "orphan" rovings dirt cheap because nobody was going to buy them. There were greens and browns, bright yellows combined with weird shades of grey, reds that faded into muddy blues, purples with odd blotches of orange in them, and turquoise blue that wound up a greenish black as though it had gone moldy. Individually, they were just awful.
Ann was hoping to have her mother spin up the roving so that she could knit a sweater for her husband, but her mother wasn't able to spin at that time, so she asked me if I would do it as a commission. Because Ann was a friend, I said I'd spin them up for her. I must have been out of my mind.
I took the big bag of roving, weighing over two pounds, home and started to examine what I had. If I spun up each roving by itself, the results would be disastrous, and the resulting sweater would be one that would be stashed in a drawer by her husband as soon as possible, there to be forgotten until the moths had made an end of it. There was only one option: I would have to spin all seven of the rovings simultaneously and hope that somehow the colors would blend into something that would at least be tolerable.
I tore the rovings in half and then in half again and split the strips up so that I had eight strips per roving (56 strips in all). I dealt out the strips into eight piles, one strip from each of the seven different rovings, and wrapped a scrunchy band around each pile so that they wouldn't get mixed up.
Holding a pile of seven roving strips in one hand , I started to spin all of the colors at once, and the effect was miraculous. The ugly, muddy colors became a pleasant, muted background for bright splashes of vibrant yellows, turquoise, fuchsia pink, and purple, and the end result was a soft, variegated yarn that was absolutely unique and lovely, full of color but not so bright that a man wouldn't wear it in front of his buddies.
When the yarn was plied and finished, I was amazed at the results, and I took the finished yarn to my favorite yarn shop, The Sow's Ear, to show my knitting friends and deliver it into Ann's waiting hands. Amy Detjen, a knitting rock star if there ever was one (her hair is purple), declared the experiment a success, and christened the result "Muppet Barf" because of the multitude of colors in the skeins. Ann was stunned, as was everyone else.
Ever since that first experiment, I have continued to spin multiple rovings simultaneously, always with unexpected and beautiful results. I have spun as many as ten roving strips at a time. More than that is somewhat difficult to hold in one hand, but I'm sure I'd find a way. I finished three skeins this week, spun from two different rovings I was given by Harvest for my birthday, and I have called the new Muppet Barf skeins "Tutti Fruitti".
The skeins are spun from Australian wool top into a yarn that would make some delightful socks or a great hat and socks to match - 876 yards total in 7 ounces of yarn.
I think Kermit the Frog would approve.
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