An ode to Petlyn wool combs

Dear Julie and Joe,

Just thought I'd drop you a line to let you know how much fun I'm having with your English wool combs that I bought from you at the Australian Sheep and Wool Show in Bendigo this year. I also purchased some of Coral Stewarts' dyed fleece. More of a sentimental purchase, as I don't need any more fleece, but I do love her work and have a jacket and a jumper made from her dyed yarn, which I love.

Now I know that this was not the perfect start, whilst the fleece is dyed it was still very greasy, but I thought that knowing this was not the best start would allow me to experiment to find the best way to process it. Fleece is always tricky as you tend to get a muddying effect as there are no distinct blocks of colour. Well, this fleece, anyway.

I found the best way was to load a rough colour block at a time, then take it off with the free comb, load more, take off more, and keep going till I had this:

You can sort of see the layers that were created and when I 'dizzed' it off I got

It spun up beautifully, as you would expect using wool combs, I navaho plied the resulting single to try and keep some colours. It did turn out muddy in places and I did really lose the blue, but I love the yarn so much I didn't take a photo before I knit it up into a shrug to sell in my Etsy shop.

I really love the combs and have started work on my next project, and, as convener of Experimental Spinners at the guild, we're going to have a session playing with wool combs. A couple of us have wool combs and so does the guild. We're going to try colour blending and see what happens.

Thanks again for your marvellous products and your generosity in sharing your knowledge.

Cheers, Teresa

PS Hints on blending colours on wool combs would be appreciated!