So I'm thinking of yarn...

Sadly, the cough is making my hands not steady enough for jewelry work. So I spent the last few hours carding up alpaca fleece.

I'm thinking of doing some yarns in jewel tones based off the Black Jewels books. The jewel ranks in the books are:

• White
• Yellow
• Tiger-Eye
• Rose
• Summer-sky
• Purple-dusk
• Opal
• Green
• Sapphire
• Red
• Grey
• Ebon-Grey
• Black

Now you'd think that these would be pretty straight forward. However, all of the jewels have different strengths, so I want to make the fiber multi-tonal in shade. So, white would be ecru, white, cream, etc. Yellows all blended together so you get bits of butter, sunshine, crayon, etc. Tiger-eye will be interesting, since that will need really well blended golden orange and browns. Rose can be pinks and lavenders (and hey, I just spent all day carding up lavender! :)

Summer-sky has never really been defined. But I tend to think of it as shades of blue, maybe with a touch of white and yellow through it occasionally. Just a hint. Never a dark blue, but like the clear, deep, brilliant blue that you see vaulting overhead in the middle of summer. Purple-Dusk would be blues, purples, with some pink threaded through it as well.

Since Opal is the middle of the ranks and can be a dark or light jewel, and since opals contain so many colors in them, I plan to blend bits from all the other jewels into 2 different opal yarns. 1 with all the light colors and 1 with all the dark colors. I might even do a third with super fine singles of each and ply them together so that you have the balanced dark and light halves.

Greens, Sapphire, and Red. Pretty basic, I want to blend all different shades of those into each fiber bunch. Grey will be interesting, since I can blend so many different colors of grey and Ebon-grey can be the same grey blend, but with 1/4 or so substituted with black.

Then you get the Black jewels which will be as black as I can get them.

I also intend to get sparkly additions to add into the fiber to be spun. I just have to buy it. I know they make White that sparkles with WHITE, various shades of white with blue, green, and purple shimmer...there is also purple, blue, gold, red, black, all the colors I need.

Now I just need to be able to afford them. Ah well. That's what the 9-5 is for. :)