I fucking love merino.

I started thinking the other night - I know, I know, that's always dangerous - and decided if I was going to use the malachite green roving as a gift, I should probably hone my spinning skills a bit (okay, a lot) more before I screw it up. From knitting the Zen sweater, it has become apparent that my spinning is a lot less even than I think it is.

So I dyed half of the merino roving I had laying around.

The trick seems to be using a lot of mordant. In this case, vinegar. The husbeast has carried on for two (three?) days now about how the house smells like he stuck his head in a pickle barrel. I may have to remind him of the weekend he went drag-racing and blew the differential out of the truck three times, to get him to shut up. Like he's never smelled up the house.

Anyway, the roving came out a bit, uh, well.

Bright. I think bright's the proper word for this. As I've been spinning it, I've been trying to come up with a name for these colors, and all I can think of is "Summer Landscape on Acid." I dunno, call me crazy, but I'm not sure it's good to be refrencing illegal drugs in my color names. (I've already blown that with Purple Trainwreck, actually. Turns out it's the same name as a high-yield mairjuana hybrid out of British Columbia. I SWEAR I did not know this when I named it. Honest. I swear. Stoners keep showing up on my blog after doing searches for the stuff and finding yarn instead, poor bastards.)

So I've been spinning the merino. I'd been told by quite a few people that I shouldn't start with merino because it's too slippery or something, but this is the nicest fiber I've spun so far - long staple, soft, smooth, easily drafted, you name it. It's like a tactile hot fudge sundae. Though the colors are still, um, yeah.

Maybe it'll mellow out a bit when I ply it. But somehow, I doubt it.