Roving Yarns

Throughout the year, I make a few hand-dyed roving yarns for events and direct sale. My usual bases are:

~ Briggs Country Roving, a 5-strand pencil roving yarn from Briggs & Little. As a product of one of the only commercial mills in Canada, any Briggs yarn is 100% Canadian from the sheep to your needles. As a base, Briggs comes in a variety of natural colors and many mill-dyed tones. I use bleach white and cream as bases for various color-ways, but I will also occasionally experiment with overdyeing their mill colors in the cake.

~ Awesome Possum, a 5-strand pencil roving yarn from New Zealand. I obtained my current supply of this base from a warehouse closure of a historical sweater factory. This is vintage yarn of very fine quality. It was wound into wide flat cakes at the mill, and I typically dye it while still in the cake to produce a variegated "shibori"  effect. I mistook it for Icelandic Plötulopi for nearly two years, but people who knew their Lopi kept telling me it was too soft! And when I eventually found a label on one of the bags, it turned out that they were right.

~ Cloud Roving, a 5-strand pencil roving yarn which I obtained from the warehouse closure in 2024. Although it matches 1-to-1 in terms of weight with Briggs Country Roving, this yarn was wound differently into large rolls and is a finer grade of wool. Experienced knitters may find that it pairs well with historical pencil roving yarns like White Buffalo and Chinook.