Fractal Rovings, by the Hilltop Fibreworker (aka) Elizabeth Watt, are pairs of rovings designed to make a subtly striped sock yarn within a unified colour scheme. The idea comes from a SpinOff magazine article.

I had beautiful Corriedale roving that spun into fabulous sock yarn, but it was thinner than usual, so I came up with a pattern for dyeing that would allow the fractal techniques. The colourways, called analogies because they are based on analogous colour schemes, are each based on a particular secondary colour usually leaning toward one of its primaries – Forest is made up of 4 greens leaning towards yellow, Ocean is 4 greens leaning towards blue etc. The base primary is included in one of the rovings as an accent. The dye pattern is specifically designed to create the stripe pattern, with a number of variations possible. What follows are detailed instructions to help you create sock yarns from these rovings. In this example the difference between the lengths of stripes is emphasized. The yarn will show a background of wide stripes of colour against which shorter stripes quickly change.

You will find two “skeins” of roving, loosely tied together. One has 4 long stripes (the long stripe) around it’s circumference, the other has 4 repeats of short stripes around its circumference (the short
stripe). Untie the ties on each skein and wind each skein into a ball.

The roving is a bit thick to spin as is for sock yarn, so you need to split it lengthwise to thin it. You will split the long stripe in half and the short stripe in quarters.

Here the split is begun and I have wound the two halves into separate balls. When the split is finished, rewind one of the balls so that the current outside end is on the inside, then wind that onto the other ball. This keeps the stripe pattern going in the same direction. If you just wound one ball onto the other you would reverse the pattern of the stripes. Or you can leave them as is and spin them one after the other.

For the short stripe roving you will split each half in half again. You’ll want to keep track of the ends so as soon as you split in half start the second splitting and then mark the outside ends of the balls by tying a piece of scrap yarn onto each one as shown below.

Again, you can either leave the 4 balls to spin one after the other, always starting at the marked end, or you can rewind one ball so that its marked end is in the centre of the ball then wind the other balls
onto it, always starting to wind from the marked end.

Here are the two balls. Notice that one is thicker than the other. We’ll handle that as we draft for spinning.

I spun the yarn at approximately 9 twists per inch and 40 wraps per inch for the singles as shown in the following pictures. Notice the difference in the drafting triangles for each. The Long stripe is first.

Here are the singles on the wraps per inch gauge and on the bobbins. You can see the difference between the short stripe bobbin which has mixed colours (left) and the clearer colour changes on the long stripe bobbin (right).

Now just ply as normal (6 twists per inch). Watch the short stripe colours change on the long background. Every once in a while the colours will match. The finished skein looks like this

These are socks I knit using the Widdershins pattern from the Summer 2006 issue of Knitty, slightly modified to include 2X2 ribbing and increases up the back of the calf. I rather liked the gusset heel.