My Experience With Malabrigo Nube Roving

Three skeins of handspun yarn and a bundle of Malabrigo Nube roving on a white background.

Handspinning with Malabrigo Nube Roving

More handspun to show you!!! I love spinning. I do it when I don’t have an urgent project…or when I feel like avoiding my work. Today I’m sharing with you the fun and unexpected results I had while spinning with Malabrigo Nube roving.

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So, I have this Malabrigo Nube roving in colorway #866 Arco Iris. It is very colorful. When I got this roving I expected that it would produce very loud, bright yarn.

Three skeins of handspun yarn and a bundle of roving on a white background.

Then when I began to spin it, I worried that the yarn would be really ugly, because I was getting lots of yellowish-brown. I am not really a big fan of brown.

Three skeins of handspun yarn on a white background.

All the way through spinning the singles of the first batt I really was not sure if the yarn would turn out nice. Even though some sections were much prettier than the yellowish-brown, I felt very unsure about how it would look once all the colors were mixed together in plying.

I am pleased to say that this yarn turned out to be beautiful, but not at all what I thought it would look like! It reminds me of the pattern on my mom’s china, and of heirloom quilts that my husband and I have from our great-grandmothers. I think if I were going to name this colorway I would call it “Antique Rose” or “Antique Treasure”.

And another unexpected result

Then, I spun up the second batt of Malabrigo Nube roving and got interesting results again. This time the yarn was a little more like what I thought it would be, but markedly different from the skeins of the first batt, even though they are the same colorway and dye lot.

These skeins had a lot more purple and green in them than the first batt.

Six skeins of handspun yarn on a white background.

Here are all the finished skeins. The 3 on the left are from the first batt, and the 3 on the right are from the second batt. I love them all. The pictures don’t do them justice. I am excited to make something with these to see how the color story continues to unfold in the stitching. I’m leaning towards an infinity scarf/cowl.

What do you think? Do you like it? Does it seem like a surprising result based on the look of the roving? What would you name it? What would you make with it?

I’m sure you will also want to know about how it is to work with. My experience with Malabrigo Nube is that it can be a little difficult to draft. The dye seems to cause just the slightest bit of felting. However, if you split the roving into strips lengthwise, it loosens things up and makes it much easier to draft. I’m still pretty new to spinning and really enjoyed working with this roving!

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