Food of the gods or bitter water?

Chocolate, what more need be said?

There are so many types of food and/or drink that I could have chosen to work with for my gluttony inspired yarn, though I knew from the outset that I needed to narrow things down. It wasn't a very difficult choice for me - and that choice was reinforced by a trip to the supermarket today; I wandered down the aisle marked 'seasonal' and was (only slightly surprised to be) confronted with bar after bar, box after intriguing and enticing box of chocolates! It's as if the gastronomic excess of the season is summed up in those little brown squares.

Chocolate is made from the processed seeds of the Theobroma cacao tree and has been cultivated for more than a millennium in central America and Mexico; the ancient Aztec people made a drink they called  xocolātl [ʃo'kolaː- translated as 'bitter water', if things had stayed that way chocolate would hardly be the 'food of the gods' we think of today. 

The colour palette for my next yarn has to be rich, tempting, melted chocolate brown - sweet, creamy, milk chocolate and bitter, high cocoa content, dark chocolate. I want to bring a little relief from the chocolate-brown, but don't worry it won't be too wholesome. My inspiration for the other colours is taken from candies and the pop of their colours. I found this picture of rainbow pinwheel cookies, on Pintrest, and couldn't resist sharing it here - it seems to sum up the essence of sugar-candy, all those overly bright pinks, blues, and the sprinkles around the outside edge? Do you have toothache yet? The longing for salt?  I have some ideas of how I'll incorporate tasty little snippets of colour amongst the dark, seductive, whole.

I'd already done some work on an illustration to go with this installment and here it is, well a part of it -  though it is mostly finished I decided, after some thought and discussion, to leave it as is and begin anew. The image I'd come up with, whilst fine for gluttony in general weren't quite what I was going for...and the background was too busy....and the colours weren't quite right either!

A portion of the original artwork I was doing for this post.

The yarn for this part of the SDY (Seven Deadly Yarns) has to be big and fat, chunky. I'm thinking of making a yarn with more plies (strands that are twisted together to form the finished yarn) than I'd usually go with but will have to test it to see how that goes - read that adding more plies can actually compact the yarn, rather than add to the overall bulk but that's what spinning samples is for! I've chosen my main colours and the accents as well - as last time the primary fibre that I'll be using is merino, it's good and soft and readily avaiable in a whole chocolate-box full of colours. For the accents I have hand-dyed (though not by me this time around) Wensleydale locks - that's the curly fleece of a type of sheep, not a cheese! I have a few other ideas as well but will have to see how those play out too. The photo below shows a colour-sample of the merino, posing alongside a rather tasteful (and tasty) looking bar of chocolate that came of this morning's 'research' trip.... ahem.