Lazy thing

I knew that sloth had to be grey; like one of those grey days so well summed up by poet Thomas Hood in his famous work written in 1844:

No sun - no moon!

No morn - no noon -

No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day.

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease.

No comfortable feel in any member -

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees.

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds -

November!

The kind of day that hardly makes you want to leap out of bed but that does inspire you to pull the covers higher, if just for a little longer....so you thought, anyway. With that thought in mind I went looking for inspiration and turned up this picture, on Pintrest, of this yawning woman--sheets all slovenly crumpled up around her--and knew that I'd hit the nail on the head, as it were, in terms of content and colour palette.

Much like the Gluttony yarn, I know I want the finished Sloth to be big and fat and puffy, soft. That, for me, is a challenge in itself; my 'default' yarn gauge i.e.  the one that happens when I'm not consciously thinking about--and trying to make something other than--is more on the medium line. Whilst I did get someway towards it with the chocolatey Gluttony piece I wanted this one to be more so. Having done a bit of research  (in the form of YouTube video searching) it came out that a good fibre choice would be that of the Corriedale sheep - not too scratchy and with a decent amount of crimp that helps with the construction of big, bulky, yarn. Fibre bought I set to work!

Skein of yarn - 2 ply and quite bulky. 

The spinning didn't go too badly at all, I had much more luck with pre-drafting the top first, for some reason, though it's a bit uneven in places. I decided not to worry too much about that, after all this is Sloth we're talking about.  As can be seen in the picture to the left, the natural colour of the fibre is an off-white, creamy, one and I wanted grey so time to dye. My original thought was for a slightly variagated yarn so immersion dyeing the whole lot wasn't going to work. I borrowed an idea from a book on dyeing I got for the holidays - part of the skein is held out of the water for a time, so that the yarn has a different saturation in different places.

The rest of the dyeing process will have to wait for another day, as at the moment I'm without a heat-source (and the weather's certainly not sunny enough to give solar-dyeing a try). So far I'm pleased with how it's turning out - the yarn really did 'bloom' when it dried.

Now here's a thought - the other thing that came to mind right away when I thought of sloth was the animal. Were they so named because they were lazy, or was the condition of being slothful so called because it was reminiscent of the animal? The Latin and Greek names for the animal both mean 'leaf eater' whilst tribes in Ecuador give them names meaning 'sleep', 'eat' and 'dirty'. The last seems especially fitting as--according to the ever helpful Wikipedia--a single sloth can be a home to moths, beetles, cockroaches, fungi and algae! Easy to see why they don't appear in shampoo adverts!

Brown-throated-three-toed-sloth in Costa Rica.