Anne Nester sent a tantilizing spread of yarns from a variety of places.

She wasn't sure that they would be "interestingly different" at the micro level. They ranged in thickness from the wide purple #9 to the thin-as-floss #1.

I took close-up photos and eyeclops shots below, from strand 1 to 12.

The first were two snips from the same batch of hand-spun yarn.

She believed this was single-ply, a blend of sheepswool and dog hair, and was spun with a drop-spindle. One sample has a colored stripe.

Closeup of #1.

Same structure, solid color.

Closeup. The fibers seem less twisted, and this part is a little wider than the striped version.

The second sample was wool directly from a Jacob's sheep, shorn at her friend's farm in southern Pennsylvania in early March. She advised me that it may still have enough lanolin in it to leave a grease spot on the paper, but I didn't detect one.

Raw wool fibers under the view of the Eyeclops.

Sample #3 was an orange three-ply acrylic commercial yarn.

Closeup.

Sample #4 was a commercially-spun green 50-50 blend of wool and kid mohair.

Closeup.

Sample five was something I hadn't seen before, a purple, feathery "eyelash" acrulic yarn with shiny silvery fibers.

A closeup revealed that the silver fibers were translucent, almost like kelp.

Another shot of the eyelash yarn.

The sixth sample was a pale blue rayon yarn, made by a small fiber-arts place in North Carolina.

This yarn was super shiny and beautiful at high magnification.

Another closeup of the blue rayon.

Sample seven was a blue acrylic fuzzy "chenille" yarn, commercially spun.

This chenille looked soft, even at high magnification. usually fluffy stuff is hard to get in focus, but this thread had a very uniform pile length, so I could get a big patch all in focus at the same time. Under magnification it looked like a four-foot deep shag carpet.

Sample eight was a purple wool yarn with other fibers (from Noro, a japanese company that makes crazy yarns with lush colors and interesting mixes of fibers).

This was tough to photograph under magnification, but it was obvious that this yarn had a lot of colors going on in there.

Sample nine was a single-ply 65-15 wool-mohair blend, commercially spun (Lamb's Pride Bulky, big operation). This yarn was about as big as the cord to my printer.

A terrible photo, just not in focus.

Sample ten was a red and yellow, two-ply, handspun with a drop spindle.

A closeup of where red meets orange. I realize the colors are different in this picture. The eyeclops sometimes skews the colors of things a bit.

Sample Eleven was two-ply alpaca, commercially spun at Frog Tree Yarn, Bolivia.

Closeup of alpaca.

And finaly, sample twelve, a red 70-30 wool-mohair blend, dyed adn spun by Green Mountain Spinnery in Vermont (small operation).

A closeup.

That's it! Here again is the 8.5x11 sheet of paper she taped these to, in case you lost track of how large these yarns are.

The Eyeclops is a champ at textiles. Thanks Anne, for sending so many samples, and for providing such a nice description of them all.

Send me items, and I'll use the Eyeclops to look VERY closely at them, and I'll post a photo here, on Cockeyed.com.

Detailed things:
Rob Cockerham
P.O. Box 161574
Sacramento, CA 95816

I won't return anything I get, so please don't send your favorite Tiki charms or Scrabble tiles.