These two samples were scanned on the same scanner bed, in the same scan. I cropped each in order to show the 2 side by side. (The whole picture would have been huge at this resolution, 600 dpi, necessary in order to show halo.

On the left is a yarn that I hand spun of 20% angora, 80% merino. The Angora was what I call “excellent” and was made of 1½” to 2½” angora fibers. The merino was about a 3” staple. ON the right is the IAGARB yarn of 85% prime angora(3+” with less than 10% shorter), and 15% merino. As you can see, the mill spins much more evenly than I do!

Each of the yarns were washed and put into a skein. (The IAGARB yarn was washed multiple times and hauled around to fiber shows. The handspun was washed only once, but hauled around just as much.) The crop came from the middle of each skein, not the end where you would expect internal tension on each strand to enhance the amount of yarn sticking out. Each was enhanced by one and only one click of the “brighten” tool in Word, nothing else was done except cropping and one brighten each.

This is to illustrate my point that you will get more halo with non-prime fibers. Both of these yarns were banged against a navy blue towel in order to maximize the halo showing, and neither sheds significantly. If you download this document, including pictures, perhaps you can open them in windows’ media view and enlarge them even more in order to better see what I am talking about. Also note, that there is less guard hair on the 20%. You would expect more guard hair to produce more halo. So even though the sample on the left has much much less angora in it, and the angora has less guard hair, it still has comparable, or maybe even more halo than the one on the right ,with 85% angora and almost all prime.

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