Brown yarn

Last winter I sent off two batches of wool, 50# of light brown and 50 # of dark brown, to be spun into a variegated yarn, one ply of light and one ply of dark. In my head, it was a beautiful yarn.
When four big boxes arrived at my door ten months later I was disappointed. I opened the first box. The yarn wasn’t variegated. Even worse, it wasn’t very brown. The light wool with sun browned tips and the dark chocolate brown fibers had somehow blended to yield a yarn very similar to my silver gray yarn, with just a hint of milky brown, a little like a good cup of chai. I was so disappointed that I didn’t open any more boxes.
When I finally opened the last two boxes a month and a half later, I realized that my imagination hadn’t been playing tricks on me. The last two boxes held a dark brown yarn. The spinnery hadn’t understood my directions. I now had 120 skeins of chai colored yarn and 120 skeins of dark brown yarn, but not the variegated light and dark brown yarn I had imagined.
Fortunately, I don’t have to depend on a spinnery. I pulled a ball of warm brown alpaca roving and a ball of crimpy dark gray wool roving from my stash and began to spin. Sometimes you just have to do things yourself.