Hand-Dyed Fibers - Blue Faced Leicester (BFL) Top
These tops are commercially processed and the staple is generally a very nice 5 to 6 inches long. They are each 4 ounces.
The methods used to dye them is either hand-painted/space-dyed or kettle dyed. With the the space-dyed format, you can easily create yarns that are either random or self-striping. Each is approximately four ounces.
The kettle dyed tops are one of a kind, they are not reliably reproducible....when they go...they are gone. Also, the pictures of the tops are representative of the colors in the pot. Each one is a little bit different from the other simply based on where it was in the pot - some may be lighter and some may be darker... Kettle-dyed tops will spin up into a monochrome yarn with nice highlights and lowlights. An example is on my blog.