Thin Is In

I know that my default yarn when I spin is on the thin side, but lately it's been getting ridiculous. On Friday night, I finally finished up the second bobbin of my Bee Mice Elf BFL/silk singles. Granted, I was going for a two-ply laceweight, so I knew that it would take some time, but there were some moments in the middle there when I thought I'd never finish. But finish I did:

I can't quite bring myself to think about plying just yet, because I know it's going to take almost as long to ply as it did to spin a bobbin of singles. That's not happening just yet because I started another project on the miniSpinner as soon as this fiber was done:

It doesn't look like much, but that's about 20 or so minutes of fine spinning. This is the Fat Cat Knits fiber club shipment that I showed you last week. The singles look to be about the same diameter of the BME stuff, so I imagine this will take a while to finish as well (though I'm guessing the miniSpinner will help move things along just a bit faster). I'm excited for this spin and for the fun, stripe-y yarn it will be. I'm also a little anxious to get these two projects done because I have things in line to get spun next.

Yesterday I received a shipment from Fat Cat Knits from an order I made a couple of weeks ago (normally Ginny is much faster than that, but she was waiting on some fiber from a supplier and the USPS slowed things down at the end). Every two months or so, Ginny runs a poll in the FCK group on Ravelry in which she shows about nine colorways and everyone gets a couple of days to vote on which one will be the next featured colorway. The winner is then offered on several fiber bases with a special discount. The most recent winner (for August/September) made up half of my order. This is Wayfarer on superwash merino:

I thought this would be a nice color to spin into a slightly heavier yarn than my normal (like sport to DK) to use for a hat and/or mittens for Rainbow for this winter.

Because I was ordering anyway, I decided to throw another braid in my cart. It might look familiar:

If you're thinking that I already spun this one, you'd be right. This is Boogaloo (on superwash merino/nylon); I spun an earlier braid of it for the Tour de Fleece this year, but the way I split up the fiber didn't really maximize the brightness of the neon colors. This time around, I'm going to split the top lengthwise, spin all my singles, and chain ply to get stripes. I will get some very loud socks of the resulting yarn, but sometimes you need loud socks.