The End of the Affair

I'll admit it -- I was cheating on my spinning project. Yes, I was having an affair with other fiber, even though I was meant to be spinning for the Gradient-along, which I'm hosting. But it's all over now, and the last skein has been plied.

You will recall that I had a braid of Falkland from FatCatKnits that was a Day's End braid -- meaning, presumably, that Ginny used whatever dye she had left at the end of the day to create a one-of-a-kind colorway. My braid was a mix of purples, blues, and neon greens. I divided up the fiber into most light and mostly dark bits, then divided each pile into thirds by weight. You've seen the resulting skein from the light bits, but here is the finished dark skein:

This skein is smaller, at 47 g and roughly 165 yards, but it did come out fairly consistent with the first skein. As with the first one, when the singles ran out on the first bobbin, I wound off from one of the remaining bobbins so I could ply from both ends of the resulting center-pull ball, and when that ran out, I did a bit of chain plying with was was left on the final bobbin. So for this whole spinning project, I think I only had a few inches of singles left when all was said and done. I really like it when I'm able to use up as much as possible, so that made me very happy.

With the two skeins combined, I've got just a smidge less than 425 yards, so this definitely falls into the light fingering category. I'm hoping to find a colorwork project that will use both skeins. If you've got a recommendation, I'm all ears!

Now that my cheating is done, I've returned to my Bee Mice Elf Polwarth, and after giving it a few hours of attention this afternoon, I'm getting very close to finishing up the first braid (the first half) of the fiber. Here's what it looked like when I sat down to start spinning this afternoon; I was just starting the transition from the pink over to the purple.

I'm now solidly into the dark purple, and if I can get in a bit more time tomorrow (when I luckily have another day off with Rainbow), I should be able to at least start the transition to the second braid. I'll be going from dark purple to dark purple, but the purple in this braid is more of a red purple whereas the purple in the second braid is more of a blue purple, so I'm planning to fluff out the ends and blend them together with the hope of being able to draft a bit of each color for a while to smooth the transition.

While I'm not giving myself a hard deadline for finishing the yarn, it would be really wonderful if I could finish the singles, at least, by the end of the month and then ply before the middle of March. We just made plans to go away for a week in late March when Rainbow is on spring break, and it would be lovely if I could take the finished yarn with me to start the knitting portion of the project. In any case, I am self-imposing a spinning restriction: I am not allowed to spin anything else until this project is done. I'm hoping the prospect of spinning something else will be good enough motivation to hold me to that.