Plying on a Deadline

After more than two months of spinning singles, I finally made it to the plying stage on my Gradient-along Polwarth. Plying takes less time than spinning singles, but it still takes time. I had the day off from work on Friday and spent probably three hours at the wheel in total. I spent about another hour at it yesterday and about half an hour today, and I'm only about halfway done.

You can see that I'm just getting into the more red purple that was the final color on the first braid, so I'm just past the halfway point. I'm going to spend a bit more time plying once I post this, and my hope is that if I can manage a few more hours this week, I'll be able to finish and wash the skein before Rainbow and I head to Florida for a little spring break trip on Sunday (assuming I get enough yardage for the intended project, the yarn will be coming with us).

I'm anxious to get this project done not only because I want to start knitting but because the backlog of fiber coming in is getting to be a bit ridiculous. I still have two shipments of the last round of the FatCatKnits club unspun (with the next round starting up this week), and my Southern Cross Fibre shipments have been arriving every month. February's shipment showed up this past week:

The colorway I received is called Closer to Home, and it's on oatmeal BFL. It smelled nice and sheepy when I pulled it out of the bag. This is really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my SCF stash, too. Since Rainbow and I did the big stash reorganization several weeks ago, I've filled an entire shelf of the built-in unit in the closet just with SCF fiber. I've really got to get spinning!