On the Silk Road

Earlier in the week, I finished plying the skein of yarn I'd been spinning for the past couple of weeks. It took me two evenings to ply, and not full evenings at that, so you can imagine my surprise when I was winding off the plied yarn and realized that I had a ton of yardage -- 525 yards, to be exact.

This started as Corriedale pencil roving in Silk Road from the now-defunct Crown Mountain Farms, one of my favorite dyers. I'm not exactly sure what inspired me to buy this colorway, as it's not really my colors, but it was an effortless spin -- and I still have half of the original fiber. This skein will be going into the sale bin; I'm not sure if I've mentioned it on the blog, but I'll be vending again at Indie Knit and Spin this year. I'll just be selling handspun this year, so I'm trying to increase my inventory of sock yarn. The next skein is already more than halfway done:

This is superwash BFL from Spunky Electic in a Lame Duck Mallard. It's also a deep stash spin. Wanna know how old this fiber is? I won it as a door prize at a spin-in during the 2009 Tour de Fleece, when I was pregnant with Rainbow. That's some old fiber! Luckily it still spins beautifully. The fiber is actually a little slippery, to the point that it actually feels like there's some silk content in it. I'm already more than halfway done with the singles, so I expect you'll see this in skein form by next weekend.

Some more fiber for the stash arrived unexpectedly this week:

This was a prize pack from David of Southern Cross Fibre for my Tour de Fleece participation. It's a little wool sampler (110 g of fiber), and other than the general fiber content, I have no idea what each little bundle is (though the one in the bottom right looks familiar). I might end up spinning these up as mini skeins, which would be a fun spinning refresher between larger skeins.