Yarn of Happiness

Sometimes you need something bright and cheerful to bring up your spirits. Winter is always tough for me because of the darkness and the lack of color, so it seemed like a no-brainer to choose the brightest yarn in my stash to spin. This certainly fit the bill -- FatCatKnits Targhee in a neon colorway called Juicy Fruit.

I spun the fiber from one end to the other to preserve the colors, then chain plied. I anticipated that the Targhee would poof when I washed it, so I spun the singles very fine and didn't overply. The finished skein did indeed puff up quite a bit and is quite balanced. After washing, the skein is roughly 421 yards, a very respectable amount. But when you consider that the prefinishing length was about 550 yards, you can really get a sense of how much this fiber shrinks up!

Unfortunately, while I have enough yardage for the shawl I'm planning, I think the light parts of this skein are too close to the cream Corriedale, and I really need a strong contrast for what I have in mind. So I've started spinning up the HipStrings fiber I showed you last week into another three-ply fingering weight.

It's hard to capture just gorgeous this is spinning up. There's a ton of sparkle in it as well as silk, and it's so easy to draft that it's practically spinning itself. I am really tempted to spend all my free time spinning, but there are knitting projects that need to be done first.

There's some more fiber in the spinning queue, thanks to the arrival of my final FatCatKnits club shipment (Ginny is taking a break from the club for a while). This shipment is a really interesting fiber blend -- Polwarth and bleached flax. And I love the colors!

I'm not really sure how to spin this, as I've never spun flax before, but I'm sure it'll be an adventure.

Speaking of good mail, look what else finally showed up this week:

I had subscribed to Ply back in the fall, but it appears that my first issue got lost in the mail. They were nice enough to send me a replacement issue, though, and now I'm going to have a lot of fun digging in to this.