It Might Be My Favorite

I love most of the yarns I've spun over the years. There are some exceptions, like the surprise fibers from a fiber club years ago that I never would have picked myself, but most of the time, when I pick out fiber that I've bought, I spin it the way I want and I'm happy when it's done.

Last week, I waxed poetic about how much I loved the Southern Cross Fibre club shipment I'd just finished and how the colors were so perfectly to my taste. I also mentioned how much excess twist was in the yarn even after finishing, and I was right that after the skein was dry, it needed a run back through the wheel to relax a bit. That took very little time, thanks to my miniSpinner, and while there's still a bit more plying twist than spinning twist in the skein, it's just about perfect -- and I am absolutely smitten.

I gained very little yardage in removing the excess twist (only about two additional yards), for a total of approximately 316, so I will still have shorter socks, but really that's not much to complain about. I love this yarn so much that I would settle for ankle socks if that's all I could manage. And I really loved spinning the fiber -- so much so that when David of SCF offered up a fantastic deal on 550 g lots of several fibers, including Charollais, I jumped at it. Despite my efforts to spin down my stash, I just couldn't resist what could be a sweater quantity of fantastic fiber for the price of about two club shipments, shipping included.

Meanwhile, as I have more SCF fiber now heading my way, I figured I'd better start spinning more of what I already have, so I started working on the most recent club shipment (November 2016), Corriedale in a colorway called Space.

There's a lot of dark colors in this, with a few pops of lighter gray and blue, so I decided to spin another skein of my "pseudo-self-striping" sock yarn. I'm about a third of the way into spinning the singles at this point, and it's a pretty effortless, mindless spin.

I worked on this quite a bit yesterday afternoon, when it got incredibly dark and then rained pretty heavily, and I was thankful that my fingers can spin this singles without my eyes having to get all that involved, because dark fiber in a dark room is not a good combination. This skein might be going up in the shop when it's done, because as much as I like the colors, I'm fairly certain I already have a couple of pairs of socks in very similar color combinations.