This Is the Ply That Never Ends

I really wanted to have my purple Rambouillet sweater spin all done to share with you today, and let me tell you that it took a lot of plying time yesterday to get it done -- I was washing skeins just before bed! But I did indeed finish, and in fact the yarn is still a little damp, so please forgive me for not having it all twisted up in a neat and tidy way.

I had a heck of time getting the color to photograph accurately; in real life, it's actually a bit darker and not quite as blue as it's showing up here. But I am not an expert on photo editing, and it's been rainy and overcast all day here, so this is the best I could do.

I'd originally thought I'd be able to get two plied skeins out of my three bobbins of singles, but obviously I had to go to three because I could not cram all the yarn onto two bobbins. And if you can believe it, there are still singles leftover! I tried to splice some in but ended up with a big tangle, and as it was so late in the evening, I decided to cut my losses and call it done for the night (I ended up throwing the extra singles that were still on bobbins onto my leftovers bobbin, so someday they'll end up in a mashup skein). When I spin for a specific project, which I so rarely do, I'm always worried that I'll end up short on yarn, but these singles never seemed to run out!

The sweater I'm planning to knit with this yarn is Tiny Dancer (Ravelry link), and for the size I'd make, I need 735 yards of the main color, which seemed very doable for this particular spin. Turns out that I'd needn't have worried -- I ended up with approximately 1,216 yards, and that's a conservative estimate! So I won't need to worry about playing yarn chicken and will very likely have a good amount of yarn leftover to use for something else. As a reminder, here the yarn I plan to pair with the purple for the mosaic colorwork:

The skein on top was also from the Southern Cross Fibre club, though the fiber base was a mystery.

After all that fine spinning (and ALL that plying!), I am ready for something quick and satisfying, and I think I found just the thing. Rainbow wants to knit herself a cowl as soon as she's finished with the one she's working on for a former teacher, so I offered to spin her some yarn. I pulled this rainbow in fiber form out of the stash I inherited from a friend and she gave it an immediate thumbs up.

This is superwash merino from Twisted Fiber Art, in a colorway that I believe is called Totally. I've split it for a fractal two-ply spin, meaning I split the fiber in half lengthwise and then split one of the halves in half again the same way. This will create a lot of barberpoling as well as some spots where the colors in both plies line up. I'm also trying to spin a little thicker/heavier than usual, which means it'll go a lot faster, too. With any luck, you'll see it here in yarn form very soon!