Poof! There It Is

I promised a Polwarth Poof in this post, and I hope I will not disappoint! I plied the entire skein over several spinning sessions last Thursday and then skeined and washed the yarn on Friday. By yesterday morning, after resting on the radiator overnight (one good thing about the winter cold), it was dry and nicely poofed.

I was very pleased with how the colors stayed together -- my primary reason for chain-plying the yarn. I don't think my photos do the colors justice, to be honest. They're quite saturated and dimensional, but capturing them accurately with my camera is difficult. Perhaps if I was a better photographer, I'd do a better job of conveying just how talented David of Southern Cross Fibre is with his dyeing talents. (Really click on that link to see. His photography is much better than mine.)

The only thing about this yarn that I'm not as pleased with is the yardage. I knew the skein would shrink when it was washed -- we all know that when things get wider, they also get shorter, so the poofing up in the thickness of the yarn would mean a corresponding shortening of the length. While I succeeded in getting a yarn that's fingering weight after washing, it shrank up from about 72 inches around to closer to about 56 inches. That is quite a difference! So my finished skein is only about 280 yards for 110 g (just a smidge less than 4 oz.), when the normal yardage for that amount of fingering weight would typically be in the neighborhood of 350-400 yards. Handspun is often denser than commercial yarn, particularly worsted-spun handspun, so I'm not entirely surprised, but I was hoping for more than 300 yards.

Here's the side by side so you can get a sense of how the yarn poofs up in the finishing. On the left in the above photo is the yarn before it was washed. You can see that it looks a little limp and has some active twist in it (that's why the yarn looks kind of wavy). On the right is after washing. I know it's not terribly dramatic; that's mainly because the plying was pretty tight. But you can see that the yarn is noticeably plumper and even the angle of the ply twist looks a bit steeper. While in my experience all handspun yarns do benefit from a wash after plying (and several snaps of the skein to even out the twist), they don't all change this much. The shrinkage in this skein means that it's very elastic and bouncy, and of course it's extremely squishy if you give it a squeeze. I didn't have anything in mind for this skein, so now I'm just admiring it while I decide what to spin next!