Overcompensated

I'm happy to report that I am upright and feeling mostly okay this morning! My arm is a little sore, and my joints are a little achy (and between that and the Mister's snoring, I did not sleep all that well last night), but a little Tylenol and a couple cups of coffee have done a word of good. It's still quite chilly here, but the sun is out and it looks like I'll be feeling well enough to go for a walk later.

And on top of that good news, I managed to finish my skein of Polwarth/silk! It took me all day to ply it on Friday (not all at once, of course -- that's several sessions of sitting down at my wheel over the course of the day) and probably more than 20 minutes to skein it yesterday. Here is what it looked like fresh off the wheel, before wet finishing:

It was fairly well balanced when I took it off my Super Skeiner, and that's the result of being very conscious of not putting in too much twist when plying. For one thing, when Polwarth does poof up when it's washed, a side effect is that the ply often tightens on its own. And while I may not know very much about weaving, I do know that yarn meant to be woven does not need to be as tightly plied as it does for knitting. Here is a closeup shot so you can get a sense of the looser ply:

Under normal circumstances, I'd call this underplied, but I knew that if it didn't tighten up enough in the finishing process, I could always add more twist by running it back through the wheel. I was also making a conscious effort to spin my singles fine, with the hope that after it was plied and washed the yarn would be fingering. But it appears I may have overcompensated just a bit:

Notice how you can barely make out the strand of yarn running over the dime in the center of the skein? Yep, my yarn is closer to laceweight than fingering, and there's more than 680 yards of it in this skein!

The skein did shrink up quite a bit in the finishing (it went from 72 inches around to 56 inches), and the ply did tighten up, but it still has good drape, and I am really pleased -- and I hope Rainbow is soon. The challenge now will be to spin the muted Polwarth fiber I shared last week at roughly the same grist so that they can be woven together, and I am eager enough to see how they look that I don't think it'll take me too much time to spin up the second skein. It may even get started today, provided I'm feeling up to it!