Feeling Very Hopeful

I told you I'd have another finished skein of handspun this weekend, and I'm here to deliver on that promise! I actually finished it on Thursday, but I didn't skein and wash it until yesterday -- the weather very helpfully got quite hot this weekend so that I could leave it to dry outside. I was a bit concerned that I wasn't going to end up with very much yardage with this skein because it seemed like it got spun and plied fairly quickly, but I really shouldn't have worried!

As a reminder, the fiber was organic superfine (18 micron) merino wool from Southern Cross Fibre in the colorway A New Hope; it was the November 2018 club shipment. I got kind of fussy splitting up all the shades of blue into lighter and darker segments, which made everything more complicated, unnecessarily so, from the looks of it. The light, dark, and medium shades are all pretty well distributed, and I probably could have gotten the same effect from just splitting the length of top in thirds widthwise. That's certainly what I'm going to do with the next skein (but more on that in a minute).

The finished yarn is solidly fingering and used up pretty much every last bit of singles (I ended up chain-plying the last yard or two). I was amazed that my final yardage estimate after it had dried was in excess of 430 yards! I hope I can continue to match that with the rest of the skeins I spin for this project. According to the yarn estimates given here, I'm going to need nearly 1,700 yards of yarn for my size, so if I average about 400 yards per skein, I'll need at least five -- though given my propensity to worry about playing yarn chicken, I'll will probably spin six just to make sure I have enough.

While I haven't started spinning just yet, I did get out the next back of fiber for skein number three and am venturing into the blue/purple area of the color wheel:

This is First Star on South African superfine, last September's club offering. The sections that look like black are really a very saturated navy, and I have a feeling that the few sections of purple are going to end up being much less obviously purple as the colors blend from drafting. So I think this will be another skein that reads very blue. David hasn't yet posted spoiler photos of the fiber for this month's shipment, but with this inspiration photo, I think that it will fit very nicely into this project:

That would be skein number four, so I'll have to decide if I want to lean into the purple or perhaps turn toward blue/green for the last two skeins. Knowing me, I might just spin all the options and then decide later!