Getting Closer to a Sweater

I know many of you are anxious to see me start knitting my handspun Shifty -- I'm pretty anxious to start it myself! But after all the work I did spinning the yarn, I'm not about to take any shortcuts, which means that some serious swatching has to come first. And before I could get to that point, I needed to get my yarn from twisted hank to "cake" form, so that is how I spent some of my afternoon. All six skeins are now wound and ready to go.

I'm also determined to get one more skein of handspun done by the end of the month, and as I haven't crossed any skeins off my Southern Cross Fibre club backlog list for a while (only two of the six sweater skeins were from before this year), I thought I'd spin not one but two bags of fiber. I had received a second bag of August 2018's shipment, Yesterday's Love on New Zealand Merino, and I thought it would be perfect for spinning an alternating chain-ply yarn. I'm spinning each bag of fiber onto its own bobbin first and am maybe between halfway and two-thirds of the way done with the first bobbin.

I'm sure most of you are mystified by what I mean by an alternating chain-ply, even those of you who spin! The truth is that I don't even know if that's the actual name for it or even if the method has a name. What I mean by it is that I'm going to create a faux four-ply yarn. I will have two bobbins of singles and start out as if I were chain-plying (essentially creating a long crochet chain and twisting it), but instead of just the one single, I'll be holding the other single alongside the loop. On top of that, when it's time to form a new loop, I'll alternate which bobbin I pull from. I am spinning the fiber from one end of the top to the other, and I checked to make sure that the colors did not line up in the two batches of fiber I have, so the colors -- pink, red, and deep purple -- should end up pretty well distributed. I am thinking that I will get something like a sport- or DK-weight yarn when all it's plied, though seeing as it's Merino, it could poof up in the finishing. I am not spinning this for a particular project, though, so however it ends up is fine by me. Here's hoping I can finish it in time -- it should give me a lot of meters for Stash Dash!