The Return of Spinning Sunday

It's been a long time since I last published a Spinning Sunday post. Do you remember when they were a weekly thing? I've obviously been in some kind of funk with my spinning, because this skein took me a good three months to spin; in the past, I've spun an entire sweater's quantity of yarn in less time than that. I'm not sure what caused it, but I'm trying not to analyze it too much and instead focus on going forward.

This finished skein started with three bags of fiber from the Ross Farm, two faun-colored CVM and one chocolate brown Romney. I weighed all the fiber beforehand and had 114 g of the CVM and 50 g of the Romney (a total of 164 g or about 5.78 oz.), so I knew that if I spun a ply from each back of fiber, the Romney was going to run out before the CVM did and, if I wanted to use up all the singles or as much as I could, I'd have a section of the skein that was CVM only, though the majority of it would be a slightly marled three-ply yarn. If you look closely at the finished yarn, you can see a definite difference in texture, which I attribute to the slightly different characteristics of the two wool breeds -- the CVM having more crimp than the Romney and thus making the yarn that contains both breeds a little bumpy and textured after washing.

All the fiber was roving, meaning it was carded and all the fibers were jumbled, so the surface of the finished yarn is much more uneven than what you might be used to seeing from me. I think part of the reason the spinning took as long as it did is because I was stopping so frequently to pull out VM (the fiber was minimally processed) and neps.

I'd spun this yarn with the intention of using it as the contrast color in the matching Garland and Little Garland (Ravelry links) sweaters I want to knit for me and Rainbow later this year. It's definitely the fingering weight I need, though certainly a bit more thick and thin than the main yarn, and I have more than enough yardage, at approximately 545 yards in this skein. I think it goes really well with the combo spin yarn that will be the main color, too:

I'm determined to keep the spinning going at a more reasonable pace now, and to that end, I started my next project yesterday. This is the oldest Southern Cross Fibre club shipment in my stash, from December 2015, and as predicted, it wants to be spun as very fine singles:

For those of you outside the U.S., that's a dime/10 cent coin, approximately 1.7 cm in diameter.

 

It turns out that rose fiber has a very similar feel to bamboo, tencel, and other faux silks I've spun over the years. It's a bit slippery, but it's nothing I can't handle. I am spinning the fiber from one end to the other and will chain-ply the singles in the end for what I imagine will be a yarn with tons of shine and drape.