FO Friday, Handspun Edition

Today I'm following my annual tradition of taking one of my personal days off from work before it goes poof (we get two a year that have to be used by the end of the fiscal year -- June 30 -- or they're gone), and Rainbow and I have big plans. We're going to the hair salon to get haircuts later today, my first since last May and hers since pre-pandemic times, and I'm trying to convince her to take a walk over to our local independent bookstore this morning to pick up her summer reading book for school. But for now I'm enjoying my coffee and letting her sleep in.

It's been a while since I had a finished project to share, and this one is of the yarn variety. Remember the bobbin of singles I shared on Monday? By the end of the day, they had all been plied, and on Tuesday I skeined up the finished yarn and gave it a soak. And now I have a finished skein!

This was spun as part of my ongoing project to spin up my backlog of Southern Cross Fibre club shipments. This fiber was the oldest shipment I had in my stash, from way back in December 2015. As I mentioned before, I was intimidated at the time by the fiber blend -- 80% merino/20% rose fiber -- and so didn't spin it at the time. I think David was ahead of his time in using a blend with a manufactured cellulose fiber; I remember bamboo and tencel being pretty common at the time, but this was the first I had ever seen rose as a source. I'm not sure I realized then that rose fiber would be very similar to these other "vegan silks" and would spin up very similarly; once I started in on it, I felt silly for being so scared of messing it up. This blend was delightful to spin, and the only difficulty with it, if you can even call it that, was its tendency to want to be spun very fine -- something I wanted to do anyway!

Yarn spun from fine, crimpy wools like merino often fluff up when they're washed, but this really didn't, so the finished yarn is a light fingering weight. I spun the fiber end to end without splitting it and chain-plied it to maintain the colors. As you can tell, it's very shiny from the rose fiber, but what the photos can't convey is just how much drape there is to to this yarn. I didn't have any specific plans for this skein when I was spinning it other than to just convert it from fiber to yarn, but now I am thinking it would make an excellent light summery tee, though I'd need to be combine it with something else because there's "only" about 580 yards in this skein -- quite a lot for one skein of yarn, but not enough to cover my torso!

The moral of this story is not to be afraid to try something new just because it's new or unfamiliar -- you might wind up with something you love!