First Skein of the New Year

My vacation is wrapping up (tomorrow is officially the last day), so it's back to paying attention to what day it is. Fortunately I was happy to learn that it was Sunday because I have a new skein of yarn that is finished and ready to share! You may recall that a week ago I was trying to finish up my HipStrings Base 12 spin. I was hoping to finish all the spinning and plying before the end of 2020, but in the end I settled for just finishing the singles. On New Year's Day, I sat down at my wheel and plied the whole thing, which just fit on my bobbin. Yesterday I skeined it up and washed it, and it sat on the radiator overnight to dry. And now it's officially finished:

January in Pittsburgh is not an ideal time to try to photograph much of anything -- even after editing to brighten these photos, they're still not capturing the shine of all the silk or the depth of color.

I had planned to chain-ply this yarn, and when I was spinning the singles, I thought I was spinning for fingering weight, more or less. I figured I'd end up with yarn that was a bit thick and thin because some of the fiber was a lot more textured, shall we say, than other bits. There was a mix of batts and combed top, and some bags contained a lot of things like sari silk and silk noil, which are very difficult to draft perfectly evenly. I knew that wool was a decent component of each bit, but what I didn't realize (until I opened the envelope containing the fiber key at the very end) was that most of that wool was merino or superfine merino. So the yarn poofed up quite a bit when I washed it, and it's now in the DK to worsted territory.

I am actually rather pleasantly surprised at how even the finished yarn looks in spite of all the differences in fiber content from bag to bag. When I planned spin fingering weight, I figured I'd use the finished skein for a Hitchhiker, but now I'm not so sure (I know I could knit one on larger needles, but at only 327 yards in this skein, I'm not likely to get a very big shawl out of it).

For the curious, here is the card with all the information on the fiber content:

This is almost exactly the order in which I spun the fiber (I did 1-10 and then A and B). When I said there was a lot of silk, I wasn't exaggerating!

This was a fun spin and a good exercise in letting go of a bit of control in spinning, but I'm ready for what's next. I'm not sure yet exactly what that will be, but I can tell you that it will likely have less (or no) silk content.