A Final Spin for the Tour

The Tour de Fleece (and, naturally, the Tour de France) wrapped up today, and thanks to several hours at my wheel yesterday, I finished one more skein of yarn for the year -- well, technically two, if you count the wee mini skein that came with it.

This skein used 11 of the mini batts that came in my giant bag 'o fluff from HipStrings. The tag that came in the bag said simply "TdF 2022 Bits n Bobs," so I have no idea of the content. Obviously there's wool, but what kind, I could not tell you. Similarly, I could identify bits of silk of different colors and some sparkle here and there, but really what I was spinning was a mystery. And I think that's what made it so fun. I picked out the more neutral batts from the bag -- four that were cream with some black silk and a hint of a pale pink, four that were a medium gray, and three that were a dark gray with tons of colorful add-ins -- and split them so that I spun them in that order onto three bobbins. Then I plied them together, and because the batts weren't all the same weight and I split some up, there were obviously some areas of overlap in the transitions. When the first bobbin ran out, I wound of the singles from the fullest remaining bobbin and made a plying bracelet; the mini skein is a two ply created from just those singles when the second bobbin ran out (there were more, but they got all tangled and I decided I didn't want to fight with them).

The finished yarn is roughly sport weight -- I couldn't make my singles as consistent as I do with combed top just due to the nature of the carded prep, so it's a bit thicker in some places and thinner in others -- and very nearly 440 yards. The skein was still a bit damp when I photographed it, but once I'm sure it's dry, I'll weigh it to get a sense of how much fiber I used. The mini skein is about 10 yards of heavy lace weight, and I'm just going to add it to a little baggie I have of small skeins like this that are really not enough to do anything with but are too cute to throw away.

Something I really love about this skein is how it reads as neutral colors from far away, but when you look closely, there are really a ton of bright colors in it. Spinning batts with a lot of textured elements is also a bit outside my comfort zone, so it's good for me to do to stretch my spinning skills. I still have about a dozen batts in the bag, so I'll be spinning more of them soon!

It wasn't my most productive Tour ever, but I very much enjoyed it, and really I think that's what counts. I plan to spin some more this week as well, because the organizers of the Ravelry event have announced that spinning will continue to coincide with the Tour de France Femmes. I didn't even know this event was happening until a couple of days ago, but I really could not have picked a better week to take a vacation!

What to Spin Next?

Since I finished my most recent skein of handspun, I've been pondering what should go on the wheel next. I do know that it will be something out of the Southern Cross Fibre club backlog bag, and I was thinking it would make sense to spin up something to go with the most recent skein so that I have enough yardage to make something. I thought I had another colorway that looked similar, but when I pulled it out, it wasn't as I remembered. It might still work, but it also might be awful. For the sake of matching the yarn, I want something that is a wool blended with something shiny, and I came up with two wool/silk options:

On the left is Mending Fences from November 2018. I remembered it being more blue and yellow/gold and less brown and green. On the right is Forest Gathering from May 2019. I will likely end up spinning both, but of the two, which do you think is a better match for the existing skein? (Of course, I ask this knowing full well that often the finished yarn ends up looking much different from the fiber, so I may not be able to know which is the winner until I spin them both and compare the skeins.)

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.

The State of the Spinning Stash, April 2022 Edition

This is a post I'd intended to write a week ago, but obvious it became impossible when I did not get home Sunday evening as planned. The timing is pretty irrelevant, though, which will become clear in a moment. The point of this post to mainly to take a look at how I've been doing in spinning down my fiber stash, specifically from my stash Southern Cross Fibre club shipments. You may remember that doing so was a goal of mine last year, and you might even remember that I took a photo of all my SCF fiber and was tracking which bags I'd spun during the year. That's what I'm doing again this year.

While I didn't spin all of my SCF stash last year, I did make a pretty good dent -- by my count, at least 18 bags of fiber. Some of that was in the stash when I posted that photo and some came into the stash over the course of the year. And of course that's continued to happen this year. Thought I've been making an effort not to go out and buy more yarn and fiber this year, I've continued my membership in the fiber club because it's a small pleasure I can give myself every month, and I think we can all use a little something to look forward to. So here's where things stand at the moment:

These are arranged, left to right and top to bottom, from oldest and newest. The oldest shipment is in the top left-hand corner and is from December 2015. The newest just came in March and is the February 2022 shipment. One more shipment is currently somewhere between Australia and the United States. These are all monthly club shipments with the exception of the two bags at the far right in the top row, which were prizes for spinalongs from years past.

There's a lot of fiber here -- approximately 2,310 g or 81.5 oz./5+ lbs. But the thing about collecting fiber from one dyer is that their color sense comes through even when they're creating new colorways, and I see a lot of groupings that would work for combo spins or even just combining skeins. Like look at this group in the red/purple/brown family:

Or these in the green/blue/purple range:

Or even these colorways that seem to have a lot of colors in common:

I am really excited about all the possibilities for blending and combining, and I'm eager to get back to my wheel. As I did last year, I've made a list of all the shipments in chronological order, and I'm going to be tracking what I spin throughout the rest of the year. I think I'd like to start with some of the older stash because it's been waiting its turn to get on the wheel for a long time -- in part because (at least in the case of the oldest shipment) I felt like I needed to be a better spinner to be worthy of the fiber. I am a better spinner now, I think, but I've also changed my attitude toward using the "good stuff" since then and believe that if we save things for someday, we'll never actually believe we're good enough for them.

I still have some neutral/undyed fiber to finish spinning, but expect to see some of this fiber on the wheel soon -- and be sure to hold me to account!

The State of the Spinning (and the Spinning Stash)

It's been quite a while since I published a Spinning Sunday post; since making the switch to thrice-weekly posts during the week, I've found I've needed the weekend to come up with more content, but seeing as this coming week will include a One Little Word update, I though I could sneak in a little spinning chatter today.

One of my goals from last year was to spin up a lot of my spinning stash, and I did do that. But I also haven't stopped my fiber club, which means there's always a bag of fiber coming in every month. That was part of the impetus for the big combo spin, and I expect that combining multiple colorways for a larger project is going to be more commonplace in my spinning practice. But before I embark on another big spinning project, I thought I should probably finish up the last one. I did finish up all of the main yarn for the matching mom-and-daughter sweaters, but I also wanted to spin for the contrast for the colorwork (as a reminder, the planned patterns are Garland and Little Garland -- both links go to Ravelry). It made sense to me, given how much color went into the combo spin, to spin up a contrast skein in an undyed, natural color. I have a bag of Ross Farm Florida Cracker roving somewhere in my stash that I'd planned to use but could not for the life of me find it, so instead I'm spinning up some smaller amounts from Ross Farm -- two 2 oz. bags of fawn-colored CVM and an almost 2 oz. bag of slightly darker brown Romney. The yarn will be marled but should be pretty subtle. I've started with one of the bags of CVM:

This fiber is true roving, and it's minimally processed, so there's still a fair bit of VM in it. I am pulling out larger nepps and clumps of stuff as I spin, but because it's roving and not combed top, the yarn is naturally going to have a little bit of texture to it, but I think that will only add to the charm.

As for the fiber stash, I just updated the last five months of the Southern Cross Fibre club shipments, all of which are beautiful. Here are the last four from 2021:

Clockwise from top left: Boo! on Comeback Wool, Coastline on Bond, Blazing Skies on Rambouillet, and Plumage on Shetland

The most recent shipment (for January) arrived late last week after the USPS lost track of it in the system. Fortunately, Australia Post was kind enough to send me an email letting me know it had been delivered.

This one is called Amethyst on South African Superfine Merino, so you can imagine how soft it feels. I am very excited about all of these shipments and the gorgeous colors, and I'm hoping knowing that they're all waiting to be spun is good motivation to finish up this last skein for the sweater project!
 

A Day of Rest and a Photo Dump

It's about 4 p.m. on Sunday and it's already looking dark out there -- queue the seasonal affective disorder now! Usually I don't mind getting the extra hour of sleep when we turn the clocks back to standard time, but I do very much mind how early it gets dark this time of year.

First, I am catching up on last weekend with the promised photo of Rainbow in her Halloween costume. On the left is the character she was supposed to be. I sewed the ears that we put on a headband to make her look more like a dog (I think that's what Isabelle is?). Those of you who sew for real will excuse my slapdash job -- Rainbow was happy, and that's all I cared about. We also spent nothing on that project, because we salvaged the fabric from a fleece scarf she'd been given at school and used a headband she already had. We did purchase the skirt and the sweatshirt, but she plans to wear both of them again.

Yesterday was a big day here. We were up bright and early (me because I was excited, Rainbow because she was anxious) and headed over to her school for their immunization clinic. They held it outside on the athletic field, and while she was waiting for other friends to get their shots, she was running around and chatting with friends. She acknowledged afterwards that it was not as bad as she was expecting, and she happily posed with Jabby:

As if that wasn't enough excitement for the day, I got my booster shot in the afternoon as well. I'd learned last week that there are some mental health conditions on the list of underlying conditions that qualify you for a booster, so I signed up for one at our local CVS (I'll just note, though, that I was never directly asked if I had an underlying condition, for what it's worth). I got another Pfizer shot to match my first two, and the Mister plans to get his booster next weekend (I dissuaded him from getting one at the same time so that if we reacted we wouldn't both be in bed).

When I got back from my appointment, Rainbow and the Mister were out buying a new winter coat and new sneakers -- the kid is has grown 2.5 inches since February and is now wearing a women's 5 1/2 shoe! -- so I had a quiet house to myself. I pulled out my library book and sat down at the wheel, and by last night, I had, finally, a second complete bobbin of singles for my combo spin:

There's just one bobbin of singles left to spin, and I'm really hoping I can get that done soon. I'm both excited to see how this all plies up and ready to move on to something new.

Today has been a day of resting for me and Rainbow. She's been feeling tired and achy from her shot, and I've reacted much like I did to my second dose -- achy joints and tiredness, plus some chills. Despite the extra hour of sleep, we were both not feeling great this morning, so I told her she could skip Hebrew and religious school this morning, and that was actually a good thing for me, too. The Mister was kind enough to change the sheets on the beds and do the grocery shopping so us girls could stay home and rest. Rainbow requested tacos for dinner, which are messy but easy to cook, and I hope we can all get into bed early and get a good night's rest.

I hope you've had some rest this weekend as well and that you have some people in your life who you can count on to take care of you when you're feeling under the weather!

Make Like a Tortoise

It feels a little silly to be putting together a spinning post after a week with very little spinning, but I've been missing my Sunday posts and at least have some photos to share, so Spinning Sunday is happening this week. I've added just a few little fiber bundles to my second bobbin of singles for my combo spin this week; although work wasn't too busy this week, I had a bunch of non-work administrative-type stuff to take care of, and my hands were busy typing much of the time. I am just about halfway through the fiber for this bobbin -- I have my next bundle ready to add and 10 more in the bag.

One of the fun things about this project is that although the bags of fiber I pulled for it are all green to some extent, I am noticing some pretty big differences in the fiber bases and how long it takes me to spin them. The Rambouillet, for instance, can last a good long time because the wool is so fine and springy, whereas the Corriedale goes pretty fast. I'm trying to be better about mixing up the colorways on this bobbin after finding multiple bundles from the same shipment all hanging out in the bottom of the first bag, so that means the bases will be well mixed, too. I'd hoped to have all the singles done by the end of the month, but given that there's only a week of it left, I'll settle for finishing up this bobbin.

In the meantime, my September Southern Cross shipment showed up the day before I left for Rhinebeck, and it looks like it'll be a real treat to spin:

David generally ships his club at the end of the month, which means that those of us outside Australia usually get it the following month. I think he planned for a Halloween-ish colorway for precisely that reason -- the colorway is even called Boo! The base this time is Comeback wool, which I was thrilled to see because it's been several years since he last used it for club. Comeback sheep are distinct to Australia, the result of breeding British long wool sheep and Merinos. The wool itself is soft but doesn't feel particularly delicate like a fine Merino would; there's a bit of yummy toothiness to it. I won't be spinning this fiber until I'm at least done with my combo spin, but I'm already contemplating how I might spin it. Do a random three ply? Pull the shades apart and try to spin it as a gradient? Do a two-ply fractal? The nice thing about waiting a bit to spin it is that other members of the club are likely to spin it first and I can see what they do with it.

It's been a very fall-like weekend here, with lots of gloom and some rain and that damp chill. Rainbow and I got a bit frozen yesterday afternoon at a Girl Scouts gathering at a local Audubon Society nature preserve, so this afternoon we're going to curl up with our crafting to watch some TV and then bake some snickerdoodles. Perhaps later there will be some spinning as well!

Fall Perfection

We have been so lucky this weekend, and I'll include Friday in that. We have had just the most spectacular fall weather -- low humidity, clear blue skies, warm sun. It's reached a high around 70 all three days but has been in the low 50s each morning when we've gotten up. I'm not sure how it always seems to happen, but we almost always seem to have this perfect weather for the Great Race, which we ran this morning -- yes, I did say ran! I didn't run all of it, but I spent more of the 3.1 miles running than walking, which really isn't bad considering that I hadn't run more than a block or so in about a year. I was able to run without stopping for the first mile (which is mostly downhill) at a pace of 8:30, which is about where I was last year. So my legs are still in good shape, even if my lungs are a bit out of practice. And other than some (totally understandable) tightness in my hips and legs, I had no ill effects, namely no hip pain. I'm sure I'll be sore tomorrow, but at least this opens up the possibility of starting to run a bit again.

I certainly didn't break any speed records, but I did finish under 30 minutes, which was a goal I'd set for myself. Those breaks where I walked also allowed me to really enjoy the surroundings and the view along the Monongahela River. And everyone (the Mister, Rainbow, and my parents) was there to cheer me on at the end. They had ended up parking at my father's office building, so on the walk back there to get the car, we paused to take a photo with Mayor Caliguiri outside the City-County Building:

If you're not from Pittsburgh (and also older than a certain age), the name will mean nothing to you, so let me explain: The official name of the race is the Richard S. Caliguiri (that's pronounced like "cal-uh-JURE-y") City of Pittsburgh Great Race. He was our mayor from 1977 until his death from amyloidosis in 1988. This statue of him was unveiled two years later. I don't remember when the race was renamed in his honor, but it's been held almost every year since his first year in office, and a dollar from every registration goes toward the Richard S. Caliguiri Amyloidosis Fund at the Pittsburgh Foundation. This morning at the starting line of the 5K, they announced that this year the funds raised from the race over the years would surpass $1 million. Pretty amazing, right? Last year's race was all virtual -- you could run your own personal 5K or 10K and submit your time, and they'd mail you your race shirt and finisher medal. This year there were definitely fewer participants (a little less than 1,500 for the 5K compared to more than 2,500 in 2019), but it was really good to be out there again with other people, who always spur me to run a little harder. I even ran next to a woman running with her dog for a while!

But enough about running -- let's get to the fiber talk! I've managed to spin a little bit every day for most of the past week, and the bobbin is filling up nicely!

I have 10 little balls of fiber left in my first bag, and I'm starting to doubt whether I'll be able to fit them all onto a bobbin. If not, then whatever is left will be set aside (and I'll do the same with the other two bags of fiber) so that I can spin a fourth bobbin of singles. All that will mean is a bit more trouble in the plying, as I'll have to switch up which three bobbins I am plying from periodically, but it's not a bit deal. I know these bobbins do hold a lot, and I can over fill them a bit, so I'll just keep spinning and see how it plays out. I'm not terribly concerned, especially as I've been really enjoying the spinning. After the stress of this month, it's been very meditative to sit down with the fiber and treadle the familiar rhythm. Perhaps this week ahead will see the first bobbin filled.

I hope you've been enjoying a beautiful weekend wherever you may be!

Not for Lack of Wanting

Although I had hoped to get a lot of spinning done over the past week, it was yet another crazy week in terms of work. I certainly could have used the stress relief of spinning, and I kept wanting to do it, so my lack of progress is only because I just haven't had the time. Maybe this week will be better? I've gotten through a couple more bundles of fiber, and the amount of singles on the bobbin has grown.

My August club shipment showed up this week, and in an interesting twist, it would have been perfect for this spin:

The colorway is called Gran Cenote (after the place of the same name in Mexico), and it's on Falkland fiber. At least it's in my comfort zone, even if I can't use it for my current combo spin!

Mixing Things Up

I had so much fun spinning for my Shifty that I've decided to do it again and clear out some of my older Southern Cross Fibre club shipments at the same time. This time around, I'm mixing them up in a combo spin. Remember the five bags of green-heavy fiber I showed you last week? On Friday afternoon, when I finally caught up with work and found myself with a little downtime, I pulled them all out and split up each colorway into 12 smaller bundles (I divided the fiber into thirds by width and then split each third into quarters by length).

Why 12 of each? Well, I'm trying to get all the singles onto three bobbins, and the math worked out easiest to have 20 little bundles of fiber for each bobbin. In other words, math. I mixed up all the bundles so that I had three piles, with four bundles of each colorway in each pile. The colorways and fiber bases here are (clockwise from top left) Allium on Rambouillet from September 2016, Verdant on Falkland from October 2020, Star Trails on New Zealand Corriedale from September 2018, Grazing on Bond from January of this year, and Dewfall on Falkland from July of 2019.

I've got them all in bags and have started spinning up the first bobbin. The only color management I'm doing is making sure that I don't spin two bundles of the same colorway in a row. I want the color order to be as random as possible so that the five colorways are well and truly mixed up in the finished yarn, and my hope is that all of the yarn comes out more or less greenish, with the blue and brown and cream serving to give some dimension to all the greens. I haven't gotten very far in my spinning (I only just started on Friday, and yesterday I spent most of the day outside, enjoying the absolutely perfect weather), but I am enjoying it. One really nice thing about splitting up the fiber like this is that it feels so easy to sit down and spin up a bundle or two without it feeling like a really big project.

I did have to do a little bit of spinning wheel maintenance when I started this, which you can see blurred in the background. After replacing the elastic that connects the brake band to the wheel several times, I finally had to replace the band itself because the bit of string that was left was no longer long enough -- I'd had to cut it every time I replaced the elastic. On the plus side, the pink Knit Picks Dishie that I used for the replacement is much more cheerful that the boring old white of the original, and I made it extra long so that I don't have to go through that whole process again anytime soon.

Do It Twice

If there was a theme for my most recent spinning project, it was "do it twice." Of course, I'd anticipated some of that because I started out with two bags of the same fiber, New Zealand Merino from Southern Cross Fibre in the colorway Yesterday's Love. What I didn't anticipate was that, in addition to spinning the two bobbins of singles to start, I'd also end up plying the yarn twice.

I wanted to have just one skein of yarn after I plied, and so in order to accommodate that much yarn (I'd started with at least 220 g/close to 8 oz. of fiber), I needed to use my Hansen miniSpinner to ply because its bobbins have the largest capacity of any of my wheels. In the past, my miniSpinner was my go-to wheel, but I hadn't used it in some time and was clearly out of practice. Unlike with a treadle wheel, where you have a sense of how much twist is being put into yarn because you're physically adding it by moving the wheel through your treadling, with an espinner you have to rely on how the yarn looks. And looks can be deceiving when it comes to ply twist, because not only do you lose a little bit as the yarn gets wound onto the bobbin, but washing the finished yarn reawakens the twist put into the singles (which is in in the opposite direction of the ply twist) and counteracts the ply twist. That's a long-winded and somewhat technical way of saying that I wasn't getting a good idea of how much ply twist I was putting into the yarn and it wound up being too little for my taste, though I didn't know that for sure until after I'd skeined and washed the yarn. Here is what it looked like at that point (apologies for the glare -- there wasn't good lighting to be had when I took this photo):

Notice how the yarn looks like of scraggly? That means there isn't enough ply twist, at least in my opinion. Fortunately, it's an easy enough problem to solve, provided you're willing to invest a bit more time. Once the yarn was dry, I put it on my swift and wound it into a center-pull ball. Then I ran it back through the miniSpinner to add more ply twist (which is much faster the second time around, and with an espinner means just sitting and holding the ball of yarn) and skeined and washed it again. Much better!

Can you see how the yarn looks like a cohesive unit now, rather than just some strands lying side by side? I'm much happier with it now. Here is a look at the entire skein:

After plying the second time, the finished yarn is sport weight and approximately 580-ish yards/530-ish meters. It was also my last official project for Stash Dash, which I was really only doing on my own (the KnitGirllls moved all the discussion for the event from Ravelry to Discord, and though I signed up there, I didn't really have the mental energy to keep up with the discussion). I tracked my meters through an Excel spreadsheet I kept on my desktop and updated as I finished a project. Handspun meters for this event are counted based on the number of times the yarn goes through your hands, so you get credit for the length of the singles and well as the plying. Because this is a four-ply (sort of) yarn, that means I got to calculate the Stash Dash total for this skein by multiplying the final length times five -- and that means that this skein alone contributed 2,647.5 meters to my total. When Stash Dash officially ended on August 31, my final total for the entire event was close to 18,050 meters. Not bad at all!

Let's take a look at where things stand on my effort to spin down my SCF club stash. Here's the photo I took at the beginning of the year of what I had (and note that this does not include club fiber that has come in since, though I've already spun much of that), along with what I have already spun checked off:

I've made a dent, but there's still a lot to be spun, and I still have another bag coming in each month. I so enjoyed my Shifty sweater spin that I'm contemplating spinning up another sweater's quantity in club fiber, though this time I think I'd do another combo spin. I pulled out several bags that are all predominantly green, with some hints of yellow, blue, and brown, that I thing would go well together:

I think what I'd do with these is split them up into little bits and mix them up to spin the singles, similar with what I did for the yarn I used in my Ramona Cardigan. There's less variation in color in these fiber selections, though, so I think if I mixed them up well, I'd end up with yarn that reads green overall. I was thinking that such a yarn, assuming I could spin enough, would be great for my planned Garland (Ravelry link) sweater for use as the main color, and I could use a contrasting color or even an undyed yarn for the colorwork. Looking at the photo of all the club shipments, I also see quite a few in the red/pink family that look like they'd work well together, so perhaps I could spin those for Rainbow's Little Garland? I'm excited about the possibility of using up a lot of fiber in one spinning project, but I won't be getting started just yet -- my first priority is finally finishing my swatch for my Shifty so that I verify my needle size and get going on that sweater. One handspun sweater at a time!

Ready for the Gymnastics

There are two more days (after today) left in the month of August, and I am determined to finish up one more skein of handspun by month's end so that it counts for Stash Dash. As of this morning, I have two bobbins of singles ready to be plied:

I tried to explain how I would be plying these last week, but it seems that few (if any) of you understood what I'd be trying to do. So here's a little photo illustration for you, with a bit more explanation. First, you have to understand that chain-plying is a way of creating a faux three-ply yarn. It look like a three ply, but it's actually all one strand that's just been folded back on itself and twisted. An easy way to understand it is to think of crochet chains, stretched out really big, with added twist. What I'm doing is taking it one step further to create a faux four ply. I'm still making those loops but with only one of the two strands; the other strand just hangs out next to the loop. And each time I make a new loop, I'll grab from a different bobbin. So if the first loop comes from the gray bobbin, the second will come from the orange bobbin, the third from the gray, the fourth from the orange, etc.

Here is what this looks like in some commercial yarn:

On the top are just the loops. I made the first loop (to the left-hand side) with the yellow, so it looks like there are three strands of yellow and one of the dark green. The second loop used the dark green, so it appears to be three strands of green and one of yellow. On the bottom half the photo, you can see what the loops look like when twist is added. If you click the photo to embiggen, you'll be able to see that the yarn has the appearance of having four plies, but it's really only two. And you can see that each section of the yarn is like the photo negative of the other. I don't think the yarn I'm about to ply will be quite that dramatic (because both bobbins contain singles from the same batch of fiber in the same colorway), but I expect that there will be sections where the shades in the two singles don't match and there's more of a contrast. I'm excited to see how it looks, and I'm determined to finish it by end of day on Tuesday, so I promise you'll get to see it next Sunday!

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!

Is This the Little Skein I Carried?

Friends, my spinning for my handspun Shifty is done! I finished plying the last skein on Thursday and washed it on Friday. And it's a beauty, if I do say so myself (Rainbow thinks so as well). This is Sunrise, Sunset from Southern Cross Fibre:

After drying, I have approximately 343 yards in this skein. The fiber base was South African Superfine, which shrunk up quite a bit but is also very elastic. Still, it's plenty for my purposes, even given that there are probably some sections of the skein that don't have enough contrast because they're a little too dark blue. There's enough with that beautiful rusty orange and pale blue.

And here's the real money shot -- all of the skeins together, in the order I plan to use them top to bottom:

In all, I have a total of approximately 2,323 yards of yarn here. If that number isn't impressive enough, consider that it represents nearly 7,000 yards of singles spun. I am extremely pleased with how this project turned out, and as soon as we finish the big bedroom switcheroo and I can get my stash and supplies settled in their new place, I will swatch for my sweater!

By the way, I hope you forgive me for the earworm the title of this post may have given you. If it didn't then I offer you this:

I Couldn't Have Done Better

I did indeed finish up a skein of handspun this week, and it turned out pretty much perfect -- it's consistent, it's well balanced, it has a lot of yardage, and I had maybe six inches of singles remaining when I finished plying.

This was June's Southern Cross Fibre club shipment, the colorway Ice Cave on Bond. I did a traditional three ply, and when the first bobbin ran out, I made a plying bracelet with the singles on one of the two remaining to use up as much as I could of what was left. When it was done, washed, and dry, I found myself with a skein of approximately 430 yards!

I finished just in time, too, because July's shipment -- Turtle on Polwarth -- showed up late last week, too. It's a stunner as well:

I will not be doing anything other than fondling it for a while yet, though, because I still have one more contrast skein left to spin for my handspun Shifty. I finished the first bobbin of singles last night, so two more to go! I'm hoping that work is a little more cooperative this week in giving me time to spin.

The stash move is still underway, though all the yarn and fiber is now out of what was the stash room and in two temporary locations. The house will be a bit of a mess until we can move some furniture and free up space to put the stash. I've started looking through all my handspun and getting an idea of what I'm ready to part with. Here's a little preview:

I think the easiest thing for me to do is to post the skeins, one at a time, on my second Instagram account, which has long been dormant (I started it when I first opened my Etsy shop a long time ago). I'm giving you all the first dibs, so to speak, on what you see here, so if something is calling to you and you don't want to wait, let me know and I'll share some details!

Picking Up the Pace

After focusing so much on knitting the past two weeks (spoiler alert: my wrap is done), I am turning back to my spinning, and I'm eager to finish up the last two skeins I'll need for my handspun Shifty. This afternoon I finished up the second skein of Ice Cave singles, and I'll soon get started on the third and final bobbin.

The second bobbin (the gray one here) may look a lot lighter, but it started out darker. I think I managed to have a range of shades in all three sections of fiber, so the various blues should be pretty evenly distributed in the final yarn.

Now that it is August, I also need to pick up the pace on clearing out what has been known as the stash room up to now because it will soon be Rainbow's bedroom. She decided earlier in the summer that she wanted to move up to the third floor before she started sixth grade, thereby gaining a bit more privacy as well as her own bathroom. I spent about an hour and a half earlier this afternoon clearing out some shelves and tossing a bunch of random stuff that had been shoved in there. I will be moving the stash and various tools and supplies into Rainbow's current bedroom, where there's a big closet. I'm going to be purging some things as well, including a number of knitting books and magazines, and I plan to offer them up to friends first (for the cost of postage only). One of these days I also need to put some handspun in my Etsy shop, too, because I have quite a lot of it that I will likely never use. If any of you might be interested in buying some of my handspun, let me know -- I am happy to sell it to you without giving Etsy any fees!

Inchworming to a Sweater Spin

Spinning has taken a bit of a back seat this week as I've been focusing on finishing up my wrap, but it's still happening here and there, and my Shifty sweater spin is getting closer to being finished. I have grouped all my finished skeins together and laid them out with my current spin, and I really like what I'm seeing.

The fiber is my current spin -- Ice Cave on Bond -- and I think I'm going to use it and the two skeins to the left of it for my main colors. The lightest blue skein and the purple and orange skein will be my contrast colors. I'm going to spin one more contrast skein as well (the pattern calls for three contrast colors), and I pulled this recent club shipment:

The lighting wasn't great for this photo, but I think the colors will go well together. There's a bluish gray and some deep purple-y reds in here, plus the orange. I think once I get finished with my knitting project, it won't take me too long to get these last two skeins spun up. I already bought the pattern and hope to be able to start knitting by the end of next month at the latest!

Wearing My Yellow Jersey

Today marks the end of the Tour de Fleece, which really seemed to fly by this year. Traditionally the leader of the Tour de France wears a yellow cycling jersey, so spinners are encouraged to do the same on the final day. Yellow is not a great color on me, though so I am only wearing one in spirit.

My goals for this year's Tour weren't very lofty -- I just wanted to spin at least a little every day and finish a small number of skeins. And that's exactly what I did. I didn't even have to spin up to the last minute to finish my last project, my HipStrings custom-blended batts. I had finished spinning the last bobbin of singles on Thursday, so I plied a bobbin each on Friday and yesterday and skeined and washed the resulting yarn last night.

I've had to edit these photos quite a bit to get them to even somewhat resemble what the yarn looks like in real life; for some reason, every photo I take comes out looking washed out and much lighter than the actual color. So the surface the skeins are sitting on is actually white, even if it appears blue here.

I ended up with two bit skeins of three ply, falling roughly in the sport to DK range, and a tiny mini skein of the remaining singles from the dark purple batt. The yarn is reading overall as a blue, but I love how there are not only two different shades of blue, plus purple, in the plies but also pops of many other colors from all the bits of silk and sari silk and other add-ins. I still have no idea of the actual fiber content of these batts, but that's just fine -- they were a delight to spin!

My two big skeins gave me nearly 780 yards, which is more than enough for a little sweater (I have my eye on Zero Crops Given, though I might work the body plain and lengthen both the body and the sleeves just a bit). My mini skein is only about 8.5 yards, and I only spun it to use up the rest of the singles, not with any real use in mind.

This may not have been my most prolific Tour ever, but by my count, I finished a bit more than 1,500 yards of yarn. Not too shabby! These most recently finished skeins also put me over the 10K mark for Stash Dash, thanks to the way that handspun is calculated (you get to count the length of each ply plus the total final length of the skein). In fact, I'm almost to 11K!

I am still on a long-term effort to spin down my stash, so don't think that because the Tour de Fleece is over you'll be seeing any less handspun from me. But you just might see me knitting with the handspun more in the months ahead.