Pretty yarn

Fortunately, I'm a better spinner than gardener! I finished up the half pound of brown, black, and white wool a while ago, but finally got all together for some pictures. Although I am so sick of these colors I could just scream, it made some excellent practice and it's kind of interesting to see how the spinning progressed (the pics are in chronological order). Before starting I experimented a little with spinning singles with one color at a time versus lumping all the colors together and decided that I preferred the result with keeping the colors mostly separate. Interestingly enough, all four skeins are almost exactly the same amount of fiber...weighing them on our kitchen scale showed that they were all 2-1/8 ounce (to the nearest 1/8 ounce) or between 59 and 61 grams. I expected them to all be in the ballpark of two ounces, since that seems to be how much fits comfortably on my spindle, but was surprised at how close they ended up...especially since the last hank I just kept going until the bag was empty!

The first hank is a fairly bulky 2-ply from one long single and 59 g became 22 yards.

The second hank is very similar to the first. Again, it is 2-ply from one long single and here, 61 g became 24 yards. One or both of these will become a scraper mitten for KittyDaddy, sometime before next winter.

Since I was pretty sure the first two hanks would be enough for the mitt, I experimented with thickness on the third hank. Some of the black parts, I could get pretty darn thin, though clearly consistency wasn't a high priority for this one! Clearly I averaged a lot thinner though because on this hank (also 2-ply), 61 g made 46 yards...approximately twice as long as either of the first two.

On the last one (where I obviously didn't have quite the choice of colors left!), I tried for thin and consistent and was quite pleased with myself! Because it was pretty thin, I decided to try Navajo plying to get a 3-ply yarn and ended up turning 59 g into 78 yards of three-ply...that's a whopping 234 yards of single-ply! And compare that to 44 yards of single-ply in the first hank!!

I am looking forward to getting started on my alpaca, camel/silk, and corriedale and seeing what comes of them! For now, I am in more of a knitting groove. With spring in the air, I am fighting a very nasty case of startitis and trying to concentrate on projects already on the needles. Since I am also thinking ahead to travel knitting (more on that coming soon!), I may be able to let the startitis pick out a couple of new projects!

And finally, completely unrelated to spinning (other than the fact that she loves to spin in circles until she gets dizzy and falls down), a gratuitous cute Bean picture.

While we were out on the patio so I could take pics of yarn and dead plants, Bug decided that he needed a turn with the camera. Among other more typical 4-year-old photographer shots, this one came out just beautifully!