FF: Six. Freakin'. Months.

Well, that was fun.

Started with 2 lbs of fiber.
Spun the singles at 7.5:1, semi-longdraw from the fold.
Stage 1 Plying, at 12:1
Stage 2 Plying, also at 12:1.
Final numbers: 8 big skeins and one mini-skein of 4-ply cabled yarn. Total yardage: 1745 yds/1.83 lbs (29.3 oz) of finished yarn. Holy shit, that's almost four miles of singles. Dooooooode!

I cannot believe how long this took to do. Granted, I had a few other big projects in there (the Knitting Olympics springs to mind), and I got so sick of those singles that it was hard to keep making progress on them. But I wanted to get all the singles spun up at once, so I could then ply the first bobbin with the last, the second with the second-to-last, and so on. In hopes of evening out any, ehem, alterations in the spinning.

And after all that sampling I did, my grist was all over the place. Here's the list:

Skein 1: 970 ypp
Skein 2: 984 ypp
SKein 3: 955 ypp
Skein 4: 875 ypp
Skein 5: 982 ypp
Skein 6: 1001 ypp
Skein 7: 842 ypp ***The Winner!***
Skein 8: 911 ypp
Mini-skein 9: 1984 ypp

The goal, as you probably don't recall, was 840 ypp. I'm not sure why it didn't come out closer, but maybe I didn't finish (full) the final yarns enough to get them to plump up? I may try pulling out the skeins that are pretty close (1-5 and 8, about 1200 yds) and try a swatch with those to see how it looks. The other alternatives are 1) running things back through the wheel to add more plying twist and finishing again or 2) just trying to full those lighter skeins a bit more and see if they plump up.

In any event, I am breathing a huge sigh of relief and accomplishment. Sheeit, that was a lot of purple fiber. Worst case scenario: I knit the sweater, it comes out too small, and I give it to my Mom, who has made appreciative noises over both the fiber and the pattern.

Fiber Friday: The end is in sight

A few days ago, I snapped. Really snapped. I couldn't face the prospect of anything more having to do with purple cabled yarn. So I turned on "Gladiator" and spent the next couple of hours turning this

into this.

That's the top that Devil dyed over Easter break. I'm calling it Mermaid yarn, in an attempt to get her more excited about it, and I'm planning a mini-Tappan Zee, maybe with a fish scaley lace pattern to complement the yarn.

But just to prove that the purple yarn is being finished up:

I've got four skeins finished, two more bobbins full, and 2.5 bobbins of 2-ply left. I can bang out a full bobbin of the cabled yarn in less then an evening, so I'm hoping to have it done by the middle of next week. And maybe the Mermaid yarn will be done as well!

Fiber Friday: Stage 1 is completed

And it only took a month!

I was so excited at finishing bobbin #9 (that small, unfull one at the bottom right), that I wound it off into a ball and started Stage 2 plying immediately. One viewing of "Serenity" later, and I'm into bobbin #8, and have almost a full bobbin of cabled yarn. It looks a bit different from my sample, i.e. thinner and less bouncy, but I'm hoping that impression is due to 1) the yarn being under tension as it goes on to the bobbin and 2) the lack of fulling finish.

I was also interested to see that the 2-ply showed a similar, if less dramatic, color gradation as the singles:

I kind of wonder if the finished yarn will do the same, but since I plan to skein this stuff up, wash it, and stick it away in a dark corner until, oh probably October, you'll have to live in suspense for a while. Try not to let it keep you up at night.

Hey, it's Friday!

While I have not been blogging so much, I have been doing some knitting and plying. I've been working on the third pattern from Sock Madness, and am on to the leg of the second sock.

This yarn has been in my stash for at least the length of Devil's life, so I'm glad to have finally found a project that seems to be working well. I think this is the third or fourth pattern I've tried with it...

There has also been plying. I've now got five bobbins full of two ply, and am midway through bobbin #6. My prediction is nine total bobbins-ful, but I have no real logic to this. The first bobbin, I managed to fit two bobbins worth of singles on to one with only a few yards difference between the two (!), so I'm winging it here.

Plying this has been nice because it is totally mindless. I get the wheel going, let the singles run through my fingers at a particular speed, and there they are, ready to go. Thank goodness, because after all the trouble spinning the singles, mindless is a very, very good thing!

Wiktory!

I know the standard is "pix or it didn't happen", but it's almost midnight and pictures will have to wait until tomorrow. But let the record show that at 11:32 pm GMT on 24 April, 2010, I finished spinning a veritable marathon of purple singles. Hooray!

In a week or so, I'll start the UltraMarathon of 2 stage plying. But for the moment, I think I'll celebrate by spinning something completely different.

Or maybe I'll knit something...