Last night I attempted to begin plying, but I just wasn’t feeling up for it after spending several hours trying to finish the singles.

Tonight I’ve been plying for nearly 3 hours. As soon as I came home from work I was at my wheel making my yarn.  And in that time I’ve only managed to end up with this… a mostly-filled bobbin. And there is a ridiculous amount of yarn left on the singles to probably fill almost an entire 2nd bobbin.

Initial thoughts on the ply-in-progress: I’m liking it, until I get to the red bits. The teals, blues, tans… even the pink-like shades that came from the edges of the red. They all flow. And then you get these shots of red throughout. Red with cream/tan, red with teal, red with green. It’s… jarring.

If you remember, a few months ago I posted about my current spin-in-progress. Well, nearly two months later I’m finally finished with the singles. And, instead of my initial intentions for a 3ply, I ended up just doing 2 bobbins for a 2ply.

I’m not sure how I feel about this yarn yet.  Now that I see the finished singles I’m worried the final product will be…. ugly. There are just soooo many colors and while they’re all gorgeous on their own, I’m afraid they’ll look awful plied up together.

I’m also second-guessing my decision to do a 2 ply. A 3 ply would have lent itself to be more ‘blending’ of the different colors. But I get more yardage out of the 2ply, and that lends itself to nice lace knits to show off the yarn better.

I guess I’ll just have to ply tonight and see how it goes. This will either be an epic win on stepping out of my comfort zone, or an epic fail that results in me never trying anything ‘different’ with spinning again.

I seem to go through phases with spinning. I love doing it. I love watching a chunk of roving go from a fluff of fiber to a tiny strand of yarn. I love watching the colors shift with each manipulation from fiber to singles to plied yarn to finished/knitted product. But the timing for it has to be right. I have to have a day where not much is planned and I just want to watch movies (or, in the summer, hang out on the porch with a lemonade and watch the world go by) and make something. Or be holed up sick in the house and need something to keep me busy in between breaks from knitting.

I’m not always in the mood for spinning, and my wheel sits empty much longer than I like. But this weekend was one of those perfect times to sit down and dig some fiber out and make yarn. The fiber (superwash merino from Creatively Dyed) isn’t something normally that I would pick. It’s a little ‘busy’ as far as the colors go – the roving ranges from green to teal to blue to red to rust to tan. But that was the point when I purchased it – I wanted to jump out of my ‘comfort zone.’ I wanted to take something that I was unsure of and watch it transform, little by little, to something beautiful. And so far I’m really thrilled with how the singles are turning out.

For the record, I’m aiming for this to become a 3ply sock yarn. Whether I end up with that, however, is to be determined. This yarn is spinning thicker than I would like, but I’m just going with it. I’ve learned not to fight the fiber and just let it be what it would like to be, and this may very well end up being a nice little 2ply for yet another scarf or shawl (which I seem to be knitting a lot of lately!) – or perhaps it’ll be a nice sport weight that I can pair up with some of the brown wool in my stash for a colorful yoke of a sweater! (I like that idea far better!).