Do you make resolutions? I don't. The good sounding reason is, why wait for a new year to make a good change. My truth is, I choke on resolutions. Its one place where I get contrary and dig in my heels and decide to not do something. Calling something a resolution wakes up all the negative voices in my head and gets them chattering. So I try to stick to making choices.
I ended the old year and began the New Year the same way, spinning. As I mentioned here, I decided to spin for a project, some 3 ply sock yarn. For my experiment, I chose some hand dyed BFL roving that a friend was destashing and decided to pair it with some alpaca roving already in my fiber stash. I figured to use about 1 ounce for each ply, because usually I can get a pair of socks out of 3 oz. of yarn. So 2 oz. of BFL I split into two presumably equal pieces and spun one length, then took the other length and divided it into 6 skinny lengths. I ended up with 3 bobbins looking like this;
Of course, the lengths didn't match up completely, all of the center bobbin was used up before the other two, so I spun some more alpaca to make a 3 ply with the remaining BFL. And ended up with this;
The light grey alpaca really toned down the bright jewel tones of the BFL, more so than I expected. But, that is part of the reason I'm
see all that red & green! at least the BFL has some sheen, thats nice. |
The yarn is wound into center pull balls so I can work both ends. Right away I noticed that the weight of the yarn from the inside of the ball was much finer than the yarn from the outside. "Wow", I thought to myself, "I really do spin different at the beginning of a bobbin than I do at the end. Well, I'm sure it won't matter much." I could say these things out loud, but I get annoyed when my family humors me, so its better if I keep it to myself. I stayed up past midnight (!) to greet the new year, noted that the 2 toes still looked very different in gauge after about an inch and a quarter of length, and went to bed.
Those of you with sharp eyes may have already spotted the problem, but I didn't figure it out until this morning. After deciding to start over, I started pulling the center yarn from the ball, looking for it's weight to match the outside of the ball a bit better. That's the red/grey yarn over the smaller ball in the picture above. See the problem yet?
How about now?
Yeah, that top yarn is only 2 ply. I ran out of one of the alpaca singles and just 2 plied the remaining singles on the same bobbin, figuring I'd separate it later. Then forgot all about it. Oops. Now the 2 ply is safely set aside, maybe for future sock darning, and the Society of Sisterly Socks restarted.
I already love the gentle colors of the toes, I wonder what the rest will look like?
I love the 2BFL/1alpaca yarn color! Cheerful, not seasonal, at least to me.
ReplyDeletethanks Michelle!
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