More than a mile! Or, Spinzilla 2014

My Knitters’ Day Out shopping this year resulted in me bringing home “3 Feet of Sheep” in the BFL/silk blend dyed in the colorway “Colors of the Capital.”

You can see that there are some color variations in each separate ball of top. Some of this is due to the difference in how silk and wool accept dye, but some of it is the blending of dyed fibers in each. The balls were presented in this color sequence in the bag, and I honored the sequence. I separated each ball into two equal segments (as best I could) and spun singles onto 2 separate bobbins. As I made a 2-ply yarn, sometimes the two plies were from the same color and sometimes they were from adjacent ones (which kind of extended the gradient effect).

Astute readers will notice that this fiber is top, not roving, but that the wool and silk aren’t homogenously mixed. Because spinning in a woolen style (longdraw) from roving is the fastest way to spin, I wanted to approximate it this week. I tore the top into short segments and spun from the fold, which was far faster than my old inchworm style. Want to see the finished yarn?Here it is! Between the two skeins, I got 594 yards of 2-ply yard (which gets me 1,782 yards of Spinzilla credit – you count the yardage of the singles PLUS the yardage of the plied yarn). This is more than a mile! I’m pretty pleased with how it came out.

I finished those singles early Friday evening and looked around for something else to spin. I wanted a small project that I would have time to completely finish before Spinzilla ended on Sunday night. I dug around through my fiber stash and came up with 2 ounces of Shetland roving (dyed teal) and 2 ounces of Romney roving (dyed yellow). I spun both of these longdraw and got some more yarn. I need to get a better photo of the Romney especially… it’s still a bit wet in this photo because I wanted to wrap up this post tonight: Specifically, I got 100 yards of Shetland (for 300 yards of Spinzilla credit) and 93 yards of Romney (for 279 yards of Spinzilla credit). That brings my overall Spinzilla yardage to an astounding (for me) 2,361 yards! This is far and away the most I have ever spun in a week and it was so fun to learn that I could do it.

Now I need to think about knitting. I had planned to use the gradient yarn to knit Stephen West’s Spectra, a pattern that has long been in my queue but hasn’t gotten made yet. (Side note: I originally intended to make it with this yarn that I bought with Steven in 2012, but then I decided that the color changes were too long. His turned out beautifully, though!) Now I’m not so sure. I have about 600 yards of that yarn, and it should probably all stay together. I need something that will use most of it, so that probably means I WON’T be combining it with another yarn. Maybe something like this?

Spinzilla 2014 was a total win for me. Yay, #teamstorey!