4-ply odyssey

The Sheepspotters' Society focus this month is Proficient Plying, and one of my suggested challenges was to make a 4-ply yarn. Okay. Here it is, but it sure took a long time to get here.

This fiber arrived in my stash in June, 2018, when S1 brought it home from a LYS on Victoria Island where she had a conference. I'm still not sure what the fiber is. It's either Cormo (that's what was written on the paper bag it came in) or a CVM-Merino cross (which is what the shop clerk pointed to when she was shopping - she took a photo of the sign). Heck, maybe it's both - the blue could be one thing and the aqua another. This is what it looked like when it got to me:

So pretty! In October, when I was borrowing Annette's drum carder to make batts for my fleece-to-sweater project, I carded these up, too:

I should have known something was a bit off when it was so hard to remove the batts from the carder. What was off was that there was a lot of lanolin still left in the fiber. When I decided to spin these up in November, I could barely draft the fiber - and the yarn I got was very uneven. When I washed the sample, a lot of grease came out in the water. I started to wonder if the fiber had been washed at all before dying. Who knows?

I kind of wanted to toss it all at this point, but I attempted to re-wash the batts (I tore them into pieces) - here they are drying after a weird second wash:

These needed a bit more prep before being ready to spin again, so I did a couple of passes with my hand cards and made rolags. I knew the fiber wasn't going to make smooth yarn, because there were lots of blobs that seemed like short cuts and bits that pilled up during this process. I picked some of them out, but eventually gave up. Here you can see a prominent one on the giant knitting needle I use to roll rolags off the card:

I spun the singles long draw on a 12.5:1 whorl, and then wound them off onto 4 bobbins. You can tell that the last bobbin is short, which just gave me a chance to practice making ply joins.

Plying a 4-ply goes SWIFTLY - I got it done in 2 mornings before work, in tiny spans of time that may not even have been as long as 15 minutes each.

I believe the finished yarn is overplied a bit. It looked fine while I was plying, but after wet finishing, the twist angle is pretty strong. This yarn really puffed up in finishing. Here is a strand of finished yarn held taut (similar to how it would have appeared to me during plying, when it was under tension):

And here it is without tension. See how much is sproings up?

Often, when a yarn is overspun or overplied, it feels hard and ropy - but this is still quite soft. I only have 138 yards (95 g), but it could definitely be a hat (I think) or weft on a scarf. Maybe even warp, with something else as weft.

It's kind of a rustic looking yarn, but in a good way, I think. Nevertheless, I'm glad to have finished it off. Now I can turn my attention to something else!