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The Only Yarn of 2017

2017 was quite a year. I'm glad it's over, but I also wish I'd spent more time spinning. I made it through the singles for this yarn sometime early in the year (perhaps by the end of January? I can't remember), and they proceeded to sit on a shelf until the last week of December.

A close-up of a twisted skein of soft pink, lavender, and white yarn. The two plies of the yarn are mostly barberpoled with different combinations, like the striations on a shell, and there are a few thicker and thinner spots in the yarn.
My camera doesn't like macro photography, but I make it do it anyway.
Spoiler alert: I finished plying just before the end of the year.

A skeleton of a wound ball of yarn, composed of a few layers of pink-beige singles yarn, resting on a very full red-whorled spindle laid on its side in a windowsill.
Constantly delighted when the center-pull ball holds its shape as a skeleton.
I had originally planned to do...something...clever with the colors, but by the time I got around to plying, the balls of singles had gotten out of order, and I didn't remember what the plan might've been anyway. Instead, I plied randomly, and got sections of barber poling and matching plies, which should look nice when it's knitted or woven up.

A snapchat of a white redheaded woman holding a very full, red-whorled top-whorl spindle in front of her face so the whorl rests perfectly flat under her wide grey-green eyes, and the shaft divides her face in half. She's slightly backlit by the bright window behind her right shoulder, wearing a white v-neck shirt, with her hair falling loose behind her shoulders. The yarn is mostly dark purple and reddish-pink on top, with a partial layer of white and light pink at the base. A grey bar with white text says "DONE" in all-caps across the woman's forehead. (Yes. That is me. If you've never met me, though, what good would it be to say "me"?)
My sister said this was a nice photo, so I had to include it.
That's four ounces of yarn, by the way. I have packed eight onto this spindle before, but by the end my wrist ached from winding, and the yarn itself was quite strained. Still a fun experiment, though.

And then, of course, there is the winding off the spindle, which has to happen before I can wash and measure the yarn. This is easier with two people, but I didn't have a fibery friend handy to kidnap for an hour or two.


The first try included a mixing bowl to contain the spindle, and hoping the weight wouldn't create too much tension for my swift to stay open. That...didn't work. It looks hilarious, though.


Second go was a return to the method we worked out in college, before anyone in the house owned a swift, and it's remarkably graceful when you get into a rhythm. This only works with a folding chair, though; if you use a standard chair, it needs to have straight legs, or you won't be able to get your skein back when you're done.

A wooden folding chair, laid with the back and seat edge on the floor and the uptilted legs facing the viewer, with pink-and-purple yarn wrapped in an ex around the legs, and all the strands in the lower-left-to-upper-right leg of the ex passing over all the other strands. A bright green rug fills the upper half of the background, and blue-grey industrial carpet fills the near half.
This photo has a nice palette. And look how clean my carpet is!
The cross in the middle, which gives a much longer skein than is possible by just wrapping around the chair legs, also means it's smart to run your hand through the intersection once in a while, just to check that you're not absently interweaving your passes into what will be a tangled mess the instant it hits water (let alone if you try to snap it open to drop onto a swift).

A low-angle close-up of pink, purple, and white two-ply yarn, held under tension on th elegs of a wooden folding chair, showing the barber-pole striping as different colors meet throughout the skein.
I never get sick of shots like this.
Unwinding like this gives me much more control over the tension throughout the skein, which makes measuring the length more accurate, too. Besides, it looks like magic.

A folding chair standing upside down, with the legs half-folded, and pink, purple, and white yarn wrapped aorund the legs in an ex. The yarn drapes softly between the legs of the chair, and ripples slightly at points from the twist of the yarn now that it's loose. It looks squashy and nice to touch.
Yarn go sproing.
And it's really fun to fold the chair and feel how squishy the yarn is when it's finally not under tension (from the weight of the spindle, from my hands keeping it taut enough to avoid tangles, from the chair after winding...). I love high-twist yarn, and these singles had sat for so long that most of their residual twist energy had dissipated, so the raw plied yarn looks pret-ty overplied. It's much more balanced after a bath.

A close-up of a narrow silver cuff bracelet with "to thine own self be true" stamped into the surface in a lowercase sans-serif font, hooked around a small bundle of pink, purple, and white yarn and a stick of a light wooden umbrella swift.
Look, I know Polonius is a pompous fool. My grandma gave me this bracelet, don't knock the quote for its context.
I like to count my yarn before I wash it, because...I can. There's no real reason to, I just do. Probably because after waiting two days for the yarn to dry all the way through, I'm really impatient to skein it and add it to the Wall O' Yarn currently decorating my entry hall. For big skeins like this one, I'll use the cuff bracelet I always wear to hook counted strands away from the remaining mass, so if I lose track within one 25-strand section, I don't have to start again from the beginning. (Ask how I learned to do that. Actually, you're smart, I bet you can guess.)

A photo from above of a thick skeing of pink, purple, and white yarn tied occasionally with light yellow yarn. It looks a bit like very well-behaved spaghetti, which is apt, because it's in a stainless stock pot, floating on the water in the bottom.
Sink, dammit.
Wool is hydrophobic, which is a grand quality when you're hiking and you need your feet to stay warm even though you're sweating and it's fall in the Rockies, or when you and your cabled sweater are on a lobstah boat off the coast of Maine and the wind is blowing fit to raise the dead, or when you're creeping through the mist-laden heather in the Scottish Highlands with your felt cap tilted at a rakish angle. It's less grand when you're trying to soak your effing yarn to finish it.

I won. Eventually. Some brute force was required.

A photo from above of a tightly twisted skein of pink, purple, and white two-ply yarn, laid out on a purple twill blanket that matches the darkest purple in the skein.
It even matches my blanket! How cute.
Hardly any shrinkage after washing, so I ended with about 900 yards of laceweight yarn from four ounces of fiber. Not too bad for a drop spindle.

And no, I have no idea what I'm going to do with it.

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