Fireworks!

 

There's big news on the spinning front!  On Sunday I finished spinning the last bobbin of Fireworks singles!  Just to recap, this was fiber I bought on Etsy from BeesyBee - 65% Merino/35% Recycled Sari Silk.  The Merino is black and the silk is pretty much every color there is.  There are also some bits of metallic fiber in there.

Each bobbin has 128 grams of fiber on it.  I started spinning this on September 7, 2019.  I only finished one bobbin last year though.  Bobbins 2-6 were all finished this year.  The singles were spun worsted with a short forward draft with a goal size of 50 wpi (for the singles).  I say goal size because the nature of the silk waste means the singles were thick and thin - there was no way they would be perfectly even.

Yesterday I started plying!  I'm making a three ply yarn, so in the interest of balancing out any differences that might have happened between the first and the last bobbins, I'm plying bobbins 1, 3, and 5 together and bobbins 2, 4, and 6 together.  I've gotten the first skein plied, from the first set of bobbins (as full as these bobbins are, I'll probably get three or four skeins from each set).  I haven't washed it yet (I'll wait and wash them all together), so it's not completely finished, but this is 428 yards of fingering weight three ply.

Since I'm lazy and I'm not going to reskein and remeasure after washing (when you wash freshly spun yarn it tends to shrink a bit as it fluffs into it's new yarn shaped self), I only count 90% of the yardage I measure for project figuring purposes.  The actual measurement came out to 476 yards.  I started doing this when I first started spinning because my niddy noddy was actually 1-1/2 meters, not 1-1/2 yards, but as an American, I tend to think in yards, so I just ignored the approximately 10% difference and let it compensate for skein shrinkage.  For Christmas this past year Mickael got me the new Akerworks Super Skeiner*.  It measures in yards, so I'm just counting 90% of the actual yardage.  I've never gotten super scientific to figure out how much actual shrinkage there is, and I have a sneaky suspicion that different fibers and even different wools have different rates of skein shrinkage, but I've never come up short in a project by estimating my spun yardage this way either, so it must be working!

*Yes, it's expensive, but it's much easier on my shoulder than a traditional niddy noddy.  For a big project like a sweater spinning project, that could make the difference between spinning for a sweater, and still being able to knit it afterwards.