In Which the Pirate Challenges the Laws of Physics.

I did indeed spin the white bobbin as part of my Day 1 efforts, and got a picture of all three together first thing this morning. I’m quite pleased with it, though I do wish there was a little bit more difference between the dark and medium grays to show off the colourwork better. I doubt that it will look more obvious once it’s knit up, but I’ll try anyway and see what I get. How bad could it really be, right? It’ll still be a warm hat that I knit myself of yarn that I spun myself, and that’s pretty awesome no matter how subtle the colours are.

The plan was to make a plying ball and not lose a yard of the singles. I used my trusty ball-winder to make a cake of the singles, then attempted to use it again to wind both ends together. That was a terrible mistake on my part, since the yarn unwinds from the outside of the ball faster than the inside, and then twists back on itself and makes tangles. A third hand might have come in useful at this point; I ended up awkwardly using the side of my leg to hold the ball-winder’s handle steady while I did some of the untangling.

The double-stranded yarn cake does look neat and tidy, but it was such a pain to produce because of all the stopping and untangling. So I decided to wind the second plying ball around a cardboard roll. It really wasn’t as bad as this looks, honest. This picture is from the very end of the process when my cake of singles collapsed in on itself. I was able to untangle it fairly easily, and then plying from the roll was an absolute breeze. It might be the most even plying I’ve ever managed.

Tomorrow I’ll ply the third bobbin, skein the yarn, and give it all a wash and a whack – and then my first Tour de Fleece yarn will be finished! It’s already soft and squishy, so I can’t wait to see what it’s like when it’s been abused a little bit, and what it will be like to knit with – but that won’t be for a while, yet. Not until the Tour is over, anyway.