In Which the Pirate Finishes Yarn.

It’s a month from the end of the Tour de Fleece, and my combospin is all spun, plied, overplied, cable-plied, skeined, soaked, thwacked, and dried!

The singles were quite fine, because I knew the eventual yarn was going to be made up of four strands. I wasn’t sure how to determine the final WPI from the singles, as the strands kind of lock together in the plying process, so I aimed for the 42 WPI line on my control card.

Sometimes I just had to stop to admire the way the silk strands gleamed in the sunlight.

The next step was plying. I made two-ply yarns that were half Falkland and half Merino/silk, and then ran them through the wheel again to double the original amount of twist. The top strand (shown across the back of my hand) is extra twisty. If I had been making a two-ply yarn, I would have left it at just the amount of plying twist shown in the bottom strand of yarn.

Then I plied the two two-plies with each other in the direction I’d originally spun the singles, taking out some of that extra twist and creating a very round, but slightly bumpy, cabled yarn. When I skeined it off it was still quite twisty, but a warm soak and several very firm thwacks against the inside of the bathtub evened it out and let it lie straight. That was a relief.

In the closeup view you can see the texture and the way the two strands interlock to form one. Instead of all four strands rotating around, as you’d see with a traditional four-ply yarn, this almost looks like links in a chain.

In total, I got 364 yards of yarn that’s just thicker than standard sock yarn, from eight ounces of fibre. Not too bad at all! Now I need to finish up some of the socks on my needles so I can justify starting a new project with this yarn. I don’t know if it will be smooth enough for socks, but I’ll swatch and find out.