

In Which the Pirate Acquires.
Posted by Pirate in custom blend, fiber, spinning, Unicorn SpitAn Etsy gift card, combined with a sale on some of the (discontinued) Ashland Bay multi-coloured top, combined with a little egging on from a friend, combined with the need to have a little bit of retail therapy, all came together and thwacked me over the head, resulting in a delivery of spinning fibre arriving at my house.
I bought these two braids of merino-silk in the "Del Mar" and "McKenzie" colourways, which may or may not end up in the same project...
...and these four braids of 21.5 micron merino, in the colourways "Sage," "Granada," "Riverstone," and "Borealis" - which will *definitely* become some sort of a fade/gradient project.
But I can't start those until I finish the Unicorn Spit, so to that end I set myself to spinning over the weekend, and now I have four completed skeins (adding up to 570 yards of three-ply, before washing) and three more to spin. This should add up to about a thousand yards all together, which ought to be about enough for a sweater, right? Here are the bobbins in my homemade shoebox kate before I plied them:
It didn't take long before I got frustrated at the lack of tension on the shoebox kate, so I punched two more holes in it and made a brake band out of some scrap yarn. One end is tied to the box, the other is tied to a rubberband which I can hook to any of those binder clips, depending on how much tension I need. The plying is going much more smoothly now, thank goodness!
