January Wrap-Up

Fiber Prep

• I blended approximately 2 pounds of fiber into rolags for a sweater spin.
• I have used my lock pop and Valkyrie wool combs to prep a handful of Corriedale nests for spinning at some point.  I'm aiming for slow and steady progress on this.

Spinning

Flatiron

• This month I spun batts of Oxford fleece.  I ended up with 357 g, 682 of a woolen spun 2-ply that is a DK/worsted weight.
• I dove right into my next project and have been spinning blending board rolags of mostly merino wool.  I have filled up 4 bobbins of singles.  I did ply the first bobbin so I could start swatching.  I would like to finish this project by the end of February.  I am aiming to spin at least 4 rolags a day, and if I stay on track I should be done spinning singles by about February 22 and will able to spend the last week of the month plying and finish the spinning portion of the project.

Kiwi 3

• I spun a 4 oz braid of dyed BFL and chain plied it.
• I spun 4 oz of Teeswater roving (another Save 'Em to Shave 'Em breed complete!)
• I plied all the Polled Dorset singles I had and created 5 skeins of yarn in various colors, 4 of the 5 are 3-ply.
• I began spinning some Knit Picks Stroll roving that I dyed.  I am aiming to make a 3-ply sock yarn.

Knitting

Finished

• A hat from the handspun BFL completed in early January
• Another handspun hat, this time from a yarn I spun in February 2020
• A sweater!  The sweater is Floof by Skeindeer Knits.  I knit it holding one strand of  Knit Picks Palette and one strand Knit Picks Aloft together.
• A pair of handspun socks.  These are from yarns spun from batts I created last February, designed with socks in mind.  It is mostly polled dorset, but there is mohair and silk and maybe some nylon in there too.  They are toe-up, fish lips kiss heel, basically a DK weight. 
• A pair of mittens.  The pattern is School Mittens by Janis Kristjansson and are knit holding three strands of sock yarn together.  I used two fingering weight and one sport weight yarns and ended up using up all the sport weight up towards the end of the second mitten and added in another sock yarn to finish it off. 

On the Needles

• Newleaf by Jennifer Steingass.  (Cast on 8/27/21)  I completed the yoke and divided for the sleeves.  I then put it the stitches on holders and washed to relax the yarn a bit and see how it is fitting.  I am using a cone of Jamison & Smith 2-ply jumper weight for the MC, but the CC is handspun so that part is a little unpredictable.  It looks good, so I will keep going and get the stitches back on the needles sometime in February.  The plan is to go ahead and knit both sleeves and then return to the body.
• Festive Sweater KAL Pullover by Skeindeer Knits. (Cast on 12/12/21)  I am just a few rows past dividing for the sleeves.  At this point I am done with colorwork and the rest of this will be pretty mindless.  It has taken the back burner since I will not want/need to wear it until December.  For this sweater I will finish the body first and then go pick up the sleeves.  This is also a cone of Jamison & Smith 2-ply jumper weight for the MC and I used 3 different CCs of  J&S 2-ply JW.
• Purse Socks (Cast on 9/??/21).  I have the rib done of the second sock (top down) and have worked a few rows of stockinette stitch on the leg.  I am in no hurry to complete these.
• Flax sweater by Tincan Knits.  (Cast on 1/12/21)  This is using handspun yarn from a Jacob fleece and is part of the Shave 'Em to Save 'Em Sweater Challenge which ends February 23.  I have finished all the white yarn and divided for the sleeves and am into the gray mix on the body. 
• World's Simplest Mittens by Tincan Knits.  (Cast on 1/23/21)  I am just trying to make a pair of mittens my middle child will wear.  The School Mittens I finished were one attempt, this is another.  I have the cuff of the first mitten done.
• I have a swatch going for the blending board merino sweater spin project.  It doesn't count as a project, but it is on the needles so I will list it here.

Teeswater SE2SE Spin

When I signed up for the Shave 'Em to Save 'Em passport in 2019 Teeswater wasn't on the conservation priority list.  It was added in 2020 and soon after I purchased 4 oz of Teeswater Roving from Lawrence Cottage in Oregon.  

I did a tiny bit of sampling with it when I initially received it; however, it has had to sit in my stash waiting its turn.  In an effort to be transparent, I suppose I should admit that it took a back seat because even though they can be absolutely beautiful, I am just not drawn to working with longwools.  I am more of down-like and medium wool spinner and knitter.  I like elasticity and I like spinning woolen and knitting with those type of yarns, so longwools don't really fit into that.  But I also like to mix things up and give myself a challenge from time to time and I really try to appreciate that there is a wool for every purpose and a purpose for every wool so I set about spinning up the long neglected Teeswater roving.

It said "roving" on the package anyway.  It didn't really feel exactly like top, it wasn't quite that smooth, but it also wasn't jumbled up the way the Leicester Longwool I spun last month was.  

I have spun longwools before so I was aware of some things.  1) Too much twist make longwools feel ropey.  I was spinning this on my Kiwi 3, so I kept it on the lowest ratio (5.5:1).  I did try spinning it with the jumbo/super flyer attachment too.  That flyer is mostly meant for art yarns, but the ratios are even lower and now I have an orifice reducer that makes spinning normal yarns on it less annoying, so I thought it was worth a try.  Perhaps it is that I haven't hit my stride with that flyer yet anyway since it is bobbin-led, but I was not getting enough twist with it, so I went back to the regular flyer.   2) Staple length matters and keeping your hands far enough apart makes a big difference in being able to draft without frustration.  The sellers included some locks with the roving, so that was very helpful to see the staple length without even pulling out any fibers from the roving.

Even with that knowledge and some prior experience, I did struggle a bit in the beginning.  This might be because I'd been spinning Oxford and plying polled Dorset, so my muscle memory was recalling working with a very different type of wool.  When you have been working with short, springy wool switching to long, drapey wool is quite a switch.  I committed to spinning for at least a few minutes everyday and within a few days I was finding the spinning to be a lot more enjoyable.  

Unless or until I find a use in my making for longwools I probably won't be spinning them too very often, but I would definitely recommend Teeswater for anyone who loves spinning and/or using longwools.  It is relatively soft, it has a beautiful luster, and if you like using locks in your spinning they do have gorgeous curls.

Blending Board Sweater Project Commenced

One of the projects on my list of possibilities for 2022 is a handspun sweater with yarn made with blending board rolags.  I'm excited to announce that this project is beginning to take shape.

Last spring I took a Blending Board class from Sasha Torres of Sheepspot.  During the class she mentioned she had an idea to do a similar project and after doing a few of my own blending board mixes in the class I realized that a project like that could be really fun and had a lot of potential.  This was fresh on my mind when I went to the Great Lakes Fiber Show the next day, so I made a lot of my fiber purchases with that in mind.  I brought home several small quantities (1 oz or less) of dyed merino in various shades from blue greens to purples and pinks.  In this picture of that day's purchases you can see where I was going with this.

In addition to these bits and bobs, I had a couple pounds of mill ends to select from and some Targhee that was too compacted to spin pleasantly on its own but would still work fine once it was opened up in the blending process.  Weighing a lot of little bits of fiber isn't the easiest, but I had at least a pound, probably more, that could go into the project.  I knew I needed at least 8 oz more.

I wasn't in a hurry to get started with it though, I had plenty of other fiber to spin first and wasn't ready to take on that project yet.  It was on the back of my mind though.  I kept checking out fiber sales and trying to decide how much more fiber I needed and what colors I wanted and not making any moves because nothing was quite right.

Then about a week and a half ago I was checking out an Etsy shop (littlebeanlovesyarn.etsy.com) and I found fiber that I knew would work wonderfully in this project.  I snagged 8 oz and when I received it earlier this week I set to playing right away.

I want to have plenty of yardage for a sweater, so I figured I need about 2 lbs of fiber to be safe.  It is going to be interesting to see how this turns out, if I am cutting it close or if I end up with multiple skeins left over at the end, but  I will never know until I do it. 

My goal for this project is to have a yarn that is random but consistently inconsistent with color so that there is a lot of marling and optical blending going on, but the yarn is really interesting on closer inspection.  To do this, I am making sure a portion of every board contains the same fibers, but then a portion of the fibers vary from board to board.  I am also spinning the rolags at random and will ply the bobbins randomly as well to help mix everything up.

Knowing that I want to spin up approximately 2 lbs of fiber, and that my blending board can hold about an ounce at a time, that means that I will need to blend 32 times.  I started with the 8 oz of merino and divided it into a total of 32 sections.  I was able to do the same with some of the other fiber I had if I had at least an ounce of it.  For the smaller bits and bobs, I sorted them into color families and then divided up all the fiber in those groups into at 32 little bits of fluff.   Those groups helped me have a little variety in the fiber for each board while the larger quantities let me have that consistency in each board I wanted.  It was an organized mess.  I took pictures so I could share how I was keeping all this straight, but I was doing this at night so the lighting isn't terrific.

There is a lot of work here!  I am about 2/3 the way through blending.  My goal this week is to have all the rolags made up.  The rolags are great though!  They make me feel really happy when I  see them in the basket waiting for me to spin them up.

 

Above are a few boards prior to pulling off the rolags, below is the basket of rolags as of this afternoon.

Best practice would be to sample though, right?  Ideally I suppose I would have sampled before diving in, and I kind of did.  While I was waiting for the fiber to arrive I blended a board of merino from colors I knew I wouldn't be using in this project and did a little spinning to see how I wanted to set up my wheel.  Since these are rolags, I wanted to spin them longdraw.  I also wanted to use my Flatiron because it is up in the attic where I am doing all this anyway and I wouldn't have to carry things around the house.  I decided I could get a nice soft yarn with enough twist by using the 17.4:1 ratio.  I probably should have plied and knit up a little swatch with that sample yarn, but then my real fiber arrived and I dived right in.

I thought it would be good to have an idea about how this was going to turn out before I got too far in though.  I started spinning a bobbin as soon as I started blending.  This worked out well because the nice rolags could go in the basket and the ones at the beginning and end of the board that were sometimes a little wonky or didn't want to stay together could immediately be spun up.  

In no time at all I had a bobbin full of singles.  I rewound them and plied and came up with a great skein of yarn.  That first skein had a grist of 893 ypp, so with approximately two pounds of fiber I should have a safe amount of yardage for a sweater.  I did start knitting up a little gauge swatch and I will share that when it is washed and blocked and I am ready to start talking about the knitting portion of this project.

The singles and plied yarn on the bobbin

Mid-Month Check-In

This weekend is the half-way point in January and I think a mid-month check-in on what I'm working on would be a useful regular post for me to make.

Spinning:

On and Off the Kiwi: 

• The first week of January I spun a 4 oz braid of Mixed BFL combed top from Three Waters Farm in the colorway "Flannel Shirt."  I have a blog post about this spin and the resulting hat project.

• I have just started spinning 4 oz of Teeswater Roving from Lawrence Cottage in Oregon.  I tried a few things but have settled on spinning this at a 5.5:1 ratio and am using a short forward draw.  I have more to say about this but that will likely be a blog post down the road.

On and Off the Flatiron:

• On January 1 I began spinning my batts of Oxford.  I had about a pound total weight of these batts (approximately 1 oz each) and I have been spinning one a day.  As of today (1/14) I have spun all of the singles.  I am letting the last bobbin rest and then I will rewind those on to storage bobbins and then I will be ready to ply.  I'm even experimenting with numbering my bobbins so I am mixing up what I am plying (i.e. first and last together)  I would love to get it all plied this weekend, but I should definitely be able to within the week.  I filled up 4 regular bobbins with the singles so I expect to get 4 or 5 skeins from this.  These are woolen spun.  I'm not entirely sure how I will use the resulting yarn.  I might put it in the mitten stash or I might go for a shawl meant for a woolen spun yarn, Skeindeer Knits has a couple of those patterns.  

• As for what is on deck after the Oxford project is complete- I am leaning towards another dyed braid from Three Waters Farm.  I haven't decided which one or how I want to play with color with it.

Knitting:

Socks

• Earlier this week I completed the toe of sock #1 of my current purse socks and cast on sock #2.  I haven't worked on it past the first few rows of ribbing.  These are "vanilla socks," but I am doing them cuff-down and with a heel flap and gusset because I need to mix things up every once in awhile.  They are in the colorway Manderley by Voolenvine on the Footsie base .

• I am probably going to wind up one of my skeins of Dorset sock yarn and get that going as well.  The first skein I spun was with batts I made inspired by Valentine's Day so I think it would be nice to make those in time for the holiday this year.  The yarn is sport/dk so they should be relatively quick to knit up.

Sweaters

I have 4 of these going.  I will start with my most recent cast-ons and work backwards.

• On Wednesday the Shave 'Em to Save 'Em Sweater Challenge kicked off.  I joined in because Deb Robson is teaching sessions and she is a wealth of knowledge and experience, but also because I have a fleece worth of yarn that has been waiting for months to become a sweater.  I hadn't started yet partly because I was trying to clear other things off the needles, but also because I was a little intimidated about knitting a sweater from my own handspun.  This challenge provided the nudge I needed to jump in.  Originally I was planning on following directions form Ann Budd's Top-Down Sweater book, but it turns out the charts are only for a whole number of stitches per inch.  I have 17.5-18 stitches per 4" or about 4.5 stitches per inch.  I decided to check my pattern library and found that Flax by Tin Can Knits matches the stitch and row gauge pretty closely.  I'm using that as a guide, I've knit the pattern before.  I am eliminating the garter panel on the sleeves, I chose option 2 for the neckband (I will pick up stitches to knit the neck) and I am going to add the short rows shaping for the back of the neck as well.  I cast on and am currently working the raglan increases.  The sweater KAL goes through late February, I hope to have it done with some time to spare.

• The second sweater I am working on is the Festive Sweater KAL Pullover by Skeindeer Knits.  This was definitely an impulse cast-on when I heard about the pattern and it was released, but it was just the thing to start right around Christmas.  I considered making it an all-over colorwork sweater but ultimately decided I would rather make it a yoke.  I'm using  Jamieson & Smith 2-ply Jumper Weight, the MC is a cone of the white, and I used a dark gray, red, and green in the yoke.  I have now finished that section and divided for the sleeves, so now it is a lot of stockinette.  I am leaving it out to pick up and knit something that requires no thinking for at least awhile.  I may end up putting it away eventually and bring it back out to finish it later this year.  As long as it is done and ready to wear for the 2022 holiday season I can't say that I am in a huge hurry to finish it.  

• I am at a very similar point with a similar sweater.  My next sweater WIP is Newleaf by Jennifer Steingass.  I started this in late August and finally finished the colorwork yoke within the first week of January.  The MC is also a cone of Jamieson & Smith 2-ply Jumper Weight in shade 202 which is kind of ecru/natural/light beige.  The CC is handspun though, so it has a really great effect to it.  The CC will come back for the cuffs, but in the meantime it is also lots of stockinette.  I don't have any real deadline on this one, but would like to get it done by March maybe?  It is kind of spring-like with the colors and motif.  I would like to be able to wear it before it is time to put sweaters away.

• My oldest sweater WIP is Floof, also by Skeindeer Knits.  I started this in early August.  I was doing alright with it but it hasn't had much attention in the past two months.  When I fractured my elbows I was at a point where I wanted to put the main body on hold and pick up stitches for the neck and then do the sleeves (and then I could go back to the body and knit as long as I wanted and be certain I had enough yarn.)  Unfortunately, picking up stitches was a really painful maneuver for my wrists with my injuries, so I have just picked this sweater up again this week.  The neck is done and today I started a sleeve.  I really would like to finish this one soon.  I am holding Knit Pick's Aloft (their mohair/silk) with Palette (a 2-ply fingering weight wool).  The Aloft is hand painted and the Palette looks to be a dyed-in-the-wool blended color, so the color of this sweater is kind of interesting.  It should be really warm, so I really like to get this done and wearable soon.

Weaving, Crochet, other Fiber Arts

Nothing right now

Polled Dorset Fleece

How it started:

How it's going: 

Silly memes aside, I am incredibly pleased to finally be done spinning this Polled Dorset fleece I purchased in May 2019.

The Lake Metroparks Farmpark in Kirtland, Ohio hosts a Shearing Weekend in May each year.  My impression is that the event's target audience is more general public for awareness and exposure to sheep than to a fiber arts crowd; however, they did have a small marketplace set up that year.  I think I actually learned about the shearing weekend through an Instagram post from one of the dyers I follow who was vending there.  I was interested, and there were several events aimed at kids (like a shearing demonstration of a rainbow-dyed sheep!) so it was a great little weekend trip for our family.   

The Farmpark has sheep of several breeds.  As a very new spinner who was just beginning to understand just how many different breeds there are and how different their wool can be it was great to see so many different sheep in person.  I was especially excited to see that they had a handful of sheep that are on the Livestock Conservancy's list for Shave 'Em to Save 'Em.  My experience with sheep is mostly at the county fair where there are only a few breeds and they are all meat sheep that are shorn before showing.  

In addition to the outside vendors who were set up at the market, there were a couple long tables set up with fleeces for sale.  For the most part these were not really being marketed to spinners.  They were selling them for their horticulture use really.  (i.e. Stuffing flower pots, mulch, compost...)  I remember there were several Jacob fleeces, but I had already purchased a Jacob fleece earlier that spring so I was looking for something different.  I found a polled dorset fleece that was pretty dirty and had quite a lot of vm, but it was sound.  I found someone and asked about the price.  There was some searching and asking around, and eventually I was told it was something like $2.50/lb.  The fleece was about 7 lbs, so I paid under $20 for it and took it home.  

One of the reasons I was interested in the Dorset fleece was that I had heard it was unlikely to felt.  I figured that with that characteristic and the low price, it would be a good fleece for me to play around with dyeing.  So that is what I did.   

When I got the fleece home I skirted it heavily.  I'm not sure if it had  been skirted at all.  At one point I even wondered if I actually had more than one fleece in that bag because there was so much wool.  My prior experience was with that Jacob fleece though, and they are much smaller than a Polled Dorset so I think that probably wasn't the case.  The ironic part is that much of that fleece did end up in my garden.  I still had quite a bit left though!  

Since I was going to be doing the dyeing in the kitchen, and with kids around, and I wasn't very experienced with dyeing, I decided to try out Wilton gel food coloring, like what you would use for icing.  I bought a 12 pack on Amazon and tried out kettle dyeing one color at a time in a (now dye-dedicated) pot on the stove.  I also did one with pink lemonade kool-aid because a friend of mine had some really interesting results with that flavor.  My results were much more exactly the color you would expect from pink lemonade.  I left some fiber undyed as well.  When I was done I was left with piles of fiber that resembled a clown wig, but it had not felted!

 

And then I stored it away and it sat for months.  

It sat until late winter 2020 when I was starting to feel some vague apprehension about the future from listening to the news.  I started combing.  I have to be careful with combing because I find it can be verry hard on my elbows and wrists, but it can be a really great physical outlet when you need it, kind of the same way kneading bread can be. 

I distinctly remember putting a comb down to read a text from a friend who informed me that our governor had just cancelled school statewide for three weeks starting the following week.  Some expletives may have escaped my mouth at that moment as I was just beginning to feel how serious things were about to get.  I went back to combing.  Did I mention it was a great physical release for stress?

The combing released a ton of dirt and tiny vegetable matter.  That is primarily why I chose that method of fiber prep.  I also had a lot of waste, which is typical for combing anyway, but especially in a fleece like this.  The colors I had dyed were really interesting in the locks, especially the black and violet dyes because they had "broken" but when I combed them together they combined enough to be more cohesive, yet the combed top still retained subtilty and had a heathered appearance.  

I finally finished combing all the locks.  I moved on to combing and carding and flicking other wool.  

Then last winter I started to give some more serious thought to what I wanted to do with all this fiber.  My mind went to socks first.  I decided to play around with blending some pinks together on the drum carder, along with some firestar, silk, and mohair to strengthen the blend.  The results looked a lot like house insulation.  It might have been the color, but it did amuse me.   I spun those batts into a skein of yarn.

Next, I decided to spin up three colors into singles and then ply them together for a 3-ply sock yarn.  The black, royal blue, and violet became a nice 3-ply.  I was trying to spin the singles thin, but with 3 plies it still came out to at least a sport weight.  

I was pleased with the results and spend the remainder of 2021 spinning up the singles of one color at a time.  I did do a little more blending with the yellow, orange, and salmon pink colors at one point, but that batt was also spun up and became a ply, I stuck with a worsted draft with and while it had a little more texture than the combed top it was still quite strong.  

At one point I did take one of the colors and overdyed it.  I believe it was originally dyed with Wilton's Brown, and it just wasn't exciting to me, so I used Cherry Kool-Aid to give it new life.  Since I had already combed it the dyeing process did compact (but didn't felt!) the wool, so to fluff it back up I put it through the drum carder.  Of course I can no longer remember what draft I used to spin it, but the result, whether from prep alone or also from draft was definitely more towards to the woolen end of the spectrum.  

By the end of December all the remaining Polled Dorset was on storage bobbins and ready to ply.  I briefly considered taking the last few days of the year to ply it all up, but I wasn't sure how I wanted to combine the colors just yet, and I thought it would take me more time than I had.  In reality, once I decided how I was going to ply, I was able to knock out five skeins in two days time.

I started with yellow, gold/orange, and the bobbin of the blended batt.  Next I moved on to the undyed, green, and light blue.  

 

The more I looked at the bobbins of the "copper cherry" as I called it, the more sure I was that they shouldn't be sock yarn and instead they should be a 2-ply that could be used in colorwork.  That skein is different than the others, but it was also a useful illustration of the different ways you could handle this wool.

The pinks went together next.  At that point I was left with several partially filled bobbins.  I decided to ply all the leftover singles together and came up with a really interesting yarn that reminds me a lot of Fruit Loops!

Now I guess it is time to start knitting some socks!

Practicing my Chain Ply

Chain plying is one of those techniques that up until now has just sort of eluded me.  I kind of understood it, I knew the motions to make, but I didn't really understand how it really worked and since I didn't really understand it in theory I was not having a lot of success putting it into practice.  I understood I was making a chain of loops like you do to chain in crochet.  I think the explanation that you were "folding the yarn back on itself" just further confused me.  

Mostly I just tried it out whenever I  had a lot of singles leftover on one bobbin.  I thought it was just one of those things that needed practice, and if I kept practicing it, eventually it would click and I would make chain plied yarn that I was happy with.  Only that never really happened.  Truthfully, it wasn't too high on my priority list either.  I wanted to feel confident with it as a plying technique eventually, but I was doing just fine making traditional 2-ply and 3-ply yarns.

Sometime in the last month, I was watching a video on JillianEve's YouTube channel and I saw Evie chain plying from a different angle and in slower motion than I've seen anyone demonstrated before, and it finally clicked.  Instead of frantic grabbing though the loop before it closed up, I finally could really see how that 3 ply was being created.  The video was called "Spinning Sock Yarn from a Dorset Fleece" and was part of a series that she did a year or so ago.  

Now that I finally understood chain plying, I was eager to give it a try again.  One suggestion I have heard is to practice chain plying with a commercial yarn, an old leftover in your stash.  This suggestion didn't turn out to be super useful to me.  Since I was already dealing with spun and plied yarn there were weird twist things going on and it was difficult to see the ply structure.  I decided I would have to bite the bullet and spin up some yarn to give this a proper go.

Conveniently, this aligned with my intention to explore more color management techniques.  One of the most compelling reasons to chain ply, in my opinion, is to preserve the color in a dyed braid while making a plied yarn.  

For this project, I chose my Three Waters Farm Mixed BFL braid dyed in the colorway Flannel Shirt.  I have been loving this color for months.  Every time I would see it pop up on Instagram I would have to give it a little heart.  Chain plying was a good option for this colorway particularly because of the colors in this braid.  There are shades of dyed brown as it is, but the other colors (blue/green and red/orange) are complementary.  If I were to do a fractal spin or even just spin it as it came and then ply it, there would likely be a lot of optical blending happening to give a skein that overall read "brown," and that wasn't really what I wanted out of this braid.  I love the vibrant pops of red and orange and electric blue.

I chose to spin this on my Kiwi 3 and selected the lowest ratio I have available with my regular flier, which is 5.5:1.  I wanted to keep the twist relatively low so that the yarn still had a soft hand after plying but also to minimize overtwisted pigtails that might get in the way and cause me headaches while practicing a new plying technique.  I used a short forward draw and tried to keep my singles thick enough that I would end up with about an aran weight after plying.  My plan for the yarn is to knit a hat with it and I enjoy using heavier weights for winter hats.  

After spinning the singles I did allow them to rest for a day before I started plying.  This is typical practice for me for many reasons, but I thought the rest would be beneficial for making the singles easier to work with, especially since I wasn't going to rewind them like I typically do.  I could have rewound them, but because I would need them to all be on one bobbin I would have needed to use one of my Bobbins Up bobbins.  It is a nice option to have, but the trigger finger motion to keep the drill going tends to aggravate some wrist pain for me so I don't use them much.  I might choose this option next time I chain ply a braid though, because although I did everything I could do minimize the pigtails I still had enough of that going on that is caused me some headaches.  Maybe I've just spoiled myself because I typically rewind all my other singles onto storage bobbins before plying these days.

I went slow and the chain plying worked well this time.  I had a couple times that the singles coming off the bobbin pigtailed and I had a bit of a mess to untangle, but for the most part I finally felt like I knew what I was doing.  My finished yarn did come out to an what I would consider an aran weight, about 96 yards and 9 WPI.  I am pleased that the yarn feels nice and round but not hard and overtwisted, which is usually how a 3-ply comes out for me.  My very tactile-sensitive middle child still thinks it is "too scratchy" for him but my oldest likes it and the colors so I think I will go wind it up now and cast on a hat for a weekend project.

My Woolly Thistle Selection Box

 

This holiday season I treated myself to a Woolly Thistle selection box.  The idea just seemed like so much fun and maybe a better match for me than an advent calendar.  Although in 2019 I made myself a yarn advent calendar from two of the Jamieson & Smith 2-ply Jumper Weight grab bags and that was a lot of fun that year and also really practical for me since I like to do a lot of stranded colorwork knitting.  The grab bags have 13 balls each, so I wrapped up one for each day for December 1-24 and then I had a package with 2 to open on December 25.  

Back to the box, in addition to a calendar and buttons and some other goodies, I have four different colors of Marie Wallin British Breeds yarn, a skein of John Arbon Textiles Yarnadelic, a skein of Daughter of a Shepherd Heritage 4-ply, Jagger Spun Heather 4-ply, and coordinating shades of Rauma Finull and Plum.  

I am wanting to work with these throughout the year.  Looking at them, I see five different projects.  

I intend to use the Marie Wallin yarn all together in one hat or maybe a pair of fingerless mitts.  I haven't settled on a pattern yet.  

I will use the Finull and Plum together, holding them double in whatever I knit.  I really love that blue, but it is close in color to another wool/mohair hat I knit a couple years ago, so I am not sure if I want to use it for a hat or not, even though that feels like the most obvious choice. 

I think the Daughter of a Shepherd would work really well as the MC in a mitten pattern, I am thinking of a free pattern called the Kainuu Flower Mittens offered as part of the Nordic Craft Week.  The yarn feels finer than J&S 2-ply or Finull, more like a light fingering weight rather than a heavier fingering/sport weight.  I think I can probably dip into my stash of Knit Pick's Palette for the CCs and they would work well together.

One of the suggested patterns for the Jagger Spun Heathers 4-ply is a shawl called the Stormy Sky Shawl by Ksenia Naidyon.  I am leaning towards using that pattern for that yarn.  I took an intentional break from knitting any shawls in 2021, but I think I am ready to knit another shawl again.  

That leaves me with the John Arbon Yarnadelic.  I haven't decided what I want to make with that skein yet, but now I am wondering if weaving it into a scarf on my rigid heddle loom might be a nice way to use it.  It is worsted spun, has a bit of luster, and it has a little bit of nuance in color that I think is really beautiful and interesting in woven fabric.  I think I am convincing myself.  Stay tuned?