The February Surprise

I will post about some knitting or crocheting at some point, but right now, I'm super into what I've been spinning. January was a great month for me. Three skeins!

Yarn the first. This was spun from a batt I received for my birthday that I felt compelled to spin in December even though December was for finishing up outstanding projects:


Yarn the second. This was once ounce of C type pygora (that's the most cashmere-like grade), plied with silk. I'm in utter love with this one:


Yarn the third. The January self-imposed spinning club project itself, in batt form:


In cop form:


And as yarn:


On to February! The old random number generator gave me this project to spin:



That's some merino silk from Fiber Optic, and a Jenkins lark. For some reason I have a bit of a hard time spinning silk blends consistently, so I figured I wouldn't be that concerned about it and try to spin a beefy single to keep the color gradient intact. Here are my beefy turtles:

What was so great was that I knew a gradient was underneath. It was like an easter egg, or as one person on Ravelry likened it, an everlasting gobstopper. It's an apt comparison when it comes to the neverending task of winding yarn onto a niddy noddy. To paraphrase Gene Wilder, "You can wind it and wind it and wind, and it'll never get any smaller. At least I don't think they do."

Because I wanted the singles to be hale and hearty, I decided to give them a good fulling. Alternating hot and cold soapy water, agitation, a cathartic amount of whacking. So here's the surprise. I have a theory why the yarn turned out like this: I tend to overspin my singles, plus wool and silk don't behave the same when fulled. So, voila, my unusually textured finished yarn:


I'm into it! Who knows if I could have made this on purpose? It's one of the great things about spinning, really more of an art than I science the way I practice it.