One of these skeins is not like the others...

Remember the Sesame Street Song?  "One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong…"

Well, I did some woolen spinning for the first time during Spinzilla.  Then I tried to go back to my short forward draft to spin the third skein for my Color Affection shawl.  Can you see the results in the pictures?

The two on the ends were spun before Spinzilla.  The one in the middle was done during Spinzilla.  

My skeins go like this:

     Skein 1; 100 g, 258 yd

     Skein 2: 80 g, 215 yd 

     Skein 3: 90 g, 168 yd

Normalized per 50 g, that:

     Skein 1: 129 yd

     Skein 2: 134 yd

     Skein 3: 93 yd

Besides the yardage being so different, the feel of the yarn is quite different: fluffy, airy….woolen spun!

My goal was to match KnitPicks Palette, as I mentioned in this post.  Trouble is, I didn't notice until just now that I'm DOUBLE what I thought!

Here I was saying, Pallete has 213 yd/ 50 g, so I'm doing well  at 258.  But that's for 100 g!  What's my problem?  I was planning to simply spin another skein 3, but now I might just have to start all over.  Hrumph.

Spinning for Color

I finally wound my first 50 grams of plied yarn for Color Affection into a skein.

I'm very happy with the look and feel of the yarn.  I was aiming to match Knit picks Palette, because others had used that for the Color Affection successfully.  50 g of Palette has 231 yards.  My skein came in at 258 yards.  Whoohoo!

Now here's the problem.  I've looked at a lot of finished projects on Ravelry that used the Palette Yarn, and almost all of them used more yarn than I just spun.  What did I look at before?  I know it was weight, not length.  I'm wondering if I need to add fiber to one of my other chunks to make more yarn.  Trying to make it come out just perfect seems like a recipe for disaster.

Getting Started on Christmas

Looking forward to a beautiful weekend of knitting while listing to General Conference at my Mom's Cabin, I wound a few balls of yarn.

I bought this yarn a long time ago for my mother-in-law who loves purple.   It's Araucania Nature Wool Chunky.  I love that it's hand-dyed in Chile by a women's coop using vegetable dyes.  I'm going to make her a small circular blanket/shawl for keeping warm while working on her laptop this winter.   I'm going to assume she's not reading this blog, or I've just blown her Christmas present!

My kids and nieces and nephews had a great time winding the balls of yarn.  My swift got a good workout.  We also wound this yarn up to make leg-warmers for my daughter, who requested some for ballet.

This is Knit Picks Palette yarn, hand dyed by me.  I've got plans for a whole line of ballet inspired knitting patterns, and this will be the first I knit up.