FO Friday: Fiber Optic Gradient

This Monday, the snow was very obliging of a little photo shoot. I finished my third spinning project, the fiber optic gradient in the rouge-purple-cerulean colorway.

There is just something magical about yarn in fresh snow. For once I could get a color accurate shot (yay spring!).

I was hoping for a fingering weight but I got something closer to a worsted. There a chunky bits from where I finally figured out how to draft, and there are wicked thin bits where I plyed my later work on my later work.

The process of finishing this yarn was a bit of an epic. Here is where I was Friday afternoon (in a mad scheme to post this last week)

I decided after all to 2 ply, and keep the gradient like I originally planned. When I ran out of the first single I would ply the rest from the end of the second single.

After I finished the singles I let the last one rest. Unfortunately the other one had been resting for weeks on end. The residual twist was so much weaker, than I had to ply this sucker pretty hard to get the amount of glomping together that I wanted. To ply until the yarn no longer twisted on itself resulted in a really under plied yarn. My instincts were correct. Once I washed and thwaked I had one quarter twist to none in my skein. Before I had three twists.

I plied from 6pm to 11pm, and I was still in rouge by the time I went to bed.

I woke up at 10 and resumed plying. I was able to go until 2-3 before the hook striped out of the spindle. Defeated I wound the plied yarn onto a handy dandy paper towel roll. Later that afternoon I got toothpicks from the store, filled the hole with wood glue, followed by a broken toothpick, and then I had to wait 24 hours.

I could not wait 24 hours. My enabler, Jen, told me I could use it as a bottom whorl. So I went online, found a tutorial for setting up bottom whorl spindles, and I wound the yarn back on. I plied through a movie, and still I was not yet done.

Sunday morning I finally finished. So I wound it onto my niddy noddy, and took some pictures.

233 yd of a worsted weight. Obviously a little thick in places. What I like the most was that because my spinning was not super consistent, it made for a more gentle gradient from rouge to purple, and purple to blue. You can see it really well on the niddy noddy. I can't wait to knit this up. I am making a hat.

The blue I plied back on itself was 40 yds so there really wasn't a huge length mismatch between my singles. That was 16 g.

I wonder what my next braid will be. Hmmmm. You have as much of a clue as I do.

Go check out the other FO Friday Bloggers. It's fun!

Take care guys

Molly : )