This yarn has been in progress since last summer, when I was doing all the spinning directly from fleeces, although since my mom dyed the roving for me, I suppose one could say it’s been in progress for a lot longer. I just finished up spinning the whole pound of roving, and plied the first skein. I’m planning on plying a few more skeins in slightly different configurations, to play around with what works best for sock yarns. The roving is 100% merino, so I wanted to make sure I spun it in a way to make it last.
I ended up breaking the roving up into 6 different pieces, because that was how many times the colors repeated. Then each 1/6th got it’s own bobbin, with a little extra floof of blue roving going on its own bobbin. (I really love having all the bobbins in the world, and three different lazy kates that together give me 11 bobbins worth of storage. It makes spinning yarns with lots of plies so much easier!) The singles are pictured here first, and you can see that they’re quite fine.
For this skein, I took two singles and over plied them a lot. Then I took that 2 ply, and Navajo plied it, resulting in a 6 ply cabled sock yarn.
the over-plied 2 ply yarn
finished yarn
I’m really happy with how the cabled yarn turned out. It’s a bit harsher than one might expect for merino, but I expect it will soften with washing and wear, and I’m really hoping that it won’t wear out quickly because of this structure. I’m also really happy with how I was able to get the colors to line up when plying the two singles together, and I’m really looking forward to knitting it up into socks.
