FO Friday: Princezna Hyacinta Handspun

I focused on getting my singles finished up and plied this week so I have a completed skein of handspun yarn to share for FO Friday today.

Original fiber: A set of four 1-oz batts from KCKnits Etsy shop (which appears to be closed indefinitely) in the way-back stash machine (2017? maybe earlier?). These were made of hand-dyed merino blended with firestar.
Finished Skein: 394 yards and 97 g of a 2-ply fingering weight with a long, slowly shifting color gradient.

To spin these, I decided I wanted to keep the colors as distinct as possible, so I opened up each batt and pulled off the colors in sections. I managed to separate these pretty easily and didn’t worry overly if there was a little bit of a next-door color that got included in the sections as long as they were mostly a single color. That left me with jade green, turquoise, cobalt blue, champagne and creamy white strips that then faded back in the opposite color pattern for each batt. I spun two of the batts in that order for 1 bobbin of singles, then repeated the process for bobbin #2.

When it was time to ply, as you can see in the above photo, I was able to keep the colors mostly aligned. I had a few sections where one color shifted first and while I left small portions of that type of plied blending, if it looked like it would run on too long, I broke the single, pulled some of those singles off the bobbin and saved them on a cardboard index card, then rejoined the single and kept plying. It worked out well since I had some of the reverse mis-match happen in the second half of the plying process, so I used the singles I had saved to correct the color sequence and maintain as much of the yarn in long sections of a single color, subtly blending to shift to the next color in the sequence.

I think this will be interesting to knit up. I’m eyeing a few projects where the long color runs will be able to shine, but haven’t decided on anything specific yet. Also extremely happy to have another long-languishing fiber spun into usable yarn!