FF: Yarn #3

I'd like to introduce you to my five hour yarn:

Fiber: HYFC BFL in "Norway", previously seen on the blog in these mittens.
Spun/plied: 9.25:1/6:1, spun long draw from the fold.
Stats: 183 yds/4.4 oz (665 ypp) of lovely worsted-to-bulky squishtastic yarn

I was inspired by a number of the yarns in the HYFC Tour de Fleece team thread, and decided to do a 2-ply color progression with this fiber. I started by pulling the component color stretches apart, and ended up with six groups.

There was the red group, the orange group, royal blue, turquoise, light greyish blue and grey. I took each batch of fiber, split each chunk in half lengthwise, and made sure the two piles weighed the same (+/- 1 gr). Then I laid out the pieces for each group in the order I wanted to spin and started in on the first bobbin. After spinning the first little baggie of singles, I switched bobbins and spun up the same color group on the second bobbin.

I started with the grey, then went to light blue, turquoise, royal blue, red and finished up with the orange. One hour of Tour highlights one evening, and one viewing of Shrek 3 the next day, and the singles were all spun. I'd forgotten how much faster long draw is! It was also a relief to spin something thicker then the 60+ wpi singles I'd been doing for the previous two yarns...then it was time to ply. First the orange and red sections,

then the royal blue (my favorite!),

then the turquoise and finally the grey.

Plying took all of an hour. My obsessive fiber weighing paid off - most of the colors matched up really, really well, with a bit of bleed over to blend the transitions. I ended up with a few yards of singles left on one of the bobbins, but I just stopped there. No need to get silly about using it all, right?

A nice warm soak in Soak, and that's all she wrote! I was going to use this for hats for the girls, but now I'm leaning towards a nice scarf, maybe on the bias so the stripes slant? Or maybe worked lengthwise so there are really long skinny stripes? Decisions, decisions...

(yum)