Summer Skin Spun

Finally finished spinning this SweetGeorgia merino braid (colourway "Summer Skin": how appropriate)!

Finally! Just short of a full 2 years later and I have finally (finally!) finished spinning this SweetGeorgia merino braid! That feels good. (For the time being, let's just forget about the other braid I got at the time, which remains quite unspun.)

This colourway is beautiful, and I'm really wondering why it took me this long to finish it up. Everything spun up very easily, and any globs that stuck together were very likely my own fault. I had a very short learning curve with this on the Lendrum after the coopworth - thank goodness - so that probably contributed to how little time it took me to spin up this half of the braid. Very little colour came out in the finishing soak (very glad, after what happened with the shawl).

Spun on my new-ish Lendrum!

I divided the remaining fibre (I spun about half of it on my drop spindles last year) into three parts, then plied the 3 strands together. The larger skein (36g) is the result of that; it's much more balanced, hanging straight down even before soaking. Then there's the mini skein on the left, which was navajo-plied using the leftovers from the two other bobbins. I really need to work on my n-plying skills. I don't know if you can see, but I can't seem to get the hang of coordinating my speed of making those loops (quite slow) and my speed of treadling (much faster) to get an even yarn. Before soaking, snapping, whacking, and hanging it with a couple of hanger weights, it kinked in on itself a lot right after removing it from the chair (my makeshift niddy-noddy). It should be interesting to see how it knits or weaves up though!

And just to wrap up, here are the skeins I spun up last year or so using my spindles:

Handspun on Houndesign spindles (Dali laceweight)

These two are going to a dear friend of mine who has just started knitting. I said I'd knit her gloves (many moons ago) using this and some of the silver SweetGeorgia, but given how long it took me to spin this braid and the fact that she took up knitting, I think it's a safer decision to just give her the handspun.