It Looked A Lot Darker At The Store...

Louet Black Norwegian Wool & sweetgeorgia yarns merino (silver)

I've finished spinning up one bag of that Black Norwegian Wool, with a total of 201g between all 4 skeins. Some of the remaining 24g had gone to the samples I spun up prior to doing the entire batch, but a bunch of it was lost during skeining on the niddy noddy because it was underspun. It held together fine while on the wheel, but I think the combination of not-quite-enough-twist + this stuff was top, not carded fiber + relatively short staple = big fluffy mess of tufts of fiber coming apart as I wound the skein. In the end, I added some twist to 3 of these skeins, giving up on the idea of winding them as is after the first one was done.

Not-so-black Norwegian Wool

After a good soak, the water came out a yellowish tinge - lanolin, I'm assuming? - and the yarn didn't twist in on itself at all once hung up on hangers, even without any weights. Hopefully that's a good sign that it won't bias too much when I actually knit with the stuff. On the upside, they're very soft and feel light and lofty! They came out pretty much exactly the way I wanted them to (if you ignore the inconsistencies in thickness), in the skein. We'll have to see how they knit up. On the downside, I kind of didn't realize how brown - not dark dark dark almost-black brown, just a very dark brown - this fiber was. 'Kind of' because I knew it was a dark brown from the outset, but it still looked a lot more like black down in the basement of Romni's. So the turtleneck is probably going to come out as a dark brown, almost-but-not-quite-existentialist, sartorial statement.

Speaking of existentialism, there was a little anecdote in At The Existentialist Cafe about Sartre being commissioned to write a preface for someone's book or another, and a while later returning to his editor with a 700-pg draft, which subsequently became its own book - I didn't note whether or not Sartre ever delivered on the preface though. Man after my own heart.

sweetgeorgia yarns merino fiber (silver)

And now back to the spinning: the merino, spun on a drop spindle many many many moons ago (2014, according to my ravelry handspun project notes), held up much better. Only one section that came apart out of the entire cop. I'm probably going to just spin the rest of it on the wheel, aiming for a 2-ply laceweight yarn, I think.