Handspun Friday - Polwarth Fiber

I've finished HALF of my FatCatKnits Mixed Blessings Fiber Club Spring/Summer 2010 fiber. This first installment was Polwarth fiber, VERY nice to spin, and I love how it feels as yarn too. Polwarth fiber comes from a mixed breed, Saxon Merino and Lincoln, and is over a hundred years old. For me that says, it's almost as soft as Merino, but hopefully will hold up better with wear. Because - I made a sock out of my spun yarn. So lets hope I'm right!



I was drawn to the red colorway, but liked the purple colorway also after it was spun. As I said before I've only spun half of my 10 oz so far.
At first I thought I was going to do a cabled yarn again. Make a 2-ply with each colorway and cable those together. While I was spinning the singles however, I remembered something Dave, a fellow spinner and knitter showed us in FatCatKnits forum some time ago.
He made lovely yarn, navajo plied, with TWO strands held together. He was very patient with me, asking again, and again, how it's done.

This is also my first spun and finished yarn after Denny arrived on the scene. Part of the spinning time he slept beside me on the sofa, once both of them slept beside me on the sofa. Yep! Nice!



Anyway, I finished the purple singles second, and was so eager to give this plying method a try, that I let it sit only over night. It started out very well, and I thought, oh wow, that's not so hard, but soon I was entangled in a big mess. The purple singles had so much life in them, and of course so much twist, I had to break it off.

You see the small finished skein, up in the mosaic, that's the "4-ply", navajo plied yarn with 2 strands held together. It's not much, but I got the idea, and I will definitely try this again, with well aged singles.

So, I could still make the cabled yarn, but I didn't want to any more. I navajo plied the singles, and I was glad, because I liked both finished yarns in the skein very much, again the red a little more than the purple.

As you can see in the fiber, the red colorway has some colors which are the same as the purple colorway. This told me, that if used together there was not much contrast. I wanted to know for sure, and cast on for another Burning stripes sock right away. Well, no surprise there. You can hardly see stripes, you'll have to look very carefully were one colorway ends, and the other begins.



I've knit each colorway for four rounds. The contrasting stripe in the back is not very much contrasting at all. I knit the heel flap and heel turn with the red colorway only, as well as the toes.



I think I would have liked to use the red colorway on its own very much. Oh well, too late now.
Now that the first sock is finished, I need to spin the yarn for the second sock. How long is that going to take me?

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