Pullovers finished just in time for too-hot weather

I gleefully finished two pullovers in May.  I even wore them a couple times.  I know it will soon be too hot to wear them. Fortunately, it will get cold again.

 A Chantalle (that I fear is actually too big for me... but I'm not willing to concede that quite yet)

And my self-designed Cafe Au Lait top knit in boucle (what was I thinking when I picked that up? Well, I was thinking there was a lot of it - enough for a sweater - and it was dirt cheap second-hand) and brown chenille from a destash.  The chenille colourway was "Starbucks" and when I saw it with the off white boucle I knew I had to make a coffee inspired top.  It's a basic contiguous shoulders top-down construction (with bust accommodations) featuring stripes with a slipped extra YO of the boucle that crosses over the stripe to break it up... simple hey? If I write it up, I promise to give a better description of the stitch pattern I made up.
After the BO I decided I didn't like how the bottom edge flipped and I wanted a wee bit more length, so I added a crochet border featuring puff stitch "beans".

Not for me, but in line with other things I knit in time for it to not be cold,
my mom got this vest/shell in super bulky yarn - as per her request

And one of my dance mates / fellow twins-mama will be getting this hat she ordered (because I apparently can't get enough of knitting brioche hats).  This one is Frost on Roses:

4-ply Chain

Fellow spinners, have you heard the chatter this past season about 4-ply chain-plied yarn? I did, and I thought I would try it out on the thin singles of alpaca-corn fibre (ingeo) I had spun up on the wheel.  It seemed like an interesting way to try and balance the evenness of the final yarn when my singles were not consistent (and I blame the fibre/roving/blend for some of that).

Spinning singles in progress

The basic process is straightforward if you've chain plied before. The only difference is that you work from two singles and alternate which single is chained.
In theory this could be done at the wheel. I've chain plied at the wheel (and on the fly with my spindles) many times using long chains.  However, I wasn't up to the task of trying to alternate chained singles as I plied.  I chose to work a plying ball in advance, and even then I wish I'd done things a little differently to keep the two bobbins separate. For example, I should have used two shoe boxes spread apart to make sure the two plies wouldn't start wrapping around each other.  I also wish I hadn't tried this with a yarn that already had a lot of twist in it. I was reminded that I should really find a way to keep tension on my bobbins (a brake band of sorts) when plying.  In short, I only prepared several meters of chained 4-plies before I decided I should take my sample to the wheel and test if I even liked the plied result before I continued with the full bobbins.

I did like the result of a nice fingering weight yarn. A multi-ply yarn certainly helps in balancing out uneven singles. However, I really did not enjoy the process of preparing the plying ball.  I decided to keep things simple for the rest of this yarn and whip up a couple bobbins of 2-ply instead so I could move on to other projects.  Other than making a more consistent finished yarn, there wasn't a lot of interesting benefit to using the technique with this yarn and it wasn't as simple as a 3-ply chained yarn.

Knit sample of the chained 4-ply, ball of 4-ply, and 2 full bobbins of 2-ply lace.

I'm quite happy with the lace yarn.

I'm still thinking of the chained 4-ply opportunities with colour work. The effort could certainly be worth it to play with colour, like a type of fractal yarn. I'd need to get more colours in my stash to try it out, although for a fractal I'm imagining you wouldn't want to alternate which thread is chained. I'd be interested, for example, in keeping one thread different and single while chaining the other.  Hmm, thoughts. I have some playing to do, even if it's with different fibres. Next time, however, I won't work with high-twist singles and I will keep my bobbins separated.

Blending

Having blended together some fibres (usually alpaca with wool) I decided that, with proper hand-carders to work with now, I should try my hand at blending different fibres.  There are a few braids of wool roving in my stash that I considered playing with, but since I'd clearly not started any of them it seemed what I needed to do was buy some wool with the intention of blending. Additionally, the wool I was thinking of is 8oz (which I'd rather keep for a single project) and is already brown/neutral - which would hide the additional fibres.  I want to be able to see my blending and have visual evidence in the yarn.

So, some of my Christmas yarn shopping included a braid of green BFL from Sweet Georgia.  I have silk noil (top) and yak down (bottom) in my stash from a destash purchase long ago that have been waiting for me to blend. I also thought it was time to blend in some angora (left).

(Yes, my home is dry. The angora tells you so.)

I experimented a little with how I wanted to layer, whether I wanted to use some or all of the fibres, and if I liked the spinning.  I settled on a thin layer of BFL followed by very thin amounts of the other 3, with a little more of the angora, and then another thin layer of BFL on top before carding into rolags.

The resulting singles are tweedy with the noil; I like the texture.  The yak down is blending in quite well and the luster of the BFL is complimented by the other fibres.  The natural, light colour of the other fibres is enhancing the lovely Botanical (colourway) green of the BFL.

I started spinning on my homemade top-whorl, but I found the speed was too fast and I didn't have the sort-of-long-draw control I wanted for this blend of short and long fibres. I wound on to a medium sized Turkish spindle and this is working well. I prefer my spindles for experimenting with smaller amounts of fibre, especially when my wheel bobbins are occupied with large lace projects (as usual). So far I have prepared 12 rolags. For the sake of testing I'll spin 6+6 and ply to see what yarn I achieve.
I also timed how long it took me to prepare 8 rolags. Or, more accurately, I tested to see how many rolags I could make while watching Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (a 55min episode, but only about 50min of rolag-making).  I made 8. That's roughly 6 minutes each (6 and a quarter, but my measurements of time in this case are all approximate so I'll stick with 6 min), which is 4 minutes faster than combing and carding fleece (from my previous post).  It takes a lot more carding to blend to my satisfaction whereas it's usually the combing that takes the most time with the fleece.

Final Yarn Update:

The remaining BFL, blended, yielded another 29 rolags. With all the fibre spun up I have about 250m of squishy worsted-aran weight yarn.