Snail Spirals

The grand reveal!  The yarn is done!



This is the Fiber Optic 50:50 superwash merino and bamboo top, in "Catamaran Batik", that I bought at Sock Summit.  I finished plying it Saturday morning, and it has had a nice warm bath.  It is beautiful.  That's all there is to it.  It's beautiful.  I can't believe I spun this on a spindle.

 Can you SEE how soft it is?!



Anyway, the stats.  This is a 4 oz. (114 gram) skein, and is very skinny yarn.  Ready?

It contains 2,068 yards of 2-ply.  Wowzer.

I was just spinning as fine as was comfortable, figuring I would get about 1,600 yards, based on my previous two Kuchulu skeins.  Apparently the fine merino + fine bamboo let me spin extra-fine.



As a side note, I had a terrible time photographing the colors in this yarn.  All my pictures came out too dark or too washed out or too blue or too red or too yellow.  I did some extensive adjusting in Photoshop, so if the color looks weird on your monitor, that's probably why.  In real life, the yarn is mainly turquoise and purple, with some sapphire blue and sea green.  Really, really pretty.  Imagine it somewhere in between all the pictures that are in this post.



This yarn represents a pretty large time investment:

• ~38 hours to spin the singles on my Kuchulu (calculated based on the time to spin 1 gram, tested 3 times)
• 9.5 hrs to ply on my wheel
• 0.5 hr to wind off the bobbin onto the skeinwinder
• 0.5 hr to count the wraps in the skein
• 0.5 hr to rewind the skein after washing

I am thrilled with the final yarn.  It's so soft and has such a lovely sheen.  I can't stop petting the skein. I didn't take any special care to match the color sections as I plyed, I just let the barberpoling happen as it would.  It turned out with good distinct runs of color, and should look lovely when woven.

To close, let's just take a moment to ponder the fact that 2,068 yards is 1.2 miles.  Of yarn.  Of 2-ply yarn.  That means approximately 2.4 miles of singles.  From 4 oz of fiber. Spun on a spindle.