I plied the very fine merino yesterday, in several hour-long stints. I used the lace flyer’s 20:1 ratio to make the process a bit quicker, but it still took about 3 hours. That’s with a reasonable speed of treadling, but not super-fast manic.

That’s the trouble with fine spinning – lots of effort and it doesn’t look like much (until the very final stage when you have a completed lace scraf.) Anyway, 3 hours of plying and the bobbin was nowhere near half-full, but that was all I’d spun. I wound it off into a skein and weighed it – 30 grams.

I’ll need more for the project I have in mind – probably about the same amount again. However, this time I’m going to weigh out the fibre beforehand, put it in two labelled bags for each ply, and then I’ll know as I’m spinning how much I’ve done.

I’ll wash the skein this morning and hopefully it will dry in the sunroom during the day, then I’ll photograph it.

After that effort, I got out the silk caps that I bought the other week, and spun some of them (while watching the episode of Taggart about the community devasted by foot and mouth.) The spinning of the caps went better than the couple of previous times I’ve done it, so I almost enjoyed the process!