Spinning up May 2020's fibre from the fibre club

I am so glad to have reached the point where I have spun up the last full braid of fibre that I purchased directly from a previous supplier that I had issues with.  I wish I could say that that is it with fibres from her but I can't.  I still have one double braid lot that I bought second-hand and I still have fibres in my "ingredients cupboard" that are from her, although they are going down gradually.

This one is "Athena" and from May 2020.  I wanted to keep a lot of the colour separation to create an interesting yarn rather than one that is blended together to make a boring "beige yarn". I split it in half across the length, creating two shorter pieces, and then each half I split down into lots of long thin strips to keep as few colours as possible in each piece.  

I spun it finely and plied to produce a yarn of Light fingering weight of 103g/510m.  The fibre content is 40% 18.5 micron Merino, 20% Alpaca, 20% Baby Camel, 20% Mulberry Silk.

Spinning the 12 Days of Advent 2019

Spurred on by my recent spinning of the previous years' 12 Days of Advent set of fibres I decided to tackle this one which was produced the year after and was the last one that I purchased from that particular supplier before I parted custom with her.  It seems that I didn't make such detailed notes about the different options available that year on my stash page for this fibre but my chosen pack was called "Frost Fair" and the inspiration for the colours is the picture below.  Having said that I have discovered that I did, however, write a blog post about the options available back in the day and that can be found here.

The main braid is 60% 18.5 micron Merino, 20% Yak, 20% Tussah Silk and the 11 x 20g smaller packets are all 14.5 micron Merino, which is also known as Ultrafine Merino.  The original post that I wrote showing all of the fibres in my pack after I opened them can be found here. Apparently, according to the notes that I took from the supplier at the time, the colours are all on a theme but I haven't managed to work out what that "theme" is yet.  Answers on a postcard to...

This time I started with the main braid first and I spun this over-the-fold and chain plied due to the short Yak fibres and to try and keep colours together as much as I could.  It's lovely and soft and spun up to sport weight 102g/293m.

I spun all of the 14.5 micron merino fibre bumps in the same way, over-the-fold and chain plied.  I did have a few problems along the way with it breaking on me during the ply and this was due to it being underspun in parts.  I'm not a fan of such fine Merino, or at least not the stuff from this supplier, the fibres were very short in parts which didn't help in keeping the yarn in one piece.  Personally I prefer something with much more body and more hardwearing.

So this...

became this

All of the Merino spun up to sport weight.  At some point in the future I will figure out what I will make with it but I doubt that I will use all of the smaller merino bumps together in one project.  I'm glad it is all spun up now though because about half way through it began to feel like a tedious chore but I was determined to push on through and complete it.