Just finished spinning my first skein of yarn for the new shawl…

…and my, is it lovely.

It’s a blend of black satin angora, white bombyx silk, and 15-micron merino wool (gray). A nice, lustrous pewter gray with just enough color variation to be interesting, and obscenely soft. It has a nice soft angora halo to it–a little spikier than regular angora, but still very nice. I can’t wait to start knitting with it. 🙂

Oh, and did I mention? The entire 225-yard skein weighs less than two sheets of paper. 🙂

At this rate, an entire 1800-yard shawl (which is a pretty good size) would weigh only 2.75 ounces. Not bad, eh? It’s the finest I’ve spun yet. (10,200 yards per pound, for those interested in such things.)

But I’m more happy over the quality of the yarn–it is more softly spun/airier than what I did for the spiral shawl, and it’s also more evenly spun. I’ve been spinning this woolen-style (long draw), so I’m especially pleased at having managed to keep the yarn diameter even. This has been a much more technically difficult yarn than that for the spiral shawl, and I’m quite happy with it.

(By the way, people say it’s hard to spin superfine yarns. It actually isn’t. It’s just a matter of getting used to it…the easiest yarn is whatever you normally spin. For me, it’s much easier to spin superfine than it is to spin sweater-weight–my fingers naturally gravitate towards superfine since I spin that way normally.)

Now it’s a matter of sitting down and working out the pattern I want to knit…I have an idea of what I want, but need to sit down and have a conversation with the yarn, to see what it wants. No sense in arguing with your materials. 😉

Lots more, but I’ll have to write it later; tomorrow morning I meet with my career coach, and then have Yet Another Interview at Openwave in the afternoon. Tomorrow is a second-round interview with Ofoto–wish me luck!!

Tien