Tour de Fleece, day 20

In the spirit of full disclosure, I really started the plying after dinner on day 19 in a fit of optimism and total understatement of how very much singles were crammed on those two bobbins.  Sure, I'll finish that tonight!  Famous last words.  :P  I'd made it through 3 of the 5 colours in the progression before I was falling asleep at the wheel and decided it might be best to finish up today.

I had planned from the beginning to not try to line up the colours in the progression while I was plying, as I wanted there to be some overlap and blending.  It was really interesting watching the changes as I plied. The blues (first colour up) matched up almost perfectly.  The light green was slightly longer on one bobbin, and then things got completely muddled about halfway through the dark green.  It appears that my first set of singles wasn't consistent in size and got a bit bigger as the bobbin emptied, so the second set of singles, which I'd matched to the size of the end of the first bobbin ended up having quite a bit more yardage.  This is a good argument right here for not letting a project languish for a year between spinning sets of singles.  :(  Probably also a good argument for starting to keep a spinning log and a sample piece to spin to, which is something I keep meaning to do.....

Anyway, by about halfway through the dark green on my thinner singles, I was already on the brown on the thicker ones.  I had a wee bit of overlap where both singles were on brown at the same time, then the first bobbin ran out and I had to start improvising.  Without breaking the one single that was attached to the plied yarn, I wound the remainder off into an Andean plying bracelet (this is a wee bit awkward while still attached to the wheel, but it is doable if you're pigheaded patient enough), spit spliced the end of the first single to the end of the second, then finished plying from the bracelet.  Voila!  One continuous skein, no knots required.  Since I hadn't yet gotten through the last of the brown and into the orange, it actually transitioned quite smoothly and still gave me a good section of pure orange to end the skein.   It is intended for a shawl, probably top down, to showcase the colour progression.  Final yardage count is 600, at about sport weight, so it should be a good sized, snuggly warm shawl.