140 grammes of merino

This particular spinning project has taken a really long time to complete because it got put down a lot whilst I did other stuff and  there's quite a large amount of yarn here.  There is about 140 grams and I (not very cleverly) decided that since my lovely IST spindle was so fab, I would use it for plying as well as spinning the yarn, rather than using my old student spindle which is much larger and heavier so has more capacity but is unnotched so once it has some weight on it, it drops and tangles and generally misbehaves.  It was a real struggle to fit that much yarn onto the small spindle and it threatened to fall off a lot.  In the end I had to do the last bit on the larger spindle, and spit splice the two bits together. 

I don't think its a true gradient yarn but I'm hoping that it will look quite close to it when knitted up.

 I lined my colours up from dark to light, split each colour as evenly as I could (which wasn't very) and attached each colour to each other in the same order to produce two balls, supposedly even sizes, ready to make a two ply.  Because the colours weren't exactly evenly split, there is a section between each solid colour where the two adjacent colours meet, making a barber pole effect that I am hoping will cause the colours to lead softly into each other and make a gradient.  Its destined to be a shawl but I have yet to decide which pattern to use or even what shape.  I am also not totally sure whether my colour changes are too long to produce the look I am going for, but we will see what happens. 

Although by no means free of flaws, and most certainly not a uniform thickness, I don't think its come out too bad at all.  Overall its a finer weight than any I've produced before and I'm fairly sure that's due to both the superior spindle and the increased practice I've had with it. 

The fibre is Merino from Wingham Woolworks, and is just over half of my purple themed bag of mixed colours bought last year.