I've spun a rainbow

........ and I am ridiculously pleased with it.  Despite the fact that the law of beginner spinner struck and I didn't get what I set out to achieve.  Though I did, accidentally, get a very beautiful barber pole effect on the majority of the yarn.  

I set out to spin this one as three rainbows with the colours kept clear and split my roving extremely carefully to achieve this.  BUT, it wasn't the most obedient roving I've worked with and the colours kept getting themselves mixed as I drafted due to my inexperienced drafting technique and the roving being a bit compacted and awkward to draft out.  It also has silk in it which is really long fibres and I kept falling back to my default position of drafting distance which was probably a bit short for silk. 

I must have picked up the roving for one of the repeats on the second ply and inadvertently reversed the colour order, or I've somehow got very much more yardage of some of the colours out of one ply than out of the other, plus some issues with drafting which meant colours got a bit mixed at the point where the colour changes happened, and all this has meant that I seem to have ended up with a clear rainbow with two plies the same colour obediently lined up, followed by a considerably greater length of the exact barber pole look that I was desperate to achieve but not necessarily on this project.     

I love it anyway, and seem to have a decent yardage, despite only having about 30 grammes of fibre. 
I am not sure if the shawl I am planning for this should start from the clear colours and work onto the barber pole section, or vice versa.  Should be easier to decide once I ball it up as it will show more clearly how the colours will lie in the finished item that the skein does.

The singles were spindle spun then I plied on the wheel.  Its a two ply and I think I got it a bit better plied than the mermaids lair that I spun last year.  It is approximately sock weight/heavy lace, with some spots that are lace and a few odd lumpy bits that are nearly double knit.  However, overall its more even than some I've spun.  And I think it should knit up OK. 

 But first, the current shawl needs to be completed and I am planning to knit some small, quick projects from some of the small skeins that resulted from my earlier spinning attempts since the bowl of practice skeins is overflowing.