Spinning with Sock Singles

The Sock Summit marketplace was a fiber addict's delight. There must have been nine or ten long aisles of vendors.

I spent half of my budget by the second aisle. (Has this ever happened to you?)

What was in aisle two was a great booth by Wool and Company (They came all the way to Portland from Geneva, Illinois.) They had some spectacular sock yarn! What captured my heart was a lovely sock yarn with a single ply. It's called Poems Sock. I got a skein in the colorway called Tropical Sunset and another in the one called Cruise.

There are two very appealing things about this yarn: the colors are stunning and it is a single ply.

You may remember from this post what my attitude is about knitting wool socks. I don't do it so much. (Besides, I still have so much cotton for socks from the Liz Claiborne sweaters that I recycled.)

What I was thinking, in slacker mode, was this:

Say, that sock single ply is about the diameter of what I've been spinning lately for plying. Hmmm, I have some roving in that colorway.

Hey! I could spin one single and then ply it with this sock yarn and see how it comes out. That way it would only take me half as much time to create a 2-ply yarn!

(OMG, I could even ply from two skeins of sock singles and not do any spinning at all!) Well, that would be dumb--I like spinning!

The Poems Sock in Tropical Sunset is in the center. The roving lying around it is the Autumn colorway from Abstract Fiber in Alpaca/Merino/Silk.

There are 459 yards in the Poems Sock skein (perfectly enough for a pair of socks), but for my purposes there was plenty to ply with my four ounces of roving.

Here's a photo of one of the skeins of yarn that I made:
The roving was split into pencil sized sections lengthwise and then it was spun with short color repeats. The sock yarn has very long color repeats, so this created some great color gradations.

Next post I'll show you the scarf I've been making from it.