Something Blue

I recently found myself in need of a new spinning project so I went digging in the stash and came up with a lovely blue Merino from Gritty Knits. Are you tired of hearing about them? No? Good. I'm in the Merino-of-the-Month club with them and so I have an abundance of amazing Merino from them and I love spinning it so when I found the braid of September 2010 floating around in the stash and took a look at its amazing blues I knew I had to get it spun up.
I started with a 4-ounce braid (which I forgot to take a photo of. sorry.) and split it the long way into about 6 pieces. It naturally wants to split this way so it's easy to do and ensures lots of color movement in your finished yarn.

With the grey weather lately I've struggled to get decent pictures so I've been using flash but that doesn't always give me the best quality. This photo is pretty accurate color-wise though.

I wanted to do something different so I drafted out each of these balls into a soft fluffy cloud.

Prince William really liked it. I wanted to make it a little easier to spin though and somewhat portable which a big pile of fiber really isn't so I wound it onto an empty bobbin.

It was very fluffy and much more full than this at many points. I put the bobbin on the built-in lazy Kate on the front of my wheel and gently tugged at it to get more as I spun along. Drafting like this really made the spinning quick and easy and made it even more joyful to spin.
Here are the singles, ready to be plied.

I did a simple two-ply because I knew I wanted the lovely blues and bluish-greens to blend together to make a lovely finished yarn.

You know what?

It did. Here is the finished yarn. It's about 412 yards so a nice fingering weight and I love it! It's colors are so similar that it makes for a very soft and subtle variation. It would work great for almost any project, even one that needs a semi-solid so I can't wait to find just the right thing to knit with it. In the meantime, it can be art on my coffee table.