Spun! To the Extreme! (Though, Really, Not Quite as Extreme as Some Other Spinners Around Here...)

So then. Over in the Southern Cross Fibre group on Ravelry, there’s a spinalong going on that’s a little Extreme.

Extreme Plying, that is.

I think it started with the two spins you see at the bottom of the post here from Smoking Hot Needles. These were both of the January colorways from SCF Club, and when Ms. Smoking Hot posted them over in the forums, I think there was a collective sigh of Oh, how cool.

What she’s done there is to make a two-ply yarn and then n-ply the two-ply. This was subsequently deemed an “M-ply,” and launched the whole nuttiness that is a spinalong where you’ve got various people making crazy yarns. (There is a 108-ply yarn there. I’m not kidding. If you’re a Raveler, you can see it here.)

Well, all of this is just too much fun not to join in, right? So I looked at my January SCF Club (Vista on superwash BFL…just 4 ounces), and thought, I want to try this m-ply nonsense too!

So. I got the wheel set up. Spin, spin, spin. And there were four bobbins of singles.

Ply, ply, ply. And there were two bobbins of two-ply.

Ply some more, ply some more, ply….OOPS! OH NOS!!!! I’M GOING THE WRONG WAY!!!!

Yes. When you’re doing a cabled yarn, or any yarn that involves plying multiple times, unless you’re intentionally adding extra twist, you need to change directions each time. In this case, that means singles clockwise, two-ply counterclockwise, n-ply clockwise again.

I accidentally went counterclockwise twice, and ended up with a crazy bit of overtwisted nonsense.

M-ply fail.

So I sat and thought for a second. What to do… What to do… What to do…

Well, as you can see, I wound it into cake. Then I plied from the outside and inside of the cake. (Let’s not speak of how frustrating this was, with the extreme amount of twist that was in that cake, making it into a pigtail mess of mess that had to be untangled every 2 seconds the entire time…ugh. Ugh. There were no tears, but there might have been some bad words.)

What we ended up with is a two-plied, n-plied two-ply–just a bit more extreme than the extreme I was going for:

About 45 yards’ worth.

Obviously, super-bulky.

That one gives you a nice look at the individual strands. I really like the texture, and I know you can’t touch it, but if you could touch it, I promise you’d be surprised by how soft it turned out after all that twisting.

Not a lot of yardage. I’m thinking…a bracelet? Maybe with a funky button closure?

Happy Weekend, Friends!

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