Eight ounces of spinning goes really fast when you’ve just spun 3 pounds. The new yarn for the teal cardigan spun up overnight, almost. I had two braids of fiber that were very close in color to the original, but they had been dyed months apart and on different fibers, so there was little chance of a perfect match. One of the braids looked about the same color as the original Polwarth yarn, and the other was slightly darker. I alternated back and forth between knitting the last of the original yarn into the sleeves, and plying one single from each braid together to make another 500 yards of 2-ply yarn:

Looking at it in the skein, I couldn’t tell the difference in color by eye at all; it’s about as close to a perfect match as you could hope for. This weekend, I used the new yarn to knit the last few inches of the sweater body. The join isn’t quite invisible. You can see it here, about 3 inches up from the bottom of the sweater body.

Still, it’s close enough that it echoes the color stripes in the rest of the sweater, and is pretty subtle.

I have enough of the second color to finish the sleeves, and now I find myself back at my spinning wheel working on the corespun accent yarn for the hem. I’m not very good at spinning corespun yet, but I’m slowly gaining more control. I spun a sample yesterday, using a sewing thread core to make the yarn a little finer than the last sample. I knit a swatch last night:

The unevenness in the yarn gives it a little texture, and the different fibers blended into the batt pop up in tiny sections of dark or light here and there. This particular section of the batt was mostly the main color, so there isn’t a lot of accent fiber in it, but you can see a tiny spot of the navy on the left, and a little bit of the white banana viscose in the top right. This has also taught me that I need to blend in more of the accent colors when I make a batt. I like the look less in the batt, but will like it more in the spinning.

The swatch actually encouraged me to spin a little less evenly to emphasize the texture difference, and to make sure that I include the accent fibers at pretty regular intervals to make a slightly less homogeneous fabric. (And yes, art yarn spinners can all laugh at me here, because this is really about the most controlled art yarn I’ve run into. Baby steps. Baby steps.)

Here’s the swatch with the sweater body. I’ll have to figure out my gauge conversion, and then I’ll pick up stitches around the bottom of the body and the front button band and work a garter edge in the corespun yarn. I’m also thinking that I’ll probably play with some mitered corners at the bottom of the cardigan fronts. I’ve never knit a mitered square before, so that will be a fun thing to try here. I blocked both the body and the swatch last night, so I should be ready to knit on, just as soon as I’ve finished spinning the yarn.

In the meantime, I have a couple of sleeves to knit, and then we can sum up this little game of knit-spin hopscotch with a new spring sweater.