I’ve been asked, what do the sock batts spin up like? Here’s an example using one batt of the Crown Jewels Luxury Sock Blend (superwash merino and tussah silk). Top: the batts. Middle: the single. Bottom: the 2-ply sock yarn after washing.

This is a 2-ply yarn; the skein came to 145 yards, and weighs about 1.4 ounces. Later today or perhaps tomorrow, I’ll have a tube swatch photo of how this knits up on my Autoknitter (you’d be waiting a long time for me to swatch it in a hand-knit sock).

Next up, a one-ounce Franquemont Fibers hand-dyed tussah silk, 2-ply and fine:

“Look, Abby,” this one says, “It’s really past time you actually bought a macro lens.”

Here it is plied on the bobbin; this yarn annoyed me because I’ve got a chatter at top speed with the scotch tension off entirely on my Suzie Pro right now, and it’s time for extreme wheel maintenance to eradicate it.

As much as you can eradicate noise from anything that you treat the way I do that wheel, which is such a workhorse, and I swear I treat it like I was a teenager with a hopped-up Camaro constantly doing donuts in an abandoned parking lot. Honestly, when you’re treadling as fast as you can at a 32:1 ratio, to the point that you’re sweating, and getting about 90 rpm out of the drive wheel, you’ve got the flyer going almost 3000 rpm (and I want it faster! faster! GO!) the truth is it’s not likely to be “quiet.” But I want it quieted back down to flyer whir, and I could maybe get a little faster if I could get the vibration at that speed to stop.

Any guesses as to the yardage? It weighs 30 grams, or just a hair over one ounce.

I’ve skeined it, so I know the yardage, and I’ll tell you after a few guesses. I’m reasonably satisfied that this is about as fine as I can comfortably spin on a wheel right now; it’s not as fine as I can spin on a spindle.

NEWS FLASH! Melanie (PinkLemonTwist) is just about dead on; she guesses 500 yards, and the skein came to 517 yards, and thus about 8,000 ypp.

While I was plying it for 17,000 years, I kept going back and forth everywhere from 400 yards to 700 yards to about 15,576,943,824 yards given the time-slows-to-a-crawl that some plying jobs can cause. I truly had NO idea by the time I was done. None at all.