no such thing as bad yarn? au contraire.

I plied the yarn from Monday night. Remember when I said this was the worst yarn I've made in a month? Turns out I grossly underestimated this yarn. It's the worst yarn I've made ever. Even my very first yarn, as wonky as it was, at least had some structural integrity. The junk I made Monday night must have broken at least twenty times while I was trying to ply it, maybe more. I kept plying it anyway, who knows why. It's totally useless yarn. It would be good to send to your knitting enemy, but otherwise I can't think of a single thing to do with it. It's 58 yards of wasted wool. It's pretty, too, more's the pity.


The good news is, my yarn equipment is starting to arrive. My scale came yesterday! This is the first thing in a long time that's arrived before I was expecting it. It's a My Weigh 7001, which has a 15-pound capacity and accuracy down to the gram or .1 ounce. It's not legal for trade, but I plan to sell the yarn by the yard anyway, so the approximate weight is fine. Plus this scale is accurate enough for calculating postage, which will certainly come in handy. Very psyched. Since none of the yarn has shown up yet, I was going around weighing everything I could get my hands on: a pack of crackers, a pear, taco seasoning, the accessories that came with the scale. I even weighed the bad yarn, although I don't remember what the result was. Anyway, the scale is very compact and comes with a plastic bowl, an envelope holder, and a mailing tube holder, all of which will come in handy for keeping stuff from falling off while you're trying to weigh it. It switches among a bunch of different units, too, including grams, kilograms, ounces, and pounds. Oh yeah, and it doesn't take some bizarre-o never-to-be-found-again special battery either--just regular old AA, or plug it into the wall with the optional A/C adaptor, which you'd have to be crazy not to buy. It's only $5. I wish I could get one for my iPod that cheap.
Anyway, I did end up doing some new spinning, too, but it's shy and wouldn't show up in a picture. I had had enough of the brown mix for one night, so I broke out the 8 oz. of BFL I bought from Little Barn over the weekend. This yarn will be the companion to the yarn I made from the Hoobody roving. I want to do all of it in active singles and make a crazy skewing scarf.
The BFL is actually remarkably similar to the brown mix, as it turns out--so similar that I suspect the brown mix is in fact BFL. At the moment I'm very much over the inchworm technique, so I decided to try my longdraw approximation on it. I thoroughly fluffed up the roving, got it going from the side, and watched the magic work. Very cool. The little bit that I did last night was a bit unstable and should probably not be used as singles, but I bet if I do more tonight it will be usable. I was just starting to get to that point last night when I realized it was 9:30 and I was exceptionally late for dinner. It was good to do something that worked before calling it a night, though. Now I just have to remember to make a label for other stuff. I'm thinking "Bad yarn, give to enemy" should do the trick.