Chain-plied mystery fiber, from a plying ball!

 

The finished yarn.  

Chain-plied, of course, as it is my favorite plying method.  But this time, I plied from a plying ball!  

I only had a vague idea of what a plying ball was before yesterday.  I knew some sort of vague hand-wavey explanations of how to create one, but hadn't made my own just yet.  But yesterday I found myself with no extra bobbins and a single that wanted to be plied up, so I made a plying ball to free up my bobbin.  

If you've ever chain-plied from a bobbin and also wound your own ball of yarn, you are fully qualified to wind your very own plying ball for chain plying.  

Here's the very start of mine, winding the ball directly from my spinning wheel:

And the final product! 

I wound my plying ball very tightly.  Usually when hand-winding a ball of yarn, you don't want to stretch the yarn when winding.  That will, given enough time, make the yarn lose elasticity and spring.  But since I knew I'd be plying immediately, I wasn't concerned with that at all. 

Winding it tightly also helped keep the energized singles from tangling.  As you can see in the ball-in-progress picture, the singles really want to tangle up.   

I kept the brake band on my spinning wheel while I chain "plied".  That helped keep the bobbin from running wild.  

Plying was very fast.  Usually when chain plying, I end up needing to use a slower speed on my wheel to form the chains.  But when using the plying ball, I found myself using the same speed that I used to spin the singles.  

The yarn was slightly underplied initially.  

After washing, it was very balanced though. 

I am very happy with how the yarn turned out, however, there's not very much yardage!  

I cast on a hat, and realized that I would have enough for maybe three-quarters of a hat.  Definitely more than half a hat.  But also definitely not enough for a full hat.  

Not sure what my plans for this yarn are anymore.  I was really looking forward to an aran-weight hat!  

The yarn is currently in time out for not producing enough yardage for a hat.