I finished this sweater before Christmas but I only just got around to taking proper photos. I'm really pleased with how this came out. I was a bit worried about how the yarn was turning out when I was plying and finishing it but now that it's knitted and he's wearing it I think it looks really good. I changed the pattern to make it a bit smaller and I continued the cable down the back. Also I changed the sleeves because I didn't want to have to sew in sleeves that were shaped with a bo2 curve so I made the cap a bit smoother.

I modified the pattern by making it a bit smaller and I continued the cable up the back rather than just up the front. This is the entire body, there are no side seams. This is quite a bulky yarn so I think the fewer seams the better. I'm still worried about running out of yarn though so I think I might stop working on the body and start on the arms next so I can make the body a bit shorter if it looks like I'm running low on yarn.

As you can see I've picked a pattern for this yarn. It's the one-cable-cardigan which I found on Ravelry.com. Here is the ravelry link and here is a link to the blog of the designer. I think I'll probably add a few large buttons down the front but no need to worry about that for the moment since I'm not sure if I have quite enough yarn. Kim is a bit smaller than the smallest size though so I'm hoping if I make it comfortable but not baggy I'll have enough. Oh and here are a few photos of the finished yarn and one of the gauge square which actually looks a bit better than I was expecting.

Well I finally managed to finish spinning and plying this yarn. I decided to three ply it in the end since some of it was spun quite fine and because I read several spinners' blogs who were raving how much better they liked knitting with their hand spun when it was three ply. The plying process took much longer than I was expecting. Most of Saturday afternoon and evening and even a bit into Sunday morning were absorbed by the process; my bobbin is not particularly large so I had to stop rather frequently to wind up the yarn on my swift. I did manage to get it all plied and wound though and today I 'finished' it. Since I spun using a woolen method I decided to try to felt it a bit during the finishing process so I used alternating hot and cold rinses with some hand agitating. After hand washing 14 skeins of wool my forearms are a bit sore (mostly because of squeezing out excess water between and after rinses I think). Next time I will definitely go with the potato masher idea on the website where I read about felting woolen yarns. I did smack the skeins against the shower floor and snap them open a few times to set the twist so I'm sure you'll all be happy to hear that there was plenty of water flying and I was a bit wet by the end of it all. I also spun the skeins in the washing machine which significantly shortened the drying time (although unfortunately Kim didn't make that suggesting until after I'd tried to wring out as much extra water as I could manually).

Overall I'm reasonably happy with the yarn as a beginners attempt but I think I probably should have plied them a bit more. Also because the yarn is woolen rather than worsted (meaning that I didn't align all the fibers before adding the twist) and also because I did a but of fulling it is a rather fuzzy yarn. Also some of the color variation in the original fleece seems to have gotten a bit lost and the yarn looks a bit dingy rather than blended. Perhaps I could have done more about that during carding. Below is a photo although I had to use the flash so the colors are a bit lighter than the actual yarn. I'll try to take some more photos this week; when I checked a little while ago the yarn was mostly dry so hopefully I'll be able to knit up a swatch this week and see how it looks.

I'm almost finished spinning this yarn, the bag that started as raw wool is almost full of of spun singles and I just have one shoe box full of rollags left. Granted it is the shoe box that my boots came in so it's not exactly a small box but at least I've finished carding. I'm thinking of making it a 3-ply yarn but I'm going to finish spinning and then see how it looks. I'm hoping to be able to make a sweater for Kim but I have no idea how much I've spun so we'll see.

I've been working on spinning this stuff for a while now and I've finally gotten through one whole bag. I started with two full bags so you know what that means: one more bag to go. I've been trying to spin it quite fine so I'm thinking of three plying it but we'll see how it looks when I finally get it all spun. I'm really hoping to have enough to make a proper jumper when I'm done.