I washed and am currently blocking the swatches. Then I realised that I couldn’t retake the swatch photos, because the swatches are currently pinned with blocking sticks to a Styrofoam block.

This is so not my day.

OTOH, the n-ply swatch seems to have softened up. The two-ply hasn’t really redistributed its unevenness as much as I’d hoped, though; it really is an issue of thick/thin yarn. (I apologise for the orange towel. It’s the current scrap towel in the bathroom and so was what I had at hand when the swatches were rinsed and needed to be dried.)

That’s the two-ply on the left and the n-ply on the right. The border on the n-ply looks a bit cockeyed because I was knitting three stitches on one side and four on the other, and I switched them accidentally after the rows of straight knit stitch in the middle. So it’s thicker on the upper left and lower right. Not a true reflection of how the border will look in the finished product, because I’ll be doing the full stitch count and won’t be having to make up numbers on the fly. (I did learn, and subtracted a stitch from my cast-on for the two-ply sample, which is why the borders at the top and bottom are even.)

I really don’t know. The n-ply looks crisper and the pattern is really textured. The two-ply looks softer and the pattern is somewhat blurred. They’re about the same to touch.

While the swatches dry completely, this is as good a place as any to paste this reply I recently made in a Ravelry forum. Someone was prepping a fibre arts presentation for classmates in a fine arts program, and was collecting answers for the inevitable question of, “Why bother spinning when you can just go the store and buy yarn?”

As others have said, it’s a tactile thing for me. Soft, pretty fibre feels so good on my hands. It’s also very meditative. I can sit down to spin and disengage the monkey-chatter of my mind, focusing solely on the feel of the fibre in my fingers, the tension between my hands and the fibre as I draft, the slide as the drafting pulls the staples along one another, and the draw of the wheel. But it’s also pleasing on a sensory level in other ways, too: I love the rhythm my foot, hands, and body get into. I love the mellow glowing stain I used to finish my wheel. I love seeing how the colours of my fibre blend as they move from the drafting triangle and begin to twist together, and I love seeing how the tones and hues of the new single wrap around the core of my bobbin. I even love the whooshing sound the wheel makes (just not the squeak that develops as the orifice spins in the cup until I dab a bit of Vaseline on it).

I’m not much of a knitter, so while I’m currently working on a specific yarn to use for a project, that’s not really part of my thing. I spin for others, though.

And yes, there is a large dose of “I made something useful out of fluff!” as well as “I made something beautiful!” that goes along with loving the process.