Maisie has asked for a pair of blue socks. I let her pick out a skein and we wound it up together. I traced around her food and took some measurements. All that’s needed is a bit of math and I can cast on.

A couple of years ago I spun up two skeins of some amazingly soft superwash Bluefaced Leichester roving into the most beautiful twine you've ever seen. It was my first foray into Navajo plying and I didn't really care for the result. My singles had looked lovely but the finished yarn was coarse and rough and completely lacking in any sort of bounce or fluffiness. It was also unbalanced to an incredible degree. The plying had been fiddly and difficult and I didn't think it was really worth all the work. The finished skeins were photographed and sat on my desk for well over a month without ever being blogged. I couldn't figure out if I had over plied or over spun and after a while the skeins were shoved into a drawer in my studio and consciously forgotten … too pretty to actually throw away but not something I was ever going to want to knit with.

I came across them for the first time in a while when I was hunting up something for another project. I pulled them out and looked at them and wondered what I had done wrong. I still loved the colours - juicy pink and orange that I'd always pictured as the garter stitch yolk to a simple grey sweater. Perhaps they could be rewashed and really roughly finished for a bit more bounce and fluffiness or maybe I could unply the yarn and redo it as a two-ply.

And that was the first time I really looked at the structure of the yarn I'd made ...

!

Somehow I'd managed to ply my yarn in the same direction I'd spun it. I'm still amazed when I think of this. If I'd been doing a two-ply, like I've done before, I probably would have spotted my mistake quickly but I was learning something new and expecting it to be awkward and unusual feeling and just didn't clue in. I used my fingers to test ply a little section in the other direction.

Magically the yarn had more bounce and fluffiness. I realized what I needed to do. I undid a skein, wound it into a ball and sat down at my wheel. I started replying my yarn and then stopped to check what I was getting. It seemed fluffier. I kept going.

I usually let yarn sit on the bobbin for a while after I spin or ply it. Mostly this is laziness on my part but I also think it helps to set the twist and gives the fibres a chance to settle into their new orientation before I wind them off onto the niddy-noddy. I was too anxious to see the result this time and wound off right away. I gave the skein a nice bath and thwacked it against the sink a few times (this is supposed to up the fluffiness or something) and let it dry. The next day I set the replied skein next to its partner. I was amazed.

Fluffiness! Bounce! (And what really surprised me) Brighter colours!

It's still not great yarn, there are areas that are underplyed and a few nubs that stick out, but I'd turned yarn that was hardly fit for handling into something I'd be delighted to both knit with and wear. Perhaps there will be a pink yolked sweater somewhere in my future after all.

Fred helped me photograph some new, Olympic inspired, mini-skeins. All skeins were safely retrieved after the shoot.