The first Skein!

It was a big way to start the week today! I had three goals for the day at the mill:

1. Wash some alpaca fiber.
2. Get some qiviut ready for dehairing tomorrow.
3. Ply, steam and skein the 1000 yards of BFL singles I had spun up. 
Oh, and not stay at work into the wee hours of the night! I still had to cook dinner and do some housework afterall.

1 and 2 were easy enough. 3 was where the learning curve begins. Plying is a piece of cake (or so I thought). I did manage to get 4 skeins of BFL plyed up. The steamer took some time to learn. It is set up so that the yarn is pulled thru it and wound onto cones. I watched numerous videos on how to load the steamer up and get the first cone started. In the end, I did get the first cone started, but the steamer was puddling water instead of steaming yarn, so I went to plan B. Skein straight from the bobbins, wash/soak, spin them out and let them dry - old school style. The skeinerwinder machine was easy enough to figure out, although my skeins were VERY tightly wound on it. As most of us know, that much tension on yarn is never a good thing. A combination of that and what appears to be a bit of overplying - my first BFL yarn is a little kinky. And instead of a 2-ply fingering we are at a 2-ply sport. But still, an amazing day of accomplishments and learning. It can't be perfect at first try right?! I did also manage to skein and wash up some Shetland yarn I completed last week and it faired much better. 
Mitch has taught me to focus on the positives and learn from the negatives. So tomorrow will be another day. A little less tpi (twist per inch) on the yarn and playing with the skeinwinder to see if I can get it to slow down a bit. I'll leave fixing the steamer to my dear husband! What would I do without him???

Time to put the animals to bed and hit it myself. As of late I go to bed thinking about yarn and wake up ready to make more...

P.S. no housework got done. Whoops!