Through thick and thin.

It's funny how all this time I tried to get my spinning as thin and even as possible just to realize that I've completely lost the ability to spin thick yarn. Well, I say lost. While my first skein was considerably thicker than what I do now, it probably wasn't very even either. However, I clearly remember it being better than this:

Fiber: Süddeutsche (South German) from Wollknoll. Yay for local products!

If I were a whimsical Etsy seller, I would now write something about how the yarn has retained a lot of the sheep's character and that I've created an interesting organic texture to bring out the natural colour. No. It just turned out very wonky. I wanted to try fulling a single, so I thought it would be better to make the yarn thicker. No wonder most commercial yarns are plied rather than singles! Still, the fulling was fun and not too bad, BUT even though every tutorial said not to be scared and that the individual strands wouldn't felt together, they slightly did for me. Not too badly, just enough to make them stick a little to one another. Maybe I overdid it? It does make the yarn soft yet very sturdy though, so I'll definitely experiment some more with it.
Characterful yarn aside, I did spin up some BFL that I'm very pleased with:

Pink and purple BFL from Das Wollschaf.

I had 100 grams of each, yet for some strange reason I was left with quite a bit of purple after plying. If I wasn't so lazy I'd meassure the WIP, but it's approximately a light fingering weight. ... Sometimes I wonder who came up with these names, frankly that sounds more like foreplay than fiber. But I digress. Aaaanyway, I had both singles wound on knitting needles for a while before I plied them, only to find that the yarn on the inside had already set and lost all its twist. Is that a normal thing to happen? So while plying I had to add a lot of extra spin again, which I couldn't entirely get rid off during finishing. It was mostly even, just had a few twisted bits. So against my usual preferences, I wound it into a ball in the hopes that it would set some more, much like the singles did:

I've very much taken my cue from the Zauberball school of yarn winding here.

Maybe I just tend to wind my yarn too tightly, but that 200 gram ball is only very slightly bigger than an average 50g ball of sock yarn. I do like the colour and it's as even as I've managed to spin thus far. It'll probably become a shawl in the future, something simple since the colours would probably eat up any intricate lace patterns. I quite like The Age of Brass and Lazy Daisy. Or I could just make a Baktus or one of its many variations, which have the advantage of rows that don't take half an hour to finish. Herbivore looks lovely as well, but I've grown a bit weary of shawl shapes that aren't just plain triangular.