It was Tuesday, and I blinked, and then suddenly it was Friday. I’m sure I’m not the only one trying to find that sweet spot between Getting It All Done and Enjoying the Moment. It’s a tough balance to find any time of year, but especially as we move further into this season.

Waking early for quiet time to think and create is one thing that really helps me find my breath. The fact that I end up with something beautiful to show for that time alone is quite a nice bonus!

Last month, I told you about the Winter is Coming Spin-along in the Southern Cross Fibre Ravelry group. I’ve had a lot of big plans for this, but the spin-along will be up in two weeks and I’m realizing I’m not going to make everything I dreamed of. But I did finish my second yarn this week.

With this spinalong, I’ve been experimenting with using pictures as inspiration to guide me in the process of spinning. It’s been really fun! For this spin, I used this picture for inspiration:

That’s Jon Snow’s direwolf “Ghost” (from Game of Thrones), and I adore this picture. It seemed a nice match to the Southern Cross Fibre October Classic Club offering:

I love those luscious colors so much! This is Comeback Wool, an Australian wool I’ve never spun before. It was a total delight.

Ordinarily, I would just spin this up and ply it with itself, with my biggest decision being whether to have it barberpole or line up the colors. But this time, inspired by the picture of Ghost, I really wanted to add a significant amount of white to the finished yarn. So I ordered some undyed Falkland from Spunky Eclectic and spun that up. Then I plied it with the October Showers. I had 4 oz. of the October Showers and 3 oz. of the Falkland – I had uneven amounts because my original idea was to use an undyed grey fiber in there as well. So I ordered 1 oz. of an Icelandic blend in a natural grey from Spunky Eclectic. The color was great, but the feel of the fiber was so different from either the Comeback or the Falkland, that I ended up deciding not to use it.

With an uneven amount of fiber, I decided to ply a small portion of the Comeback Wool with itself. So when I ran out of the Falkland, I wound the Comeback with my yarn winder into a center-pull yarn cake and plied one end with the other, which yielded a nice long streak of lavender at the end of the yarn.

Enough shop talk! Here’s the final product:

This is 7.25oz, 362yds worsted 2-ply, and I love it.

I’ve been toying with the idea of plying it one more time – chain-plying it for a really fat 6-ply. But I’m torn, because I also really like it as it is. So … we’ll see!

As I’ve been writing this, snow started to fall, hard. Maybe, after these strange couple of weeks of record high temperatures, maybe winter is coming after all!