Spinning is an adventure. When I started spinning this fiber,

Mixed BFL from Woolgatherings
I had a picture in my mind of a 4-ply sport-weight yarn with long color repeats. I divided up the yarn so that the colors would be in the same order for each bobbin of singles, I made a reference card for the singles,

A piece of singles taped to a small string tag for reference
and I actually used the reference card frequently to check the size of the singles I was spinning. A reference card isn’t worth the effort to make it if you don’t use it. 🙂
I was hoping to get a yarn where there would be long stretches where the color would be the same on all four plies. I knew that there would be stretches where the colors would not match up, but I was hopeful that there would be long sections of solid color.
The plying got off to a great start. All of the bobbins began with red, so I started off with yarn that matched my hopes and dreams for this fiber. But it didn’t take long before I realized that I wasn’t going to get long stretches of one color. For some reason, throughout most of the plying, I had three strands of one color and one strand of another, or two strands of one color and two strands of another. It was only at the beginning and the end that I had four strands of the same color. ::sigh::
Okay, the yarn didn’t turn out the way I had planned. But it still turned out great.

A bobbin full of 4-ply handspun BFL
The mixed BFL makes for a heathery yarn with deep, rich colors, and because I was careful to check my singles against the reference card regularly during the spinning, my singles were consistent and thus my 4-ply yarn is quite uniform throughout the skein.
When the first bobbin ran out during the plying, there was very little yarn left on the other three bobbins.

The bobbin on the left is the one that ran out first.
Pretty amazing, eh?
Although the yarn didn’t turn out quite as I had planned, I love the yarn I got. The mixing of the colors gives the yarn a lovely tweedy look that should knit up into something spectacular. And now that this project is off the wheel, I’m all set to start the Tour de Fleece. I may have a Lendrum DT Complete coming to me today on a FedEx truck. 🙂

My new wheel will be here soon.
The Ladybug wanted a sibling, and what the Ladybug wants, the Ladybug gets.