Ply, Spin, and Warp (All in one day!)

 A while ago I spun some naturally colored cotton on my Akha spindle.  Now I'd like to use it for one of the entries in the COE in Handspinning that I am working on.  Unfortunately, my skeins need to be 1 oz and the original sliver I purchased was 1 oz....which means that I probably had less than a full ounce of spun fiber. 

No problem!  I just pulled out another sliver that contained the same color (it happened to be a tri-colored sliver, so I pulled out the desired color) and started to spin.  Today as I got started plying I noticed something--the newly spun "red" is redder than the older spun "red".  Oh dear.  I went ahead and plyed the original red...0.93 oz.  Not enough!

I do have a back-up plan.  "Mocha" has a similar history--some already spun, some sliver picked out of a tri-colored one.  I'll try spinning some of the new mocha and see how it looks compared to the old.

 In other spinning news, I finished carding my yellow cotton into punis.  This is ginned cotton that I dyed.  There was a lot of vegetable matter in this cotton.  To remove it, I passed the ginned cotton through the drum carder which loosened the fibers and got some of the trash out.  Then I tore the batts into manageable strips and manually picked out the rest of the junk.  It was slow and tedious work, but it was easier to do that then to stop my spinning every few moments to pick out the rough and scratchy stuff!  The punis were made on my cotton hand cards.  The cotton was first carded, then rolled onto a dowel to make the punis.

 Here's a bobbin with the first few punis' worth of spinning.  I'm getting ~38 wpi which is considered a "fine" yarn.

And, I got my test warp on the loom and started today.  This is a fine cotton/poly yarn with some sportweight knitting yarn stripes.  The weave structure is from Strickler.  If this test works then I hope to repeat the scarf with a silk/yak yarn I bought a year or two ago.