Gray-dient spinning

It's Tour de Fleece time, and I have some spinning to share! 

I've been working on a gradient yarn in Shetland fibre. This fibre has been in my stash for a very long time, & I had been planning & even started spinning this project months ago (and then ignored it for a while). The Tour de Fleece was the perfect excuse to finish this project. 

I started with 111 g of black fibre (the natural Black is actually a dark brown), and 84 g of the grey, & divided the fibres into five sections. 

Trying divide all the fibre in proportion broke my brain, so I chose to blend the shades in three gradient sections, and to leave the oddly numbered excess as single colours. 

I spun in five sections; the fibre was weighed in grammes as follows; 

Section 1 - black only - 51 g

Section 2 - mostly black - 30g black & 10 g grey

Section 3 - half & half - 20g each black and grey

Section 4 - mostly grey - 10g black & 30 g grey

Section 5 - grey only - 24g

I partially blended the colours of each section using hand carders & spun semi-worsted.

The singles were chain-plied to keep colour in order.  The finished yarn is 270 metres of about aran-weight, with some variation (my dreadful hand carding resulted in a few little clumped up sections of fibre, & some thick & thin sections of finished yarn).

I had originally intended to knit myself a Boom! shawl. While spinning this, I realised that I (being a super sensitive type) don't particularly like commercially spun shetland fibre next to my skin, never mind my own lumpy, sticking-out endy hand spun shetland, so I think this may be destined to become the yoke of a very cosy cardigan or jumper (with a long sleeved teeshirt underneath).