TdF: I think she's got it! I think she's got it!

I'm clearly in a honeymoon phase with spinning.  I find myself with spindle separation anxiety when I go to work, and coming home to get a few spins in is like sitting down for happy hour.  Here's my first fully spun, plied, washed, thwacked, and dried skein of yarn:

I love my baby blue.  And it has some sibling skeins in the works as well.  One single cop is just waiting for the third to be complete so my spindle will be free for plying.

And speaking of plying, one of the honeymoon symptoms is that I have a thirst to try every tool, technique, and fiber that I see.  Including this magical thing called chain, or Navajo, plying.  It takes one single and turns it into a 3-ply yarn, and it means that any color progressions in the single will be maintained in the yarn instead of the barber pole effect.  I love that effect, but I also love being able to do it another way.

Of course, there are stages of discovery with these things.  The first is hearing/seeing a term a few times while having no idea what it means.  You see the result without knowing what it is, and then you make the connection and start to investigate how it's done.  This means Google and YouTube.  And after a few sessions of squinting and yelling at the screen, 'But how did you get that first loop?  What is going on, which strand is that, make it stop!' you find one that actually makes sense to you.  And like Pickering rising from repose with a newspaper over his face, you hear Higgins' voice in your ear, 'I think she's got it!  I think she's got it!' 

Or maybe that part only happens to me.

To help anyone who is in any of these phases with chain plying, this is the video that made it click for me:

The relief!  I still have to take the final step and actually do it myself, but I'll have to save it for my next braid, since I'm going to try and turn this one into four matching skeins.  That's right, I already have plans for my next braid.  What can I say, I'm a newlyspun!