Fear of Plying

I'm having a bloody awful time with plying, and I realized after this last skein, that plying is as much of a process as the rest of it.  It's just going to take time, patience, and practice.

Here is the story of my three-ply yarn.  

There are a couple of clarifications that need to be made.  First, I wind my singles onto toilet paper roll spools. Second, when I indicated that I used Abby Franquemont's plying ball method with the last skein of two-ply, what I had really done was wind two toilet paper roll spindles of singles onto a third toilet paper roll and plied from that.  Don't do that.  It was a mess.  Just, don't.

This time, I wound the yarn from the toilet paper rolls into a real, three-strand ball.  But it wasn't easy.  I started winding from the three toilet paper rolls, but they rolled around, tangling. Off to Walmart to buy the last three terracotta pots they had.

With the toilet paper rolls contained under the pots, and the singles coming out of the holes, it went much better.  Until I dropped the ball, which rolled across the floor, tangling as it went.  Much cursing ensued, while I did my best to get things untangled and back in order.  I wound as much as I could, but ended up cutting it all apart and tying it all back together.   Twice.

Plying from the ball went much better than plying from a multi-stranded toilet paper roll, but my ham-handedness continued.  I dropped the spindle three or four times, also resulting in much cursing.

The calm, rational part of my brain advised that I should just set everything down and come back to it, later. However, the part of my brain that demanded that I get things figured out NOW, was firmly in control.  Despite wanting to fling the entire mess across the living room and set fire to it, I persevered.  I have a reasonable skein of three-ply yarn, with a couple of nasty bits where I tied everything back together.