FF: The first of the unfinished TdF yarns

Et voila! My second spindle-spun Tour de Fleece yarn is finally finished.

Fiber: Corriedale from Hello Yarn, colorway "Seasick"
Spun/plied: on my Wildcraft spindle
Final stats: total yardage is 170 yds/4 oz (680 ypp), ~7-9 wpi, bulky weight.
Comments: I had two bumps of this Corriedale from the Hello Yarn Fiber Club, and when I needed something to take with me to France, one of these seemed like a good bet.

I split the fiber into three different color groups: yellows, browns (with a bit of yellow) and blues (with a bit of yellow). Then I split each piece of top in half lengthwise and spun up two balls of singles to ply together.

I managed to get through the yellow and half of the brown singles before the Tour ended. Over the last couple of weeks, I've spun up the others. And then there was much plying.

72 yds yellow,

27 yds brown,

and 71 yds blue. I have no idea what this yarn will become though, but I like the colors split up like this.

There's always that other bump to play with I suppose...

Fiber Friday is back: the Tour de Fleece final report

This year's Tour de Fleece was an unparalleled success! I spun up 8 lbs of fiber, including 3 sweater lots and 2000 yds of lace weight!

Ha ha ha ha ha! Actually, I didn't meet my TdF goal in any way, shape, or form. Here's the final output:

I ended up with two finished skeins and a bobbin and a half of singles of the Gotland fleece.

I'm pretty happy with the final yarn - it's definitely a bit "rustic", as you would expect from inexpertly handcard fiber, and it will definitely end up as an outerwear sweater rather then a next-to-skin cuddly sweater, but I like it. My goal for the weekend is to finish up the bobbin that's on the wheel and ply those up and see what my yardage is. Based on these first two skeins, I'm going to need 8 or 9 to get the yardage I need for the sweater. That shouldn't be a problem unless I get super sick of carding.

I didn't even touch the Hebridean rolags - they went missing! I had several weeks of panic because I couldn't find the box they were stored in, and I was convinced Himself had thrown them away in a fit of tidying. However, when unpacking boxes from the move, lo and behold there they were. Phew!

Since we were traveling, and life was a bit nuts with moving, I did a fair bit of spindling in addition to the fleece on the wheel. I just went in to my stash and pulled out some Hello Yarn fiber (because Adrian's genius makes up the bulk of my dyed spinning stash, and so I could post in their threads!) and threw it on the spindle. 


HY Burnished BFL, 2-ply, spun on a variety of spindles, 177 yds/4.4 oz (644 ypp). The colors on this are gorgeous - it really does look like metal. I think this will become a cowl or a hat or something like that. Maybe some simple mitts? Dunno.

I was planning on the BFL lasting through our trip to the Pyrenees, but I finished it before we left. Back to the HY stash for another spindle project.

This is Seasick Corriedale. I've got two bags of this (approximately 8 oz), so I took one bump, split it into the component colors (i.e. yellows, browns, blues), and then split each piece of top in half lengthwise for two singles.

Here you can see the yellow and brown singles in balls ready for plying. I used my Wildcraft spindle for this fiber, and it was a bit tricky - the Corriedale wanted to be spun a bit thicker then is optimal for the weight of the spindle, which meant I had to be really careful about keeping the spindle going in the right direction - but I'm happy with the singles. I think this will end up being an aran or bulky weight 2-ply, once it's washed.

So there you have it: three weeks, about 550 yds of finished yarn, and a whole load of other stuff going on. So be it! At least all that spindling meant I got some good pictures...


So given that my Tour de Fleece was an abject failure a bit underwhelming, my Ravellenic Games goals have to change as well. Now I'm thinking that I'll hope to finish the spinning of the fleece by the Closing Ceremonies. Then I can get to work on the sweater in September. Which works out well, to be fair, cause it's not really the best weather for rustic-heavy sweater knitting.

Next verse, same as the first

I realized that for those of you not caught up in the ridiculous spinning/fiber-photo frenzy that is the Tour de Fleece, the next few weeks may be really, really, boring. I will try to do my bit to blog about something other then spinning - day after day of pictures showing miniscule incremental progress on natural colored fleece is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Here, have some knitting instead!

It is still knitting with handspun, but I'm 12 rows from the end of the body of my Garter Yoke Cardi, knit out of the Timber Romney I spun up last year during TdF.

Every time I knit with handspun, I am swept away by watching the color changes, and the way the different plies play off of each other and transition from one color to the next. These pictures are not quite right colorwise, but it's late and I can't be bothered to go back and redo the pictures tonight. I'll get a better color balance next time...

PS - here's today's spinning tally:

Ready? Steady? Go!

And we're off!

45 min to spin, 5 hand-carded Gotland rolags on the bobbin. This is going to be some rustic yarn y'all, as I keep coming across undraftable tangles and neps. Clearly my carding techinique needs work! I'm trying to pull out the little bits of second cuts that made it through the sorting/washing/carding process, but it's slow going!

Please to be ignoring the inappropriate sport in the background - I got distracted by Ms. Williams!

O Hai!

Didja miss me? Hunh? Didja?

Did you even notice I was gone is probably a more relevant question...no good reason for absence, just not having the energy to put fingers to keyboard or camera to FOs, as the case might be. I do have three finished objects to blog about at some point, but I've spent a lot of the last week washing fleece.

After my initial attempts at fleece washing in the upstairs bathtub, which resulted in still slightly greasy fleece, I took a step back and scaled down a bit.

I took the organic Hebridean fleece I have for the colorwork part of Stasis, and weighed it - a whopping 69 gr (2.4 oz) of unwashed fleece. I split the fleece in half and washed about an ounce at a time - my rational was that since I didn't get all the grease out last time, I would measure out smaller amounts to be washed and make sure I had enough liquid.

I did the same sequence as before: two hot washes, two washes with soap, two rinses. The other major change I made was to keep the water temperature a bit higher then last time, definitely above 50 degrees, and usually closer to 60 degrees C. This was much easier to do in the kitchen, with easy access to the stove and kettle. I also did only one batch at a time, so I could really keep an eye on the thermometer.

In washing this fleece, I came across some "interesting" bits.

I think this is scurf, aka sheepy dandruff. It was definitely not vegetable matter, and it was seriously stuck to the fleece. Once the stuff was dry, I weighed it again - 51 gr instead of 69. So about 26% weight loss due to grease/muck/VM. Then I broke out the handcards. The scurfy cruddy fleece I put to one side, in case I ran low. A few (ok, many) passes with the cards later, et voila:

A kid's shoe box full of handcarded Hebridean rolags, ready for the prologue. If I were smart, I'd do a bit of sampling before I start, just to make sure I've carded enough and that I can get a fingering weight yarn that I like. But...you know what I'm doing instead?

I'm washing more fleece. Only a week to go in prep time, and I've got a big bag to go!