A wee bit of fiber to tide you over til the Tour...

So I'm full in to the rush of knitting six different versions of Annis by July 7th, but really the deadline is July 3rd, because that's when the Tour de Fleece/Tour de France starts. My goal for the TdF is to spin up at least three of the seven lbs of Hello Yarn Fiber Club I have sitting around. Here's the status of the pile as of March:

Since then, there has been two further shipments (one more pound) added. So Something Must Be Done.

But, as I said, there's some scarf knitting to be done in the meantime. So here's the last spinny bit for a while: Dev's Mermaid Yarn, spun from top that she dyed herself, destined for some sort of top-down yoke sweatery thing.

Spun/plied at 12:1, short forward draw, about 300 yds from 8 oz. That's some dense yarn! But there's a lovely pink bit showing up there - I'll have to figure out how to get it front and center on the sweater.

I split the top in half lengthwise and spun two bobbins starting from opposite ends - as you can see, one end was a lot darker then the other, and I wanted to try and minimize the dark-to-light variation. It was a fairly easy spin - a bit of felting/sticking in spots, but I predrafted a bit to loosen up the fibers and it went smoothly. I plied pretty tightly in order to get some good bounce in the finished yarn and then soaked in warm water. In fact, I put the yarn in warm water and forgot about it until the next morning, so it got a really good soaking...

So that's it on the spinning until the prologue. I'm thinking about going in chronological order, starting with Mollusc Wensleydale (August 2007!).

I even have a plan for this fiber: laceweight singles to make an Anne Hanson shawl. Either the Honeybee Stole, which I already have the pattern for, or one of the Raven ones she's done. After I finish that, I've got 8 oz of Insect Wings(somehow I don't have a photo of this fiber, so I'm pointing you towards the HYFC pool) to do up. Not sure what form that will take though - anyone have any suggestions? After Insect Wings is some more Norway, and then Five Plum Pie. And then Sour Fig. If I can get through those, I'll be a happy camper! And there will be space in the bin for April, May and June's installments (1.5 more pounds - ulp!).

FF: Six. Freakin'. Months.

Well, that was fun.

Started with 2 lbs of fiber.
Spun the singles at 7.5:1, semi-longdraw from the fold.
Stage 1 Plying, at 12:1
Stage 2 Plying, also at 12:1.
Final numbers: 8 big skeins and one mini-skein of 4-ply cabled yarn. Total yardage: 1745 yds/1.83 lbs (29.3 oz) of finished yarn. Holy shit, that's almost four miles of singles. Dooooooode!

I cannot believe how long this took to do. Granted, I had a few other big projects in there (the Knitting Olympics springs to mind), and I got so sick of those singles that it was hard to keep making progress on them. But I wanted to get all the singles spun up at once, so I could then ply the first bobbin with the last, the second with the second-to-last, and so on. In hopes of evening out any, ehem, alterations in the spinning.

And after all that sampling I did, my grist was all over the place. Here's the list:

Skein 1: 970 ypp
Skein 2: 984 ypp
SKein 3: 955 ypp
Skein 4: 875 ypp
Skein 5: 982 ypp
Skein 6: 1001 ypp
Skein 7: 842 ypp ***The Winner!***
Skein 8: 911 ypp
Mini-skein 9: 1984 ypp

The goal, as you probably don't recall, was 840 ypp. I'm not sure why it didn't come out closer, but maybe I didn't finish (full) the final yarns enough to get them to plump up? I may try pulling out the skeins that are pretty close (1-5 and 8, about 1200 yds) and try a swatch with those to see how it looks. The other alternatives are 1) running things back through the wheel to add more plying twist and finishing again or 2) just trying to full those lighter skeins a bit more and see if they plump up.

In any event, I am breathing a huge sigh of relief and accomplishment. Sheeit, that was a lot of purple fiber. Worst case scenario: I knit the sweater, it comes out too small, and I give it to my Mom, who has made appreciative noises over both the fiber and the pattern.

Fiber Friday: The end is in sight

A few days ago, I snapped. Really snapped. I couldn't face the prospect of anything more having to do with purple cabled yarn. So I turned on "Gladiator" and spent the next couple of hours turning this

into this.

That's the top that Devil dyed over Easter break. I'm calling it Mermaid yarn, in an attempt to get her more excited about it, and I'm planning a mini-Tappan Zee, maybe with a fish scaley lace pattern to complement the yarn.

But just to prove that the purple yarn is being finished up:

I've got four skeins finished, two more bobbins full, and 2.5 bobbins of 2-ply left. I can bang out a full bobbin of the cabled yarn in less then an evening, so I'm hoping to have it done by the middle of next week. And maybe the Mermaid yarn will be done as well!

Fiber Friday: Stage 1 is completed

And it only took a month!

I was so excited at finishing bobbin #9 (that small, unfull one at the bottom right), that I wound it off into a ball and started Stage 2 plying immediately. One viewing of "Serenity" later, and I'm into bobbin #8, and have almost a full bobbin of cabled yarn. It looks a bit different from my sample, i.e. thinner and less bouncy, but I'm hoping that impression is due to 1) the yarn being under tension as it goes on to the bobbin and 2) the lack of fulling finish.

I was also interested to see that the 2-ply showed a similar, if less dramatic, color gradation as the singles:

I kind of wonder if the finished yarn will do the same, but since I plan to skein this stuff up, wash it, and stick it away in a dark corner until, oh probably October, you'll have to live in suspense for a while. Try not to let it keep you up at night.

Hey, it's Friday!

While I have not been blogging so much, I have been doing some knitting and plying. I've been working on the third pattern from Sock Madness, and am on to the leg of the second sock.

This yarn has been in my stash for at least the length of Devil's life, so I'm glad to have finally found a project that seems to be working well. I think this is the third or fourth pattern I've tried with it...

There has also been plying. I've now got five bobbins full of two ply, and am midway through bobbin #6. My prediction is nine total bobbins-ful, but I have no real logic to this. The first bobbin, I managed to fit two bobbins worth of singles on to one with only a few yards difference between the two (!), so I'm winging it here.

Plying this has been nice because it is totally mindless. I get the wheel going, let the singles run through my fingers at a particular speed, and there they are, ready to go. Thank goodness, because after all the trouble spinning the singles, mindless is a very, very good thing!