Tour de Fleece - Days 6 - 11

Uh, whoops! Forgot to post for a few days there!

Day 6


Corespun Hobbledehoy ArtBatt. We're talking soft wools, locks, bling, and angora spun around a cotton core. My favorite! About 40 yards, I think.

Day 7


Finally started spinning my challenge yarn that counts towards both Team Raw Power! and Team A Spinner's Study. This is a singles yarn from Gulf Coast Native wool, which I processed from raw fleece. For Team Raw Power!, you must process 1 lb. of raw fleece into yarn. For Team A Spinner's Study, I'm doing Challenge #1, which is to spin a wool breed (or any fiber, I s'pose) which is new to me. Gulf Coast Native sheep are native to northwest Florida! They were brought there by Spanish settlers (think St. Augustine) and gradually adapted to their surroundings. The wool is moderately soft...soft enough for the blanket I'm planning (I think), but should hold up better than the ridiculously soft stuff. Nice to spin some yarn with some teeth.

Day 8


Here we have the first plied skein of Gulf Coast Native wool. Whoo hoo! About 180 yards.

Day 9


Silk spinning from bombyx silk combed top. Yeah. I'm crazy. This skein is going to be eensy. Maybe I'll weave with it!

Day 10

Day of Rest from the Tour! However, I didn't rest...this was my LYS's spin-in day. So I went to that and spun more silk, which would be a boring photo.

Day 11


The silk spinning goes on! But I also finished my second skein of the GCN fleece. Whoopity whoop!

And just for reference, here is a pic of the Basket o' Fun as it looked on Day 7:

Tour de Fleece - Day 5

FINISHED! With the mohair boucle of crazy! 121 yards.



Gosh, it feels good to say that. Finished. Yay. Not that I didn't enjoy the process, it's just a long one, and I kept screwing up. First, I had to tease apart all the mohair, which took awhile. Then I spun the singles from the cloud, so that tends to mean fighting the fiber a bit. Mistake #1: spinning the singles Z instead of S. Then I plied with a commercial 80/20 angora/silk weaving yarn. Mistake #2: not putting in enough twist in this first S ply. Then I tried to add the binder thread by spinning Z again, effectively cabling the yarn. Unfortunately, without a huge amount of twist in the first round of plying, most of the neat boucle effect began to even out. This wouldn't have been as noticeable if I hadn't spun the singles in the wrong direction, but what can you say. Dang. So I cut off what I'd done so far and sent the first round of plying back through the wheel, adding more twist. Turns out it still wasn't quite enough twist, but by this time I'd had it, and just cabled the whole thing with the tencel binder thread.

Oh, well. Still looks pretty cool. Might use this for weaving.



Mileage check-in: 252 yards spun & plied

Tour de Fleece - Day 3

Considering it was eleventy billion degrees inside my apartment on Day 3 of the tour (the high in Boulder was 100 degrees. Not okay.), I trucked my Kiwi outside and started on a mohair boucle yarn.

I began with luscious kid mohair locks from Kai Mohair, teased them apart, and spun "from the cloud."



The bobbin took awhile to fill, and I was moving at a snail's pace. My neighbors and I were gathered at the creek, since staying in our apartments was not advised, and we were a little lethargic.



I didn't get enormously far, but I did start plying the mohair with a pretty alpaca/silk thread. I'll probably finish that ply today before putting in a binder ply to hold it all together. Not sure what possessed me to do such a labor intensive yarn, especially because I'm on the Sprinters TdF team and we're supposed to spin like a mile or something, but I've never done a true mohair boucle before and wanted to give it a shot.

It was kind of too bad that the creek was snow melt and just dipping your feet in there could give you hypothermia (or at least in theory...Josh's feet were bright pink after a few seconds), but it did motivate us to gather the neighbors and head for the hills. Nederland, up in the mountains, was about 20 degrees cooler and had a fantastic fireworks display! Wishing everyone a happy 4th!

Le Tour

Guess who forgot to join the Tour de Fleece yet again this year? Yup. I always do this kind of thing...get excited and promptly forget. But that doesn't mean I'm not spinning! Still spinning every day, though that's pretty usual. I figured Hey! I'll just be a late joiner. No big woo. But it turns out the Tour forum on Ravelry has nearly 3,000 members and the threads are eons long. So I think I'll keep track of my yarns on the blog here and pretend in my little fantasy world that I'm another treadler in the Tour.

So without further adieu, here's what I've been working during these first few days...