Tour de Fleece 2015 | Through The Yarny Curtain

Tour de Fleece 2015, Stage 10

My continuing mission is to ~~seek out new life and new civilizations~~ um, I mean spin one color of 3 Feet of Sheep each day. Today I spun through my one color and about 40% of the next color. Unfortunately, my Tour de Fleece will be cut even shorter than I expected. Chris’s uncle passed away early this morning and we will be going to the funeral. This means I now have at least three more days with no spinning. I do hope to finish 3 Feet of Sheep by the end of the month, even though it will be outside the usual Tour de Fleece time frame.

As usual, the picture on the left is my bobbin at the beginning of the day and the picture on the right is my bobbin at the end of the day.

I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far. This fiber continues to spin up faster and thicker than the cormo. I can’t wait to see it finished!

Tour de Fleece 2015, Rest Day 1

During the Tour de Fleece, spinners rest on the days racers in the Tour de France rest. July 13 was the first rest day for the Tour de France, so most spinners rested today. I am not resting on the official rest days as I won’t be able to spin for the last week of the Tour since I’ll be in San Diego for the TKGA Annual Conference.

Since I finished plying the cormo yesterday, today was the day to start something new! The next fiber in my spinning queue was 3 Feet of Sheep. This is 8 ounces of Blue-faced Leicester hand-dyed by Frabjous Fibers. The colorway I have is “Colors of the Capital.” It is 10 bumps of fiber, each a different color and each weighing 20 to 21 grams. The fiber comes packaged in a long tube:

I toyed with the idea of fractal spinning this fiber, but decided to spin end to end so that when I knit it I’ll have a gradient. I plan to Navajo ply to maintain the color sequence. I didn’t do any pre-drafting, but I am splitting each color into multiple strips and spinning from those. The colors aren’t solid; they are tonal and look like they are probably space-dyed, with concentrated dye applied in certain sections and then wicking out into the rest of the fiber from there. The result is subtle striping within each color. I spun each strip starting from the same end so that this subtle striping happens multiple times throughout that color.

My goal is to spin 1 color per day until I’ve spun all the fiber. I’m spinning this fiber about twice as fast as I spun the cormo, so I had time this evening to spin up two colors. Here’s how my bobbin looked when I stopped for the night.

Looks like I’ll be spinning yellow tomorrow 🙂

Tour de Fleece, Stage 7

Today I continued plying the cormo. While plying is faster than spinning, it still takes a long time when your singles are like thread! I finished the first bobbin and barely started on the second bobbin.

I haven’t mentioned this before, but I a towel under my spinning wheel to protect our hardwood floors. The small movements the wheel makes while I’m spinning scratched my floor the first couple times I used the wheel. I usually pick the towel up at night to keep it away from the cats. I forgot to pick up the towel last night and someone puked on it during the night, so I put a different towel on the floor today. Fortunately, the guilty feline missed my wheel and my bobbins of spun yarn. I would not have been happy to find dried up cat puke ruining my beautiful singles!

Tour de Fleece 2015, Stage 6

Since I only had 0.06 ounces of cormo left to spin, I finally finished it. Then I started plying. And plying. And plying some more. Plying is a lot quicker than spinning, but with yarn this fine it takes a long time. I’m about halfway through the first bobbin of finished yarn, or one-quarter the way through the singles.

My husband walked through the room just as I was getting set up to ply. He looked at the spinning and said, “Do you still call this yarn? It looks like thread to me!”

WIP Wednesday: July 8, 2015

I wasn’t sure if I would have anything for WIP Wednesday this week. I’ve been knitting a shawl, which I finished and blocked today. I do have an update on my Tour de Fleece spinning and I cast on a new project!

Tour de Fleece, Day 5

I really, really, really wanted to finish the cormo today. I didn’t quite make it. I have 0.09 ounces left to spin. That’s not a lot, but at the rate I’m spinning it’ll take at least 1/2 hour and it’s already 1 am. I’m throwing in the towel. I’ll finish it tomorrow.

Miranda Shawl

I cast on and knit the first 4 rows of a new shawl. This one is another test knit. Since it’s knit from the bottom up, I had to cast on 418 stitches!