Final haul for La Vuelta, L-R:
Blue/yellow 2ply fractal spin, heavy lace/light sockweight, 642m;
White warping wool, chain-ply, Aranweight, 602.3m;
WoW Galaxy Melange in Andromeda, 2ply, Sportweight, 80m;
Black & white thick and thin – to be core-spun;
Brown/pink/blue/grey, 2ply fractal spin, laceweight, 703.6m;
Yellow/purple, 2ply fractal spin, Aranweight, 156.1m.
Finished length: 2,184m (not including black/white)
Total spun: 6,552m (ditto).
Whoa! Might do a bit of knitting now…
Blue-yellow 2 ply fractal spin from a space-dyed braid (Unresolved School Uniform Trauma), 642m (roughly 2/12Nm, lace/sock);
Yellow-purple 2 ply fractal spin from a gradient-dyed braid (Golden Sunset), Aran-weight, 156m (abt 2/3Nm);
2 skeins of chain-plyed warping yarn from a cone (World Of Wool), over-spun for strength, Aran weight, for weaving with the orange centre-pull ball which I spun from a batt during TdF23 – procrastination much?
Still to come – more space-dyed braids from stephscraftybits! I’ve just started the sugared-almond Jean Harlow one, which is also coming up rather fine. And if you’ve been paying attention, I did say “more braidS”, plural.
Yes, I went off and bought another 3 braids and a batt from stephscraftybits. A bottle-green/wine combo on Bergschaf, which I have named The Parting Glass – I’ll definitely at least start this.
Then, this cheerful 100% Lonk braid, described as green/red/pink. The green is barely there, and a bit browny. I might take it out when I unwind the braid, depending on whether it looks okay.
The third, God forgive Steph for inflicting her irresistible colour choices on me, is BLUE, green and grey, on Charollais fleece. Charollais is a fibre I’ve wanted to try for a while, that’s not why I bought it. I… just… liked it??
The batt is a mystery blend of black, white and grey fibres – probably merino. They’re laid one on top of the other, so it’ll probably spin up as grey. It’ll be a relief from all this blue…
Allez-oop!
Which probably makes no sense whatsoever…
This lovely yellow-purple gradient (craftwithcolour on Etsy) has lots of tweedy nepps and wanted to be thick-and-thin, which is very much not me, but you gotta work with what you have. I have no idea what to do with it when it’s done – it’s not the kind of yarn I usually knit with… This is the first half completed.
Speaking of not me, the blue/yellow Corriedale is spinning up fine and taking forever. I’m about halfway through the first bobbin’s worth of flooff. I have decided to name it Unresolved School Uniform Trauma.
Tally-ho!
Naturally, La Vuelta a Lana does too!
I have only fun stuff to spin this time. The sparkly Golden Sunset braid from craftwithcolour is first up. I didn’t get around to it on TdF or TdFF, partly because it arrived late, having to travel with my niece when she came home from uni, but mostly because I loaded up on extra spins.
Then, because I enjoyed spinning the rose/olive Merino Tencel braid from stephscraftybits, I bought some more of her braids! One is a Merino Tencel braid in sugared-almond colours that remind me of Jean Harlow’s evening dresses, rose, brown, grey and powder blue.
The second is 100% Bergschaf in bottle-green and wine. I’ve never spun Bergschaf before – no idea what to expect there. Some people say it’s soft, others that it’s coarse. The braid itself doesn’t feel particularly soft to me, but not so bad that I’d put it in the to-be-socks box.
And the third… is blue. Royal & Prior uniform blue. And yellow, obviously. But the blue is nonetheless precisely the colour of the R&P gymslip that I had to wear 5 days a week for 5 years of my life, and which I hated with a passion that is unmatched to this day. But I kept coming back to this braid. It talked to me. It whispered that it wasn’t really that bad – just misunderstood – and wouldn’t it make a beautiful plaid shawl if I wove it on a continuous bias tri-loom…
So yah, I have that to look forward to…
The Golden Sunset and blue/yellow are divvied up into 1/2, 1/4 and 2 x 1/8 parts for fractal spinning. This time, I actually weighed everything to ensure they all worked out to be the appropriate weights when divided. Fiddly, and my scale isn’t cooperative with low-density volumes, but I got there. It’ll be interesting to see if it helps!
I couldn’t have imagined this three years ago, when, as a very new spinner, I joined my first TdF, but I have blown all my expectations out of the water!
My TdF25 aim was to work through a 400g 75% Hebridean/25% bio-nylon blend, with a couple of fractal spins as palate cleansers. I thought this would take me all of TdF and maybe Tour des Femmes too. However, I blasted through all the Hebridean blend midway though the second week.
So I added another 400g blend of 75% Herdwick/25% bio-nylon to my task list. And last night – or possibly early this morning – I plied the last two bobbins of that!
I only finished one of the fractal spins. I intended to continue through Tour des Femmes anyway, so I’ll work on the second braid, plus a third that showed up in the mail last week.
What has stunned me is the sheer quantity I’ve spun, without pushing myself hard. On my first TdF, I learned that some people’s goal was to spin as many yards or metres as the cyclists covered in miles or kilometres, calculated in either completed yarn, or as individual singles+plying. “Huh”, thought I. “I’ll never get anywhere near that!” So here are my data for TdF25:
Hebridean/bio-nylon: Completed yarn = 1091.2m; 2 singles+ply = 3273.6m
3-ply Fractal “Mulberry”: Completed yarn = 200.6m; 3 singles+ply = 802.4m
I haven’t had time yet to measure the Herdwick blend, but it must be at least as long as the Shetland blend, as it wanted to spin up finer. So a guess-timate of my totals is 2331.8m in completed yarns, and 7156m as separate singles + the plying.
This year’s Tour de France covers 3,338.8 km. Ahahaha!
Also, a pic of Sir Lasair in full winter plumage as penance for blowing my own trumpet here!
I did indeed race through my Hebridean/bionylon blend which I thought would take up the whole of TdF! By Monday I had 6 skeins plied, then washed and thwacked on Tuesday, and drying since. I suppose I could have measure the length, but I want to put them all on a single cone using my Royal cone winder – and the cone-hats have yet to arrive.
So, that stalled, I hoked out another 400g sock blend, Herdwick/bionylon. I wanted thick welly socks, but the Herdy isn’t cooperating, as I believe is normal for the breed. Instead of a Sport-cum-DK weight, it is stubbornly coming in as Fingering when 2-plied. It’s a bit like spinning Brillo pads, so hopefully they’ll be sturdy even if thin. In the background are a couple of blackcurrant liqueurs, vodka and whisky, which I started the same day! I just have one dwarf blackcurrant bush. This year it produced over 2kg of fruit!
I finished the first fractal spin yesterday! The bobbins are waiting to be plied, and Sir Lasair Lothbrok the Loud approves 🙂
Yesterday I filled roughly half an EEW 6 bobbin with my Hebridean blend top! I was using a mongrel long draw: partly English, partly supported (mainly to coax more fibre into the thread when it was getting too fine), and not all that long due to my osteoarthritis. I call it my Cripple Crutch Drag Til It Hurts Draw…
These bobbins are BIG. They can hold 200g (8oz for the colonials) of singles. That means there’s close to 100g on it already. I bought 500g of this blend originally, and spun a sample to see what it was like. The sample is somewhere in my completed-spins bin. The bag of fibre now weighs around 300g, minus the sample and what’s on the bobbin. I thought it would take all of TdF, including the Tour Des Femmes, to slog through this fibre, but I’ve spun about 20% of it in a few hours, and have a (presumably) 100g sample already done??? This does not compute… I’m going to have to re-jig my TdF goals if this keeps up.
I also made a start on my 3-ply fractal spin on Blaise, my Herring wheel. That was not as epic as the Shetland. The fibre, which is sumptuous, is a bit compacted from being in the braid, so it’s fighting me all the way so far – snapping, not coming out easily despite pre-drafting, and of course I’m not used to the side-to-side drafting necessary to maintain colour separation – I’ve only done one fractal spin before. Blaise can be a little temperamental, too. Sometimes she sings along producing invisible gossamer strands fit for an emperor, then suddenly it’s DK singles or nothing and don’t even think about plying – this lady is not for turning (anti-clockwise).
I should add something about the decision to do a 3-ply fractal spin. There are basically 2 reasons:
So obviously, it was a thoroughly-researched, analytically considered, and deliberative choice, as is usual for me.
Stop laughing, there at the back!
I did consider dividing the 2nd length into 2, and the 3rd into 4, before wising up. Instead, Bobbin 2 will consist of 3 x 1/6ths, and Bobbin 3 will have 3 x 1/9ths, as is tradition.
*: This is often the case with commercial combed top. The mills have 3, umm, extruders where the final top is spat out. These are positioned close together in a triangular shape, so the top comes out as one length, even though it’s really 3. IYSWIM.
I posted to the Tour de Fleece 2023 Facebook group about my Shapwick Blaise wheel and I think it’s had the most engagement of anything I’ve ever posted on social media outside my Quora content!
She is an absolute beauty, but there’s so little information about this wheel that I’m slightly despairing of ever putting her in working order. I found someone via Google who had recently (May ’23) reconditioned a Herring Gordon, but their website no longer exists apart from a few scrapes on the Wayback Machine. Frank Herring is still in business, but the website doesn’t even mention their history of producing these beautiful and unusual wheels… I will email them, but I’m almost as fond of email as I am of cold-callers so it will take some time for me to work up the courage to engage.
I’m on #TeamWoW, World of Wool‘s TdF team, and today being Stage 4 (I think?) the challenge is to spin some Shetland. I got another delivery this morning from WoW with Shetland wool – the Woodland Collection, and the Breed Discovery pack – but I’ve decided to spin from a colour pack of Shetland top that I picked up at Woolfest instead. I picked the dark-ish fawn colour for a change of pace – I have lots of black, grey, and white fibre to work on, but not much in the brown spectrum. I think the Shetland word for this colour is Moorit. I also have dark brown, fawn, and Musket, a greyish mid-brown. The plan was to spin the whole 25g, then ply it. Here’s the whole thing, wrapped around my homemade wrist distaff:
And the Fates must have been smiling on me, because it went to plan! I cannot stress how rarely this happens for me. I am a disaster magnet. The house could have burned down, I could have been struck by lightening, the wool might have had hatching tarantula eggs in it – none of these happened. The phone didn’t even ring! Okay, I cheated a bit – instead of plying on my wheel, I used my ancient Daruma Home Twister, a ball-winder which has a plying attachment. It’s not ideal, so the yarn is not perhaps as tightly plied as it should be – I don’t care. Today, I have done what I set out to do, even if the end result is kinda half-arsed. Gotta say, too, this Shetland top has survived brilliantly for being shoved in a paper bag in my junk room for years. It fed beautifully through my hands, and there’s only the tiniest dot of waste – you can see it at the bottom of the balling attachment:
Allons-y!
This is the peripatetic sample card I couldn’t find yesterday:
World of Wool gives you the option to purchase small samples of their fibres – 5-10g, depending on the fibre – to try before you buy. While too small to do anything much with, given the dizzying array of fibres, it’s worth it. Sometimes you know by the feel that something is not what you want to spin – I can’t say I’m terribly interested in vegan fibres that are basically nylon, acrylic, etc, so I’m never going to order them. But I am intrigued enough with, say, pineapple fibre to want to see what it’s like without committing to spinning up 50g, especially if it turns out to be horrible (I’ll let you know on, umm, Wednesday). I spun the yak when the card arrived a while back. It’s fiddly – very fluffy and wispy, and you have to be quite stern with it to make it adhere together long enough to get a thread. But it is oh so soft and lovely that it is well worth the effort. think if I was to get yak again, I’d blend it with something more cooperative, like merino (or get WoW to do me a custom blend). I haven’t bothered plying it – I don’t plan to do so with any of these samples as there really isn’t enough yardage to bother. Instead I just wound the single onto a bit of card, and will keep it in its pocket for future reference and stroking.
Today, I began spinning after lunch, starting with the soybean sample on Enola, my 10g black bog-oak Turkish spindle from Ian at The Wood Emporium: teeny, dark and rather fast, but with hidden metal, like the Enola Sherlock character. The soybean sample was quite voluminous for its weight, and this wonderful mustard yellow. I was able to pre-draft it into 5 ‘locks’, whereupon it took on the colour and appearance of baby hair in my family, a kind of lustrous primrose:
Also very fluffy and very, very sheddy. There’s will o’ the wisps of the stuff floating around my craft room now. It was an odd one, full of contrasts. Very short fibres, but I had to draw it out longer than I’m comfortable with – I’m not an experienced spinner and have just graduated from death-grip park and draft, I have only the vaguest idea of the other spinning techniques, so don’t be coming at me with your forward and backward short draw, double drafting, Texas long draw, 52 pick-up – I’m just happy that the fibre is moving onto the spindle without my hands being frozen into rictus claws after the first five minutes. And the fibre was a little like silk – super-soft but strong – while also having the squeaky feeling of a plant fibre like ramie. It’s another one that might be better blended due to the shortness of the individual fibres, but I can’t think with what. Maybe another, coarser plant fibre, trading softness for strength? Or one of he scratchier wools, for a bit of sproinginess?
I got distracted midway by deliveries (another book, and a box of gluten-free flours to try in the sourdough starter I’ve adopted) and sunshine, and decided to continue the spin outside, but no sooner had I got my hammock seat set up than it started bucketing down. Then the damn dog escaped again, which is bad as I live in sheep-and-shotgun country and said dog is a sheepdog school flunk-out I took on when he proved too independent* of the shepherd. He still wants to round up sheep, but local farmers don’t distinguish between unwanted “help” and sheep-worrying. As a result I was late getting back to the second half of my daily spin: the dreaded wheel.
With quick run-through some wheel-spinning tutorials on Youtube, I made a start. I used some roving that might have been nice once upon a time when I bought it, but which is now compacted and a wee bit felted. I figured it wouldn’t upset me too much if I wasted it, and I did waste a whole chunk! But look!
It’s not very much, but it’s nearly consistent with no lumps. It’s similar to the thickness I spin on my drop spindles, which makes a reasonable 2-ply fingering yarn. I’m so pleased with myself, I’ll be unbearable for a few days.
*: It’s a problem with Border Collies. They’re very smart so some decide they know better than the shepherd, and pretend deafness to command.
Oh my giblets, what a start!
I’ll preface by saying that my vague plan for TdF23 was to spin every day – that’s all. Firming up slightly, I thought each day I’d spin a 10g sample from a World of Wool sample pack on one of my drop spindles, and then hit up the spinning wheel with something more weighty, like the 400g Herdwick ‘n’ bionylon WoW custom blend destined for sock knitting, or the Dye Candy art batt, etc. I don’t do detailed schedules and timings. I used to, but the universe has all kinds of ways of tearing up my plans and throwing them in my face, whether or not there are any plans in the first place, so nowadays I save the time and energy for the inevitable disaster management instead.
Well, first I couldn’t find the @&%$ing sample pack, but that wasn’t much of a problem. While looking for the samples, I found a remnant of some tweedy floof I picked up on a visit to Donegal Yarns. It wasn’t meant for hand-spinning – it was some intermediate stage in their processing of fleece into yarn, and by now it’s only fit for stuffing cushions. When I got my drop spindles out earlier this year, I’d spun up the rest and a brutal job it was too, basically just ripped clumps out of it and hoped for the best. And yes, it’s a lumpy bumpy yarn – but here’s the thing: I bought a cone of that same colour on my visit, and it’s not wildly different to my handspun.
So I spun up this remnant in lieu of one of the samples on my big yew Turkish spindle, whom I have named Bow Diddly:
Enola stood ready for the 10g samples, which I promptly found after finishing plying the tweed. Of course. Oh well, at least they’re there for tomorrow.
So then I hied me the 50cm or so to my spinning wheel, and this is where the trouble really began. And begat more problems. And then some. The wheel is one I got on Freecycle at least 10 years ago. I never actually used it. Although I’d taken it along to a spinning workshop a few years ago, it misbehaved, even flummoxing the instructor, so I’d ended up using a borrowed wheel. I did look into finding someone who could repair it, but it would have meant shipping it over to England and then there was the whole pandemic thing so that didn’t happen. And today, sitting before it, I realised I didn’t even know what make it was anymore… And the orifice hook was gone, and the drive band kept popping off, and why is there fishing line on it…???
Onto Youtube to look for some Setting Up A Spinning Wheel For Dummies videos. No worries, I’ve done some spinning, so I’d fulfilled my obligations for the day, and isn’t this spinning-related too?
Eight hours later I picked myself off the floor where I’d fainted from hunger. But I had learned SO MUCH. Like I apparently have a Ashcroft Traditional, probably 1982, and it’s a double drive – but is set up as a single drive. And you guys, the whole maiden (?) thingy can be moved sideways! which lines up the groove on the flier with the groove on the wheel – which was the reason the drive band kept flying off – they weren’t aligned properly! It finally spun properly, but the yarn wouldn’t wind onto the bobbin, so I went down another rabbit hole where I spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to find a replacement whorl for my flyer (learning in the interim that I had a jumbo flier) before realising that Traditionals don’t have one (or at least they don’t have one that screws on after the bobbin…). Then I found a video showing how to put together a Traditional from bits of lumber without reducing it to kindling in the process as I was by then tempted to do… and this is where I learned about the fishing line thingy! Scotch tensioning! Which has nothing to do with Scotland, even though there’s an Irish tensioning which I still have to figure out.
Hmm… Irish tension… Nope. Get thee behind me, Spinning. (Laterz).
Apparently the fishing line (which is attached to a wooden knob at the front of the wheel and goes through a hook at the back) is placed over the groove in the bobbin, and secured via the spring on the end to a wee hook on the other side of the maiden assembly. The line can then be tightened by turning the wooden knob, which has the effect of of slowing the rotation of the bobbin with respect to the flier, which in turn allows the yarn to wind onto the bobbin!!
Somewhere in amongst all this the flaming drive band snapped, and if the postie hadn’t been right outside delivering a book I’ve been waiting for, I’d have hoofed the bloody thing out the window where it would have landed on top of him. But as I want him to keep bringing me books, I refrained. Luckily there is no shortage of long, fibre-y stuff about the place. Who’d have thought a knitter would have the like?!
So that was my Day 1. I think the wheel is operating correctly and and is ready to tackle the blizzard of floss awaiting…
So much fluff… Not all. Not even close to all.
Allons-y!
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