Ideas come to life
Posted by Jessica in Non-wool fibers, Plying, Spinning, UncategorizedWhen I decided to participate in the Tour de Fleece this year I knew that setting up hard and fast goals would be a recipe for failure. With wedding planning getting intense and everything else going on I just didn’t need the pressure. So instead I just had some ideas of what I’d like to do during the tour. I thought that I would like to get some old stuff off the bobbins (and you’ve already seen that I managed to do that) and my other thought was that I would really like to spin some angora considering how much of the stuff I have around the house. To illustrate:
Those bags and boxes are all full of bunny foof. And there’s at least one more box and possibly another bag not in that picture!
Little did I realize that I would spin an entire fleece!
(Skeins reclining on HWJF’s 30 birthday present, a digital piano that he isn’t allowed to use until his actual birthday next month! Yes I am evil.)
That’s about 700 yards of corriedale from “The Fleece I Did Not Buy at Rhinebeck 2009″. It’s so yummy and fluffy that it’s actually quite difficult to make nice pretty skeins of it! Now this was a small fleece, only around 3 pounds, but still! I spun up the whole thing!
On major conclusion from this: If someone else processes the fleece I actually do spin it. Perhaps it’s time to turn over the 5 or so fleeces that are sitting around here waiting to be processed to the professionals?!? We’ll see what the bank account allows come Rhinebeck….
I do believe that I will be pairing that yarn with the BFL I previously showed you into a sweater like this one for myself. Instead of colorwork I would just use the contrasting yarn for the yoke. Or maybe a Cobblestone with a contrasting yoke. We’ll see.
In between working on spinning up that fleece I did work with some angora. I decided to blend it with some undyed merino top that I have for the shop. I took my drum carder and carded up a batt of merino and a batt of angora. I then divided each batt into quarters. I took one quarter of each fiber and further divided the merino quarter in half again to sandwich the angora in between two layers of merino. This worked out well and kept the angora contained nicely in the yarn while making it a little easier to spin. I didn’t weigh anything and while there was probably more merino per initial batt than angora, you can bet that there is a LOT of angora in this yarn. My final four batts before I would sit down to spin looked like this:
I think each bobbin took 8 of these smaller batts. I made a two ply yarn and ended up with this:
There’s just over 400 yards between all three of these bobbins. As I type, the yarn is getting the spa treatment and I’m trying to decide how I’m going to dye it. The two different fibers will each take the dye differently, the angora being less likely to take up the dye readily, so the final product could be really interesting color wise. And I’m just too happy that I actually came up with enough to do something with! I’m thinking some kind of cowl or maybe fingerless mitts right now.
So how was your Tour de Fleece?





































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