Jane of All Trades

Ooh yeah baby, that’s right.  I’ve met my self-imposed Tour de Fleece challenge.  I spun up every last tuft of that bizarro mystery fiber, and I have a total of maybe 800-ish yard of heavy worsted weight two ply.  Best part about the challenge?  This fiber would’ve languished for-freaking-ever in my stash, getting spun up in bits and pieces.  Because it wasn’t sexy–there were no great process decisions to make, no colors to watch blend or pop or merge into interesting new things, no fancy techniques.  It started out being several big lumps of animal-brown hair and it turned into many hanks of animal-brown yarn which, while a very gratifying transition indeed, was less than…  riveting. 

Which brought about what was *really* the best part of the challenge.  Even better than watching the fiber turn into yarn was watching my spinning turn into slightly less mediocre spinning.  Again, less than riveting, but very, very gratifying.

Tomorrow there will be pictures.  Tonight there is quiet triumph.

So the Tour de Fleece is coming to a close.  Here is what I have done so far:

That is about 600-ish yards of two-ply yarn spun from the “Magical Mix” possum blend roving.  I have about 5 ounces left to spin and ply.  This should be doable, but it has been a busy, busy, busy few days.

You can see the colors changed across the ‘bumps’ of roving–ranging form a light greyish brown to a distinctively reddish foxy-y sort of color.  I am still debating dyeing the whole lot of it…

I confess, my spinning has slowed down for the past couple of days.  I have picked up some knitting projects again, and taught my daughter and her friend to spin on a drop-spindle (which was too fun), but the Tour de Fleece spinning has slowed.

So I figure today is as good a day as any to take a look back at some previous spinning projects.

 Here we have the first yarn I ever spun.  I used a drop-spindle and some blue-faced Leicester (BFL) roving I dyed using Kool-Aid.  I was thrilled with the colors, less so with the process of spindle-spinning.

Here is more from the same roving, the very first yarn I even spun and plied on my Baynes wheel.  It was eventually knit into a very floppy hat.  Fun colors, though.

Around about the same time, I dyed this BFL and spun it.  Also Kool-Aid.  The colors made me very happy, though I’ve had trouble photographing them accurately.  Very robin’s-egg blue.  That roving was eventually spun and plied and knit:

 Into this very fun pattern from Knitty (Yes!  See that?  I believe I have just successfully hyperlinked some text!  Hot damn!).  I love this pattern (alright, it’s Foliage) and have knit it several times.

And finally, there is this lovely roving (Merino, I think) which I hand-dyed (again, the Kool-Aid).  I divided the total roving in half, and dyed each half for a long color change sequence.  Then I spun half of it, plied it, and knit it into a capelet for Daughter #1, starting with the red at the neckline and transitioning to the blue along the hem.  The second bump will eventually be knit in reverse order, blue along the neckline, for Daughter #2, ideally while she’s still small enough to wear it.  I should get some pictures of the capelet…

I have this issue when I’m spinning, and if you know how to solve it, do tell.  Let’s say I have two bobbins of singles and I’m plying them together.  Inevitably, I will run out on one bobbin before the other.  I know, in an ideal world, that my singles would be totally even and consistent and I would have the same amount on both bobbins, but it never happens that way.  So then I’m left with some random bit of single, and what to do?

In this case, I was plying the previously-mentioned superwash Merino.  Here, by the way, is the finished product, after setting the twist:

It’s about 150 yards of heavy-worsted.  I ran out of the peachy colorway first, leaving me with a bit of the ‘may flowers’ single left.  I switched Navajo plying (for a video demonstration, check out The Joy of Handspinning here: http://joyofhandspinning.com/spin-navajo-ply.shtml).  Navajo plying is a technique for plying from a single source.  The salient characteristics: It turns a single ply into a triple ply (meaning a.) you get a nice, thick, cushy yarn and b.) you end up with one-third the total length you started with) and it preserves color sequences.  Navajo plying is easy to do but hard to explain, which is why I recommend viewing the video if you’re unfamiliar.

Here is a close-up of the finished product in the two-ply section:

And here is a close-up of the Navajo plied section:

Because of the way you Navajo ply, it will tend to keep different-color segments of the single together, which can work to your advantage or disadvantage, depending on the effect you want to achieve.  In this case, I didn’t particularly want to preserve the color sequence, but i had that pesky bit of single left over and I didn’t want to waste it.  Since the colors were compatible, I figured I would ply it and use it as a coordinating accent in whatever I eventually knit up with this yarn.

Which brings us to another problem:  What to do with those smallish skeins of handspun…

Ah, yes, lovely.  I needed a break from the possum, the monochrome, the fur.  I spun up a teeny bit of two different superwash merino pencil rovings (probably 4 oz. total)I had in the stash (this is the Tour de Fleece and all).  One colorway was clled “May Flowers” and was white with lavender, sage green, and yellow.  Not my favorite colors, but I liked how it spun up–as usual, the roving utterly belies the single.

(I wish I had taken pics of the roving stage.)  The second colorway is called “Faith,” and it’s all sorts of peachy-pinks. 

The two were not an obvious match, at least not to me, but I had this niggling curiosity…  I suspected the muted greens in the first single might simultaneously make the pinks “pop” and also subdue the overall yarn, while the purples (which tended to be darker) and the whites (lighter, naturally) would add interesting contrast and complexity.

So I plied.  It took much less plying than the possum, so my first few yards were a snarly mess, but in the end I was delighted with the result.  The merino is stupendously soft, and has so much sheen that I would think it had some silk if I didn’t know better.  Also, it doesn’t get any easier than pencil roving. 

(Rovings procured on ebay at http://stores.ebay.com/THE-SPECIAL-TEA-SHOP)

So why it wouldn’t occur to me that my dogs would be even more intrigued by a possum-fur-roving than I was, I don’t know.  But here was the result:

Actually, that was not quite accurate, because the *real* result was four ounces of what had been neatly-coiled sliver rendered into bits and pieces and spread all over my room.  I almost cried.  Almost.  Instead, I gathered it all into a box and ignored it for months, then dragged it out last week for the Tour de Fleece.  And here is the result:

So I used to have a blog, and for a variety of reasons I have failed at keeping it up, and was bound and determined to do it over again but–alas and alack–I have been fettered by my utter incapacity for things computer-related.  Enter the good people at Word Press and their too-good-to-be-believed “Free Install” team and–shazam!–I once again have a blog.

What prompted my re-entry into the increasingly populous blogosphere?

The Tour de Fleece. (link in side bar until I figure out why I can’t insert it here.)

So here was my tour de fleece goal: to spin up the roughly 1.25 lbs. of a certain roving I’ve had in my stash for some time.  (pictures to follow, welcome to my learning curve.)

The roving was called “Magical Mix” and came, as do many things strange and mysterious, from ebay.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to contact the seller, and it appears to no longer be available, but i do remember it contained possum fur, and I think camel, and perhaps some wool.  It is the natural tan-brown-grey color one would associate with various animal undercoats, sometimes greyer sometimes redder, and it is soft, but has some random white or black guard hairs (goat? llama? dog? who knows).  The wildly variable staple length ranges from a low of maybe 2 inches to a high of maybe 6.  if you don’t count the sporadic little downy clumps which have no length at all, only puffiness.  It is, in short, a trainwreck, and I love it.