Tour De Fleece- The Home Stretch and Finish Line

Day 22- I got bored of posting very similar looking pictures of romney fleece on the bobbin. So I made Cake Pops and decided to make some of them look like yarn balls. So a different take on making yarn.

Day 23 and the final day of the tour. I finished bobbin 9 on day 23 and decided to ply the romney. I ended up with 225 yds of a bulky 3-ply. I love it. It is so smooshy. Unfortunately I want to make a sweater/jacket out of this yarn. Which means I am looking at needing between 1200-1600 yds (depends on the pattern), which means I have a lot more spinning to go. Thank goodness I have a lot of wool. And a highlight reel of some of my favorite pictures. I had so much fun and I can't believe I stuck to it. I spun every day but one. Now I can get back to my regularly scheduled knitting. :)

Tour De Fleece- Week Three

Day 15- migraine day. No spinning for me. The motion of the wheel made me sick to my stomach.

Day 16- Spun up those locks I prepped last week. Very bumpy and textured. Now I need to find something to ply it with.

Day 17- I plied the mohair locks with some cotton thread. It is a lovely spring color that changes colors.

Day 18- Back to the romney, bobbin number 7

Day 19- Rest Day

Day 20- And even more Romney. Bobbin number eight on the left and the start of bobbin number nine.

Day 21- More on bobbin number 9.

Tour De Fleece- Week Two

Tour De Fleece- Day 8. Fiber prep also counts so I took these mohair locks and separated them by color and ran them through the picker. I think I've decided to spin these with a lot of texture and ply with thread.

Day 9- I dug out some fiber that needed finishing. I had made batts of black merino, blue mohair, and blue firestar and corespun about half of them around a laceweight merino core. I finally finished them and ended up with about 200 yards. Wooo

Day 10 is a day of rest, just like the real Tour.

Day 11- More fiber prep. I picked the rest of the Romney fleece in preparation for carding. I love the extreme volume change. Before:

After:

Day 12- Dug out some more stash. This was a batt I had dyed then carded where the colors didn't really do what I wanted. I had previously spun the other batt of this and chain plyed it to make a bulky yarn. So I separated by color (orange, orange/pink, pink, pink/purple, purple) then tore those strips in half. I started with orange and moved to purple.

Day 13- I decided I wanted to leave this as a single ply laceweight and finished the other half of the batt by continuing on the same strand but going from purple to orange. So the whole thing will go from orange to pink to purple (double section) to pink to orange.

Day 14- Finished! The pink dye on this never really set and there are only so many times you can rinse fiber before it reaches felt land. So my hands got a bit pink spinning it. But now that it is done, I am going to do some major rinsing and will probably whack the hell out of if. I want it to be a bit felty so as a single it will be stronger.

Tour update- Week One

So I have been awesome at this keeping to the Tour De Fleece. Go me. But it does take up most of my crafting time during the week so not much else has gotten done. How about an update in pictures. I will break it up into week one and week two.

Days 1-3, My view at the MSACF and the romney I spun for the three days.

Days 4 and 5- 2 oz of alpaca from Kanawha City Yarn Company. Spun on my itty bitty Greensleeves Spindle. It is my carrying around project for those days when I don't have enough time to sit at the wheel.

Day 6- More Alpaca

Day 7- Back to the Romney Fleece

New Item in the Store

http://www.knittingnadine.etsy.com/

I found a pack of key chain fobs at AC Moore the other day and they were on sale. So I picked up a pack and decided to make several of my cell phone sock charms. And then I decided to sell them on Etsy. I just think they are so cute. Of course you could also use my itty bitty sock pattern to make your own.

And I am in the process of putting up more stitch markers. But I honestly won't be heart-broken if these don't sell.

Staying faithful until the end

So I know I talked about my inability to ever finish things or stick to anything. Well, in this post I will prove myself wrong. Every now an then a project comes along that consumes all of my crafting time. If that project is lucky and goes fast enough, I actually get it finished before I get bored and move on. This is one of those projects.

I would like to introduce my new knitting bag, which oddly enough is crocheted. It is not big enough for a lot of projects and stuff, but it is perfect for carrying to work on a daily basis. And holy crap is it cute.

It is even lined with pockets. I will love it and squeeze it and call it George. Oh and stuff it full of all of my knitting. Well and spinning. I needed a traveling spinning project to work on for the Tour de Fleece so at least I can say I've spun something. So I threw 2 oz of alpaca on my itty bitty Greensleeves spindle and I am going to see how far I can stretch 2 oz of fiber.

Tour De Fleece

This was my view for most of my Fourth of July weekend. It was great! I spent Thursday through Saturday doing spinning demo's with the River Cities Fiber clan at the Mountain State Arts and Crafts Fair. This was the first time I got to spend all three days and it was so much fun. Although today is the first day I haven't noticed any soreness. Spinning/carding/picking for 10 hours a day for three days straight is tiring. Not to mention all the shopping and fair food. Oh and MSACF has so many wonderful booths (like ours) where you could make something using older techniques. I forgot to take pictures of the paper marbling I did. I got in when he didn't have anyone and he just let me play until I though my booth would fire me for going missing. A tote bag with nature printing on it. I think I am going to add some embroidery to this to make it pop.

Stained glass WV. I got to use a soudering gun for the first time. I am very proud I didn't burn myself. Now the picker and great wheel might have kicked my butt. Did I mention I got to spin on a great wheel for the first time, and with cotton for the first time and in front of people. Every time I stepped up to the great wheel I had my picture taken like 5 times. It was fun.
The MSACF also fell on the weekend that started the Tour de Fleece. Nope, I spelled that last word right. We crafty people like to take over sporting events for our own purposes. First it was the fiber Olympics, now the Tour de Fleece. Anyway, the point is to spin (fiber spinning not like bike spinning) every day of the Tour de Fleece. It takes place on Ravelry(the website above is from last year) and there are prizes and whatnot. My goal for the Tour is to spin up as much of my Romney fleece as possible. I would love for it to actually be a sweater some day. And thanks to the MSACF, and needing to demo the picker and drum carder I got about half of my fleece carded up and ready to spin. I only wish I had been more optimistic and taken the other bag of fleece. It would probably be done too. But now to the spinning.

I want to make sort of a heavy worsted, bulky weight yarn and I thought the best way to acheive that would be to do more plies. So I am aiming for a three ply (we shall see after some sampling, I have lots of fleece to play with). I am also only running the batts through the drum carder once. I want it to have lots of character and still look like it used to be on a sheep. If I wanted it to look like commercial yarn, I would buy commercial yarn.

I have to say the one thing that amused me the most about this weekend (besides Judy's terror of the fiber butterflies we were making) was how many people were shocked that this brown was the natural color of the wool. A lot of them didn't beleive there were brown sheep out there.