Tour de Fleece

No knitting of any meaningful nature took place for me between April and August this year. I just lost interest for a while and life (and tennis) took over.

I did however manage to keep my interest in spinning going and took part in the Tour de Fleece this year for the first time...

I cleared the decks of spinning already started, plying up a couple of experiments I'd been playing with:

Some fractal-plied BLF (top) and a sampler of grey BFL plied with 100% bamboo.

I then cracked on with the main event: a sample pack of British Breeds from Hill Top Cloud.

These were spun on my modular spindle and plied on my heavy bottom whorl.

From l - r: White Shetland, grey North Ronaldsay, grey Shetland, oatmeal BFL, brown North Ronaldsay, moorit Shetland, brown BFL, grey Jacob, Black Shetland.

 The finished yarns are all approximately 15g and 30m of fingering weight. I hope to knit a SheepHeid with these in the future.

Finding myself with several days to go before the end of the tour, I dug out a beautiful braid of gradient dyed BFL from The Yarn Yard.

  I split this down the middle then spun each half onto my modular spindle. I plyed to try to maintain the gradient and ended up with approximately 300m of sport weight.

From (almost) first principles

I've been spinning for a while now... I first bought a drop spindle at Woolfest in 2008, then went up to Twist Fibre Craft Studio in Newburgh to have a beginners lesson. My spinning got steadily better and I produced some yarns that I was fairly proud of, but I never used them.

At Woolfest 2009, I bought another spindle so I could ply from the spindle carrying the single, onto the second spindle and a bag of beautiful 80% merino / 20% silk roving. I spun half of it up almost immediately and then never got going the other half (my intention was to ply as a 2-ply).

Roll forward a couple of years (and one small child) and The Yarn Cake in Glasgow started a Spin Sunday on the first Sunday of the month. This coincided nicely with my fingers starting to get itchy for spinning again, so I hunted down the half bag of roving and got going again.



This time, I was bitten thoroughly by the bug and within a few days, I'd finished spinning the second half of the fibre. I changed my mind about plying as a 2 ply, as I prefer the roundness of a 3 ply, so I chain plied both of my singles and ended up with two lovely skeins of approximately fingering weight yarn.





I immediately knitted the longer skein up into a scarf for my daughter.



It's a plain linen-stitch scarf using surprisingly large needles (5.5mm) as linen stitch is quite dense.
 The fabric is wonderfully flat and has a good drape and really does look woven.



The other skein is likely to become a pair of mittens, or maybe a hat.

Woolfest 2009

This year, for me, Woolfest was all about spinning. Yes, there were the usual array of fluffy and furry fibre sources on display...

and very cute they were too.

And a little yarn was purchased...

Sock yarn for the Resident Radiologist as reward for braving Woolfest for the second year in a row.

A skein of beautiful alpaca, silk and cashmere blend laceweight for me from The Yarn Yard.

But mostly it was all about fibre...

Angora fluff from one of the bunnies on show on the day,

Superwash BFL combed top (naturals) from The Yarn Yard; Superwash merino combed top (pinks / oranges) and Falkland wool combed top (blues and greens), both from Felt Studio UK.











Merino - silk blend combed top from Wingham Wool Work that I've already spun almost half of.

I also aquired some more tools for making yarn from fluff...













A beautiful second-hand lazy kate and bobbins and an Ashford Niddy-noddy.

As always, Woolfest was a real treat for the fibre fiend in me and a fantastic prologue to a couple of days in the Lake District, walking (Place Fell and Ullswater this year) and enjoying the wonderful weather.

Caramel Alpaca

The whole recent spinning thing was instigated by a random conversation with a friend of my in-laws 18 months ago. She has five alpacas of varying colours that she keeps and I asked where she sold their fleeces onto when they were sheared. 'Nowhere' came the reply 'we just throw them away'. I was really surprised by this and explained that alpaca is a lovely fibre to knit with and that surely some small-scale spinner would use them...

...skip forward a few months and the in-laws came to visit. My FIL handed me a large sturdy carrier bag full of caramel coloured alpaca fluff. They'd been sheared and could I use some?

At that time, I didn't know how to spin and wasn't sure that I really wanted to learn (there's only so much time and another fibre-related obsession would detract from knitting time). The idea must have grown on me though, as, a couple of months later I bought a drop spindle at Woolfest, then recently I learned to use it and bought the hand carders needed to card the fleece.



I've been combing raw, unwashed fleece into these light and airy rolags...


Which spin up into a fairly fine single.


I then navajo-plied them and washed the yarn in the skein.


The finished product is a little underspun so I'm going to work on that in the next batch, but for now, I have about 100m of caramel coloured 100% alpaca yarn processed entirely from the raw fleece by hand.

Learning Curve.

I've always enjoyed the challenge of learning a new skill and a class I took about a month ago has had me on a fairly steep learning curve ever since. I drove up to Twist Fibre Craft Studio in Newburgh in the north of Fife to learn how to use the drop spindle I bought at Woolfest last year.
I'd had a little go at using it but nothing had clicked and I decided that tuition was the way forward.


Initially, I used a top-whorl spindle supplied in the class and managed to produce some knobbly, hairy almost-yarn from some carded Icelandic wool. I then managed pretty much the same with my bottom-whorl spindle.

I bought some combed silk - merino tops to take home with me and started that evening and fairly quickly produced a spindle full of singles.


A quick watch of videos on the internet and I tried navajo plying it with pretty good success.
These skeins are on the small side and the yarn is a bit hard (I think that I over spun it).

Next I remembered about the mixed bag of combed merino tops I bought from Wingham Wool Work at Woolfest two years ago. I got it out and realised that I pretty much had a whole spectrum of colour. I started at the red end and spun through the colours until I reached the violet end.


This time I tried winding the single off the spindle with my ball winder, to try to control the tension during plying, which worked for a while, but eventually the lovely and obliging Resident Radiologist had to hold the ball and provide tension while I navajo plied (I like three ply - the yarn produced is much rounder so I'm going to stick with this method for a while).


I'm really pleased with the finished product this time. I've soaked and dried it to set the twist and the yarn is beautifully soft. I've ended up with about 80m of 4ply-weight yarn. Clearly I'm nowhere near the top of the learning curve yet, but I've reached a place where I can produce useful quantities of usable yarn.