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Sunday, July 08, 2012

Into Week 2

We are now into the second week of the Tour de Fleece (and the Tour de France, for that matter, though I haven't been watching as much of the coverage as I have in years past). I started the Tour with a bang, starting and finishing a skein of singles yarn from Karakul top from Crown Mountain Farms.


I ended up with roughly 253 yards of fairly scratchy and very sheddy (is that a word? it sheds a lot) singles. Still planning on felting this, so the extra energy/twist in it shouldn't be a problem.

I took my spindle into work on Friday so I could put in a little time on it during my lunch break and wound up finishing the first ounce of BMFA cashmere/tussah silk (after only about seven months!) that evening.


I've now gotten the spindling addiction (for lack of better word) back and will probably take it into work for the next few days so I can finish up the second ounce. I will probably ply on the wheel, though, because it's a lot faster and a lot easier on my wrists than trying to ply on a spindle.

My second finished yarn came off the wheel last night. This was spun specifically for a Team Footloose (the team for the Hansen miniSpinner group) challenge to spin a fractal yarn. Fractal spinning has to do with the way the fiber is split and it's primarily a way of dealing with color and color repeats; the idea is that the color sequence is the same in all plies of a yarn, but the rate at which the sequence progresses varies by ply. For my yarn, I opted for a two ply. I split the top in half lengthwise and then split one half in half again. This means that one ply of the yarn went through the color sequence once while the other ply went through it twice.


The finished yarn is roughly worsted weight and about 270 yards. It's Polwarth from Bee Mice Elf in a colorway called Room with a View. It was a club colorway; I got it in a swap with someone on Ravelry for another bundle of fiber. Polwarth is probably my favorite fiber to spin, and this was a delight. The bright colors were a lot of fun, too, and I'm looking forward to knitting this up into something for me.


Yarn #3 of the Tour was finished moments ago and is now in a bath. I'm very excited about this one, too, but you'll have to wait a bit to see it!

1 comment:

  1. That last yarn is fabulous! I'm a sucker for anything fuchsia and turquoise :)

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