Tour de Fleece 09 and other excuses to spin way to much

Well following a tweet from Kraftkoala advising it was not too late to start the Tour de Fleece challenge on Ravelry, I joined the group.

Several help requests later, from the Wildcraft Woollies group about posting photo's and I was off.












This is my first three days of the tour but has resulted in the quickest skein ever made by me.














The original wool was a BFL roving hand-dyed in my experimental stage. As the results were patchy I decided to drum card this with some bamboo I had dyed one colour - again my first attempt at Procion dyes.













I managed to spin and ply this on Day 3 + 4 to the tune of Kasbian's Where did all the love go? Try to spin to Fast Fuse if you dare! By Day 5 I had a proper skein yay!














I've already started on my next one which is one of Krafty Koala's batts I bought last week. It is a merino Cashmere blend and full of colour from light to dark. I think I might navajo ply it as this will keep the colour bands together.

I have a project already lined up for all these spun skeins - Skein Queen's, zig zag blanket. Better get cracking.

From this to this!

I haven't managed to keep up my mission to blog once a week, probably because I am too busy looking at everyone else's blogs. But anyway I thought I'd post again and try and get to some sort of theme going to make my thoughts easier to put on "paper".

I knit, spin and crochet so following on from many of my fellow Ravelry virtual mates I thought I'd try showing some of my projects.

I am new to spinning - well under a year anyway -so my yarn making is still a little inconsistent but getting there.



This is one of my recent forays - the wool was actually an English wool/silk noil tops mixture bought from Forest Fibres through her ebay site where she has a wonderful range of different wools and spinning equipment to choose from.




First I hand dyed the rovings which wasn't great success as I didn't mix enough dye and the wool wasn't wet enough for it to disperse the dye. Anyhow's it came out very mottled looking. To put a bit more colour into it I then drum carded it with some merino royal blue and turquoise commercial tops.




When I started spinning it it really wanted to draft finely but this made the yarn have quite a hard rough feel, so I decided to let the drafting happen in chunks making this a thick and thin yarn but super bulky in places.




My potential for it is a hat and a reasonably loose knit chunky one was found at Ozark Handspun who make wonderful handspun yarns with loads of texture in them.

Well I'll upload some piccies once I manage to get this knitted up.