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.

Little Town of Knitting

Model village of Wool

I was looking through Yarn Forwards site the other day, primarily to see whether there were any jobs being advertised - not that I can move jobs at the moment you understand - but just to satisfy my curiosity as to whether a job was even possible to pursue in one's hobby, when I saw this link to the Telegraphs website.

It turns out the ladies in Mersham near Ashford in Kent have been very busy with their knitting needles and managed to knit a whole town out of wool. It has taken 23 years for their 40 strong afernoon club to create this little town but now due to its large size they are selling it off.

What a tragedy, you'd think that a local museum would want to invest in this unusual take on their town. Still good luck to all the ladies there, hopefully it will raise a lot of money for their hall funds.

Spin Spin Spin the wheel

A good friend of mine went to New Zealand on holiday way back at the beginning of year. We only manage to meet up about twice a year but as she has just lost her job, we decided to have a get-together to catch up on life. She did let me know that she had a "little gift" for me but what a shock I got when she pulled out from the back of her car a full fleece all the way from New Zealand. She squashed it in her suitcase just for me! She's a real love.

So not to disappoint I have managed to dye 100gms of the 1.6kilos she brought back and spun a little. The dyeing process was a bit hit and miss as this was my first attempt, so there are a multitude of different colours going on despite only three dye pigments being used. This is the first batch spun and it looks quite good although it will be a bit more heathery once plyed. I will have to think of a good sweater project once fr the rest of the fleece.

I still haven;t managed to figure out which sheep the fleece has come from - it's definately not a merino or BFL fleece, it is coaser in feel. Unfortuately my dear friend couldn't remember the name of the sheep breed although she thought it might have started with a "b". Answers on a postcard please for anone who knows what other sheep tend to be bred in NZ, it was farm she bought it from, on the South Island.