Tour de fleece day 6

An early post today because I did my daily spinning this morning. I do tend to get a little obssessed with whatever I am working on, so because of the tour I am totally hooked on spinning, knitting has taken a back seat (where it has not been for months).

I did the prep and a little of the spinning for this yesterday, but it was too late at night to alter my day 5 post. I have returned to alpaca and this time used my spindle. It was one of the fibres I bought over a year ago to do a big project with lots of fibre types, I am only just getting round to spinning them up.

I split it into skinny roving strips again, I have found this makes my spinning so much faster, and the airer is a good way to store the strip without getting in a mess.

It does look a bit creepy, like human hair.

I made a fairly thin single from this, it will be navajo plied tomorrow using my wheel and then be put with the banana for knitting after the tour.

I am glad this was not my first alpaca spinning because I think I would have been put off a little. It is very hairy to the touch, although a close look shows all the fibres are the same, so I don't think it is a dehairing problem (I am not sure about the details of this though). The colour is a gorgeous chocolate brown and it did draft very nicely and the roving joined easily, so not all bad, but I think there is nicer alpaca roving out there (actually I know there is as I started the tour with some).

I couldn't tell if it was Suri or Hucaya, it was a fluffy roving cloud, but I could not see any crimpiness in the fibres. I have a few waste scraps left so I will compare them to the bags of Suri and Hucaya when I get those out to spin.

I have some baby alpaca to spin next, which is much softer to the touch so I think that will be a better experience.

Tour de Fleece teams and challenges

Welcome to my first Tour de Fleece post, this will be the first year I have taken part and I am quite excited about it. I am not a huge fan of cycling, so that aspect does not really interest me, but I am into the spinning part. I need to get more practise and this is a good way to motivate that.

For anyone not familiar with this the idea is to spin along with the Tour de France, spinning each day the tour rides from Saturday July 2nd to Sunday July 24th July apart from rest days on the 11th and 18th. An extra task is to spin something challenging on the day of the mountain stage (Friday 22nd).

First up, the teams. You can joint more than one team, and there is a choice of Main teams and Wildcard teams.

I have joined the Peloton team from the Main teams group, this the group for the pack and really the only option as I have been spinning too long to count as a Rookie (over a year) am not aiming for lace (Sprinters) or art yarn (Breakaway) and hope to spin every day so am not a Lantern Rouge. Climbers is a group for those with a big personal challenge, but I think I will save that for next year. I have not found a badge for this yet.

For Wildcard teams I have picked a few:

The Team of Wonder 2011, as some of my challenges are alpaca based, including a lovely Batt of Wonder.

Team UK, because that is where I live

I don't have badges for the rest of my teams yet, but I have joined Team Kromski as my wheel is a Sonata. I am using my wheel for my larger projects.

And the Spindlers team, as some of my challenges will be done on a spindle.

I have also joined Team Hopelessly Overcommitted, because I am :D.

Next my personal challenges:
To spin for at least 15 minutes each day apart from the rest days. This can be wheel or spindle.

To spin this beautiful merino and alpaca batt courtesy of Haze the alpaca and the Wonder Why Gal. I want to make some slipper socks so need a two or three ply that is fairly thick.

My third challenge is to spin up some of the fibre samples I have collected, I would like to try them all, but am aiming for three so I am not too over committed! There is baby alpaca, alpaca, humbug Bluefaced Leicester, Wensleydale, plastic bottle, tussah silk, seaweed and crab. I am going to spindle these into a thin single then navajo ply them using my wheel. I may make my mountain stage challenge to do a whole fibre sample in one day.

Finally I have this beautiful roving from Shunklies (post about the purchase to come later in the week). I tried to resist this as I think I have plenty to keep me busy just with the above tasks but it is so pretty. If I finish the other tasks this will start its journey towards becoming socks.

So with fibre waiting I am eager to get to the start line. I need to do some training first though, by which I mean I need to empty my spindles. 

FOs- Dyeing and a mini square

The FO Friday this week comes from the future. Not as exciting as it sounds really, just that the FO for week 4 out of 52 is a gift for some one so I don't want to post it up here yet. As the goodies for week 5 ou of 52 are done I thought I would share those instead.

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At the start of the week I decided to have a bit of a dyeing session. I am enjoying spinning at the minute so went for jazzing up some of my undyed fibre. I also found a good tutorial online for plaiting roving, am quite pleased with how they look all neatly plaited up.

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I thought I was down to my last two undyed sock yarns, which I already have a plan for so was pleased to find a 100g merino superwash sock lurking in a bag (now I really am out of supplies :( ). This is the result of my first ever dip dye attempt.

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Very pleased with the purple but left the last section a little long before dunking it so it is quite pinky.
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Greenhouse dyed fibre:
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Sock yarn blanket square 4/52 for the year:
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Techniques- Plaiting roving

I wondered how to plait roving, it looks so nice on the webpages I wanted to make mine look the same. Managed to find a tutorial here, it is nice and striaghtforward, but I thought the page was worth saving and sharing.

Greenhouse dyeing

At knit group a while back we were talking about how some people dye yarn in their car on hot days and every time I have got in the car for the last two or three weeks I have thought about it, but not got round to organising some.

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On Monday I had a bit of a dyeing session (photos to come on FO Friday), as I was handpainting roving I thought I would try a small sample. The car was at work with my OH so I decided to use my mini greenhouse instead. I have tried it for rising bread dough in the past, which worked well so I thought it had potential.

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The handpainting and wrapping clingfilm was done in the usual way, then I sat it on a roof tile that was hanging around the garden and put it in to cook.

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To show you it really is a greenhouse (the dye parcel is the slightly sad looking bundle top left):

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Dye parcel in close up, I closed the door and left it for about 24 hours, with just occasional prodings and temperature checks.

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Since it did not puff up in the way of a stove top steamed parcel I put a thermometer in with it to have an idea of how hot it got. Not that I know how hot it needed to be.
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The moment of truth was the next morning when I unwrapped it. To be honest I was expecting a lot of mess with dye running everywhere but was pleasantly suprised to find very little residual dye, a little more than a typical steamed parcel, but still not much and the colours stayed nice and strong.
Even when I gave it a wool wash soak only a little extra came out:
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The weather was good yesterday, so I dried it outside without any trouble.
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There's about 10g there, not sure what it will be, but that is for another day. I am keen to get spinning it but am trying to resist as I already have a spinning project on the go.

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I will definitely be giving greenhouse dyeing another go, it seems to work and after all its free heat, better for the environment and gives something to talk about.

Proof of my usefulness in the aftermath of the zombie apoclypse

For April's sock of the month I am proving that I can be useful once the world has been taken over by zombies- I can make socks from sheep! OK, so from roving but that is pretty close. (And yes, I do realise that once zombies take over you could probably help yourselves from the abandoned shops, but these are prettier :D)

The roving for these was handpainted and steamed, I made a length of turquoise and green and a length of grey and blue. I did try to split the roving to get two matching lengths of yarn but gave up pretty quickly and left the colour changes to fate.

The roving was drop spindled, as close to a commercial sock weight as possible. It ended up a little heavier so I used a 3mm needle and followed the pattern for a size down from my usual one.

The pattern is based on the freebie one that gets given away with Regia but is really just a very plain, straightforward sock.

Close up of the pretty colours:

I have not worn these yet apart from trying for size and taking a photo, they are not quite as soft as I had hoped but hopefully will not be itchy when wearing