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Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Spinning - Making Progress!

I've made surprisingly good progress with my Tour de Fleece spinning this year. I haven't formally joined the Tour de Fleece fun on their Ravelry group but I've set myself a personal goal of spinning while watching Tour de France highlights every night. Some nights I've been out so have missed the highlights and some nights I've not fancied spinning so I've not spun every night. 

I started working on this fibre months ago. The batt was a blend of lots of different fibres which I bought from Felt Studio UK last year at Woolfest and it's got lots of different shades of green plus some gold sparkly stuff. I've been aiming for a heavy laceweight and fairly even. it was a difficult batt to spin completely even because of the fibre blends. It was a hand-carded batt so not completely 100% evenly blended. I spun the first bobbin over several months and finished it just before Tour de France started. And last night I finished the second bobbin.  The feeling of achievement is immence and it just goes to show that if I spin frequently I make so much better progress.
 I'll be leaving this to rest for a few days and I need to decide on my next fibre. Here's the short list.
 First is a camel/silk blend I bought at Wonderwool last year. I started spinning this last year but then stopped as i just felt I wasn't doing it justice. I thought I'd wait until after my spinning class with Judith McCuin at Knitnation last summer.  I'd like to spin a really fine lace weight but I have about 200 or 250 gr of this so it'll take a long time and I'm not sure about the commitment now. I'd like to spin something i can finish before the end of the Tour and perhaps knit on holiday in Spain in August.
 I fancy having a go at Navajo plying. I've tried it before but never mastered it. I've got some singles leftover from another yarn left on a bobbin and I'm saving it to practice navajo plying.  If I master it it'd be fun to try to spin a selfstriping yarn. I've been looking through my spinning stash and these are my favourite spacedyed fibres.

This is a merino/tencel fibre from Sweet Georgia Fiber club from last year. I love the colours and it'd look good in a striping yarn.
 This is another Sweet Georgia club yarn from this year and this is superwash merino/tencel. It's a blend of rose pink, olive green and camel. I'm not quite so keen on these colours but I do like it.
 Or do I go for another sparkly yarn in blue, purple and green. The colour variation here is more subtle.
I need to decide as I want to do some spinning now. I'm going to miss Tour de France highlights tonight as we have house group so I've decided to do an hour spinning this afternoon instead. I'm having a relaxing day today. My shoulders have been very, very bad since Woolfest and I've had awful, really severe headaches since last week. So this morning I had a massage and I thought relaxing for the rest of the day would help me relax and hopefully keep the pain under control for a bit longer.

So which fibre will it be? It's decision time! I'll tell you next time.

Which one would you choose?

3 comments:

Sea said...

The third and fourth ones look really nice.

Anonymous said...

Thank you. I decided to go for the pink/blue merino/tencel and it's gorgeous. Almost drafts itself. Managing to spin really fine, even singles which makes a change. Loving it. Just spun for 2 hours.

Ann said...

That's exactly what I would have chosen. In fact, I have the same fiber from the club & it's sitting in the box. I am always struggling between spending time on knitting or spinning.