This week's crafty blog post is a summary of what I spun during the Tour De Fleece. I got another chance to spin up some Haunui fibre, and it was so nice to spin.
#blog #blogging #crafting #craftingblog #spinning #FiberArts #tourdefleece
https://www.craftygardener.co.nz/?post_id=154&title=tour-de-fleece-2025
This year's crafting while #BicycleTouring - an actual Tour de France. 1800+ km of cycling, so not much crafting time.
Did some spinning on my cross spindle. Learned to spin with a DIY supported spindle. Will definitely buy a proper one to explore this technique more. And knitted the lace yoke of a sweater with a fine bouclé yarn from Japan. It's lace and bunched up on the needle, so not very visible. Very nice texture.
#knitting #HandSpinning #SpindleSpinning #TourDeFleece #WIPWednesday
My hank of merino yarn is mostly dry - I gave it a soak in hot water yesterday after plying then winding it onto my umbrella swift.
Yesterday was the final day of #TourDeFleece and I'm so happy with how this yarn turned out.
Plying is finished. You can see that the last part I plied, which was the first part I spun plied against itself, is thicker than the rest. If I were spinning for a specific project, it would be helpful to keep a sample, to compare against as I spin, to stay consistent.
I haven't decided what I'll do with this yarn yet.
Plying happened last night!
I did both the worsted and woolen spun Oni Tibetan Mastiff singles as 2-ply yarns on my EEW Nano. As expected, the plied yarn is springier than the singles, resulting in overloaded bobbins! Unlike the EEW 6.1, the flyer arms of the Nano are so close to the bobbin that you can't overload them much at all before friction prevents taking up any more yarn.
I still had my DIY divided bobbin lying around, so I used that to ply up the remainder of each set of yarn.
Also, despite measuring out the yarn to split, in each case I ended up with one cone that had significantly more yarn left over at the end than the other. So, I wound up a quick center-pull ball and finished off the plying from that.
Visually, they're still quite similar, and both bobbins are nicely squishy! I'm very curious to get them off the bobbins, washed and spin set, so I can compare the feel, elasticity (if any!) and wpi between the two.
Non-official #TourDeFleece spinning update! I have now technically spun semi-woolen yarn from the fold.
For those not familiar: this is a technique that takes prepared fiber, separated into clumps as long as the staple length, folded over your index finger, and then drafted from the bend in the middle. Instead of keeping the fibers aligned and compact, it adds some randomness and loft to the yarn, making it squishier.
From YouTube videos, it looks pretty straight forward! But I found it quite difficult to maintain clean, even drafting from that desired fold point. No matter how I tried to control the handful of fiber, drafting seemed to pull it apart with more chaos than I could control. At least not with the level of perfection I expect from myself. 😅
(If I had a third arm and/or better preparation, I could have made some video, but sadly not this time.)
But I finished a whole 2 oz bobbin (with measured 2 oz of fiber) last night, to match the previous 2 oz of worsted spun.
Tonight I transferred to cones to count yardage and split it evenly for plying:
- 320 yd worsted, split to 2x 160 yd cones
- 248 yd woolen, split to 2x 124 yd cones
Although they don't look terribly different in overall thickness, the shorter length from the woolen spin is what you might expect.
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