Hazel – Page 10 – Hazel Purls

Time Travel on Days 13 to 15 of the TdF

Today’s lesson – when grabbing my camera from the desk in my study, make sure it’s got the memory card in it and I’ve not left it in the card reader slot in my computer. So some of the photos on here are from the camera on my phone (which fortunately goes everywhere with me). But before I talk about today I need to catch up on the TdF.

On Thursday (day 13) I continued with plying the Shetland/Soybean blend. It’s not finished yet but I did make some progress. Yesterday (day 14) I managed to get to 11pm without doing any spinning. In the end I fancied something calming and soothing so sat at my Dryad and continued spinning the Falkland tops.

Today is day 15 and was Creating Space. I took spinning, drum-carding and felting to do. I’m not sure why I thought I would manage to do all of these things in about 6 hours (with time for lunch) but I’ve always been an optimist.

I wanted to make a start on the “Bowties are cool” yarn. My plan is to have felted bowties and the yarn itself to be core-spun. I started work on making some batts. Initially I fished out the colours and fibres I wanted to use and put them together and looked for some pictures of the Time Vortex from the new Doctor Who series (I personally like the vortex for the 10^th Doctor, so this is where I concentrated my efforts). Then, uncertain of what I was going to do. I drank some tea and did some spinning:

I then had another look at the pictures and my fibre and made some decisions, which resulted in four piles of fibre:

I drum carded each of these. I didn’t manage to cram all the fibre onto the carder, so I now have a pile of left-overs. After a single pass I was starting to doubt my plan:

So I split each of the batts into four and recarded into four new batts (thus combining the first batts). The result is four Time-Vortex batts:

Next step – felted bowties.

Omelettes on Day 12 of the TdF

I decided on a 3 ply. And I think you’ll agree that this looks like a nice even, round yarn.

I would have plied a bit more but I ran into a little problem.

I swear that this bobbin is filled with a single that has no beginning or end. It is one continuous loop that goes round and round. I’ve spent a good half an hour this evening hunting for the end and generally making a mess of the single on this bobbin. I’ve still not found it. I decided to find a bobbin that did have an end and use that instead.

So, in order to make an omelette you need to break a few eggs and if you spin enough there will come a time when you lose an end.

Days 10 and 11 of the TdF

I was relieved that day 10 of the TdF was a rest day, not least because it was the day some plumbing decided to start leaking. I spent most of the afternoon and evening worrying about the leak, if it would turn from a trickle into a gush or if indeed it wasn’t a leak at all but some other highly unlikely problem (like condensation). This morning I found the source of the leak and a kind friend came and fixed it (and is returning tomorrow for preventative plumbing maintenance!) Before the leak, and despite it being a rest day, I found myself sat at one of my wheels spinning a little, while my daughter played at “spinning” on another wheel which currently doesn’t have a project on it.

Today (day 11) I decided to make some headway on the Soybean/Shetland blend. This I’m spinning longdraw – which always feels like a little bit of magic is being performed when the thread forms as I pull back the fibre. At the beginning it feels like I’m stretching out something like chewing-gum or blue-tack. The initial thread is lumpy and bumpy, but as the twist enters the fibre and stabilises the thinner sections and I continue to pull back, the lumps disappear like magic. My longdraw spinning isn’t perfect – though I think if I used freshly carded rolags my results would be much more consistent.

I really wanted to finish spinning the singles and found myself cramming every last ounce of fibre onto the bobbins (I even swapped bobbins to get more on one that I’d previously decided was full).

And I did it! I’ve used up all the Soybean and Shetland blend:

I haven’t yet decided how to ply these, whether to make a 2 or 3 ply. I’d initially intended a 2 ply, but I think a 3 ply would give a rounder more consistent yarn.

Spinning Longdraw on Day 9 of the TdF

Yesterday I was creating large and fluffy yarn on a wheel with a ratio of 3:1. Today I decided I needed to make progress on something that’s been hanging around for a long time. So I switched to my Ashford Traditional with a lace flyer set at 40:1 and got on with spinning my Shetland and soybean fibre blend. I did a little in the afternoon and this evening after the children were in bed I took the wheel out onto the patio to spin.

The garden’s fairly unkempt, but there are some lovely plants on the patio including this pot containing three fuchsias (it wasn’t as dark as this – the flash has just made it look darker). There’s a huge jasmine halfway down the garden, and the scent from the flowers was filling the air (I’ve now learnt that when the label of a plant says it’ll grow to 4m by 4m, I need to think very hard about how big that actually is, and not kid myself that I’ll manage to keep it to 2m by 2m by pruning!)

Anyway, I sat down with my tea and my wheel and pulled handfuls of fibre from the blended batt and spun longdraw from the fold.

This is a wobbly one handed photo, taken on my phone. You can see the fibre batt on my lap, and a spun thread (going off to the left) just before it gets wound onto the bobbin.

I managed about 40 minutes spinning outside before it got too dark to see how thick a thread I was making. It was a lovely way to fit some spinning into my day.

Day 8, Tour de Fleece

Today I spun some of this (BFL on my Queen Bee):

And core-spun the batt from yesterday into this:

On this lovely wheel:

What do you mean, you don’t think you’ve seen that wheel before in my “collection”?

giggle

Days 5 (continued), 6 and 7 of the Tour de Fleece

When I left you last on day 5 of the TdF I was off to do some spinning. I did (sort of). I prepared some mill-spun yarn for core-spinning by running it through the wheel to put some S-twist in, prior to my using it to core-spin Z-twist.

Yesterday was day 6 and I carded up a batt with a variety of wool and trilobal nylon and then core-spun it. I also added an auto-wrap thread. Here it is this morning, finished and tied with some matching ribbon:

The yarn is both heavier and shorter than the previous one I core-spun. The batt I used was thicker but less fluffy, so I think I applied the fibre more heavily to the core. I shall have to experiment until I’m able to consistently get the results I want.

Today has been a busy day with the children, and being a Friday I’m quite tired. However, this evening I’ve carded up another batt. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to core-spin this tomorrow. Here it is in a deep hat-box, which is just the right size (I’ve had to re-home the fabric scraps I was storing in here):

So, that’s the first week of the TdF completed. I’ve thought constantly about spinning, fibre, and things I can add to the spinning. Earlier this week I went shopping for a curtain pole. I managed to find one but I also came back with these beads, perfect in their own little storage boxes and ideal to add to my spinning!

The fabric scraps from the hat-box? I found myself wondering if they could be spun into a yarn or added to some yarn. So, what will week 2 of the TdF bring and how much further am I going to stray from my original goals?

Tour de Fleece: days 3, 4 and 5

Days three and four of the tour have gone well. Monday was a busy day with all the usual grocery shopping and other general Monday shenanigans. When time allowed I continued with the spindling and in the evening I made a little more progress on the lovely Juno fibre.

Yesterday (day four) turned into a bit of a bumper spinning day. In the morning was my son’s sports day. I took the “fruit salad” spindle spinning and between cheering him on and taking photos I was able to do quite a bit of spindling. My spinning did get a few enquiring looks from other mums and some questions from one of the older children who was helping with the sports day organisation. I think I may need to put together a short one page introduction that can be given out at similar events if people are interested.

Also in the morning a new spinning book arrived. I spent the day flicking through it and in the evening I had to have a go at core spinning. I carded up a batt with natural white Shetland, a little commercially dyed Shetland, some food-colour dyed Jacob and some sparkly trilobal.

I enjoyed the spinning and ended up with a very light and airy yarn. In fact I found the lightness compared to the bulk of the yarn really surprising. I’ll be interested to see how it wears.

This morning I wound it into a ball. Normally I use a ball-winder – but large yarns don’t work on a standard sized ball-winder, so I had to use a makeshift nostepinne.

Yes, it’s an almost empty kitchen roll. I’m going to Fibre-East in a few weeks. I must remember to look out for a proper nostepinne while I’m there.

I’ve knitted all 31 yards up into a small Mobius cowl using 20mm needles. I just need to graft it and it’ll be complete. As yet though, I haven’t managed any actual spinning today. So please excuse me stopping here as I must now go and do at least a few minutes!

Tour de Fleece–Day 2

The sun is currently setting on day two, and an absolutely stunning sunset it is too (sadly my photography skills have never been up to capturing the beauty of a sunset, though if I keep trying maybe one day I’ll succeed)!

Today has been filled with the palaver of installing an integrated dishwasher into the kitchen. It entailed three trips to local hardware stores before the right bits of waste pipe were sourced and there was further bodging (technical plumbing term) to fix a leak right the end of the day. However, It is now installed and running and appears to be a huge improvement over the old one.

I failed to keep up with the spindle spinning today. However, at one point I needed to escape and quietly exited the kitchen, found fibre, went upstairs and dusted and oiled the Dryad wheel. I then managed a few minutes peaceful spinning.

I’m spinning some Falkland dyed by Juno Fibre Arts. It’s a real treat to spin something dyed by someone else. The colours are different from the ones I would have chosen and the distribution and proportions of colours are also different. I’m looking forward to seeing how this will come out.

I think I’ll Navaho ply it to maintain the changing colours.

Right, the sun is almost gone, so I think it’s time I grabbed another cup of tea and did some more spinning!

Tour de Fleece Day 1

Today saw the start of the Tour de France (apparently – I haven’t watched any or even caught up on events via the internet or radio). It also saw the start of the Tour de Fleece (TdF)!

Yesterday evening I got myself all prepared and set up my “stash” on Ravelry for the yarn I’m planning on spinning during the TdF. There are projects that are in progress and some are new projects to spin. Once I had everything listed I was quite shocked to see how much I’m planning on doing! I also updated my Ravelry profile with my aims for the TdF.

Today has been a busy day with the children, so I haven’t had time to do much spinning. Last night I decided that the best way to tackle spinning today was to concentrate on spindling. So I made sure that the two active spindle projects were easy to grab in quiet moments (there were a few – not many – but some) and I was able to make noticeable progress!

Both spindles already had some singles on, but here was progress by the end of the day:

This evening I’ve sat down at my Ashford Traditional with the lace flyer and made some progress on the Shetland/Soybean blend that I started nearly two years ago!

I’m looking forward to getting lots more spinning done over the next few weeks and seeing just how much I can do when I prioritise spinning over other non-essential activities.

Ingredients

I’ve been playing with colours of fibre (wool, bamboo, trilobal and angelina) and have some possible ingredients for “Bow Ties are Cool”:

I’m not planning on using these proportions though. I’m thinking of a base of dark colours with brighter colours acting as highlights. I may also need to add or take something away. Looking at the photo the fibres I’ve chosen are very smooth – I think I need some texture in there too (perhaps the rest of the Leicester Longwool locks)?

Anyway, this looks like it will be fun!