Helygen Celli

Tour de Fleece

Tour de Fleece!
I had a lot of fun spinning during the Tour de France in July 2010.
Besides spinning I also did some knitting. A knee injury made it impossible to spin for a few days.
It was a  nice month with lots of fibery goodness :-)))

My greatest challenge was to spin enough yarn to finish my pullover Ingenue. I had spun some yarn in April, but not enough I thought. The challenging part was dyeing more roving, blending all the colors and spinning it a worsted weight. Spinning thick singles is not that easy, this was really mindful spinning – not the default way. Now I have done some more knitting (WIP 75% finished while writing this blog) it seems that I already had sufficient yarn at first.

Happy Summer
Another challenge was spinning a nice 3-ply sock yarn.
hand dyed and handspun BFL, navajo plied, 100 grams, abt. sportsweight
not my regular colors; lots of red, pink and orange, some blue and some violet,
will make some lovely striped socks or a nice hat.

Waterfee
Carded about 70 grams of BFL, 10 grams of white bamboo and 10 grams of trilobal nylon.
Hand-dyed the batt with cobalt, turkoois and a bit of yellow. I used the Sewo-Color acid dyes.
I spun the batt my “default” way; abt fingering weight: 84 gram = 306.2 yards (280.0 m)
I used my basic toe-up sock pattern SokBasis* (Dutch only)

Besides these projects I experimented with some fibers, techniques, preparing fibers, washing fleeces e.a.
I have spun some singles which will one day become a boucle yarn.
I swatched a fleece I got; very large dark brown almost black with a nice staple. (‘t zwarte schaap)
A nasty smelling experiment was suint fermenting a Shetland Fleece I got earlier this summer.

I can chat for hours about it ….
So why don’t I blog more often to tell you all about it?