Fiber Galore

It's a rest day! This, of course, means it's time to wash all the yarn in the finish box and take stock of what has been done so far. Please note, I like big numbers, so I am counting everything I have worked on, even if it's just plying and/or washing. This includes the single I got from a friend and just plyed and washed. Also the mystery yarn stat will be a guess since most of that is currently drying and I likely have some more information on those once I sort out the labels when they're dry.

First of all, what all have I spun, plyed, and/or washed?

All in all I currently have a total of 1110g of yarn. In this we have:

300g of Manx Loaghtain

200g of Falkland

200g of German mountain sheep

150g of Eider wool

100g of Polar Fox wool

75g of Mystery wools

50g of Shetland

32g of Merino bamboo mix

2g of Cotton

1g of Yak

Next up, we have colour distribution. There are three categories: natural browns, natural whites, and colourful dyed yarns.

In the lead is white with 45.2% and 502g.

Next is colour with 27.7% and 307g.

And then finally, we have brown with 27.1% and 301g.

Of course, we do also need a breakdown of what work I have actually done over the last 9 days:

Singles spun:

826g, 74.4% of the full amount so far

Yarn plyed:

857g, 77.2% of the full amount so far

Yarn washed:

1027g, 92.5% of the full amount so far

I need to prep more of the alpaca im spinning on my wheel and i do not have time for that today so i ended up spinning on my trusty spindle

Look at this. Green and pink is simply the best colour combination in all its variants.

Obviously this fibre wants to be a fractal spin. I'm gonna do a 2-ply to get some decent meterage; I split it 1:4.

Corriedale is one of my favourite wools, and combining it with silk is a stroke of genius. Look at that shimmer 💖

Typical for Corrie, the wool was an off-white prior to dyeing. The darker hairs are still visible if one looks closely. I love this, wool should not be too uniform, it is grown by living creatures.

I took my shiny new yarn out to photograph it in the sunlight, to capture all the different colours of it

I didn't get my spindle emptied before Tour de Fleece started, but I had about an ounce of roving left when it did. That's all spun up and I'm pretty happy with it, so it's on to giving chain plying a try!

I haven't had much time to spin, and I'm about to be the driver for road trip with a 34hr drive time, but hopefully there will be some down time in there for me to try.

A few weeks ago I admired tiny spindles and @ofchaosgoddess offered to send me one... but she sneakily sent me TWO and also a gorgeous squishy batt!!!!! The batt is romeldale + rambouillet + silk; unbeknownst to her (I assume), romeldale is possibly my favourite wool and also difficult or impossible to find here in England. The spindles are 8 grams each and I've never used a cross-arm spindle before so I really need to look up how to wind the cop. They are gorgeous and perfect and fun to use and I feel they will fly away if I breathe on them.

How tiny are they? THIS TINY:

2) Full spindle! This is, uhhhhh, 5 grams. I estimate it took between 5 and 10 hours of spinning. Ran it through the yardage counter as I chained it into a plying ball and it claims 200 metres. Yikes.

I have 7 or 8 grams of the batt to go. I think I will carry on making singles and then ply the whole lot onto my 18 gram spindle, which I used to think was so small!

Purple-green bfl fibre, my first fractal, undeniably alien-monster yarn ٠࣪ ⚛︎

It will take forever, also makes for a very bad travel project (can't take the scale with me)

But DAMN look at this pink (I'll go from light pink, to the dark, then green)

I did a math mistake. But that is fixed...

I mix the proper weight of silk and BFL on the drum carder until it is somewhat mixed, and then refine it with the hand carders and make rolags. That also means less math when it comes to the color change!

And now behold. 22 rolags if the most delicious antique rose color

I'm almost done with all the image editing which is great and exciting since that's the bulk of the project. I have a ton of other blog topics and experiments I want to run off and do, but I'm making sure I finish this first!

It's finally done! Pretty happy with the pattern, so I published it. Includes adult and kid versions of ears and horns, I may design a vest and moss/flower horn accessories as well in the future.

TDF days 8 and 9? I think?

Yesterday I did a bit of tiny spinning on the nano. Almost through the first green section! I also plied the exmoor horn and spun up a sample of my next breed: lonk.