al dente crafting

Tour de Fleece days 1-3! The cool toned bobbins are getting plyed tomorrow. They’re a cultivated silk blend that was extremely challenging to spin. I’ll have notes on their finished post, that’s for sure.

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!

TdF Day Five: A Teal Unicorn Barf

~160g/275m, spun and plied today from a John Arbon limited edition falklands corriedale.

I found this jelly roll on sale when I was out of town and it’s so pretty.

Imma chop it up and make something with it!

TdF Day -1: Pink/White Singles Happy Tour de Fleece! I had zero chill so here's my TdF Day -1 entry for some pink roving I had kicking around.

I went for one super fine single (spun Z) and one slightly thicker single (spun s). I've spent too much time staring at Sarah Anderson's Spinner's Book of Yarn Designs and got it in my head that I wanted to try a boucle so... yeah. Expect a lot of little textured samples this first week of tdf.

We have achieved full rowage!

Now for the columns. Not sure I’m going to make a whole 5 columns with my next colours, but by the gods we’re going to try…!

Had an online class today (voluntarily; trying to keep my skills fresh while working on my dissertation), and I think old monk handwriting goes great with some spinning.

Tour de Fleece day...6? (July 9)

I only managed like 20 minutes today, but it still counts as spinning every day! Please ignore the piece of my hair just hanging out in the fiber supply

Instead of more spinning, I decided to play with acid dyes on 10g strips of eider fleece.

The results are very pretty, and the dyes exhausted well, which I was relieved about. (The right hand strip of plain fleece is totally a control, and not me running out of spoons for a third test)

I've been on hiatus from this project for a few weeks now while I work on other things, but I am partway through carding and processing the tunis fleece I washed last summer. Not sure yet what I'll end up doing with it, but I'm very pleased with how it's spinning up so far.

Also still working on spindle spinning my Woolen Wytch batt (photo from day 1 as I'm in the garden and cba to walk in to the house to takea new photo).

Not spinning quickly but spinning every day which is what I really wanted to achieve!