Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Tour de Fleece 2010 - my first sock weight yarn!

Hi knitters,

Been quiet on this channel - but I had to share my first sock weight yarn, plied this afternoon on Margot's sunny deck with vultures circling overhead.

These are the three bobbins of merino superwash which I spun from roving dyed by Janice Kang for my birthday. It was some of Janice's very first dye work, and now it has been plied into my very first sock-weight yarn. I *think* it's both soft enough and firm enough to count as sock yarn, and I'm tempted to knit socks out of it. Janice - I hope you like the yarn I made out of your fabulous, generous gift of your very first creative work in color!

I spun these bobbins over the last 10 days as part of the Tour de Fleece, which is a spinning challenge that asks spinners to spin something every day that the Tour de France is riding. I've missed two days so far, but spinning 8 out of the last 10 days is way above my normal production - hence the three full bobbins!

My plan for this yarn was to divide the roving lengthwise into three sections, and then strip down two of the sections into about 20 width-wise strips each and spin the third one in just four strips. This should give a 5-to-1 beat of the thinner strips (which make shorter spun lengths of color) against the fatter strips, and in theory might turn out sort of interesting. Right?

In the photo at the top, the outer bobbins are the thin strip bobbins and the middle one shows the long color runs that came from my widest strips.

Here's plied yarn (iPhone photo... focus was not great this close up in the sunset light. More photos coming from my hostess!) You can see that there are quite long stretches of one color - orange being the most visible in this view - and the other plies dance around making different color relationships to the long run color.

Next up on the Tour de Fleece, I invited Margot to come over tomorrow and see my fleece sorting & washing in progress. So I guess there had better be some fleece sorting by the time she gets here! And the next lot of fiber I want to tackle is a gift from the Fiber Fiend of a wild & crazy batt she bought from an indie dyer / carder in yellow with sparkly things in. Tune in next week for more news of the Tour de Fleece chez spinnity.

Edited to add: Margot took some photos of me plyiing, including much better photos of the yarn in progress - have a look at my Flickr Tour de Fleece set.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Bogie said...

Wow, look at that 3 ply! It looks mighty fine, very colorful, and squooshy. I am honored. :D

July 14, 2010 10:40 PM  

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