Well here we are at the start of the Tour de Fleece. I’ve joined the Peloton, Rookies, Team UK, Spin Our Socks, and Team Jelly Legs so I think I had better stop joining teams now.

I have started off the tour in a bit of a lateral direction, by not making progress towards any of my goals, but instead learning to spindle spin!

I was concerned that I would start off the tour on the back foot as I was out all day today at the Knitting and Crochet Guild AGM. (did you know that when your TomTom stops working part way up the M1 a crochet hook can be the ideal tool to poke it up its reset button with). I’m afraid I have been my usual appalling self and although I remembered to take my camera with me I completely forgot to take it out of the bag. After the AGM itself we had a very interesting chat by Pat, Steve, and Ben from Woolly Thoughts. I have been to a couple of their talks before, and they are always very good. Also I am biased and enjoy hearing about a nice bit of mathematical knitting 🙂

After lunch there were some workshops, and while unfortunately I wasn’t fast enough to get into Mary‘s workshop on wire knitting, I was just quick enough to get a place on Terri‘s workshop on making your own spindle and learning to spin on it!

My DIY skills leave something to be desired so Terri had to help me out rather a lot with the spindle construction, I am going to superglue it now I have the yarn off it since I was having a bit of trouble with the CDs wobbling.

I got home with just enough time to watch the last bits of the tour highlights on the telly, so here is the spindle, watching along with the maillot jaune.

Here is a close up of the singles:

The yarn we were using was English Wool tops. I found it a bit hard to draft at first, and so the yarn I made this afternoon was rather lumpy and bumpy. I was thinking about it in the car on the way home and thought it would be worth varying the way I was trying to draft and spin to see if that would help. I was finding the fibre very grabby with my usual woollen-ish spinning style. I got home and switched to a more worsted style and did much better.

I also managed to ply on the spindle!

As you can see the light was going here by the time I managed that. The plying is rather wobbly. I was having a lot of trouble with getting an even amount of twist, both in the singles and in the plying. More practice needed!

There is about 24m and I haven’t measured the wpi yet as it is currently spinning in the washing machine after setting the twist. Photo of finished skein tomorrow!