Category Archives: Spinning

Le Tour de Fleece: Days Two, Three, and Four

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We were out all day Sunday but I did manage a little bit of spinning in the evening, and finished off bobbin 3.

Half way through the singles now!

It was spinning group at Ash yesterday, so I got started on bobbin 4 although I was having a bit of trouble with the treadles feeling very heavy. A bit of oil on the hinges sorted that out and I managed to spin quite a bit more in the evening.

I re-oiled the wheel again this morning, and wiped off some black gunk which was on the hinges and it has been spinning much better!

Before I had to go out today I spun a bit more of bobbin 4, hopefully I might finish this one tomorrow, it feels like I am rocketing along now (though luckily with fewer crashes than the cyclists). So here is bobbin 4 as it looks now:

And this is a recap of what I have spun on days two, three, and four, with a bit of the fibre too.

Le Tour de Fleece: Day One

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I realised looking back at last years tour that I started that on the back foot too. Last year I went to the Knitting and Crochet Guild AGM on Day One but did manage a bit of spindle spinning.

Today was my brother in laws wedding. I thought taking the wheel might be a bit conspicuous though I did have a bit of knitting in my bag in case we were early, in the end I was very restrained and it stayed in the bag. We were lucky to have much better weather than the cyclists in Rotterdam and it was a lovely day, the bride and groom both looked very nice and everyone had a lovely time.

We got home a couple of hours ago, in time for me to do a bit of spinning while I watched the highlights programme.

I feel I am starting to get back into the swing with this fibre. I haven’t actually done much spinning since the demo at Clandon back in May, and was having some trouble with the bobbin jerking, but I think I have solved that now. I am definitely glad to be getting a bit of practice in before Knit Nation since I have booked into 2 spinning classes and want to be a bit more on top of my game before that.

I’m afraid I am starting off with a bit of a dark photo, but you get the idea.

This is bobbin 3 of 6, so coming along!

Spinning sunshine

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Well, best laid plans and all that. I seem to have spent the last couple of months squashed flat underneath City and Guilds stuff. I did manage to hand in another wodge on Sunday (lucky Fiona!) but everything else seems to have slipped by the wayside recently. I shall catch up on blogging about the stuff I have handed in fairly soon hopefully.

I am still spinning the stuff I started shortly after Christmas. Luckily it is lovely 🙂

This is a merino / silk mix from Wingham Woolwork. I think it is 70% merino, 30% silk. The merino is a blend of about 4 colours in shades of yellow and orange, and the silk is white undyed. It is such a lovely cheery colour, and I am enjoying spinning it.

The grand plan is that it is going to become socks. I have about 200g and I have split it into 6 hopefully equal bits so that I can make two lots of three ply.

After much umming and ahhing I have decided I am going to do the Tour De Fleece this year even though I know I have stuff going on during the next three weeks which means I wont be able to spin every day. It was such fun last year that it seems a shame to miss out so I will spin when I can.  I have joined the Lantern Rouge team for those stragglers at the back of the pack, the Majacraft group, and Jo‘s Lime Green Jelly group, though I will have to get a move on if I hope to actually start on my LGJ fibre! My goal is to finish spinning the sunshine merino/silk, I am hoping this will actually be attainable! So Happy Spinning to anyone else who is doing this, and see you (virtually) in Rotterdam tomorrow.

National Spinning Week

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After a couple of weeks of concerted effort on the City and Guilds homework I am now catching up on everything that has been neglected again. I am going to try and stay in roughly chronological order otherwise I will get confused. I shall try not to bombard you with everything all at once 🙂

So first off, the first week of May as well as being the election was National Spinning Week. Our group demonstrated spinning and weaving and showed off some of our creations at Clandon Park (definitely worth a visit if you happen to be in the area). They very kindly let us take over their visitor room which is a beautifully large room with high ceilings. There is plenty of space to show off things we have made, and for people to look round and ask us questions about what we are doing.

Despite the election excitement and the rather variable weather we had a good steady stream of people come through and see what we were up to.

I love the variety of people you meet at these things, and all the things I learn about, some to do with spinning or other fibre arts, but lots of other things as well. We had several people have a go at spinning on a drop spindle, they were all much faster learners than me! I think it is great that we have the opportunity to share our skills and enthusiasm with so many people at events like these. A lot of fibre arts can be hard to get into if you don’t have a friend or family member who already does them, it may not even occur to you that spinning is something you can have a go at. So these events are a great opportunity for people to see what is involved and ask a lot of questions, and hopefully some may then either join us or their local group, or may be inspired to investigate further something related. I also love it when people bring things to show us. One lady brought some lovely crochet, and another brought a wheel. I had a fabulous time and am looking forward to the next one!

Circle socks

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I actually finished these back in March while at Skip North, and have finally managed to take some photos of them.

The pattern is Circle Socks by Anne Campbell. The yarn is some of my first spinning (I dyed the fibre too), and was a bit variable, and also rather thicker than that specified in the pattern. However the pattern was also written for smaller feet than mine, so by changing the needle size to 2.75mm it all worked out fine.

It has really surprised me how much the knitting evens out the wobbly bits in the spinning. The socks are still noticeably different, but not nearly as different as I had feared given what the yarn looked like!

Manx Loghtan

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I just finished spinning up some Manx Loghtan ( a rather funny looking sheep as you can see from that link). I bought the fibre from Wingham back in November and started spinning shortly after Christmas.

The fibre smelt quite rural, although that improved greatly after washing the finished yarn 🙂 and is quite hairy, producing a fairly hairy and slightly lumpy yarn.

I spun a 3ply and got 346m from 121g (the non-round number of grams is because if you go up to Wingham, then rather than buying fibre per 100g for most of the different types of wool you select a plastic bag and stuff in as much as you would like from an enormous coil of combed top, then pay for the weight you have got. I was aiming for slightly over 100g to allow me plenty to play with), in about a DK weight.

It has come out as quite a soft and bouncy yarn, though not as soft as Merino or Bluefaced Leicester. I am enjoying experimenting with different breeds of wool and seeing how they behave. In hindsight I didn’t put quite enough twist into the singles which meant that they drifted apart a few times as I was plying. All a learning experience, I will know for next time.  The finished yarn seems fine though and not too delicate. I am looking forward to knitting with it! It is going to be part of my Handspun Leaves Waistcoat, which I must get a move on with, it has been languishing on top of my speakers recently (yes there is yarn or fibre on every surface in this house!).

Resistance is futile

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The jumper has become a bit difficult to haul around, so for the last couple of weeks I have been stuck with no travel knitting. I had been resisting casting on anything new, for fear that it would slow down the jumper progress. The frustration of not having any knitting to take with me has worn me down and I have cast on for a sock, with strict instructions to myself to only knit on it when it is not possible to be knitting on the jumper.

The pattern is called circle socks, and the yarn is some 3ply handspun bluefaced leicester I dyed before spinning. My yarn is a bit thicker than the yarn the pattern used so I am using 2.75mm needles rather than the 2.25mm recommended. I am not altering the stitch count (yet) though because I would like these to come out larger than the pattern. My foot measures about 10 inches in circumference, but the pattern is written for 7.5 inches.

I have tinkered a bit with the cast on to make sure it is stretchy enough, I cast on 96 sts, then worked a round of purl, a round of (p1, p2tog), then another round of purl, and then went onto round 4 of the pattern.

I did have a bit of a false start with these. My first guess at needle size was 2.5mm, but the fabric was coming out a bit too stiff! There is a fine line between a sturdy sock and something which stands up on its own, and these were on the wrong side of it! The 2.75mm needles seem much better.

Red merino

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It seems very appropriate that I was spinning festive red merino over Christmas. This was the stuff I carded using Lisa’s drum carder. The original fibre was merino top in scarlet and crimson. There was slightly more crimson in the mix than scarlet because it turned out I wasn’t very good at estimating equal quantities.

I spun a 3ply, DK weight, 11 wpi, and have 146g which is 298m. Here is a (rather blury) closeup.

I had some of the uncarded merino left over, and thought it would be interesting to spin the singles in separate colours and then ply them together, and compare how this differed from the fibre that had been carded. So I spun two singles in the scarlet, and one crimson (luckily I had almost precisely twice as much scarlet as crimson), and plied them altogether in a 3ply.

Again DK weight, 11wpi, there is 53g and 116m. Here is a closeup where you can see the different coloured plies.

These are going to be part of my handspun leaves waistcoat. I am looking forward to seeing how the two different yarns knit up. The carded yarn is definitely lumpier (due to my lumpy carding), and wasn’t as nice to spin as the uncarded top. The uncarded yarn looks stripey in the yarn (although because the colours are quite similar it looks less stripey from a distance), but the colour mix is more even than in the carded yarn, and I will be interested to see whether they are a lot more similar once knitted.

Spinning laceweight

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Well at least it is a bit thinner than 4ply, and I am intending to knit lace with it 🙂 It isn’t as thin as some laceweight, but then laceweight is a bit of a vague term anyway.

This started off life as two balls of Schoppel Wolle Fingerwolle, in the Fuschia colour, bought from the High Weald Fibre Factory at Wonderwool Wales (the stuff on the left of the picture).

There was 40m on each ball of combed fibre about the thickness of a finger (hence the name). You can also knit with it as it is on 8 – 9 mm knitting needles or spin it (or you could probably felt it too). The colour changes are very gradual, although it turned out that the two balls I picked weren’t at exactly the same place in the sequence, so when I plied my two singles together I have got quite a few bits where one ply is orange and the other purple.

The effect of the colours is muted quite a bit by the plying (I did a 2ply). I am looking forward to knitting this up and seeing how the colours go. I think you will still get the colour progression effect, just not as striking as it was before spinning.

I have 450m and 100g, and this is the thinnest I have managed to spin so far. I am very proud 🙂 even though it is still a bit wobbly, but I am improving. I think I am going to knit some kind of a lacey shawl but haven’t decided on a pattern yet, I shall continue to keep my eye out.