Tour de France/Tour de Fleece 2024 First Rest Day

The Cycling: Today is the first official rest day of the Tour and the cyclists transfer to Orléans in readiness for tomorrow.

The Daily Challenge: Orléans was liberated by Joan of Arc on 8th May 1429 - not a very relaxing face but a key part of history!  Rest is important.  So we challenge you to nap uninterrupted from 30 minutes.  

Suggested Fibre: No spinning, just napping!  But if you are desperate then it's a good opportunity to finish what you've started - or even to try to get ahead if you've got a goal in mind.

What I did

I finished spinning the second single and then plied them both together.  Amazingly, and only just, I did actually manage to squeeze all of the yarn onto one bobbin when I plied it and there is no room left between the yarn on the bobbin and the flyer arm (which spins around the bobbin feeding the yarn onto the bobbin.

This spun to fingering weight and there was actually a bit more in the pack than the 140g.  My finished skein is 148g/375m

Tour de France/Tour de Fleece 2024 Stage 9

The Cycling: Stage 9 is 199km of a hilly route that starts in Troyes and ends in Troyes.

The Daily Challenge: This area produces 1/4 of all champagne.  We estimate that to be around 75 million bottle which is enough to fill 22 Olympic swimming pools!  Spin a fibre that is a treat for you; it might be your go-to favourite or something you've been saving for a special occasion.

Suggested Fibre: Pink Champagne is the first of this year's limited edition TDF blends.  It is 37.5% "Rose Leaf" Tussah Silk, 25% "Eggshell" Merino, 25% "Sandstone" Merino and 12.5% "Oyster" Merino for a subtle colour and soft handle

What I did

This fibre is kind of a treat for me and I have been saving it for a while.  It is a 140g pack of gradient blend that is 86% Corriedale Wool, 14% Mulberry Silk.  I got this from a previous supplier that I used to get most of my fibres from before I stopped purchasing from her due to her behaviour and attitude towards some of her customers, including me.

My plans for this fibre was to spin a 2 ply yarn by splitting each bump of fibre into 2 equal parts. I did consider just spinning one long single and then chain plying it but I wouldn't be able to fit it all into one bobbin and it just fried my brain trying to work out how to handle having to split the single over 2 bobbins whilst keeping the colours in the right order for plying afterwards and how to manage the join from one bobbin to another so I took the easier route of spinning two singles and plying.

I pre-drafted each half of the bumps, joining the bumps in order as I pre-drafted and I did notice that the fibre didn't draft particularly smoothly and evenly.  I started spinning from the lightest colour in the gradient, towards the darkest shade.

As I was spinning this blend I discovered the reason for this blend not drafting particularly smoothly in places and that was due to this fibre having clumps of really short fibres, along with some absolute rubbish, every now and then down the braid.  It made spinning a little more challenging but I persevered and spun all of one single and made a start on the second one today.

Spnning "Mint Chocolate"

This is the third of four planned yarns that I am making using the last of the black Jacob wool that I have from fleece that I got several years ago.  I made sure I had a full bobbin of the black Jacob and then I spun up some odds and sods of green Merino that I had in my "ingredients cupboard", which is a cupboard full of small amounts of various fibres in various colours that you can buy as "mixed bags" etc and most are generally 10-30g sample sized bumps of fibre, into a gradient.  I made the green merino gradient by just simply pulling bits off of each adjoining colour and basic hand blending it a bit to make a "go-between" colour.  I did this for all of the adjoining colours.  It's far from perfect but it's worked pretty well.

31g Conifer, 18g Forest, 18g Leaf, 14g Peppermint
89g Natural black/brown Jacob 

As you will note, there was far more of the darkest green than any of the other 3 greens and I could have decided to not use all of it but I did use it all and my thinking was that I could use this to my advantage if I make a semi-circular shawl that starts with just a few stitches and increases with each row. I would have quite a deep section of the lightest colour and then as the shawl gets bigger the next two colours would be used on a decent number of rows, but not as many as the lightest colour, and then with the length of the rows being so long by the time I start using the darkest shade I would need that extra amount to get any decent number of rows worked in it before it runs out.

I spun each of them separately and then just plied them together until all of the green Merino gradient was used up.  I used 89g of black Jacob with the 81g of Merino.  The fibre content is 52.5% Jacob, 47.5% Merino.

I'm not totally in love with this one.  I had an idea and I had to try it out.  It could have gone better, I could have done it better.  I think the palest of the green looks almost white and I think that is what is throwing me off this a little bit. It is what it is.  I've called this one "Mint Chocolate".

This has turned out to be Double-Knit weight and there is 166g/396m

Spinning the Suri Alpaca and merino gradient

Over 9 months have passed since I made the Suri Alpaca and Merino blended gradient and it has been sat on the cardboard tube ever since.  There is over 230g of fibre in the gradient, so I have been worried that each half won't fit on one bobbin, and so how will I handle spinning the last bit as I don't have enough bobbins and right now I really don't have the money nor the storage space to get additional bobbins.  I have four, once for each single, one to ply onto and one spare or just in case I may want to make a 3-ply yarn at any time.

I eventually decided to just get on with it, stop procrastinating and just do it.  Amazingly I discovered that I was able to get the 115-120g of fibre on each bobbin after all.  I think its to do with the density because this is more like human hair to some extent, its smooth and lies flat and takes up less space than the same weight of fibre of a "bouncier" breed like Jacob, Shropshire, Hampshire Down.

Just look at the last photo on the far right.  Wow!  Now that is a beautiful gradient and well worth the hard work that it has taken in combing, planning, weighing and blending and then finally spinning it.  There is one Russian join in the skein purely because each single filled a bobbin so when you ply them together two full bobbins won't fit back onto one bobbin, it fits onto two.  This is a whopping 232g of 50% Suri Alpaca, 50% Merino sport weight yarn, one very long gradient that measures 480m.  All I need to do now is find the right shawl, I'm thinking of a large half circle, or 3/4 circle, lacey design, knitted top down, starting with the lightest colour and ending with the darkest colour along the bottom of the shawl.  It will look spectacular and having fewer stitches at the top will mean that small amount of really light colour yarn will look bigger and in better proportion against the rest.

She sells sea shells...

I bought this fibre direct from my previous supplier that I no longer use and I think it may have been some kind of stock clearance or something because I bought this in August 2018 but this fibre was from February 2015.  

Its a larger amount of fibre than usual and the description from the website is "Gradient Packs are a clever way of creating a subtle gradient skein of yarn.  Careful design means you can just sit down and spin and get a great result. 140g of fibre designed to give you seamless colour transitions.  I take some shades of dyed wool, combine them with natural colours of wool and other non-wool fibres.  There are 5 main shades in each gradient, but in addition there are smaller amounts of transition colours.  This means that you get gradual shifts in colour, rather than broad stripes.  The colourways are all limited edition, so if you see a colour you like it's best to get it while you can.  The good news however, is that I keep introducing new and exciting shades."

I have always wanted to try one of her gradient packs but usually as soon as she releases them they are gone so fast and it usually works out that I don't have spare money to treat myself at the right time but this time I did finally get one and its a really nice colourway.  I did manage to buy a second gradient pack in an unusual but striking colourway last year too so I will have that to spin up in the future as well.  The colour is "Sea Shell" and the fibre content is 50% Merino, 25% Shetland, 25% Seacell.  I split each little fibre bundle into two and spun each single the same and plied them together.  The final yarn is spun to sport weight and is 139g/302m and its really soft.

Teeswater - Autumn Gradient

I've made a list of the ready to spin braids of fibre that I have in my list by order of the date they were bought by me and in the case of those I've bought from fellow spinners, the date or approximate date that they bought them.  I intend to spin some of my stash down, starting with the oldest of these braids.

Back in May 2020 I bought a number of braids of fibre that a fellow spinner was selling off because they just either don't have the time to spin any more or they have fallen out of love with it.  This is one of those braids.  They originally bought it in August 2014 but I fell in love with the colours and I do like spinning the longwool breeds.  I have had this for 18 months myself so now is the time to get spinning the older fibres in my stash before they become no good for spinning.

I was a little worried about the quality because it looked a little fuzzy so it may have become a little compacted or felted but I needn't have worried, it was absolutely fine and it's made a lovely fingering weight gradient yarn, 104g/161m of lovely autumnal gradient.

Combing the darker Jacob fibres

I've combed some of the darker fibres from the same Jacob fleece that I've been working on lately.  I've made a couple of yarns already from the lighter coloured fibres that I dyed using Logwood and Carrot tops dyes.  I'm trying to reduce the space that my fleece takes up so that I have more space for yarns and fibre.  I'm not sure its working that well so far but it has to reduce the overall bulk and weight eventually.

Anyway, I'm waffling so I grabbed a bag of 372g of fleece and got combing it.  At the end I was left with 180g of hand combed top ready to spin or blend with other stuff.  I'm not 100% sure what I will do with this yet.  It may well become a gradient but not necessarily left as a natural coloured gradient, I may decide to dye it and, because of the coloured fibres, it should produce a gradient in whatever shade I decide to dye it.  There are also other options too like blending the lightest and darkest nests together to even out the colours to produce a more even coloured grey yarn.  I will most likely go with the dyed gradient option.

Combing some Suri Alpaca

Way back in 2015 I bought 200g of Suri Alpaca fleece from someone in Gloucestershire.  The fleece came from a female Suri Alpaca called Shimmy.  She must have sent me more than 200g because even after washing the dust and dirt out it still weighed 208g once it was dry.

I've put off working on this because I've never worked with fibre this long, silky and slippery before, most of it is between 5 and 8 inches in length.  Time to stop being scared of it and just get on and at least prepare it.

There are lots of different shades in this fleece and most of it could be easily separated from the other shades and so I kept it this way as I combed it so that I would have hand combed nests in different colours which gives me more options than just blending it all together.

At the end of combing I have 160g left.  Its incredibly soft and silky, very much like long human hair in terms of texture and apparently incredibly difficult to spin on its own as there is no memory to this fibre, no elasticity and you need plenty of twist to keep it together but not too much else it very quickly turns rough and rope textured, but not enough and it will stretch and fall apart. 

From doing some research Suri Alpaca is OK on its own if you want to weave with it but not so much for knitting or spinning, it has good drape but is likely to loose shape completely quite quickly so is better blended with something that will provide grip and elasticity, like wool, merino perhaps.  I do have some small amounts of merino in similar shades of brown so I will compare those and order more if necessarily and then make a gradient yarn in a blend of Suri Alpaca and Merino but I will have to cut the Alpaca fibres in half to make them similar length to Merino so that they will blend.  By blending with Merino it not only will it improve the finished yarn but will make the gradient go further meaning that I can make a much bigger shawl from this.

Elford Jacob Fleece No.9 Part II

Around mid-September I started work on combing the black/white mixed fibres from the Jacob fleece that I'd been working on for most of the year and I ended up with a bag full of hand-combed nests in various shades of browny-grey totalling 382g.

I could have spent more time and wasted more fibres by blending the darkest with the lightest and trying to achieve a bag of hand-combed nests that was pretty much an even shade throughout but I decided to make another gradient yarn, or two.

I sorted the hand-combed nests as best I could from lightest to darkest and took every-other-one and threaded them onto a wrapping paper cardboard tube centre and then done the same for the remaining nests, spinning every other one from each set for the first ply and the remaining for the second ply and then plying them together, so technically each single ply is made from every fourth nest out of the original line up.  I'm having déjà-vu here, I've done this before!

I made two different thickness of yarns, a fingering weight (left) that is 112g/440m and a sport weight (right) that is 116g/360m and both are lovely and squishy.

Hillcresent Farm Jacob Fleece No.1

This is the last fleece from the seven that I bought as a job lot from a local farm.

Sheared on 26th May 2013 this one weighed 1.5Kg after I skirted it and below you will see a photo of the sheep that this fleece came from with her new born lamb in 2015.

This particular fleece had very few white locks which meant that it was not worth the effort trying to produce a very small amount of white yarn.  I separated the blackest locks from the rest of the fleece so that I can spin from these two colours of the fleece and I washed the two colours separately.

The black part of the fleece gave me 432g after washing and the mixed colours of fleece gave me 567g.

The Black Fleece

The locks of this fleece are anything up to 8 inches long, incredibly long for a Jacob sheep and black fleece has a tendency to grow longer than white fleece, or white parts of the same fleece.  A lot of the length broke off during the combing process due to the length of the sun-bleached tips.  From my original washed weight of 432g I was left with 220g of hand-combed nests for spinning, which is about 46% yield.

I wanted to make something different to my usual thickness of yarn this time and so aimed to spin this fleece as thick as I could, which is not easy to do when your hands naturally tell you to do something else.  I did manage to make two skeins of yarn, each just over 100g, in a super bulky weight and totalling 297g/248m.

The Mixed Colours

I decided to leave this in its natural colour and I just combed it as it came out of the bag, not paying any attention to what colours in what amounts was on the comb.  At the end of combing the big bag of fleece I was left with 272g of combed nests from my 567g of washed fleece.

The bag of combed nests was quite colourful with all the different blended shades of browns and greys in there and I decided to sort all of the nests from darkest to lightest as best as I could.  I then got a very long cardboard tube left over from wrapping paper and threaded every-other-one of the nests in shade order onto the tube.  As you wind the length up around your hand and secure it there is a "hole" in the middle a bit like a doughnut.  I then took a second tube and loaded the remaining nests onto that, again in shade order.

This gave me the opportunity to either make one huge skein of yarn in a natural gradient colour by spinning a single from each tube worth of fibre and then plying together, but this would have to have a break in the middle as you would never fit that amount of yarn onto one bobbin as you ply it.  Or I could make 2 different natural gradient yarns, perhaps in two different weights/thicknesses of yarn.  The latter is what I decided to do.

I spun two different weights of yarn, both were spun as a single and then Navajo plied, which is a method of creating a 3-ply yarn from a single length using a loop method, and this keeps the colours in the order that you want them in the finished yarn.  One yarn was worsted weight, 133g/270m and the other one was super bulky weight, 127g/66m.  The pictures below shows the worsted weight yarn.

The super bulky yarn was used to make a hat for my husband to keep his head warm after he participated in MacMillan's Brave the Shave event.  He didn't go completely bald, but not far off, and the hat was darkest at the rim and fading to pale grey at the crown and kind of matched his hair, dark but going grey.  He had no idea that I had made this for him and I presented him with it after he had had his hair buzzed off.

In waves of green - Design A193

After a very beautiful but intense knit of the beaded lilac shawl I wanted to make something a bit simpler and a bit thicker as we are heading into Winter and its getting cold outside.  I have some really nice Rowan Summer Tweed in various shades of green..  The yarn is aran weight and 70% Silk, 30% Cotton and is no longer manufactured so I have to be very careful and precise with my maths to ensure that I don't run out of yarn.  Maybe a motif design or something in stripes, or at least something that could be worked in stripes to produce an interesting effect.

I got out the skeins that I have of this yarn in five various shades of green and sorted them from dark to light.  There is obviously a cuckoo in the nest that was a completely different tone and just didn't fit in with the others and this was put back into my yarn stash and I proceeded with the four remaining shades.

Using a 6.5mm crochet hook I started this on 9th November with a row of foundation single crochet.  This is much easier than working a long chain of stitches first and then crocheting into them as you make the foundation chain and the stitch at the same time.  Here is a very good YouTube video on how to work a foundation single crochet.

The photos below show it laid out on my blocking boards before a soak and after a soak and pinned out.  I knew that the wrap would not grow width ways but I did expect it to grow length ways as the lace pattern was opened up.

Its a lovely soft shawl that is versatile and can be used as a wedding shawl or equally would look good casual with shirt and jeans or a summer dress.

Anemone gradient Wensleydale shawl - Design F213

Seeing as we are now in Spring/Summer I wanted to make a small, lightweight shawl that is just perfect for the season.  I found a sweet little pattern and decided to make one using my own hand-spun yarn.  It is a top-down shawl so I decided that I wanted the lightest colour at the top and so made sure that I began knitting with the lightest end of the yarn.  I also chose to use the same colour beads as on the Victorian lace shawl that took me almost 2 years to knit as the colour went perfect with this as well and they are Size 6 Toho round seed beads in shade 1076 Magenta lined grey.

I began knitting on 2nd April and finished on 4th April 2013.  Its pretty much a stocking stitch knit, with a few rows of garter stitch to add interest with "lines" or "ridges" throughout and finished off with a lace edge to which I added my beads.  I used 244 beads in total which added a little bit of much needed weight.

It was so crumpled up when it came off the needles but soaking and blocking soon sorted that out.

I am so proud of this shawl as it the first one I have made with my own hand-spun yarn.  I have made hats and things like that with my own hand-spun but this is the first shawl.

Want to know how I made the yarn for this shawl?  Just click Wensleydale Gradient Yarn

Wensleydale and trying to make a gradient yarn.

One of my favourite colours is purple and I just could not resist buying this fab purple Wensleydale top from Yummy Yarns UK in shade "Anemone", yeas another Anemone!.  I could have left it as it was but I decided to tone it down a little by blending it with the white Wensleydale that I got from Griffiths Mill.  I also decided that I wanted to try to make a gradient yarn as I was seeing lots of fantastic gradient yarns showcased by others spinners.

I started with the purple and separated out the colours as best as I could given that due to the staple length of the fibres, most were more than one colour.  I combed the fibre to loosen it and fluff it up a bit and then arranged the fibre into gradients and re-blended some of the fibre where necessary, as you can see in the long photo below.

I then blended some of the White Wensleydale into it and pulled the longest of the fibres off my combs, laying the shorter fibres to one side and then spun the longest fibres as a single and set the twist.  I got a skein of yarn weighing 117g and giving me 417m. 

I made this sweet small shawl, with simple beaded lace edging with the yarn, but I only used about half of so I have the other half to use on something else.

The remaining, shorter fibres I hand carded together and used to make a thicker, bulkier yarn of 78g and 41m, which I used as part of a scarf.