Tour de France/Tour de Fleece 2023 Stage 10

The Cycling: Stage 10 is 167km of a hilly route that starts in Vulcania and ends in Issoire. 

The Daily Challenge: This will help you along a bit...grab two singles that you've spun so far and ply them together...huzzah! A finished yarn!

Suggested Fibre: Whatever you've created so far, or if you've got some in your stash, use those!

What I did

First of all I finished spinning yesterday's Fibonacci spin and then chain plied it.

The finished yarn is 50% Merino, 37.5% Bluefaced Leicester, 12.5% Swaledale, sport weight and 210m/94g.

The second yarn I plied today is the Fractal Spin from Stage 9

The finished yarn is 100% Superwash Merino, sport weight and 421m/110g.

Tour de France/Tour de Fleece 2023 Stage 2

The Cycling: Stage 2 is 209km of a hilly route that starts in Vitoria-Gasteiz and ends in San Sebastian, in Basque Country, Northern Spain.

The Daily Challenge: Finish something!  If you bit off more than you can chew yesterday, get stuck in and complete that spin.  Or, if you put down a project to start TdF, pick it back up.

Suggested Fibre: Anything

What I did

I chain plied yesterday's spun single to keep the colours together.  The finished yarn is perfect for working garments, such as a shawl, where you start with a few stitches at the neck edge and progressively increase the number of stitches as you work the rows.  The progressively increasing colour lengths will match that increasing stitches and the resulting stripes should be pretty even in depth as you work.  If you were to use this type of yarn to knit something that is a straight knit or square or rectangular in shape then the stripes would start off thin and get deeper and deeper as you knit.

The finished yarn is 100% Merino sport weight and 201m/100g.

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.

"Mule" fleece - The first fleece.

I saw a bargain on Ebay and thought I may as well give it a shot, it will give me a lot to practice on.  If the fleece is rubbish, I've not lost a lot, if the fleece is good and I mess up, I've not lost a lot and if the fleece is good and I do a decent enough job then I may just get some usable yarn.

So, my bargain?  5 "mule" ewe fleece, weighing around 12kg in total that had been stored together for a couple of years.  A "mule" ewe is the result of mating a Blue Faced Leicester ram with a hill breed ewe, such as a ewe from the Black Faced Mountain family, the Cheviot family, the Welsh Mountain family or the Clun Forest family.  In this case the ewe used to produce the mule is unknown.

None of the fleece had been skirted, so that had to be done and then I started working my way through all of the fleece, washing them one at a time.  Most were thick with lanolin and had a lot of "orange" stuff stuck in it.  I think that this was possibly some kind of sand, maybe building sand, and it all washed out very easily though and turned the water an orangey-red colour and left me with fairly white fleece.  They are not the softest of fleece, a little coarse in places, but I guess that's the hill sheep element showing through..

The First Fleece

The first fleece that I have chosen to tackle started out at 2.4kg before any washing or preparation.  After being washed and combed there is 1176g of clean combed top ready to be spun.  Its very bouncy and quite crisp and some of it is definitely on the coarser side of OK.  I tried to keep the coarsest fluff together so that it could be spun together and not "contaminate" the nicer fluff.  I got a lot of different skeins from this fleece over a long period of time between 23rd August 2012 and 9th January 2013, and I spun some as single ply, some as 2-ply, some as traditional 3-ply (3 singles spun together) and some as Navajo plied (3-ply using loops made and spun from a single ply).

Skeins A, B and I have been used up in small non-clothing items as they were the coarsest of all the skeins and not suitable for wearing due to the scratchiness of them.  All of the other skeins will eventually be used to make pretty shawls, either left in their natural colour or dyed.

Skein C was knitted into a pretty but simple kerchief/small shawl but due to the natural variations in colour of the yarn I was not happy with the end result, it looked dirty and unwashed, quite "yellowish" in places so I decided to try dyeing the finished item.  I dyed it using some Greener Shades dye and I am now happy with the finished kerchief.

Corriedale

This Corriedale fibre came to me with my spinning wheel.  It is one of several fibre samples that came free with the wheel.

I spun it as a single and then navajo plied it to give me 78m from 98g.  It is lovely, smooth and soft.

Spinning with beads and experimenting

When I bought my Ashford Joy Spinning Wheel, I got some fibre samples with it, including some Merino Slivers and some Corriedale Slivers, just over 30g in each sample.

Top Row: Merino Sliver in shades Blueberry and Green Tea
Bottom Row: Corriedale Sliver in shades Raspberry and Cheesecake

I had seen someone showing off their spinning with beads on a forum and I was very intrigued with the idea and so I Googled for information about how to do it.  Armed with this new knowledge I spun the Merino as singles and then I started Navajo plying, adding beads every now and then by putting the loop through the bead, sliding the bead up to the last loop and then spinning up to the loop and pulling a new loop through as you normally would with Navajo plying.

This is the YouTube video that I used to learn how to add beads whilst Navajo plying.  I hope you also find it useful.

The Blueberry yarn is about 33m long and has alternate blue lustre glass and Haematite beads and the Green Tea yarn is about 39m long and has green lustre glass beads.

The two Corriedale Slivers, I spun from both at the same time to make a multi-coloured single and then Navajo plied it.  I am not overjoyed at the results but I called it Gryffindor for obvious reasons.

All three yarns were eventually used with lots of other yarns in small, striped projects.