Archive for August, 2019

TDF 2019

Friday, August 23rd, 2019

I didn’t know what “TDF Prep” meant when I kept seeing people mention it in my various spinning groups.  By the time I’d worked out it stood for “Tour de Fleece”, a spinners excuse to spin every day during the Tour de France, I was too late to do any preparation, but not too late to join in!  I joined a Facebook group and shared lots of photos of my daily spinning :o)

My first spinning was the grey dumbo fibre I mentioned in my previous post, but after that I had no particular plan, so I grabbed this lovely braid of fibre from Yummy Yarns which had been sitting in my cupboard rather longer than expected!

 

It spun up really beautifully into a very consistent yarn.  An absolute pleasure to spin :o)

TDF includes a couple of challenge days, timed to match the challenge days in the race I believe.  I decided to finally try some lock spinning with these beautifully coloured locks I bought a long time ago.

  

Honestly, I didn’t get along very well with it.  I think the locks had been somewhat felted during the dying process and they were a real struggle to work with.  I found attempting to keep the lock structure intact very hard, and combing them out still didn’t make them particularly easy to spin.  It was a fun experiment which I think has mostly taught me to be more careful when buying locks ;o)  I have since bought some more from another dyer and they look much easier to work with! :o)

I was very pleased to get back to the second half of the River Walk braid! :o)

My final spin for TDF was this fibre which Nikki inadvertently chose.  I asked for her assistance choosing some fibre for Angela and she kept telling me she liked this one by Spin Jones, so I bought it to spin for her :o)

 

The fibre was beautifully soft and I barely had to pre-draft it :o)  Pixel wanted in on the action whilst I was spinning so furiously trying to get it finished before the end of TDF!

 

I managed to get it all spun up just in time and made a lovely soft, consistent fingering weight yarn which I knitted up into a cowl for Nikki :o)

Here’s a photo of my finished TDF spinning, although only with a little of the grey as I had already finished knitting up the shawl :o)

Dumbo – 210m, Lock spinning – 55.5m, Riverwalk – 241m, Feather – 302m

I really enjoyed joining in with TDF and I’m looking forward to doing it again next year! :o)

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Disney Shawl

Monday, August 5th, 2019

I decided to combine some of the fibre from the Peter Pan and Dumbo boxes from Siobhan’s Crafts to make a knitted shawl for my Mother :o)  I saw the pattern on Ravelry and it just felt like a perfect match for the fibre sitting in my cupboard!  With her Birthday fast approaching I set about to spinning and knitting it at high speed :o)

The Peter Pan box had these 4 lovely mini braids.  All merino blend, some with sparkles :o)  They spun up beautifully into a pretty consistent DK weight yarn :o)

   

The finished four yarns back in their fibre bands so I didn’t muddle them all up ;o)

In the Dumbo box was this wonderfully soft braid with 50% merino, 30% baby alpaca and 20% mulberry silk, so lovely!  I split the fibre in half lengthways to maintain the gradual gradient along it when I spun my singles.

My split wasn’t weighed so I wasn’t too surprised by needing some Andean plying at the end, but this was the most I’ve ever had to wrap around my hand! :o)

 

All five colours balled up and ready to start some knitting :o)

The pattern is Swoop by Rosemary Hill.  Obviously I’m not capable of actually following a pattern, as I had the wrong number of colours, and not quite enough yarn, but I certainly followed it to start with ;o)  I just had to change it at the end a bit :o)

The only photo I took of the finished shawl was on a bright red towel whilst it was blocking!  Thankfully Angela sent me some more photos :o)

The finished shawl was wonderfully soft thanks to the alpaca and silk, and the slight sparkle in the coloured sections really catches the light :o)  I managed to finish it with just hours to spare, it might have still been a little damp from blocking when I wrapped it up! ;o)

Ravelry Project Link

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