tdf13 day 2

Natural white 4 ounces LACE. Lace?! I wanted to be spinning fingerweight. I blame my terrible head cold. It's not fun spinning when you have a runny nose. Fluff all over your hands, fumbling quickly for the box of tissues every couple minutes. Sneezes that attack from behind.

Still I think I may love this yarn. It's reminded me of why I fell in love with spinning in the first place. The beauty of natural colored fleece.

Or maybe that's just my cold medicine talking.

tdf13 progress - day 1

I got my cranberry batt spun and n-plied (fingering weight) today.
Now I'm working on the natural white one.

Here begins the overposting.

Ravelry has changed they way they do things again and since I don't have the money to buy the 'extras' that allow me to upload a picture directly from my computer, you dear readers, will have to put up with my daily tdf progress all through the tour. It's the only way I can post to the daily threads. Otherwise you can come back after July 21st when I will resume my regular off and on postings.



tdf13 countdown: 24 hours.

I pulled a stupid.

I certainly did. A combination of being over tired, in a rush, and having a kitchen that's inadequate both in space and useability has led to a broken dye pot. Yep, I broke the crock to my dye pot crockpot. And I was just two colors away from being finished dyeing for tdf13 too.

Grrr!

This means that I will not be able to find out if I can spin 3 pounds of fiber in under a month. Yeah, I was crazy to even try that but I did want to see how far I could get. But anyway....

This is what 2.55 pounds of my hand dyed, drum carded, fluff looks like.


I'm actually thinking of going back to the thrift store and picking out another basket as my regular spinning basket is too small now.

That's the one on the right. I had to pull all of my wips out of my old sewing basket (left and hasn't had any sewing stuff in it for years) just to give all this fiber a nice place to stay while it waits to become yarn.

To give you an idea of size, most of these batts are around 2 ounces, give or take.

In between carding all of these up I've been frantically trying to finish a scarf for my niece for Christmas and being on a Hercule's Legendary Journeys kick. I was busy having kids when it originally aired so while I enjoyed it when I happen to catch it on I wasn't in a position to watch it often. Now thanks to Netflix I'm seeing every episode (and in order) and having a lot of fun. I am so tempted to buy the dvds just for the commentaries. You gotta love Michael Hurst.

In training.

Last year I couldn't do Tour de Fleece (a.k.a. tdf) with everything that was going on/wrong. This year things are a little better and I've got my daughter helping me.

For Christmas I'd like to try to make these for family members. (For those who don't have a Ravelry account, they are hand knit advent wreaths). It will mean knitting in ways that I've never knit before and I figured hand dyed/hand spun would make them mean even more.

Of course it could just mean that I'll be sending family members lumps of unrecognizable wool. We shall see.

Since I need to do the spinning anyway I decided to make it my tdf project. Tdf runs from June 29th through July 21st, so right now I'm in 'training', which is another word for GET READY TO SPEND EVERY WAKING HOUR AT YOUR WHEEL! The last time I did this my wheel wasn't working (or I didn't have it yet, I can't remember) and did it all on spindles. This time I'm hoping I'll be able to spin about 3 pounds of fiber.

I dug into my fiber stash and found some super fine BFL, Colonial, and Baby Suri alpaca.


Pulled out some Country Classic acid dyes


Mixed them up


Weighed out the fiber


tied it up


And dyed them in the designated crock pot. This is one is spruce.

Normally I wouldn't be dyeing this fiber this way but since I have to blend fibers together afterward I decided to go the easier rout. I love the ease of dyeing in the crock pot.

I had to make the decision of how I wanted to prep them so I divided up one color (teal) and drum carded half then used my hackle to prep the other half.


And did a test spin of both before deciding that I wanted to card all 12 colors.


I also hired my daughter to photograph my progress for me. You can tell the difference in our cameras in all the above photos. That and she's willing to take them outside to get the really good shots. It's a small price to pay and it really helps me out by allowing me more time prepping and spinning. She was going to do it for nothing but I wouldn't let her.

As it stands today, I have half of the 12 colors dyed and in various stages of prep. I'm about to go put another color on the drying rack so I can dye more and tonight I'll be sitting at my drum carder again making nice fluffy bats.

Tdf13 teams I've joined:

Peleton
Climbers
Hopelessly over committed
Spin your stash.

Ashford
I think I got a little cared away this year.


What we'll watch during tdf, because my daughter will be doing her crafting stuff along with me while I spin:

Sherlock (BBC)
Star Trek movies (old & new)
Jungle cubs
merlin
jungle book
The Hobbit
My little pony
Russell Howard’s good news
Year End Review
Simon & Simon
Being human uk
Jack Benny on utub
Wild America
Short circuit 1 and 2
Kung Fu panda
Saiyuki (+ Gaiden if we can find it online)

The above is subject to change since we just signed up with Netflix again and Hulu plus for the first time.

I wonder what I could be doing today?

To be continued. But hopefully without pictures that were taken in the basement. Sorry about that.