Tour de Fleece Finale

My last post for this year's TdF.  This was my final skein of the Falkland for the Tour :-

I spun this straight from the carded fleece (unwashed, undyed) because I've had an awful lot of waste when I've dyed the fleece first.  This turned out to be much quicker and far less bother - must try and remember this in the future - dye after spinning.  I mordanted it and then dyed with logwood chips which gave a really dark purple.  In fact, it looks more navy blue than purple.

My final photo of my achievements during this year's Tour :-

It looks quite a lot, but these are all relatively small amounts - 515g in total.  All the Falkland was made into centre-pull balls; back left are the three dyed with madder, then two dyed with St John's Wort flowers, then two dyed with grape vine trimmings*, and the final 3 are dyed with different lichens.  In front of the lichen is the logwood dyed ball. Then at the front, the top skein is the result of our 10-minute challenge, the middle one was the 10g challenge, and then the cotton at the front dyed with weld.

* I realise I haven't posted about the dye session with grape vine trimmings, basically because it was rather insignificant.  I crammed my large dye pan as full as I could with grape vine leaves and cooked it.  I removed the spent leaves and crammed it full again with fresh leaves and cooked it.  After all that there was just a pale yellow colour in the dye which gave beige (!) on the fleece.  An experiment I probably won't repeat!

Onto a brighter note, I won a prize!!!  This was donated by a fellow team member and came all the way from America (thank you Meagan).  My prize was a hand-turned cedar nostepinne, which smelled amazing by the way, and she also included lots of little extras (tea bags to consume whilst spinning, a sample of spun yarn, a cute little pin, and a button on a hair grip).

If you don't know what a nostepinne is for, this might give you a clue :-

I couldn't wait to try it out!  I already have a ball winder but tend not to take it with me when we go away in the camper van as it's a bit bulky.  I've quite often been stuck without it and have had to leave off spinning because my bobbin was full.  This will fit nicely in my spinning wheel bag and will come in very handy!

Dyeing with Lichen

This is a little experiment I did for TdF with some bags of lichen I've had sitting around for a while  (I always lay my lichens out to dry before storing them, otherwise they can go mouldy).  I used the boiling water method for these because I didn't have enough time to ferment them. 

This one grows quite flat on wooden branches and is sometimes difficult to remove without taking a bit of wood with it.  I try to avoid getting wood in my lichen dyes because it can dull the colours.  I think this is a Parmelia type, but no idea which.

The fleece came out quite pale, sort of a mix of beige and yellow, but was quite nice once spun.

The second batch was from a bag of mixed lichens :-

There's all sorts in here.

These gave a pretty pale yellow

which actually doesn't show up that well in the skein :-

Finally, I had a bag of this lichen.  I think it may be Usnea, but again, I'm not sure which one.

This one looked by far the deepest of the three

and much brighter when the locks were picked out and fluffed.

Not a bad colour :-

All of the skeins I've shown you were awaiting their final wash.  I was quite amazed to see them change and brighten as soon as they hit the soapy water.  Here they are finished :-

As you can see, there's not much difference between any of them.  Next time, I'll just put them all in together!

Le Lot et La Laine

The wool festival Le Lot et La Laine was held again this year in the Lot department of France during the second weekend of July.  It's only held every two years, so I had to go, didn't I?  It always seems to fall in the  middle of the Tour de Fleece, so I made sure I packed my wheel into the camper van so I could carry on while we were away.

As usual, I was too engrossed in looking at all the stalls to take photographs, but I did get a few :-

Someone had spent an awful lot of time on these characters!

I've been saving my pennies for a while now, and was determined to have a good spend. I think I did OK actually.  My first purchase was some lovely mohair top from a lady who'd travelled all the way from Italy for the weekend.  She had lots of gorgeous alpaca too, but I have plenty of that.

I'd been looking for raw mohair actually, but no-one seemed to be selling any, except one lady who had a small amount of delicious kid mohair in the middle of her table.  She gave me a sample and her contact details because she will be shearing her animals in August. Think I might just be ordering some of this.

Then I found some dyed mohair locks that I just couldn't leave behind :-

The only raw fleece I bought was Bizet, which I'd never heard of but have since read that it's generally a meat sheep.  I did notice though that quite a few vendors had used Bizet in their prepared batts, so thought I'd give it a try.  It's not the softest fleece I've ever bought, but it has character, and it was only 6 euros per kilo!

There was one lady there who was selling silk products and I was rather taken by this dyed raw silk.  These are actually degummed cocoons that she's dyed and then just pulled into fluff after drying.  It gave me the idea of doing the same with my cocoons.  So I had to have some of that!

She also had some reels of spun silk which I thought would come in very useful as an additive to my own spinning, so some of that went into the basket as well!

I went a bit batty after that and bought some ready prepared batts for spinning.  I loved the colours in these, and the fact they contain nettle fibre as well as merino, alpaca, silk, soya and the obligatory bit of sparkle.

The next ones took my eye quite early on in my travels and I kept going back to look at them.  In the end I decided to buy them - just in time too, these were the last ones, the rest had all sold.

I loved the "wild" appearance of these batts, but they're ultra soft too.  A few detail shots :-

One of my last purchases was something I've always avoided buying until now - plaited fibre.  I've looked at lots and always thought they felt a bit compacted.  Not so with this one, this feels superbly soft and has that "fluid" feel which makes me think it will be a delight to spin.  This was made by Maria from Toulouse, one of the organisers of the festival.

I love this so much it seemed appropriate to photograph it this way!

I almost missed the dye plants!  Most of the plants on offer I already have in the garden, but I've never grown indigo.  This has gone crazy since I brought it home and repotted it. I'm hoping it will flower and give me seeds for next year.

Last but not least, the trees around the parking area are covered in lichens, and there are always lots of windfall branches on the ground.  I stripped a few of those to bring home for dyeing.

I had a lovely day wandering around in the sunshine (it was really hot in the afternoon) shopping, talking to other spinners and just generally "being there".  Eric was very taken with one of the spinning wheels we saw being used.  It was an Ashford Joy 2 - a folding wheel which has its own shoulder bag.  He thinks I should buy one for when we go away in the camper!  I've never come across so many spinners all in one place here in France before.  I loved every minute, and I can't wait until the next one in 2017.

TdF Finale

This year's Tour de Fleece ended last Sunday, and already I'm looking forward to next year's.  It's a time when we can challenge ourselves and try new things - things we wouldn't normally have time for.

The last little challenge I set myself was to try and perfect coreless core spinning.  Same principle as core spinning, but without a pre-spun core.  I still had some of the baby alpaca left that I dyed for the first attempt at core spinning, so I added a bit of lichen-dyed merino and carded it into batts ready for spinning.

There's a bit of sparkle in there too.

I started off a bit shaky, but soon found I actually like this method better than ordinary core spinning.

So, how do you core spin without a core?  Easy - create the core as you spin.  You just separate a small portion of your fleece and let some spin enter before wrapping the rest of the fleece around it.  Simples!!  Well, it took a bit of getting used to.  It's actually not as easy as people make it look on youtube videos.

By this point, I'd improved quite a lot.  The trick is not to put too much twist in the fibre - just enough to hold it together.  The finished yarn was still a bit twisty and energetic, but a whole lot better than the core spun.  Think this will be my favourite method in the future . . . and there will be more of this, I really want to get it right so need more practice.

Core spinning and coreless core spinning usually come under the umbrella of "art yarn" - don't think I'm quite there yet though, mine's more "scribble" than "art"!!

TdF Week 2

For our second week challenge I decided to stay with alpaca.  On the left is some baby alpaca I dyed with woad a while ago, and on the right some of Hope's (my neighbours' alpaca) fibre dyed with fermented Xanthoria Parientina.  In the centre, I added some leftover merino from last year's TdF dyed with madder (top) and Brazilwood (bottom).

This week's challenge was to Navajo ply some yarn, or, if you are already able to do that, add some beads as you ply.  As n-plying is one of my usual methods, I went with the beads.

This is a selection of beads I thought might look good with the fibre, but I finally discarded the seed pearls because the holes were too small to thread onto the spun yarn.

I whizzed the fibre through the drum carder to make the batts

and started spinning.  The fibres were not processed beforehand apart from mixing on the carder.  I simply teased them apart a bit first.  The result was that they were full of nepps (little balls of rolled up fibre) which I usually remove, but this time I wanted to leave them in to create a more textured yarn.

Once the spinning was done, I got down to some serious plying.  To begin with, I'd threaded the beads onto dental Superfloss, then, when plying, I slid a bead onto the loops occasionally, then carried on plying.  Now, how do I describe this?  Basically, I threaded the end of the floss through the loop formed by chain plying, folded it over onto itself, slid a bead over both strands of floss and then up onto the yarn.  Worked perfectly, but boy did it take some time!

The finished yarn, washed and made into a yarn cake.

I think I need more practice with this method (and I will be doing more) as I managed to over-ply this a bit whilst fussing with the beads.  Need to be more laid-back next time! Maybe some soothing music would help - not that we get much any of that in our house!!

Tour de Fleece is Here Again

Can you believe it's a year since the Tours de France/Fleece?  This year we started pedaling on Saturday the 5th and have some interesting challenges in the Team I'm involved with - Team DIY and Dye on Ravelry.

The first week we are trying different dye methods, i.e. something we haven't done before.  I've been wanting to try fermented lichen dyeing so in April I started off some jars with an ammonia and water mix.  These have been sitting on the kitchen windowsill ever since and  have been stirred/shaken every day (more or less).

On Thursday I carefully (or so I thought!) washed some alpaca provided by Hope who lives with my neighbours Rob and Tammy.  The female alpacas were sheared recently (the day after we did the boys) - they must have known something was happening because the day before they found an old bonfire pit and all had a good roll in the ashes! So, as I said, I carefully washed 100g of the fleece, which I placed in a mesh laundry bag.  The water was warm not hot, there was no excessive handling, just placed in the bowl of water and left to soak then lifted out into the sink to drain, repeated to rinse.  So why did I manage to felt it?  I put it in the dye anyway, hoping I'd still be able to do something with it.

The next day, after soaking for 24 hours, I gently heated the jars in the microwave and then let them rest and cool.  Here's the result of the first one, Xanthoria Parietina, which looked the most promising dye :-

This came out of the dye bath pink but changed to blue when I put it in the sun to dry. Didn't think to take a photo of the fibre when it came out of the dye bath, but this will give you an idea of the original colour :-

This was the side facing down on the table which hadn't been exposed to the sun.  I hoped it would stay pink if I didn't turn it over, but the sun must have got through anyway as it all changed to blue.  Next time I'll keep some separate to dry inside so I get both colours.

The second dye bath was Stags Horn lichen which looked very promising until about a week ago when it changed from reddish-pink to brown.  I have no idea why.  Anyway, in went the fleece and out came . . . yes, you've guessed - beige!  I haven't even bothered to take a photo of this as it's been set aside to be over-dyed with something else.

The good news is that the blue fleece is only lightly felted and I should be able to pull it apart and spin it.  However, I didn't have time to do that before the TdF started, so I'm spinning another 100g of Hope's fleece straight from the bag - unwashed, and uncarded. So far, it's going well.

This shows how fluffy the fleece is, even the blue which was a bit felted.

By the end of the second day, the bobbin is filling nicely considering I haven't had a lot of time to spin :-

You wouldn't believe the colour of my hands after spinning this, it's absolutely filthy!  I'll dye this when I've finished the spinning and plying - this time with some packets of Kool Aid my friend Victoria brought back from the U.S. for me.  Then I'll spin the blue lichen dyed fleece separately.  I'll be back in a day or two to report on progress, but won't bore you with endless photos of a gradually filling bobbin of dirty fawn fleece.  Have fun!