TdF Week 3

My last efforts for this year's Tour de Fleece were both with Cotswold fleece.  The first was some fleece I'd dyed earlier on with an onion skin dye that I'd made.  This was the 2nd item to go into the dye bath so is a much paler colour than I normally get.  It's still a nice colour though - kind of apricoty.

This was a very quick spin - only took me one day :-

From 75g of fleece, I ended up with 65g of yarn - 120 yards/11 metres.

My final offering of the Tour was more Cotswold.  I dyed the locks midway through the three week period using about half of the woad leaves in my garden.  They weighed 550g and I wanted to get a good, deep blue so I put in 100g of fleece.

This is one of the deepest blues I've ever achieved with woad and, although it's still wet here, I think it will still be pretty deep once it's dried.

I was pleased to see I got a bit of pink in there too!









This spun up like a dream.  I didn't card the fleece, just pulled it apart and spun from the cloud.

This was destined to be a tail-spun yarn as I have a cardigan project in mind.  A couple of months ago we had friends here from Australia and she was wearing a gorgeous cardigan that I want to copy.

She very obligingly sent me a photograph.  The tail-spun yarn is needed for the cast-off edge on the fronts and around the neck.  If there's enough I might add a pocket with some of the tail-spun yarn across the top.










Anyway, to get back to the making of the yarn!  I split the single that I'd spun into two separate balls and flicked the cut ends of some of the locks.

Then I was ready to ply!  Before I started this yarn I looked up "tail-spinning" in all of my spinning books and they all said this should be a core-spun yarn, i.e. you spin a single then put it back through the wheel in the opposite direction and spin the fluffed up ends of the locks onto and around the single.  This usually ends up quite a chunky yarn and I didn't want that.  I watched a few videos on this subject too, and they all did it the same way.  I began to wonder if my idea of spinning the fluffed up ends in between the two single plies was actually going to work, or was I trying to produce impossible yarn!  Well, there was only one way to find out!

I think it worked out pretty good, don't you?  The only thing I decided to change was the way some of the locks looked a bit "messy" where they were spun in.  They were quite secure - I couldn't manage to pull them out - but weren't as tidy as I'd hoped.  That was when I decided to use a binder yarn to hopefully make them look a bit better.

I still had some locks left so I carded them and spun a fine single which would be used to wrap around the yarn I'd made.

Lovely fluffy blue clouds!

I was quite happy with the finished yarn - the binder thread did what I wanted and added a bit of character too (not that tail-spun yarns need more character - they have enough by themselves!)

I didn't use all of the 2 singles that I'd spun, so they were plied together to form a 2-ply yarn, and I also had some of the binder single left.  I n-plied that to make it a 3-ply.

Here are the finished yarns :-

The middle one (the n-ply) was still finer than the 2-ply below it, but I'm sure it'll come in for something.

Finally (if you've managed to hang in there until the bitter end), here's a photo of all the yarns I spun during TdF this year.

Another year over and another year to wait until TdF 2018!  It'll be here in no time!