Tour de Fleece 2019

This post is a little overdue - I'm neglecting my blog again!!  Yes, I did take part in the Tour de Fleece again this year.  I think I'd find it hard not to.  I even managed to spin on my spindle when we were away in Switzerland for 5 days.

This was what I'd managed to prepare before the Tour started.  At the top is a bucketful of my home-grown cotton, the purple on the left is a blend of merino/Falkland and kid mohair dyed with logwood chips, the tub in the middle is leftover kid mohair (logwood dyed), the yellow on the right is merino dyed with apple leaves and twigs, and the other two are mohair dyed with madder.  The one on the left is dyed with the water from pre-rinsing the roots (I just couldn't bring myself to throw it away as there was lots of colour in there), and the one on the right is the first dip in the madder solution.

So, I started with the purple rolags, this was a nice blend and spun really well.  It was about 80g I think.

For the second ply I blended some of the kid mohair (madder and logwood) on my carders to make some two-coloured rolags.  I just love that pretty pink at the bottom!

The two bobbins ready to ply :

and the finished skein.  The toilet roll holder shows how much of the purple was left after plying . . . not much!

Next up, I started spinning the yellow rolags (merino dyed with apple leaves and twigs)

There actually wasn't a lot of this, maybe 50 to 60g, so I rooted around in my cupboard and found these rolags for a 2nd ply.  This is some merino I dyed a few years ago and haven't gotten around to spinning until now.

These were a bit "neppy" to spin, and I started off picking them out every time I came across one, then I thought, oh what the heck, it'll add a bit of texture!

Unusually for me, I prepped some more fibre to make a 3rd ply.  I normally just stick to 2-ply (unless I'm chain plying).  So, this is some Falkland dyed with dyer's chamomile :

At this point, I started to wonder if this yarn was going to work.  The one on the left (the merino dyed with lichen and dock seeds) was so very different.

I plied them together anyway, and was actually very surprised how well they did go together.

By now we were entering the 2nd week of the TdF and I started to spin my cotton.  I haven't spun any for quite a long time, and it took me a while to get going again.

I spent a few days on this, and then realized our Swiss trip was rolling up faster than I'd thought, and I didn't have anything prepared to take with me.  I'd already dyed some merino in the madder bath, so I combed that for spinning on my spindle.  Incidentally, I strained the madder roots out from the previous dye bath and put them in the blender with a bit of water to break them up a bit more.  That way I thought I'd get more colour from them.

We were visiting family in Switzerland because our nephew was having his 40th birthday, plus he got married in June so he decided to have one big party to celebrate both events. After the party we stayed with brother-in-law and his wife in their chalet half way up a mountain.

This is the view from their terrace - it's a bit hazy over the mountains so they weren't very visible.

I managed to spin all of the fibre by the morning we were due to leave, so I took our travelling day as one of my "rest days".

When we got home I combed up some Falkland.  This had been dyed in the madder bath after the merino came out.  So, including the "rinsing water dye", this was the fourth lot of fibre to be dyed with the madder roots.  This was to be a 2nd ply to go with the merino.

Ready to ply :

Oooops!  While I was plying, I couldn't understand where the strange scraping noise was coming from, or why the tension was all over the place, until I realized the end had fallen off the bobbin!  Luckily, the yarn didn't get too tangled and I was able to transfer it to another bobbin to finish plying.  Some of my Ashford bobbins are 30 years old this year, so it's not really surprising they're feeling their age!

Then, for the final sprint to the finish line, it was back to the cotton.

I plied what I'd managed to spin on the last day of the Tour.  I only had one bobbin of cotton, so I made it into a centre-pull ball and plied from each end.  Not so difficult a task if you keep your thumb through the centre of the ball so it doesn't knot up inside.

The cotton was finally dyed with woad from the garden (our Ravelry team is DIY and Dye, which means everything has to be prepared from raw fleece, with no commercially-prepared fibres being allowed, and then it has to be dyed.  Well, it can be dyed beforehand if you like, but at the end everything must have been dyed).

So, here's the finish line photo :

The final details are :-

The yellow is a 3-ply mix of merino/Falkland, one strand dyed with dyer's chamomile, one ply with lichen and red dock seeds, and the 3rd with apple leaves and twigs.
150g, 357 yards/329m, 14 wpi.
This was the only one that was 3-ply, the rest are all 2.

The pink/purple is merino/Falkland/kid mohair dyed with logwood chips and madder.
130g, 256 yards/236m, 14 wpi.

Pink was merino/Falkland dyed with madder.
60g, 159 yards/147m, 12 wpi.

And the blue was my home-grown cotton dyed with woad.
40g, 159 yards/146m, 18 wpi.

So, the end of my 7th (?) Tour.  Not sure about this, I may have joined in with another team the year before.

Sorry this is such a long post - next time I'll try and remember to post maybe at the end of each week.  If you've persevered down to here, go and make yourself a gin and tonic . . . you deserve it!

Christmas Dyeing

As usual, I'm working almost at the last minute to get Christmas presents made.  Each year my friend in the UK and I exchange something we've made.  As the years go by it gets more and more difficult to come up with something I haven't already made for her.  But this year I had a brainwave - why not make something, if not exactly for the Christmas table, then something for the table that can be used every day of the year.  Placemats and napkins!  And what better way to add my own personal touch than dyeing them with natural dyes.

I ordered some Egyptian cotton from Empress Mills in the UK.  They were offering pieces just big enough to make one placemat and one napkin for £5 which I thought was pretty good.  So I ordered two.  The fabric when it arrived was really nice quality and I can see myself buying more next year when her birthday comes around.

Firstly, I washed the cotton in hot soapy water to make sure there were no residues or finishing substances still on there, then I soaked it overnight to make sure it was well and truly wet through.  Since I've never done any tie-dyeing before, and it didn't look too difficult, I thought I'd give it a go.  I was hoping to maybe get something resembling flower shapes, so tied little scrunched up pieces of material with elastic bands.  So far so good.

The next step was making the dyes.  I decided to make life a bit easier, since I didn't have a lot of time, and use natural dyes which didn't need a mordant for the dye to adhere to the fabric.  Onion skins are usually pretty good for that, and I had a large bag-full in my cupboard.

After boiling the skins in water for an hour or two, the dye was looking pretty impressive:-

so in went one of the sheets of fabric and I heated it for an hour before checking the colour.  After an hour, the fabric had hardly taken any colour at all!  By now I was feeling a bit despondent, thinking maybe I should have mordanted.  Anyway, I gave it another couple of hours simmering and it started to look a bit deeper.  In the end I turned off the heat, thinking that was as dark as it was going to get, and left the whole thing overnight to cool.  I was actually quite amazed the next morning to see just how much more colour the fabric had absorbed.  It's not quite the same as dyeing wool with onion skins as normally I would have got yellow or orange, but I'm still happy with the colour.

At this point, you'll notice my photography skills were slightly lacking - i.e. I didn't take any of the fabric as it came out of the dye pot.  Still, I'll show you the finished result at the end.

Next up, woad.  Woad never lets me down, never fails to amaze me, and always looks great when it's finished.  I was quite hopeful.

I picked, washed and chopped about 600g of woad leaves and poured almost boiling water over them so they were all covered.

After leaving for an hour to steep, I strained out the leaves and added some washing soda to make the solution alkaline.

Then came the aeration part.  I used an electric hand mixer to whisk the whole lot up.  I think I may have used a bit too much washing soda because the suds were spilling over the side of the bowl!  You probably can't see too well in this photo, but the foam does have a slight blueish colour.

This was then left to stand for the bubbles to dissipate, then I sprinkled the surface with Spectralite which removes oxygen from the mix.  After about half an hour the fabric was carefully added to the dye liquid.  This was particularly difficult with fabric because it holds air in the folds.  The trick with woad dye is to keep all air out of it which is quite easy with soggy wool.  I did get air in the dye, and wondered if I'd get any blue at all.  Happily, I wasn't disappointed and the fabric came out a beautiful pale to mid-blue.  How can you not love woad?

Here are the finished results, starting with the onion skin dyed set.  It's quite a lot browner than I expected, but it's actually quite a nice brown considering it's a colour I hate with a vengeance!!  I sewed the name of the dye using embroidery silks, unfortunately not dyed by me!  I didn't exactly get flowers with this either, but the shapes are quite interesting.

The woad set is my favourite, I must admit.  Again, not quite flowers, but, given that the fabric was tied in exactly the same way as the other one, the woad attached itself in quite a different way to the onion skin dye.  Hubby thought this would make a really nice dress fabric, so that's something to aspire to next year.  I think I'll need more than 600g of leaves though!

The plan is to make another four sets like these for my friend, each one using a different natural dye.* I need to start in good time though because mordanting cotton is a bit more complex than wool and I want to be sure I get it right.  I think I was lucky this time!

*The friend I made these for is a little bit unconventional when it comes to sets of things.  I think she'll quite like the idea of having, eventually, six different coloured place settings on her table.  Last year she sent me odd socks after admitting that I sometimes wore them and her admitting that so did she!! 

Baby Blues

Recently I knitted this cute little baby sweater for a friend who's having a baby soon.  I still had some Falkland super wash yarn left after finishing Mara's blanket, so put it to good use.  The pattern is Jeudi by Elisa Di Fiore and was a very easy knit.  I think the original pattern is "vendredi", but it's written in French and I still can't cope with that.

Apparently it's going to be a boy, so a visit to the woad patch seemed in order.  I now have woad growing in a few different parts of the garden so I was able to harvest quite a bit from "volunteer" plants first, meaning I still have lots to harvest here:-

Woad is considered a pernicious weed in some parts of the world, but if they're as useful as this one I don't mind if it colonises the whole garden.  The farmer who owns the land all around us might not be too pleased if it spread everywhere though!

I won't bore you with photos of the dye process - I've posted lots in the past, so if you're interested in knowing how it's done you can find out in older posts.  I'll never tire of the magical transformation from yellow, through green to this amazing blue though.  In fact, it actually turned out a bit patchy, but hubby said it made it look more like old faded denim, so I can live with that.

This is the back view, which is equally cute.

For the buttons, I searched through my late mother-in-law's button tin which I inherited.  I think they're pretty old.  They've never been used, and were still stitched to the original cardboard.  They had a sort of faded bit in the middle which matches the patchy sweater! Perfect.  And I have two spare in case they're needed.

As usual, there was still some colour in the dye pot after the sweater came out, so I found a random skein of sheep's wool to put in there.  It's not ultra soft, but I think will go well in socks.

TdF Weeks 2 and 3

Just in case you thought I'd given up part way through, here are my final contributions to this year's Tour de Fleece.  I must admit life got very busy during the second week and I didn't get as much spinning time as I'd planned.  I only managed one skein during week 2, and one and a half in week 3.

For this week's challenge, I chose "tonal yarn" where the yarn is dyed in different shades of the same colour.  As you'll see at the end, this didn't actually work that well, but never mind, I like it as it is anyway.  I went rummaging in my fleece store and came up with some of this :-

I have no clue what this fleece is - it was stuffed in an old pillowcase and I couldn't find a label in there.  I'm pretty sure this will have been gifted to me by someone in the past, so maybe it isn't labelled because I never knew what it was in the first place!  It's pretty good fleece though, quite fine.

I carded up about 100g of it and spun it as finely as I could.  The fleece helped there because it really needed to be spun finely.

After filling the bobbin I transferred it off and made a plying ball.

By this time I was pretty tired of seeing natural coloured fleece.  I really needed some colour in my life!  So I quickly got it plied and skeined off

and probably went a bit mad with the hot pink dye I chose.  I washed and rinsed it, then lay it in a bowl and applied the dye in different strengths around the skein.  When it came out though, the stronger colour seemed to have seeped into the lighter areas!  You can just see a few lighter bits on the next photo, but it really just looked badly dyed!

So at the end of week 2, this was my "Non-Tonal Yarn" :-

As I said, it may not be tonal yarn, but it is pink!!!

For week 3's challenge I picked out some more of my lovely super-kid mohair fleece and dyed it in the team colours again (grey, teal and violet).  I used the same dye batch as I had some left from week 1, but I think I maybe put more dye on this time because it definitely looks stronger in colour.

I separated it into the three different colours again and started carding.

Finished rolags :-

The challenge I chose this week was "Accidental Boucle" which is actually an opposing ply yarn, i.e. one ply is spun clockwise, one ply anti-clockwise, and then ply anti-clockwise. So one ply loses twist (the clockwise) and one ply gains twist (the anti-clockwise).  First bobbin finished and looking good :-

Second bobbin was spun anti-clockwise.  Here it is alongside the first bobbin :-

After plying and taking it off the bobbin, I was a bit disappointed.  It was supposed to have loops and kinks, but mine just looked a bit wavy.

In the next photo I put it alongside the skein I spun during the first week, so you can see that not only is there a difference in colour, there's definitely a difference in texture.

After throwing it into hot water though, my loops and kinks suddenly arrived.  Magic!

Final photo shows it off quite well I think.  So from "Accidental Non-Boucle" before washing, I think I can now call it "Accidental Boucle" after washing!

I finished this one with 2 days left to fill before the Tour de Fleece ended so I needed a quick project to use up those 2 days.  I chose some alpaca (from Cadbury, my neighbour's animal) which was in pretty good shape and I knew it wouldn't need much preparation before I could start spinning.

For alpaca, it didn't have an awful lot of vegetable matter, but it did have a lot of dust!  I just pulled handfuls out of the bag, pulled it apart, removing vm and second cuts as I went, and literally threw it through the drum carder.  Each batt went through twice and I made little nests ready to spin from.

By the time Sunday came to an end, I'd managed to spin this much :-

but I still had more to spin.  I've since finished and plied it, but it still needs to be dyed :-

At the moment it's still on the bobbin, but I plan to dye it soon.  In fact, a couple of friends are really interested in natural dyeing so I'm hoping to invite them over for the day and we'll have a woad dyeing session.  I'll be interested to see how this colour fleece will take the dye.

Final round-up of yarns achieved during this year's TdF (except for the alpaca) :-

So, that's the end of the fun for another year.  Time for a rest?  No chance, I now have to spin and knit a baby blanket for my brand-new step-granddaughter who arrived 2 weeks early on 2nd August.  I'm going to have to be pretty quick with this one!