Tour de Fleece: Stage 5

Wednesday was Stage 5 of the Tour de France/Tour de Fleece.  I filled up a bobbin with 2-ply green yarn.  I also figured out the awful squeaking noise my wheel was making.  The drive band was slipping on the drive wheel.  At first I thought that meant my drive band was too stretched out and I would need to replace it, but then I did some internet research.  It turns out that for the smaller whorls, it is sometimes necessary to tension the drive band with the little white drive band tensioner wheel (just above the red drive wheel in the picture).  I had thought that the drive band tensioner was only for the double drive set-up, but the wheel's documentation also mentions it in connection with the smaller whorls in Scotch tension set-up (which is the only set-up I've ever used).  I started using the drive band tensioner once I figured out where the sound was coming from and it seemed to help, but next time I sit down to spin I'll set it much more aggressively and hope that that makes the noise go away all together.

Yesterday I had a super busy day with work and then a church commitment, and I didn't even think about spinning until I got home from church at almost nine o'clock and just wanted to go to bed.  So yesterday was an unplanned rest day.  I'm planning to spin on the first planned rest day (I think it's the 13th) to make up for it.

Spinning, spinning

I did my usual Tuesday spinning on Wednesday this week (and I only did half as much as I have the past few weeks).  I'm getting excited for the beginning of the Tour de Fleece on Saturday!

White yarn finished!

My UFO list says I started spinning this yarn in November 2011.  I finally finished it last week.  I bought a pound of un-dyed blue faced leicester to practice spinning on.  I spun the whole thing on my wheel, using a short backwards draw and the slowest ratio on my ladybug.  I plied it into a two-ply yarn and got two skeins: the one with green ties is approximately 270 yds and the one with brown ties is about 240 yds.  I could definitely see when I was plying it that the earliest singles were much less uniform that the more recent ones.  That was pretty gratifying!

I decided to use this yarn to knit a cardigan version of this sweater.  I have 4 oz of Hello Yarn hand-dyed roving that I got at yarn school two years ago, which I'd like to use for the top part of the sweater.  I'm not sure if it's enough, or if I have enough of the white yarn to do the body AND sleeves, so my plan is to start the sweater body from the bottom and see how it goes.  If I have enough to do the sweater body and sleeves as in the picture I'll do that, and if not I'll just do the body in white and then either spin something else for the yoke and sleeves or buy some Noro for it as the pattern suggests.

Finished yarn!

This is the first yarn that I've finished since I went to yarn school, which was over a year and a half ago.  It is one ply of natural white BFL and one ply of a batt that was mostly alpaca with a bit of tussah silk and a little bit of something sparkly.  The color in the bottom photo is much more accurate - the natural really is a creamy white, not yellow.  I honestly don't love the yarn, but I am satisfied that I finished it.  I guess I should wait until it's knitted up into something before I make a final judgment, but I don't know what I should knit from it.  If I counted correctly when I was winding the yarn onto the niddy-noddy, there are about 225 yards here.  It's kind of thick and thin, and I sort of wish that the plies were more tightly twisted around each other, if that makes sense.  I think I am going to try to overtwist my singles and plies a bit on my next spinning project to make that happen.  I should probably make a sample card for quality control on my next project, too, to try to make it more consistent.

Fiber: one ply BFL, one ply mostly alpaca with a bit of silk
Yardage: ~225yds
Weight: sport to bulky, but mostly worsted?
Spun and plied on my Ladybug

What I've been working on lately

I've been spinning a lot more often lately, and I'm really enjoying it!  It's very relaxing to sit and spin while Robert reads aloud in the evenings.  We've both been impressed by how "productive" wheel-spinning is.  It's really gratifying to see the singles accumulate on the bobbin at what seems like an incredible rate.  I've been spinning some undyed white BFL (I bought a whole pound to practice with after I got back from yarn school 18 months ago!) but recently I've started reading a few spinning blogs and have really wanted to spin some of the gorgeous colored fiber I have.  So I started spinning a lovely custom carded alpaca and tussah silk batt that I bought two (I think? maybe it was three) years ago.  It's a lot of fun to spin - pretty easy, and it's fun to see the interplay of the different colors.  Here's the rest of the batt:

My plan is to ply this with some of the white BFL singles I've been spinning.  I only have two ounces of the alpaca, and I want to stretch it into more yardage - also I think I will like the candy-cane stripe effect.

My other new project is these toadstool socks in fancy self-patterning yarn.  This yarn was given to me at yarn school, and it is a pain to work with!  You have to get the tension EXACTLY right or the mushrooms will be all messy and ugly.  Also, the pattern is written pretty terribly (and apparently not tech-edited?), which is a shame since the kits are so incredibly expensive.  The pattern calls for casting on 56 stitches, and says that if your yellow and green stripes work out to almost exactly two rounds, you'll be good to go.  I did not find this to be the case.  After starting over on the toadstools about 5 times, I finally looked at the chart and realized that the pattern is for 52 stitches!

I started over a sixth time with the right number of stitches, and I've been following the chart religiously, adjusting my tension stitch by stitch to make sure I have the correct number of red and white stitches in each section.

I'm glad I kept working on these - I'm finally getting the hang of it (I've knitted another one and a half repeats of the toadstools since this picture was taken) and the socks are going to be really cool when I'm finished, but I'm also glad that I'm not the one who paid for this yarn.

Both the purple yarn and the socks count as new starts.  I've also finished a quilt that I haven't blogged yet, so I'm at six finishes and three starts since I started counting in February.  I want to finish some more things so I can sew myself some clothes!

Spinning Wheel!!!!!!!!!!!

My spinning wheel has arrived! I was expecting it yesterday, and I was heartbroken when it didn't get here. But today when I got home it was sitting outside my door! (I really wish the UPS deliveryperson had put it in the apartment office, but that's not what this post is about.)

The wheel arrived in a large box:

It's a Ladybug!

I took it out of the box. There was some assembly required...
Putting it together didn't take very long.

Here's a closeup.
My wheel is a Schacht Ladybug. One of the special things about it is that the people at Schacht put a little ladybug somewhere on each individual wheel. Not unlike the Snuggle Piggy book! It took me a few minutes to find mine:
Here's a larger view: it's behind the flywheel:
I started spinning a bit of some blue roving I've been spindle-spinning. It's so much easier spinning on the wheel than with a spindle! I love it!

Thank you Mom and Daddy!