*knitknit*
Posts tagged Tour de Fleece
Day two
Jul 4th
I find it very difficult to sit at home and work with fleece and yarn on beautifull days like these. I also noticed I really missed drawing.. I don’t know why but somewhere at some point I decided to split the knitting blog from the artstuff blog and then it all went down the drain. Since then I have not drawn a thing… which is a bad thing since I’m still not done with my brothers airbrush thingy… So now I’m having second thoughts about the second blog but I still don’t think the two subjects should be mixed… The blog started out as a place to organize all of my hobbies, but somewhere along the line my drawing got shoved out of the way by the knitting/ sewing and now I feel like I’ve lost an old friend…
I’m not sure what I’ll do yet but I’m thinking of returning the drawing stuff to the main blog because it’s not working out right now…
Talking about things creative – I’ve been nagging about how slow my bobbins are and that I’m annoying the living daylight out of myself treadling so fast I can’t even hear the tv anymore, but now I’ve come up with a solution. It’s still an experimental sollution but if this works out I’ll take the whole thing to the next level.
I spent a whole day searching the internet for a bobbin that will work out for me, and then came to the conclusion that I’m not willing to spend so much money on something I can make myself (funny, that’s what I said when I started knitting/ sewing/ spinning), so I grabbed my jig saw and the sander, and then the gluegun and I was a happy little girl 
Obviously this is an experiment, but it’s already a huge success, so the next step is to get me some plywood and making some good calculations to get me a 1:10 ratio
This end was twice as big and completely useless, the bigger side (now) gave me a 1:5,5 ratio, the new part gives a 1:7 ratio. Not a huge improvement but I can definately feel (and hear) the difference!
I know how it really looks very crappy but it’s totally worth it! This little experiment will allow me to actually do something else while spinning, like watching tv or a movie without the need for heavy headphones 
A total success if you ask me. So for the next step I think I’ll create some custom bobbins with different sets of plywood (recreating the original side). I’ll keep you guys updated
I had mentioned spinning a little today, but I paused because of the greyish color. It’s the first time I ever washed and carded fleece so obviously there’s a million things I could’ve done wrong with this, but the most obvious thing is that it isn’t clean. The fleece is a white alpaca, and not grey… but the singles are very very grey… It feels rather dry and gross on my fingers after a while but that’s not the biggest of my problems, right now I’m wondering if the color will ever go back to ‘white’ after spinning and plying….. 
Besides the new singles on the mutilated bobbin I spent some time trying to get the overtwisted Dandelion straight again… I was so afraid of undertwist I really really overtwisted the whole thing in the end. The beginning isn’t even that bad, but the last 50 meters are horrible… It’s 178 grams of a total of 300 grams and I’m really sure I can make something quite large with this…
I was going for malabrigo sock and tho it’s not 400 meters per 100g it’s close enough for a first attempt Here, have some pix 
Tour de Fleece :)
Jul 3rd
I’ll be honest, I’m really not a fan of the Tour at all… I don’t like watching it and I really think its quite boring.. I do however respect the athletes and I think it’s an awesome achievement but still it’s just not for me.. however.. this does not mean I don’t like to use this as an excuse to spin The plan was that I’d be done with the washing and carding so I could start spinning immediately when the Tour started, but unfortunately, because of the extreme heat, I haven’t been able to finish. It was simply too hot to touch any fibre so I haven’t knit or spun at all for a while. This meant that I had to finish plying the BFL before I can do any other spinning, so that’s what I did.
I finished the plying and I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. It’s become a bit thicker than I planned it, but on hindsight I’m very pleased with that fact. It’s rather difficult to only knit very thin materials, sometimes it’s pleasant to have some heavier yarns to play with
This is what it looks like right now, it’s about the same size as malabrigo sock yarn (sometimes thicker sometimes thinner) and so far it measures 406 meters. At first it was a lot of fun to spin this but at the end it was a real pain. I will definately not start the other half before I have a faster bobbin because trying to spin light fingering 3-ply yarn with a 1:5,5 ratio really really sucks if you ask me…. Not only does my foot not like the fast treadling, but I’ve managed to unscrew the wheels main bolt….. I also noticed my hands start working faster and faster and my foot keeps the same pace so when at a certain point the singles break I can’t manage to continue because there’s not enough spin, causing the yarn to keep breaking and breaking every time I try to restart…. very very frustrating.
Another rather funny point is that it took a long time for me to spin the singles and then to ply them, so the end of the plying process was rather annoying because the singles were allmost ‘stuck’ to the bobbin. They were a bit curly and I had trouble getting them off in one piece. Also the plying went too slow because of my recent trauma concering underspun singles.. so while trying to correct this I overspun the yarn a bit causing this pretty mess. At the moment it’s hanging out to dry, hopefully tomorrow the curly mess will have subdued
Besides the Tour and the WC there’s been a birthday to celebrate My dad has become a year older and for us kids it’s the time to bake a cake. Why you ask? Well for as long as I can remember my birthdays have been marked by my dads ridiculously cool birthday cakes. My second birthday I had a barbie cake, with a real barbie doll on top wearing a pricess candy dress, for my third birthday it was a grass field with a house and 3 bear candles and the years after that I always had some fun cake. Later on my brother got the awesome cakes (kirby, mario..). So now (since last year) we bake him cakes and try to decorate them creatively. We just started out so we still suck but I think this one is another little success
My dads birthday was the same day we won with 2-1 from Brazil, and we didn’t want to show his age on the cake so we made the soccer field and the teams Like I said, we really suck (and Brazil didn’t play in yellow, and we didn’t have blue!), but I think my dad liked it anyway
Here’s my dad stabbing cake…:)
