New Game

I think there were only two skeins of the Tour de Fleece spinning I haven't put here, yet. One was a handful of fleece, which conveniently fitted into the Potions class in the HP game, too. The prompt for the class was

Exhibit two or more stages of turning raw-off-the-sheep fiber into handspun.

Since I'm doing something similar for my NEWT, I thought a trial run would be great helpful. I found my small bag of fleece from back when we shore Barley in 2010. She's the one who died this year and left us Kissy to raise I soaked about 100g in hot water and my new Unicorn Scour. (First time I’ve tried scour; it’s great!) After half an hour or so, I tipped it into the sink, catching the wool on a biscuit cooling rack. Then I repeated the scour.

Back into the pot it went again, this time with vinegar and dye. I added a fair bit of green and dark blue, but it didn’t take a lot of the dye for some reason, and ended up a nice grey-blue.

I squeezed out the water with a towel and dried it on the biscuit rack. Time for carding! This time, I stretched out and spread out all the small bits of fibre before putting them in, pulling out the felted bits of short fibres and the grass I found. It worked so well that I only needed to card once, making two fluffy batts that totalled 87g.

I took it to Mum's place. (The electric wheel is very light and portable, about 2 kilos). I had to pull out a few more bits as I spun, but it spun much better this time. In the end I had 82g of navajo plied yarn.I think my spinning from batts is improving slowly.

Then I spun the second skein of Callington (BFL and mohair).

The one on the left ;)


So in the end I didn't make my goal of spinning the same number of meters of singles as the number of kilometers in this year's Tour de France. I got 3352m out of 3497! So close... :) But I had to work on other things. Slytherin needs all those points. Hehehe.

As soon as the Tour de Fleece finished, we began the Ravellenic Games (we got in trouble for calling it Ravelympics, so we had to change it; still feels weird to call it something different after all these years.) So far I've entered the Handspun Heptathalon

More spinning, if you can believe it. :)

...the Hand-dyed High Dive

...the Mitten Medley

(which Jasmine immediately turned into her Oven Gloves and started making biscuits)

and this one is in both the Hat Dash and the Baby Dressage

which is for my new niece or nephew coming in *only a few weeks*! We had a baby shower tonight, so, naturally, I decided at 9pm last night that I needed to knit one.

I have Telly's scarf on the loom, using the handdyed stuff above, for the Weaving Vault. That's next.

Well, I'm dyeing more fleece and about to watch the diving while weaving a bit more. Stay tuned next time (hehe) for Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test fun!