Tour de Fleece, week one

Ahh: the Tour de France, where real men wear lycra and attempt incredible feats of endurance and stamina.  And the Tour de Fleece, where spinners do much the same, except with less lycra, more wool, and a distinctly lower requirement for high calorie intake.

This year, as well as I’ve challenged myself to do two things:

• Spin up enough of a wool/alpaca blend to knit a sweater later in the year, and
• Get to grips with my new Russian spindle (bought at Woolfest).

I have to admit that I haven’t gone near the Russian spindle since tidying up after my recent travelling sprees.  And, as it happened, I had no chance at all to do any of my own spinning on the first day of the tour – Saturday the 2nd – because I was demonstrating and teaching drop spinning at a friend’s come-and-craft birthday party.  Still, I consider spending several hours teaching spinning to new acolytes to be a good way to kick off the tour.

A bigger technical hitch was that I hadn’t actually finished carding the blended fibre for my sweater spinning.  I wanted to blend the seconds from the cocoa-coloured alpaca fleece with a grey wool that I, errrm, ‘washed’ mostly by putting it in cold water to soak ‘for a week’ sometime last year.  By this spring, it smelled pretty much like the bottom of a pond, and had green slime growing on the top.  However, the lanolin seemed to have mostly disappeared, so I finished washing it, and called it good.  It doesn’t smell bad any more; it reminds my of my dive kit, for some reason.  The quantities I had of each meant that I could produce a blend that’s roughly one-third alpaca.  This is what my sample batt looked like:

And here’s the two-ply yarn.  Very woollen, very lofty, very stretchy:

The blending has been an adventure.  Last weekend, I spent a day and a half on it, and got enough fully finished to keep me busy on the wheel this week.  This weekend, I’ve managed to finish the rest of the carding – thank goodness!  So, by the end of the first week of the tour, I have three very full bobbins of singles, plus a partial bobbin:

And a big box of batts – enough to keep me out of trouble for a wee while yet:

Kita is amazed