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@stringbit
Tour de Fleece, days 20 and 21
Didn't quite get it finished yesterday, but I sure did today! Man I love supported spinning. Might not make for impressive mileage (compared to wheels, anyway; I think I'm starting to be able to keep up with slower drop spindles), but it's just so nice and chill.
Woman weaving a rug in the Armenian SSR, late 1950s.
The first load of fleece (about 1/3rd) has been washed. Lanolin dissolves in water thats 60C, but wool doesn’t like hot temperature or sudden temperature changes otherwise it’ll felt. So it’s important to keep the water hot across the baths & to only gently paddle the wool to encourage lanolin/urine/sweat/dirt/etc to come out with the soap. There is 1-2 rinse baths after the scour baths, which isn’t shown, just to get any remaining soap out.
At home sick, studying, and excel crashed and wiped a day's work (I'd a manual save + autosave was on, but it was android. Don't ask me. Don't ask the flu fog ethier. File not to be found).
I SHOULD HAVE BEEN SPINNING!!!
Life lesson learnt.
Fleece related discovery of the day: indigo vats are stinky but magical. I’m very glad I was sensible and used it out on the porch.
I test dyed about 20g of floof, and 100g of two ply that I spun a few weeks ago. I’ve also got some safflower extracting on the little induction plate at the moment, so if I get a good yellow from that, I’ll try over dyeing some to green as well.
In more spinning-related activities, it’s a bad pain day today, so I’ve only done a token amount of spinning, but I did manage to skein up the first half of this lovely silk and alpaca mix, and start spinning the rest. It’s my first time spinning silk, and it’s fussier than I’m used to, but soft and shiny enough that I don’t actually mind.
Finished the 25 grams of Tussah silk, and started on the 25 grams of muga silk, with 25 grams of peduncle silk to follow. Massively improving my skills on the takhli. And when this is over, I've 100 grams each of raw corriedale, merino, and leicester to play with. Improving skills on the combs is next in line
I mean this started as tour de fleece. But why stop there?!
Stolen from reddit where it wasn't being properly appreciated
"Indigo dyeing silk thread"
In case anyone wonders what the Japanese is saying
I just learned about this recently from a Viking reenactor! Indigo dye isn't blue until it oxidizes, so when you dye with indigo your cloth or thread doesn't come out of the water blue, it comes out and then reacts with the oxygen in the air and seems to spontaneously turn blue in front of your eyes. It's a really cool process to witness.
Join the 24days of sashiko
a free step-by-step of twenty four hitomezashi sashiko patterns! not just photos of finished products, but like step one: all the horizontals / step two: all the verticals are all laid out 🤩
please ignore the old dates, it's totally still functional (I am on day two of receiving emails, June 2026).
so, this ended up being awesome! and I really felt like I was ready to tackle bigger projects once I finished it.
which led to playing around with this tool
hitomezashi.com
Hitomezashi
and remembering I can print a design and a dot grid on any light-colored fabric smaller than 8.5x11" using sticker paper and an inkjet...and now looking at fancy examples for inspo...I kinda wanna make windsock style banners?! koinobori style... but some other animal(s) maybe?
this is. three ply.
the tags i woke up to on this are delightful. I appreciate everyone’s horror <3
to try and answer some of the questions people have asked:
1) i am as bewildered about how i’ve managed this as you all are. i’ve comfortably done a light fingering/heavy lace 3ply before, but this is uhhh. new.
2) the fibre is a 25% penduncle silk/75% superfine merino commercial mix, and it’s extremely soft and extremely fine and extremely easy to draft, which i think helps with the fine-ness. i’m spinning on a small whorl, treadling pretty fast, and with basically no tension on the bobbin because otherwise it snaps the thread.
(relatedly, as someone who habitually spins pretty fine: when i bump into people who struggle with it, the issue is very often that they have their tension up way too high.)
3) this is what the singles look like (with the 3ply on the far left for comparison):
to my eye, they look like they should be plying up thicker, but! i guess not!
bonus picture of the yarn so far, which really does not capture the colour (green-grey-cream) of the subtle lustre of it well at all:
TdF day 11
I barely got any spinning done today, only finished the tiny sample of Punta Arenas wool. It floofed up wonderfully after washing!
So I'm not doing TdF because I haven't really got the time... but Tour de France is not the only cycling race right now so consider me spinning along some of the shorter bike races.
Anyway... I got a blending board yesterday and here is what I made so far:
The orange rolags are mainly the BFL I dyed with Annatto a few weeks ago, mixed with various orange mill ends, including a little bit of sari silk. Its so soft and the colour is so peachy and creamy, reminding me of Bellini.
Then I blended a mix of different brown and green mill ends I had flying around, probably around 10 different types of fiber. It turned out absolutely perfect, deep and earthy browns and greens with lots of texture and colour variation. I have about 65g of this and I'm really excited to spin this!
Next is another test for my idea of a watermelon art yarn. The fiber content is extremely varied, a mix of several sheep races that I dyed two years ago. The initial fiber prep wasn't that great, densely carded with a lot of lanolin. The dyeing process didn't help any so now even carded again its not that pleasant to spin and I can't get it do draft evenly, but thats completely fine for this project. My biggest problem is with the black nepps, as they refuse to stay during spinning, losing a little bit of that watermelon vibe I'm going for.
Lastly I have a small test skein for a project I've had in mind for a very long while. Using hebridean wool (my beloved) as a base, I blended in small bits of scrap yarn that I have been collecting. I spun it long draw directly from the mini-batt and then i plied the two singles together. It worked way better than expected, especially considering my experience with the black nepps mentioned earlier. The resulting yarn is chunky and colourful. I might play around a bit with adjusting the size of the yarn scraps, maybe carding them by themselves first before adding into the batt. But first I'll see how it looks in a test swatch!
far away, this yarn looks pretty dark
and then up close…
magic!
Tour de Fleece, Day... 15? The internet says 15:
I got stuck in packing hell for a few days but I did get to spin so here's what happened.
On Day 14 I plied the spun mystery roving, because I wanted to keep spinning with my new toy the wooden spindle. And then I got "just a new leader, just to get the ball rolling" started with my usual roving, which was less forgiving than the scratchy stuff, but somehow nicer to work with.
Today, I was packing and driving all day so I only got to spin once I was at a new location, where they speak German with a distinctly different accent.
Tapestry diary - April 15 2025 to April 14 2026
My diary was accepted into the HGA Member Showcase!! It's an online exhibition, check it out here!
“He wished that he could break out his knitting, but for some reason, people didn’t take you seriously as a warrior when you were knitting. He’d never figured out why. Making socks required four or five double-ended bone needles, and while they weren’t very large, you could probably jam one into someone’s eye if you really wanted to. Not that he would. He’d have to pull the needle out of the sock to do it, and then he’d be left with the grimly fiddly work of rethreading the stitches. Also, washing blood out of wool was possible, but a pain. Still, if he had to suddenly pull out his sword and fend off an attack, there was a chance he’d drop the yarn, and since he’d been feeling masochistic and was using two colors for this current set of socks, there was absolutely no chance the yarn wouldn’t get tangled and then he’d be trying to murder people while chasing the yarn around. And god forbid the tide rose and he went berserk. You never got the knitting untangled after that; you usually just had to throw it away completely.”
― T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Grace
good news, i have in fact been spinning for Tour de Fleece
meh news, i have not been posting about it because i'm tired
so here's a day whatever it is round up of some yarns i have recently plyed. haven't gotten around to washing them yet but i'm happy with them all
okay so post-TDF i'm now planning to make a tips and tricks for spinning two ply gradients so that the colors match up
anyone who wants tagged, let me know
Day 11 - 30 minutes of spinning after work.
Day 12 - I'm marking this as my rest day because I got absolutely no spinning done today. I was busy packing and moving boxes and by the time I was done with that I was so tired and sweaty 🥵 even the thought of touching wool made me cringe.
Day 13 - spun for 1 hour today! I'm still in the oranges but the yellow is creeping closer.
