No, you’re not mistaken, you’ve seen this title before. 😀 Today however, instead of a WIP you’re getting a finished object! As I told you last week, Tour De Fleece 2021 met me with the same finish, finish, finish energy I had in the #casualcraftalong I hosted on Instagram and this spin finish is as a result of that energy. Before the Tour started I got all my spinning projects — wheel spun, supported and suspended spindles — and put them in my spinning basket. I’ve been methodically crossing them off my WIP list and it feels really good!
The nuns of Inglenook Fibers are phenomenal with color and blends. Cherry Blossoms At Night came to us by way of a fiber club series they planned in the first quarter of the year — Armchair Traveling. The concept was to imagine yourself, despite the pandemic, visiting countries around the world via your armchair through fiber. The series ran for 3 months in which participants received a batt, a braid, and a set of sticklebatts, each from a different country. There were inspiration pictures from each venue and these were used to create the fiber item. For the visits I received, a braid from Norway, sticklebatts from Peru and a batt from Japan aka Cherry Blossoms At Night.
As an aside: every crafter is unique with a different set of skills and although Ravelry is difficult for me to navigate since the change in the interface, I use it for notes sometimes looking at how spinners broke down items to create a finished spin object. One of the most frustrating things for me is when I see a lovely finished item, I go check the notes and boom — NOTHING!!! Not even the number of plies! Sooooooo frustrating!!!! So in addition to adding notes on my Ravelry page, this post will also serve as a breakdown of how I did the batt spin so others can see what I did and maybe, just maybe, learn from it.
Opened, the batt displayed 5 distinct colorways with soft transitions between each of them. I divided it according to those colorways trying my best to keep the transitions intact.
I then spindle spun each of the colorways. These singles were spun thin because I knew I wanted a make a 3 ply yarn. Additionally, since I planned to use the chain ply method to create the 3-ply yarn, I knew I had to spin the fiber thin enough to get a resulting 3 ply yarn of more than 200 yds.
After spinning each single, in order to create a single ply ball of one long continuous yarn, I joined the spins together.
Pro Tip: always leave a bit of fluff at the beginning and end of your spindle spins if joining. I leave about 1.5 to 2 inches of fluff so I have space to draft the fiber together when joining and still keep the integrity of the already spun yarn (allow the joins not to be made too thin or too thick)
After the single ply join, I make a chain ply ball — this video’s instructions are the ones that I connected with the most so this has become my technique for creating a chain ply ball.
After the chain ply ball, I spun the fiber on my Lendrum Double Treadle wheel for the gradient result below:
Project Details:
- Fiber weight: batt was 3.9 ozs.
- Dyer: Inglenook Fibers
- Fiber Composition: Corriedale fleece, merino, polwarth, silk, bamboo, silk noil, angelina.
- Fiber Attributes: carded with use of commerical dyes
- Spun on Kerry and Bosworth Spindles. Plied on Lendrum DT
- Single Spun: with Z twist
- Plied: with S twist
- First Pass: 690 yds of singles
- Skein Finish: chain plied
- Final Skein Total: 230 yds of 3 ply yarn
- Finished Object: for Tour De Fleece 2021
Corriedale by itself isn’t as soft as merino, but the merino and silk adds to the batt makes it deliciously soft. The Polwarth adds some bounce and the bamboo some drape. Some spinners don’t like to spin nepps, silk noils, angelina or firestar but presence of these makes spins interesting to me and my goal is always to spin them in such a way so that they add visual interest and not dominate the end result.
I hope your Tour De Fleece is going well and looking forward to catching up with all of your projects in today’s YOP blog hop. ❤
D'NALI 