Loosen Up!

The last fibre I chose to spin up for the Tour de Fleece (where cycling-obsessed spinners follow along with the Tour de France) was a lovely bump of 250 grams of dyed Corriedale (a sheep breed with fairly fine, crimpy wool).

At least, it had been lovely in 1999: so soft and fluffy, it filled a large bag when I bought it from Penelope Fibre Arts. Ten years of being stuffed away left it dull, compressed, and stiff as a board: that one piece above is barely five feet long, 1.5" in diameter, and weighs two ounces -- not something that is particularly spinning-friendly.



So I started by splitting it in half lengthwise and gently worked to widen the resulting pieces: the one on the left (above) has been loosened, while the right "rope" hasn't been. There's a substantial difference, isn't there?

Doing this also gave me the chance to see how the colours were dyed on it -- the yellow really wasn't noticeable at all in the compressed version -- and to check to see what kind of shape the wool really was in. The good news is that there wasn't any damage to it, so I was able to make a better decision about how to spin it.



I decided to make a fairly thick, two-ply yarn with this roving, so I could spin it up quickly and let some of the colour shifts be fairly subtle at the same time. Having widened the roving to thin it out, I decided to turn it into something a little easier to spin, loosely rolling it up and then gently pulling it lengthwise.

Doing this thins out the fibres from the mass even more, and lets the colour change work over a longer distance.



By the time I was finished, I had a lovely, long, fluffy collection of fibres, reasonably organized into a worsted-like preparation, and with a gentle colour shift.



I've finished spinning the first half of this bobbin: you can see the colour shift in the last few turns. When I'm finished spinning the singles and move on to plying, this will definitely give the yarn some visual interest.



Done! Three good-sized skeins, with just short of 400 yards of two-ply yarn. I've been using one to work on some knitted artifacts for my solo installation show in EPCOR Centre that opens September 4, and I have some thoughts about the other two skeins.

As luck would have it, I have some very fine cotton thread in my stash that is almost the same family of green: not quite sure how I'm going to combine them. Yet.

So stay tuned....