Tour de Fleece, Days 4-5 I Finish a Skein!

Sometimes I don't mind waking up before the alarm goes off.

Tuesday morning I did some fantasy treadmill walking -- in Holbrook, Arizona.  Because it's very, very flat!  And still had a couple of hours before I had to leave for work.

Finished my first skein of fractal spinning - 200 yards!

The two singles:  Smaller bits on the left, larger ones on the right...

  Plied...

Moving to Thor's reel...

It's all on the reel now...

Washed and all done!

Phew!  On the one hand, I'm pretty proud of the result.  Although it's still uneven, it's much better than my last yarn.  On the other, I pretty much hate the result.  It reminds me of the string they use in those cheap drawstring bags.  Know the ones I mean?

I took it to class Wednesday night and got mixed reactions.  Most of the people reacted like I did.   A couple of them actually LIKED it.  A lot.  I guess there's no accounting for taste.

On to my next project.  I'm calling this one "Fractured Fractals."  Instead of using a space-dyed roving, I selected three solid colors of Merino - red, gold, and cream.  Yes, I know I droned on in my last post about how much I hate predominantly yellow shades, but my school colors happen to be cardinal and gold.  So loyalty won out over personal preference.

I decided to alternate the red and gold with the cream, so I broke the red and gold into two pieces each, and the cream into four.  The repeat will be R-C-G-C..  Split each of those pieces in half lengthwise, and set half of those aside.  The other half I split into four pieces, so there will be two repeats on the first set and eight repeats on the second one.

Pre-drafted the first big red piece.   Not good.  Maybe it's felted a little, or maybe I was just having a bad day, but it felt like the fibers just didn't want to separate.  Finally got it loosened up enough to spin, I thought.  But spinning was just as difficult.  I kept having to stop to draft and also had lots of breaks.  Decided to give myself the rest of the day off -- it was Independence Day, after all.

I may go back and unspin what I did, and try carding it to see if I can loosen up the fibers.  Or shove the whole thing back in the roving bin and work on something else!