Craft! Bang! Boom!

Given enough time, I’m fairly certain I’ll try anything even remotely involved with the sphere of fiber arts. And for some reason, recently, the notion of buying raw fleece and washing and processing it myself kind of started to appeal to me. I was fairly certain I’d find the process too much of a pain in the ass, but yet… I was intrigued.

Fortunately, instead of just buying an entire fleece at random without knowing what the hell I was doing, I was able to get a sample of raw fleece from Stickyfingers so I could give this a shot without committing to an entire sheep.

Here’s what I started with – about 4 oz. of Border Leicester fleece.

Click below the fold for the dirty, dirty details.

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Double the Fug, so named because it combined two pretty fugly rovings. This one is a monster, 8 7/8 ounces, and 263 yards. I do really like the way it came out, so now I’m working on combining some more fugly rovings together.

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Yeah, I know, I’ve been slacking off on the spinning lately. This is just a wee skein to prod me back into it. The wool was from a batt carded by Terrabellaspun called October Glow. 77.5 yards, 2 3/8 oz. I do like the way the yarn wound up striping. Tres cool.

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Dear Catastrophe Soy Silk. Medium twist single. I had dyed this soy silk fiber a few weeks ago, and it came out like ass, so I overdyed it a few days later, and I wound up getting weird colors with the bonus that the fiber just sort of collapsed into soft catastrophe. I spun this up today, and I think it redeemed itself. I was originally going to spin it up as a two ply, but surprisingly, the soy silk wanted to be made into a thicker yarn than I had originally thought, so I just kept it as a thicker single. Anyway, I like it now. 149 yards, 3 5/8 ounces.

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Beachy yarn. Low twist single. 146 yards, 4 3/8 ounces. After spinning the last yarn really skinny, I wanted to switch it up a bit and spin something soft and fat. There are still some skinny parts in here, but I think that’s because I could have predrafted my roving a little better. It turned out appropriately soft and squishy, though.

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3D. 100% superwash wool. 5 5/8 ounces, 364 yards. Navaho plied. This is one of those yarns that I should have spun over a longer period of time, but once I started spinning it I just wanted to be done with it. It was a bit angsty to spin. I actually don’t even care for this color combo that much, either.

That being said, I think it came out nice. The yarn is balanced, and I think the color is even more vibrant than it was in the single. I’m looking forward to knitting some socks out of these because I’m interested to see what kind of striping (if any) I’ll get. The roving was splotchy as opposed to having long areas of single color, so I expect I’ll get maybe one or two rounds per color when I knit a sock. Could be interesting. Could be weird.

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I’ve been slacking off on posting this past week! I have a lot of catching up to do! The above yarn is the first time I tried spinning with fabric. I kind of had no idea what I was doing, and finally figured out that my best bet is to use thin strips of fabric and secure both ends of the fabric in the yarn by tucking the end in the middle of a fat section of wool. Some of my ends came free, and were flapping around the yarn like tiny banners, but I thought that was kind of cool. I do actually like the finished product, and place it in the same category of anything I do with beads – I have so many fabric scraps that anything I can do to reduce the amount of fabric in my house is a good thing. There’s someone on Craftster who is just spinning straight fabric with no wool or fiber of any sort involved at all, which I find interesting. I could see doing something like that and then winding the fabric yarn directly onto a weaving shuttle from the bobbin and using it as weft for a rug. Anyway, this skein is called Applejack, and it’s 128 yards and 5 1/2 ounces.

This is a skein I spun for a friend. I combed up the main fiber combining wool, mohair, mohair locks, nylon, nylon sparkle, silk noils, and angora, and then corespun the first ply. I plied that with some holographic thread, and then boucleed it against some of the original fiber that was spun thin. It turned out quite fuzzy and blingy. 88 yards, 4 5/8 ounces.

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Here’s the finished Travis yarn! I love this.  It’s called Intoxicate, and wound up being 302 yards and 3 7/8 ounces.  I decided to just leave it as a skinny single ply.  It is shiny and wonderful and it changes colors and shimmers.  Sigh…

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Green viscose (sorry, no snappy name yet). 106 yards, 2 1/8 ounces. This was spun from some fiber that Travis and I dyed last summer. I got this out and spun it the other day because I hadn’t spun any viscose in a while, and I wanted to practice first before I got myself in the middle of Travis’ beautiful viscose bonanza.

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I’ve gotten a little behind on posting the yarn. Whoops! This first one is called Play Doh, and I screwed it up. The fat ply is various colors of wool, and the skinny ply is tencel. I didn’t spin the tencel tight enough, and when I tried to do the coils, there were some areas where the tencel just kind of drifted apart. Thanks a lot, tencel! Anyway, it turned out to be 87 yards and 4 1/8 oz.

I had some leftover of the fat ply, so I navaho plied it just to get rid of it. Not sure on the yardage, but it weighs 1 7/8 oz. It’s called Clown Farts:

The next yarn is actually pretty cool. I like it the best out of today’s skeins. I took the leftover thrums from the rug warp and tied them together. There was two ounces of waste yarn leftover from weaving, and I didn’t want to waste it. So after they were all tied together, I spun a big fat fluffy ply using the thrums as my core and the Lilac Jacob/Angora blend as the fluff. After that was spun, I plied it with a skinny ply from some meh roving that I wanted to get rid of. The finished yarn is called Little Ghost. It is so soft and fluffy. I love it! 64 yards, 4 1/8 ounces.

And finally, I spun up the rest of the meh roving (I don’t know why I disliked this so much, but I did) and navaho plied it. Now I’m all done spinning the meh roving! Yay! I can move onto something fun!

100 yards, 3 5/8 oz.

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