{"id":701,"date":"2009-07-04T22:55:26","date_gmt":"2009-07-04T21:55:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heatherknits.com\/blog\/?p=701"},"modified":"2009-07-04T22:51:59","modified_gmt":"2009-07-04T21:51:59","slug":"le-tour-de-fleece-day-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heatherknits.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/04\/le-tour-de-fleece-day-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Le Tour de Fleece: Day One"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well here we are at the start of the Tour de Fleece. I’ve joined the Peloton, Rookies, Team UK, Spin Our Socks, and Team Jelly Legs so I think I had better stop joining teams now.<\/p>\n

I have started off the tour in a bit of a lateral direction, by not making progress towards any of my goals, but instead learning to spindle spin!<\/p>\n

I was concerned that I would start off the tour on the back foot as I was out all day today at the Knitting and Crochet Guild<\/a> AGM. (did you know that when your TomTom stops working part way up the M1 a crochet hook can be the ideal tool to poke it up its reset button with). I’m afraid I have been my usual appalling self and although I remembered to take my camera with me I completely forgot to take it out of the bag. After the AGM itself we had a very interesting chat by Pat, Steve, and Ben from Woolly Thoughts<\/a>. I have been to a couple of their talks before, and they are always very good. Also I am biased and enjoy hearing about a nice bit of mathematical knitting \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

After lunch there were some workshops, and while unfortunately I wasn’t fast enough to get into Mary<\/a>‘s workshop on wire knitting, I was just quick enough to get a place on Terri<\/a>‘s workshop on making your own spindle and learning to spin on it!<\/p>\n

My DIY skills leave something to be desired so Terri had to help me out rather a lot with the spindle construction, I am going to superglue it now I have the yarn off it since I was having a bit of trouble with the CDs wobbling.<\/p>\n

I got home with just enough time to watch the last bits of the tour highlights on the telly, so here is the spindle, watching along with the maillot jaune.<\/p>\n

\"SpindlingWithTheTour2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is a close up of the singles:<\/p>\n

\"Singles\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The yarn we were using was English Wool tops. I found it a bit hard to draft at first, and so the yarn I made this afternoon was rather lumpy and bumpy. I was thinking about it in the car on the way home and thought it would be worth varying the way I was trying to draft and spin to see if that would help. I was finding the fibre very grabby with my usual woollen-ish spinning style. I got home and switched to a more worsted style and did much better.<\/p>\n

I also managed to ply on the spindle!<\/p>\n

\"Plied\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As you can see the light was going here by the time I managed that. The plying is rather wobbly. I was having a lot of trouble with getting an even amount of twist, both in the singles and in the plying. More practice needed!<\/p>\n

There is about 24m and I haven’t measured the wpi yet as it is currently spinning in the washing machine after setting the twist. Photo of finished skein tomorrow!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well here we are at the start of the Tour de Fleece. I’ve joined the Peloton, Rookies, Team UK, Spin Our Socks, and Team Jelly Legs so I think I had better stop joining teams now. I have started off the tour in a bit of a lateral direction, by not making progress towards any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tourdefleece2009"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Mzk-bj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=701"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":776,"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions\/776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}