Sunday, July 08, 2012

Tour De Fleece 1, 2012


 So, as some of you may have heard, there has been a huge dealie going on between many knitters and the US Olympic Committee. Basically, many of us compete in the Ravelympics (now defunct - thanks to the USOC it had to be renamed, but that's a whole different story which many others have covered in depth) while watching the regular Olympics. Luckily, no heck has yet been raised about the Tour De Fleece, what many of us compete in (against ourselves) while watching and cheering on our favorite cyclists in the Tour De France.

It's very meta if you think about it. Watching spinning while spinning?

Let me be honest, I don't have a favorite cyclist, so I just generally cheer for the guy who seems the most determined and awesome.




But I do have specific Tour De Fleece goals. This time, my goal was to spin and ply 8 oz of fiber. The goal was first to finish a bump of crown mountain that I was already 2 oz in to. I think the color is Atlantis, which would be cool as I've been spinning it while watching Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis. Here a pic of 2oz of unspun. Isn't it lovely? Mostly white and denim blue with some blackish brown spots that are a warm beige. Wierd, and not really me, but I like it.

So after spinning the remaining 6oz of this bump and then plying all 8 (as well as spinning 2 oz on my travel wheel and another 2oz of a new fleece project), I met my goal. There was also a knitting portion, but that got completely derailed, as you'll see in my next post.




Progress pics. Here it is as a single.  As you can see, it's gone very much bluescale. The whiteish-blue and dark blue are more overpowering. The brown/beige is more or less lost in the singles. I tried to bring it out, but it didn't really work.



Here is a ply pic. As you can see (even though it is really blurry), some of the beige is also coming out. What I found while doing these is that the two halves of the roving (I spun it in 2 oz chunks - 2 chunks for each bobbin, then navajo plied) were pretty different. You'll see it in the skeins below.




So here's the first pic of the two skeins. I had trouble getting true colors to show up so I took a photo in natural daylight and one in diffuse light. Here you can really see the differences in the skein. The back skein is just darker, more saturated with color. There was less white in that 4 oz. The first has a lot more white and  a lot more beige.



My spinning is also a little different between the two skeins. The darker skein is a little more loose both in the single and in the ply. The second skien is a little tighter. I was testing to see what the differences would be. However, looking at them now, the differences in spinning are pretty minimal. Even in this light, you can really see the color difference

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