This month I'm taking part in a spinning race. It started after the Tour de Fleece, which is when spinners follow the Tour de France while spinning, and use it as a stretch of their own skills. I didn't do that because I had other commitments for July, but when a group of my online spinning friends decided to continue the fun with another themed race month, I joined in.
This month's theme is Fleece to the Finish, and the goal is to go from new fleece to finished yarn in one month. Now, I don't have much for new fleece hanging around the house, but I do have that black alpaca I've been very lazy about spinning. So I'm using this month to motivate myself to spin up as much of that alpaca as I can. It's destined to be 3-ply yarn, to be knitted into a warm (VERY VERY WARM) sweater for Noel to wear while biking across San Francisco every day. I'd like it to come out somewhere in the fingering range, which it might be; I'm not consistent enough to be sure of what my gauge is before the yarn is finished. When it's made into yarn, I'm thinking of overdyeing it with a purple to give it a more inky colour, and reduce the rusty look that naturally black animal hair always gets.
Here's my starting point: I had 19 batts of alpaca. Of those, I'd spun up one and a half onto two partial bobbins (I started one, took it off for a class, then misplaced it for a few days, during which I started another).
Here's bobbin #1 (which was really the second one I started while looking for the real first bobbin; sorry for being confusing, but I decided to number them by the order in which they are completed, not started):
And bobbin #2 waiting in the wings:
Hmm. I should count my remaining batts, because it kind of looks like there may be two and a half batts on these guys, not one and a half.
Anyway, last night I sat down to spin for at least an hour. We ended up watching a couple of movies (one documentary on TED, and Spies Like Us, both of which were disappointing in their own ways). But I did get a lot of spinning done, and ended up finishing the partial batt I had in the project bag. And here we are:
Tonight I plan to spin at least half a batt. That'll fill this bobbin and get me onto bobbin #2. I'll try to be less sloppy about my bobbin, too; filling it this unevenly can lead to twists and knots in the singles, which is Not Fun.
The plan is to spin three bobbins full of singles, then ply them together until all bobbins are empty, repeat until done.
