Paws 2 Spindle

#TourDeFleece Stage #3 Added twist to my husky/wool blend 3-ply, and I'm quite a bit happier now. It's a much better match to the Rio heather gray. After a short rest I'll give it a bath with blueing shampoo to see how much whiter I can get it. After that I started spinning singles of 2:1 Tibetan Mastiff/merino blend. This is a project on pause since last winter (fall?), where I started with 50:50 TM/merino blend (the cake and swatch in the 2d photo). My goal is to find a blend that benefits from the structural properties of wool with the fuzzy character of #chiengora. The 1:1 seemed to lose its doggy character, so I'm testing 2:1 and 3:1. So far 2:1 is still spinning nicely! The wool grabs onto the slippery fur, allowing a not-quite-long-draw drafting motion. It wants to be thin, but I've been working to keep it a tad thicker to give it some more loft, squish and body. And yet, I only got through about 1/3 of the 60g prepared tonight. #TourDeFleece2026

RE: https://mastodon.online/@globalmuseum/116851762136857210 Love it! Great way to end the work week (for many Americans anyway)... Make me want to break out my clarinet...

#TourDeFleece Stage 10 No actual spinning, but plenty busy nonetheless! The white husky/wool blend was now dry after a second wash, so I removed it from the PVC frame and wound it into a cake. It's nice and white, and a close enough match for the Rio gray for me to move forward with that double-knit project. I blended up another 4 oz of 1:1 Tibetan Mastiff / Espresso merino for a project where I'm more interested in color than maximizing fur content and character. That came out really well. And finally I transferred the 2:1 TM/Espresso merino singles to 3 cones for plying. More on that in the next post. Overall, a productive day! #TourDeFleece2026 #HandSpinning #FiberArts

#TourDeFleece Stage #8 Making up for no photos yesterday, I guess! This is a 2:1 Tibetan Mastiff/merino blend, but with a lighter, richer brown: "Dark Chocolate" instead of "Espresso". (I may have mixed up the names in previous posts/replies.) I'd weighed it out, but didn't get around to blending it back when I did the Espresso samples. I'd chosen the Espresso for the primary blending work because it matched the dark browns best in the TM fur, but the Dk Chocolate is nice at matching the redder tones that can be found in it too. It's difficult to see a difference on the singles, so I'm really curious how it'll turn out plied and worked into a swatch! Mostly spent my time blending on the drum carder, but I did sneak in time to spin about 1/3 of the batch before calling it a night. [Edit to note that these browns are natural colors from different sheep at Fleecewood Farms where I got the wool.] [Edit #2 to correct the year in the TDF hashtag. Sorry for extra alerts!] #TourDeFleece2026 #HandSpinning

#TourDeFleece Stage #4 Spun a couple more hours last night to finish off the 2:1 fur/wool blend. I was initially going to do only an hour, but it was going so well and I could see the roving getting quickly smaller, so I was inspired to keep going, even if it kept me up later than I'd wanted to! I don't remember much at all of the cycling playing in the background: I'm currently sitting kind of cross-ways to the TV, so I rarely look at it while spinning. And apparently I'm so wrapped up in my spinning process that the race commentary just goes in one ear and out the other!

#TourDeFleece Stage #6 Finished the 3:1 TM/merino singles. I have some plying I can do, but it looks like I'll need to do some fiber prep before I can spin singles again! #TourDeFleece2026

#TourDeFleece Stage #5 I started on the 3:1 Tibetan Mastiff / merino blend and OMG is this nice to spin! Compared to the previous blend, drafting is so much smoother, with plenty of slip for even drafting and just enough grip to keep the fibers in contact along the way, perfect for long draw drafting. Now I'm wondering if I should blend up something with even less wool, like 10-15%, for comparison. At what point do you lose the benefit of grip from the wool? This is about half the 60g of fiber that I'd blended at this ratio. #TourDeFleece2026

RE: https://sunny.garden/@Paws2Spindle/116961470705350878 Question for fiber folks about moths: Last night, I forgot I had these skeins out drying until after dark. When I went to bring them in, a moth flew up from one of the skeins. These are a blend of wool and dog fur. Should I be worried that the moth might have laid eggs in the yarn? Should I throw them in the freezer or do something more drastic? I'm keeping them well separate from the rest of my stash for now. #Yarn #FiberArts #HandSpinning

A quick video of my fiber transfer setup. Please excuse the mess of my Fiber Corner that is still under construction! Here I'm transferring the 2:1 TM/Espresso merino from the EEW 6.1 bobbin to the cone winder via the yarn counter. According to the counter, the whole bobbin had 319 yards. After accounting for the weight of the cone, this was 63g of singles. The nice thing about the EEW system is that I was then able to wind off of this blue cone onto the two others, again via the counter, but this time automatically set to stop at 105 yd. This resulted in 3 cones with exactly 21g yarn each! Oddly, the EEW cones don't have adapters for the EEW Lazy Kate, so I have to improvise there. (EEW Nano bobbins + chopsticks! See the previous post.) but all together it makes an efficient system. #TourDeFleece #HandSpinning

#TourDeFleece Stage #2: plying the singles from the previous day. The good: The yarn sources were almost perfectly matched for length! The husky blend cake only had a tiny amount left when the 100% husky ball ran out. The bad: It's not my best work. In fact, it's pretty ugly. The center-pull cake of thin and energetic singles required full-time attention from my left hand, leaving my right hand to manage both the meeting point of the singles and occasional tangles from the Turkish ball. It went slower than I'd like AND the results were still uneven and mostly under-twisted. This may be the first yarn I go back and add twist to. I may also not end up using it for the project for which it was originally intended: my Rio heather gray deserves a better pairing than this! #Handspun #TourDeFleece2026

#TourDeFleece Stage #9 I finished the 2:1 Tibetan Mastiff / Dk Chocolate merino blend. When I went to photograph the bobbin next to the one with the 2:1 Espresso merino, it was just way too similar under indoor lights, so I brought them, and the source wool, outdoors to see if natural light would help. The results are different, but I'm not sure if it helps! My usual photo spot on the patio table was in shade, so I started there, and that was worse than indoors! So I dragged a chair into direct morning sun. That's better. You don't have to pretend that you see a difference between the two balls' tints. But, ultimately, at 1/3 wool, the singles are effectively identical. I think I can end this experiment concluding that I don't need to worry about which wool I use to pair with the TM, and in fact I might combine them both just to get a little more visual texture in the yarn. Now for a rest day. I'll probably spend some of it prepping more fiber to spin, not that it's restful, but because I'm anxious to move on to the next project! #TourDeFleece2026

#TourDeFleece Stage #7 No photo today. I just wound the white husky blend into a skein ("hank" for the sticklers) for a wash and blueing. It looks whiter than before (wash water was a little dirty) but maybe not as crisp a white as I'd prefer. We'll see once it's dry. I washed and let it dry loose, and it's still rather twisty and energized, so I think I'll re-do it under tension and see if that helps.

@TindrasGrove@infosec.exchange Thanks for the link! That's good to know. Sadly, it was dark at the time, so when I saw it fly off, it was just a small whitish speck -- small enough to be the right size. So, even though it means putting my yarn away for a number of days, better safe than sorry!

@TindrasGrove@infosec.exchange Oh! I guess the problem with cone winders is that to get a nice even distribution across the angled surface, you need some sort of mechanism that's a bit more complicated than a ball or bobbin winder, and once you've engineered that, adding a motor is a minor cost. (Also, when you said "bobbin winder" in your original post, I confused that with skein winder, which is a very different thing! Sorry for the added confusion.)

@Axiom@fiberart.club OMG that fluff is so deep, there doesn't appear to be much at all for head down inside!

@Axiom@fiberart.club Priorities? Check!

@miyotehew Love is in the air!

@potterybyosa@mastodon.social Thanks for the explanation! I love the designs in your work, combining deliberate geometry with the controlled chaos of natural textures and reactions on the surface.

@potterybyosa@mastodon.social I love the blue that varies from a verdigris patina to almost turquoise glossy jewel tones. Is it the same material, but applied either thin or thick on the surface?

@frogglin@theblower.au Yikes! I mean, if you have a plan and the necessary equipment it's more of an inconvenience than a disaster...

@frogglin@theblower.au Hopefully that's the state of things more often than not!

@Kymberly@old.mermaid.town When I see repetitive, geometric patterns like this, I tend to presume that you are using a loom with a mechanical system to automate the pattern. It's that much more impressive to learn that you are creating the pattern by hand, strand by strand! (I am deliberately naive about loom terminology because I know that once I start down the path of learning weaving, it's a slippery slide and I may never come back up again! 😅 I'll get there eventually, but I have plenty of other projects and ideas to finish before I get there!)

@epilonious@toot.lgbt (I also realize now that there was a typo in my original post that could have raised the question of whether I knew what I was talking about!)

@Kymberly@old.mermaid.town It's been fun watching this come together! I love how all the colors play with each other, as well as the texture. I hadn't realized from the early photos that the technique doesn't create a reversible pattern. (I mean you CAN reverse it but it's not the same pattern on both sides.) That makes it even more interesting to look at!

@epilonious@toot.lgbt That is a very interesting article of clothing! I like that you call it a thneed. Is that a common nickname for the pattern or just between you and your coworker?

@Kymberly@old.mermaid.town I'm loving the pattern you chose for this!

@Kymberly@old.mermaid.town Brilliant idea!

@andy@social.4142.io Congrats! We need more good news like this.

@nobyeni@zirk.us Love the iridescent / opalescent effect!

@TindrasGrove@infosec.exchange No worries! The EEW Yarn Counter might be a worthwhile investment at $79. You can put that between a swift (does the bobbin winder work as a swift too?) and the ball winder to get an initial measurement of the singles' length, and then back through to break the ball into even fractions. The yarn counter also has a setting to beep when you reach a specific length, so if you're using it manually, just crank the yarn through until it beeps and stop! You don't have to constantly watch the screen (which can be difficult to read at an angle). https://www.dreamingrobots.com/product/eew-yarn-counter/

@redsad Ich weiß nicht, wo ich spucken soll.

@Sobtanian@mstdn.games Most of my WIPs are in tote bags so I can grab one to bring with me on road trips, which is when I do most of my knitting. The idea of having them out and visible is kind of foreign to me! However, I do have a handful of FOs that I'm working to provide some sort of display for, when it's out of season for them to actually be worn!

@TindrasGrove@infosec.exchange You could always wind your bobbins slower. 😉 My lazy Kate has thick spindles intended for holding a cake or center-pull ball while you ply. Perhaps something like that might help with the running-away problem!

@TindrasGrove@infosec.exchange I've always been curious why cones are used with weaving vs. balls in knitting, especially in manual weaving. I can imagine for commercial high-speed weaving you want to be able to unspool the fiber unsupervised, without tangles, and for that, having a smoothly-wound cone would be helpful. Imperfections could lead to inconsistent tension and tangles. So, if you're OK with imperfection, why not use something like a ball or a cake instead? Where does the shape (even an imperfect one) come into play?

@afterzoe@aus.social Oooh. I like the effect!

@Sobtanian@mstdn.games FO = Finished Object!

@epilonious@toot.lgbt Oh, I'm quite familiar with the Lorax! I'm glad you didn't make yours from truffula trees. It's such a perfect name for the Allegro Shawl that I was curious if it was used widely among knitters or just something you'd come up with. Sounds like the latter! ...but perhaps a good goal to try to make it more of the former.