Tour De Fleece Wrap Up

Last week I walked out of the Wool House and around my car to find my beloved bike crashed and all the accessories strewn about...and a sassy little tail sashaying away.  Hit and run.  A bit like my Tour de Fleece this year.  If you look closely, Jared is standing up the hill peeking around the back of the truck.  Jared does not like drama.  He lives with Maisie...

I ended up spinning four bobbins of Ellie's lamb fleece.  I had some issues with back fatigue because I was using a not ideal chair in the air conditioned wash room so I could hang out with Pinot while I spun.  I didn't make any effort to change my chair until almost the end.  I'd have probably spun more if I'd done that earlier.  My typical can't get out of my own way strategy.

Removing the chair aspect, Ellie was a fun spin.  The yarn is super soft and just a bit fuzzy and a beautiful creamy white.  I loved it even, or more so, as a single, which is not very common for me.

I did my weights and measures thing and paired up the appropriate skeins for plying and then swapped out to the double arms for my skein winder.

This is my favorite way to ply.  Everything stays nice and tidy and evenly tensioned and by using skeins rather than balls or bobbins, you have a better idea of what each skein looks like throughout and I find I have better luck matching up my singles that way as I'm not a very consistent spinner, especially over a long time frame.

I was able to get most of the plying done during the day with just a little bit left for after evening chores.  The porch was cool and comfortable, even in the heat of the afternoon.

As I was plying I noticed a pretty big spider crawling on a ball of wool off to my left.  Just as I was thinking I needed to remember to watch for that in the morning it took off towards the ceiling and I realized she was building a big web.  That really struck me, the two of us spinning on the porch.  Two Wool House Crafters :-).

I ended up with a little over 700 yards of smushy, cozy, sportweight/dk yarn.

It lost a bit of it's fuzziness being plyed, but Ellie's dad was a Cotswold cross from Nistock Farms so I know if I want it back all I'll need to do is run a soft brush over my finished item.  The pattern I've picked will look pretty either way.  The skein winder is from Nistock's as well - good sheep, good tools :-).

I started knitting a few practice rows with the small skein yesterday.  I'd have more to show if I hadn't had trouble counting to nine, but I've practiced doing the stitches required for the patterning and I'm hoping to get started for real this afternoon or tomorrow.

Tomorrow we are going to go back to In Person Crafters here on the farm.  We'll still be on Zoom as well as we are every Tuesday, but if you are local and would like to come out from 7:00 to 9:00 on the second Tuesday of each month until it gets too cold, the porch is really nice now - spider approved :-).  We'll have to over flow onto the grass so maybe wear long pants if you are a bug magnet.

My Favorite Sheep...Of The Week

Since Bullwinkle shared the top picture with Tessa last the other week, I picked him for this last week's SOTW.  I'll hopefully be back on track now.

"I really wasn't in the mood for a photoshoot, but whatever, lady."

This was one of his first baby pictures.  He loved sleeping on the fleece dog beds.  

Or out in the grass with me :-). 

He was a complete grump about cats and hated Betsy for some reason, but did ally himself with, of all cats, Claire Bear.  She may have taught him to hate Betsy and that's why she liked him.  We used to call him her little henchman.  That's a pretty fun post.  I'd forgotten about Comby schooling on him :-).

He loved riding in the car, but his favorite thing in the whole world was riding in the Unit (UTV/side by side) and the faster the better.  He'd jump into anyone's Unit and one neighbor took him for rides.  Another about had a stroke because a sheep jumped into his brand new Unit.  I'd try to take him for a ride now, but I'm not sure he'd fit.

Bullwinkle was always very "helpful", especially on the Wool House porch.  I'd forgotten about locking him off the porch.  I can't remember what he kept getting into long after he should have been living in the barn.  His "educational" video about the Proper Use of a Skein Winder was a classic.

His wool is very soft and very springy.  His mom was one of the "Texas cross" sheep over at Final Frontier Farm.  I prefer spinning the coarser long wool crosses, but I really enjoy using his wool for needle felting.  The finer texture helps with creating details in faces... Everyone else would probably spin it.

Bullwinkle is always one of the last sheep to head out in the morning.  He usually stops to check in with me as he goes through the gate and any time something is going on - sheep checks, foot trimming, shearing, he likes to stand right next to me.  I'll always be his mom :-).

If You Want To Get All Technical About It

With enough cute corgi pictures to keep it interesting ;-).  And some stats at the end that will probably surprise you.

Even 20 looks overwhelmed with trying to decide how to decide which singles to ply to which to get the most evenly matched skeins in the end. 

Here is what we did:

We re-weighed each finished ball.  The reason?  A big fluffy pile of wool doesn't necessarily weigh the same as a compressed ball of wool.  I used my "science" scale to get really fussy technical.

I then put each ball in a water pitcher (so it wouldn't bounce all around the room) and pulling from the outside of the ball carefully wound it into a two yard skein.

Noted yardage.  I love, love, love having a counter on my skein winder*.  It's life changing...well spinning life at least...but spinning is life...no wait, sheeps are life... ;-)

I tied a piece of yarn to the loose end of the single.  I did that so I'd easily know which end I was supposed to start with for plying.

I also tied a couple of tight bow knots to secure the rest of the skein.  I used the bows to be easy to untie but also to help keep track of the outsides of each skein.  

Next, the Jethro cipherin'.  Skein #11 actually weighted 2.024 ounces.  It is 220 yards long.  Solve for x to get the yards per ounce, in this case 108.7.

You can do the next part by hand...or use a spreadsheet.  I like math, but love spreadsheets ;-).

I sorted the skeins by yards per ounce and then paired of skein #6 with skein #17, #4 with #9, #3 with #7...  

Making sure you have the two loose ends facing the same direction...

 ...and the bows are all facing up (if facing down then the skein is twisted)...

...and your skein winder securely anchored with a corgi butt...

...ply as usual.  My skein winder has a tensioning feature and I cranked it down pretty tight so I didn't go free wheeling off into space.  

The final results?  

First I re-weighed all the plied skeins.  The yardage of each skein could only be as long as the shortest single so there were leftovers on several of the skeins.  The leftover singles were all on the thinner side (longer yardage per ounce) so when they were plied together, the resulting two ply is significantly thinner, hence separated out at the bottom.

Ply shrinkage - when you ply the two singles, the plied yard will end up shorter than the original singles because as you twist the two yarns together, the yarns are no longer straight.  The more you twist them, the shorter the yarn will become.  

That skein with the shrinkage of 14 was either plied with more twist or I wrote something down wrong.  Just looking at the finished skein I can't see a significant difference from the others so regardless it will knit up just fine.  Likewise with the shrinkage of 4 yards.  

Verdict?  I am much, much happier with my finished yarn.  The difference between skeins now is much less than any yarns I've spun previously.  Plus I found it interesting to track all the stats.  

While I was thinking along the lines of statistics, I decided to track my time spinning and plying.  It took me 27 hours to spin the singles and 6 hours to ply them.  I didn't figure in my time cipherin'.  That would have been an embarrassing number ;-).

Want to take this a little further?  If I paid myself $10 an hour, that's $330 just for the spinning work.  It costs $10 per sheep for shearing and about an hour for skirting, so another $10 there.  $24 to wash and $27.50 for processing into roving, not counting gas and time going up to the mill and back.  

Just counting BASIC yearly costs for hay, grain, bedding, vet work...it costs us $100 to produce a fleece.  That doesn't include mortgage, insurance, utilities, fuel, buying the sheep, farm equipment... Also, spinning wheels aren't cheap.  Neither are the workshops I've traveled to take to learn to spin the yarn...

The moral of this story?  I might just print this out and hand it to the next person who can't believe I can't sell them a hand spun and hand knit sweater.  That's $501.50 Just. For. The. Yarn.  Figure in the weeks I spent knitting the Muffin sweater?  Even if it wasn't Muffin...it would be priceless.

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*My skein winder is from Nistock Farms.  Even if they weren't good friends of ours, I would say this is the very best skein winder I have ever used.  It's solid and stable, easy to use winding on or off and being able to easily count yardage is...life changing ;-).

The 2018 Iknitarod Race Prep

After seeing the iPhone compilation of pictures and videos from knitting on the Baaxter Carbeth, 20 knew he'd lost his new sweater and that we were going to re-knit it.

I hadn't done a cast off or woven in any of the loose ends, so it was physically easy to pull the needles out and start frogging (rip it rip it).  Mentally...well, a. it wasn't right and I wasn't happy with it and b. Stella (the queen of rip it back and make it right) came down to help and support.  It wasn't so bad ;-).

We used my handy Nistock skein winder to...wind it into skeins.

One sleeve.

The body.  I'd spit splices all the original skeins together so we decided to let it wind off as one biiiig skein :-o.

We used steam to relax all the knitted curls...without setting Stella's hand on fire, but Be Careful with steam!

Back to normal.  Wool yarn is fun :-).

Just for curiosity I decided to hold out one sleeve to wet block just in case I needed to know something important about how the knitting would behave.  I don't usually wet block my swatches...and should.  

We took measurements, let it soak for 20 minutes, set it out on a towel, let it dry completely, remeasured, learned that Baaxter's wool yarn was going to respond the way wool does almost every time, steamed out the last of the curls and wound everything from skeins into balls.

It doesn't look like a sweater's worth of yarn there, but it is.  1700 yards total, but held double to knit a second attempt, smaller Carbeth sweater.

20 was okay with getting his Ford sweater back, but asked if he could participate more this year, so he will be going along as my Iknitarider :-).  The Carbear will be the knitting bag mascot :-).

The Baaxter logo from a couple years ago has been updated to include 20 and reflect Baaxter's more, um, mature color ;-).

The Iditarod's Ceremonial Start is underway, so the Iknitarod "mushers" are eligible to cast on, so I'm going to go get busy!  Hope you enjoy following along this year.  I believe this is my sixth year :-).

Poor Bullwinkle

"Auntie Petunia?  The Tour de Fleece starts tomorrow and I don't have my ravatar yet.  I'm not exactly sure what a ravatar is, but I've been told I should have one and all mom is doing is tearing barn walls down and then putting some back up and and some gates up and then going to town three times in one day and feeding some stupid baby bird and then this afternoon she built him a fancy cage on the porch and I've had to sit in the barn with Auntie Lila all day because Auntie Blossom bugged out last night but then wanted back in when it was 'cookies before bed time' last night and anyway, I don't know what the Tour de Fleece is, but I don't think I'm ready."

A ravatar is Ravelry's version of an avatar.  I've done some really cute ones in the past, like Petunia's and 20's, but this year I am drawing a blank.  Well, I'd LIKE to do something with Bullwinkle, this year's team captain, itching his butt on a skein winder or spinning wheel, but in reality, when you get down to it...that's a bit weird ;-).  

Saint Tim tore the barn wall down in between the two sheep stalls.  There's a quick tour on my Instagram and Facebook feed and I'll be taking some regular pictures tonight when all the gates replacing the boards are all in place.  It makes the barn so much nicer and we should have done this years ago.

He took down a few boards too many and I had to put them back up this morning.  All fixed.

I did make three trips to town yesterday.  It was ridiculous.  Luckily it's only 3 miles away.  

I have been feeding a baby sparrow (I think) for almost a week now.  He fell or was pushed out of his nest above the roll up door/in the rafters/? in Bullwinkle and Lila's stall, but wasn't ready to fledge.  He landed in a somewhat secure spot in an old mineral feeder and I watched for a couple hours with no attention or concern from a parent...so I started feeding him.  Sigh. 

He now has most of his feathers and needed to move from his bucket to a cage that would allow him to start testing his wings while still being fed.  Luckily a friend had a baby chick brooder set up thingy that is perfect (wait, that made 4 trips to town in one day! ;-) and even has add on addition that will let him really have some flying practice space if we think he needs it.  

While I was gone picking up the big cage, Tim took down the dividing wall and then unhooked the big mower, hooked up to the big manure spreader (prepping for a summer barn clean out tomorrow)...and drove it (yes, the tractor and spreader) to the neighbors.  Ah, farm life ;-).

I came home, blocked the driveway with the truck (how was I to know he was out joy riding with a manure spreader?), he came home, we unloaded the cage and then drove everything back up to the barn...to find that in the confusion of everything, I'd left a gate ajar and Blossom was exploring the wash room (!).  

Is it any wonder I don't have the Punkin's Patch 2016 Tour de Fleece ravatar created yet???

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SO, if you are on the fence about joining The Tour this year, jump on in!  You can see that it's pretty, um, relaxed around here and in our fun Ravelry group.   I'm obviously hopelessly unprepared this year, so the bar has been set at a record low.  It will be fun!

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Don't forget the Yard/Yarn Sale next Saturday!  Several TdF spinners from our group will be here so there will be butt kicking aplenty if you need it, learn to spin help aplenty if you'd like it,  wool aplenty if you need something fun to spin or knit (or sell or trade) and sheep aplenty to hug if you aren't a knitter or spinner and just. like. sheep.  

There will also be shade aplenty, air conditioning aplenty, ice cold drinks aplenty and peanut butter and jelly.  Feel free to pack your own lunch ;-).

Proper Use Of A Skein Winder

"This top part is for scratching your eyes."

"And your cheeks."

"This part moves to adjust for different size sheep...but I can't figure out how to move it."

"Oh, here, this knob is how you do that."

"What?  I was just supposed to be looking at your yarn?  Here, let me try to fake some interest."

"Moving right along, the arms are for scratching your back."

"Ah, yes, that's the spot."

"If you put some yarn on, you can scratch your butt."

"It is, TOO, for scratching your butt!"

"This stupid yarn keeps getting in the way."

"I guess it is kinda pretty."

"But I've sure never seen a sheep that color before!"

No skein winders were harmed during the filming of this instructional article ;-).