For a challenge…

One of the purposes of the Tour de Fleece is set a challenge for oneself during the course of the tour – and especially on the most challenging day of the tour – on this tour, it coincides with stage 18, where the Tour de France riders climbed Alpe d’Huez twice.

I have been struggling some time with some persistent issues with my right arm/wrist and hand.  Usually when I am having problems with my arm/hand, I switch to a different craft – such as knitting…or weaving – or I just take a break.  This year during the tour for my personal challenge I’ve decided I will force myself to spin with my non-dominant hand in the lead…while also aiming for practicing long draw (I’m not terribly good at spinning long draw to begin with).

With that in mind, I prepped a pile of fibers for spinning:

That would be a pile of Southern Cross Fibre Glass Gem on polwarth broken up into fauxlags.  A video tutorial on creating fauxlags can be found here – or a quick photo tutorial can be found here (both by David of SouthernCrossFibre).

Using the slowest ratio on my wheel, I set to spinning.

It has been going slowly, but this experiment has been progressing better than anticipated.  The yarn definitely is a bit on the uneven side, but is probably fluctuating between fine fingering and sport weight  – I won’t know for sure until I wind it off and take a few WPI measurements.

I’m still working on dialing in the takeup on the Matchless – and find it challenging to fit a full bump of fiber onto the bobbin…at the very end I was getting rather concerned that it wasn’t going to all fit…but it did.  🙂 it was a little bit messy, but it did indeed all fit – I just had to make sure to stay away from the very end hooks or risk having yarn hopping off the bobbin entirely.

When it was all done, I was surprised to discover the yardage – 724 yards out of 110g of fiber…that works out to be fine fingering as far as a yards per pound rating goes.  I’ll give the yarn a bath and try to lightly full it before committing it to an as yet undetermined project.  It was a fun spin – if you’ve not tried spinning from fauxlags, it’s a fun treatment.  In this yarn, I spun randomly from the pile of fauxlags, resulting in short-ish sections of color that transition with a small amount of mixing.  I’ve also done gradient spins from fauxlags in the past – those are also great fun, but require keeping the fauxlags in gradient order (which I find slightly challenging with a wool-loving cat in the house).