Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Tour de Fleece Preparation

Within the past year I've gotten more serious about my spinning.  I really enjoy the process and someday hope to actually knit with all of this handspun I've created.  I decided to give myself a good challenge for this year's Tour de Fleece (June 30th to July 22nd): to spin up the 2 pounds of Spinner's Hill roving that I purchased in my favorite color red.  I have 2 of these:



I finally weighed them today and one ball is 15.65 ounces and the other is 18.10 ounces for a total of 33.75 ounces or 2.1 pounds. 

I had no idea of this was an unrealistic goal because I've never really kept track as to how much fiber I can spin in a night.  In my planning I decided to do a little preparation/training and spin up this:


It's 12.3 ounces of Twisted Wool BFL roving.  I divided it in half and spun up the first half in 2 nights of about 2 hours each of spinning.  So my math came out to:

2 nights = 1 skein of 6 ounces
33.75 ounces (5 skeins) = 10 nights plus
5 additional nights of plying (1 night per skein)
15 total nights of spinning & plying for this fiber

The tour is 23 days long with 8 of them being weekends days for bonus spinning.  One problem I do see is that I have a wedding to go to in Pittsburgh on July 20-22 so realistically I have only 20 days to spin but that gives me some room since I only really needed 15.

Doing this preparation actually makes me feel better because it is an attainable goal.  I am hoping to use the resulting yarn for a garment for myself if I have enough yardage and if not, who cares?  I'll find something great for the yarn on Ravelry eventually!

1 comment:

Nicole said...

I hope I'll be able to spin a little too. I really like the red fiber and you know I'm not a fan of red;-).