Moving yarn with a drill

Here is a very poor video of me transferring some singles off a wheel bobbin and onto, well a weaving bobbin. I bought them a couple years ago to hold my yarn back when I only had drop spindles. The white bobbin doesn't fit in my flier, so I can't spin onto it, but it does fit on my Lazy-ish Kate bar, so I can ply off of it.



Anyway, the drill method works much better than the mixer method, though they are aiming for different goals.  Luckily, these white bobbins fit into my husband's drill, for the most part (you'll see the adjusting).



So yes, moving yarn with a drill. Not super interesting, no audio, and sped up quite a bit, but hopefully it'll help somebody.

Grease Dyeing Part 1

My TDF team put forth some challenges for the Tour. One of this week's was dyeing in the grease. So far it's pretty similar to regular dyeing, but we'll see how the wool comes out at the end. Here's some photos of the process so far.

 While I still have plenty of blue and green left to work with, I figured I'd try for orange, but not directly. I was hoping for a bit of variegation.  Since I have found that it is much harder to add enough yellow to red in order to make orange, I started with the yellow.

 I added a bit of red to fairly spaced out areas, hoping that these areas would stay fairly red, while it would spread to orange everywhere else. This was not the case. Once the red diffused through the water, the wool was just looking pink, so I added more yellow. I ended up with more dye than wool, so I added more wool. That's the nicest part of grease dyeing so far. While I did soak the first set of wool, I just grabbed more wool out of my bag and stuffed it in.

Turns out the dye had been orange at this point, but the first set of wool seemed saturated, so now the new wool gets to soak up the orange. We'll see how it goes when it dries...

• Will there be yellow?
• Will the first wool just be pink?
• Will the orange be variegated since it went in dry?
• How will the wool come out with all the grease, dirt, and veg that didn't get removed in the first wash?

I guess we'll see in a few days.

TDF Day 1

 This is what I got done today from my Bella Wool. I had part of the bobbin done before today, but this is today's.

 Here's my helper. He hung out with me for a bit. On the leg that treadles...

And some lovey merino to be plied with that red mohair. Now I just have to get that spun too.

TdF2015 Before Inventory

Tour de Fleece starts in, well 65 minutes, but I'm not that dedicated, so it'll wait until I get up tomorrow. But before the spinning starts, I had to go through and see what I had to work with and just how much of it there was. So the rest of this is just going to be photos and captions. We'll see how it changes by the end of the tour.

I've got two nice sets of flax. That might not get much attention this time.

Here's my silk collection. I've already got some of the black done on a drop spindle. I would like to get through a bit more of that.

Some angelina, someday it will get blended into something, maybe if I spin for the Celestarium.

Yak! Two colors, to be spun with other things. It's going pretty well on the spindle.

Camel and cashmere! The cashmere is the whiter fiber on the right. It's going to be spun and then plied with the lighter yak.

My own dying of the Border Leicester/Cotswold from my friends. I have 21 birds' nests of the blue green.

Two different sets of natural BFL.

Various other wools including Shetland, Romney, Corridale, Polsworth, and Wensleydale.

Alpaca, from the same purchase. I just didn't get around to dying all of it.

Mohairs

An abundance of Merinos

Random and brightly colored wools

Merino blended with flax, yak, alpaca/silk, and silk respectively.

Merino/silk and Polsworth/silk to be plied together

Blended and unblended Siberian Husky

Cotton and rose