Tour de Fleece, Day 19.

Ostensibly a Day of Rest.

Yeah, I’ve been kind of scarce around here since Day 8, I know. Most of what I’ve been working on has been either A) not too interesting because it was merely more of the same (I’m a little beyond the halfway mark with combing the CVM, and just how much grey can you stand to see?), or B) under a special temporary version of the Stealth heading (nearly finished with that, and hoping for a reveal before the Tour is over). Oh, or C) - late-night breakthrough craziness of the kind that leaves you too exhausted and bleary to post. I’ve been taking pictures, at least. Have every intention of doing a comprehensive round-up post at the end of the Tour - and you know what they say about good intentions.

Meanwhile, this.

The other day, in the comments to the gradient skein post, Dan said something that really got me thinking. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?)

To wit:

But yes, this is where you find that you are, in fact, a Knitter at heart. Just as I am a Spinner… and a knitter, not a Knitter.

It’s certainly true in part. There is no denying that I am a Knitter - have been one for nearly as long as I can remember. But I think the point made there - in my decision about the fate of the gradient skein - is not that I am a Knitter; the point is that it demonstrates which kind of Knitter I am. I know plenty of knitters AND plenty of Knitters who would happily and successfully knit with a gradient yarn like that - or with the gradient-repeat variant that I’m still contemplating. Me… not so much. Me… laid-back and slipshod about so many other things in my life… when I knit I design, and when I design I need to control. Unlike some Knitters and Designers, I can’t let my yarn be the boss of me. Mind you, it’s a perfectly valid way to work; it just isn’t mine.

(Incidentally, I suspect that in truth Dan himself is fundamentally more Knitter than knitter, or at any rate could be if he chose. No one who has heard him talk about the transparency of sock construction could doubt it.)

Sure, Knitter at heart - you bet. All those tsocks in their tserried ranks to prove it. But - as someone once said about a second marriage after widowhood - my heart is a garden, and there is room in it for more than one flower. Knitter at heart, yes; but Spinner at heart, too. They’re not mutually exclusive.

I put it to you that if I weren’t also a Spinner at heart, I would never have made that skein at all. I did not need to see it to know that I wasn’t likely to knit with it. I knew that about myself, and about this yarn, long before I began work on it. I needed to see it, needed to make it, for its own sake.

Marcy, a Spinner at heart if ever I met one, is fond of playing out the following semi-apocryphal dialogue between muggle and spinner:

     Q: What’re ya makin’?
     A: Yarn.
     Q: What’re ya gonna do with it after?
     A: Have yarn. Dur.

That’s the Spinner speaking. The spinner may make any number of sample skeins as part of the production process, but it’s only the Spinner who makes yarn purely for the sake of making yarn; who makes yarn just to see how a particular combination of techniques and materials will work; who makes yarn that will live out its honorable life as a Petting Skein or an Ogling Skein.

The other day I spun my first long bast fiber; actually I blended hemp with bamboo, so a long bast fiber combined with a rayon-process fiber. I spun one strand of that and I plied it with a strand of cotton I’d spun on the charkha. Why? Because. Because I wanted to see how that combination of fibers would work together in that configuration. Because I wanted to see what it would be like to spin. Because - like the mountain - it was there.

I got my answers. I learned that I like spinning hemp, and that it’s a whole new and different experience from any spinning I’ve done before. I learned that those fibers work well together; I learned something about how to spin them and how to ply them and how to finish them. And I came away from it with 130 yards of yarn that may or may not ever be anything other than a Petting Skein, a trophy and memento of this particular spinning lesson.

I might make something out of it. I might make another yarn like it to make something out of. But I might not, and if I don’t that will be perfectly fine. Sometimes - often - yarn is made for a particular purpose, as a means to an end… but sometimes yarn is an entirely satisfying end in itself.

I put it to you that only a Spinner could feel that way about it.

More to the point, or at any rate equally so… only a Spinner, and a loony one at that, would make an 18-ply yarn purely for the sake of making an 18-ply yarn. Purely for the joy of trying. Purely for the satisfaction of figuring out how. Purely because the tools and materials are available and therefore it is imperative to find out whether it can be done.

And also, not so purely… on a dare.

You already know that I did exactly that for exactly those reasons. Now… gonna show you how.

Members of Team Russian Underpants, grab your popcorn.

Ken Burns, eat your heart out. From the same studio that brought you the Short-Draw Speed-Spinning Smackdown (oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard yet about the S-D SSS, have you), we now proudly present Fran’s inspired video production of the 18-ply Escapade - what Pam in the comments so aptly dubbed the Docu-Nuttery.

As for Fran - well, there’s no thanking her enough. And her work speaks for itself.

So without further ado, here it is, straight from the Oh!Zone:

Yeah. Tell me anyone but a Spinner at heart would do that. I rest my case.

Today was the second anniversary of my aspinneration (you know, as in “Resistance is futile” etc.); of the day when I failed to prevent myself from picking up spindle and fiber, and then promptly failed to force myself to put them down. Yup, it’s just two years now since the twist took me - and where and how far it has taken me since then, there is almost no telling. But not for lack of trying.

It’s fortuitous that the date happens to fall within the Tour de Fleece. Obviously Someone Is Trying To Tell Me Something, and this time last year I figured out that the Something was this: July 10th is my personal Challenge Day. Or one of them, at any rate.

For my first aspinniversary last year, you may recall, it was the day that I spun the Mile for Team Suck Less.

This year - as I mentioned the other day - the ante, she has been upped.

I spun my mile two days ago - 8 hours and 9 minutes. Sorry I haven’t posted about that in detail yet - I will, as soon as I recover, with statistics and pictures and everything.

Yesterday - Houston, we had wind-off.

Today - the Stupid Wheel Tricks Challenge: 18-ply. Yup, 112 yards of 18-ply yarn. Fer realz. I did it. Loaded Luke and the wheel and the bobbins and the swift/kate into the car, drove up to Fran’s, and did it there while she took seventy-’leven billion pictures and a metric buttload of video. It’ll take a while to process all this into the mega-mini-documentary coming soon to an internet server near you, so for now I leave you with this single teaser shot:

Incidentally, that thread-guide gadget I’m using to tension the singles? Fran provided that too, and I tremble to think what an unholy mess this whole attempt would have been if she hadn’t.

Kids, do not try this at home.

Or… on second thought… do.

You might learn something. I did.

 
Watch this space for exciting full-on mega-mini-coverage of this brain-breaking event… as soon as we get it together. Film at 11, as they say - but not 11 tonight because we all need our naps now.

Tour de Fleece, Day 4.

Some time around the middle of April, Teleknitter posted her spring clip of CVM for sale, and I promptly had a fit. Here were some of the most fascinatingly beautiful fine-wool fleeces I’d ever seen, and I couldn’t justify buying one, because I had just splurged on half a Cormo. (Oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard yet about the Cormo, have you.) Which was also insanely beautiful, as you might expect from a Cormo bred by Alice Field… but it was also WHITE. And I have a lot of WHITE fleece. And I’m a sucker for naturally-colored fleeces, especially in shades of grey. And I was drooling drooling drooling over Florence’s gorgeous silver-grey and Rifle’s fabulous variegation. But seriously. I already had an attic full of fleece (Oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard yet about the Attic Full O’ Fleece, have you). I had just spent very nearly top dollar on the Cormo, and the CVM was in the same price range - and mind you, both of them are worth every penny. But there was something about buying one after the other that would have added insult to injury and overshot my guilt threshold by a country mile.

So I sternly told myself, “No CVM for you this season, my girl. It won’t hurt you to wait. The sheep will make more.”

And that lasted… oh, I dunno… maybe an hour?

I kept going back and looking. And looking. And looking.

Finally I couldn’t stand it and I compromised: I bought Rifle’s neck wool and seconds.

Not a bad compromise at that. A more modest quantity, a more modest expenditure - but I still got all of those colors and all that soft crimp. And a pound and a half is enough to DO something with.

The fleece on arrival was even more marvelous than it looks in Sarah’s picture. I couldn’t believe how soft it was, and how many different colors I was seeing in it.

It’s been waiting for an opportunity, and a couple of days ago it struck me that the Tour de Fleece was exactly that. So I broke it out, semi-sorted it, bagged it up, and scoured it.

While I was waiting for the tub to fill for the first soak, young Fosdick had his very first-ever wool-huffing experience.

By the time it occurred to me that at only two months old he’s probably too young for the hard stuff… it was too late. Don’t tell on me, ‘K? (Friend of mine looked at this and said, “Yup, that’s YOUR kitteh, all right.”)

I am madly in love with this fleece and its symphony in greyscale.

I’ve been sort of on the fence about how to spin this, but I’ve never doubted that I wanted to keep the colors distinct and use them to set each other off. I’ve been having fantasies of gradient effects, either in the spinning or in the knitting as the case may be. So obviously the first thing to be done with the clean fleece was to sort it by color.

I wasn’t sure how many colors I was seeing, so I started by picking out all the really WHITE white bits - those went into Bag #1.

Bag #2 is where it started to get interesting.

Bag #2 is the home of the pale blends. The locks that are partly or mostly white but are so intimately streaked with grey that it would be insane to try to pick them apart. I’m not being too scientific here, and what I want is to reflect the natural blending that’s already occurring in the fleece. So a lock like this one

gets to stay in one piece and it goes to live with its friends in Bag #2.

From that point on it was pretty plain sailing. Bag #3 is a soft and fairly uniform medium grey, with occasional streaks of paler grey. And so on, up until Bag #7, the darkest near-black grey of all.

Yes, sir, yes, sir, seven bags full.

(Incidentally, Fosdick is not the only feline in this household with an appreciation for fleece.

Not by a long shot.

Ptolemy and Juliet don’t insist on spinning theirs in the grease, though. And please do note how I color-coordinate my animals with my stash.)

With seven shades identified, I set out to experiment - those visions of gradients dancing in my head, I wanted to see how they would play out.

I broke out a handful from each bag, and combed each into a little nest of top.

I knew I wanted laceweight - I’ve been picturing a big lace shawl in graduated shades of grey, you know the kind of thing I mean - and I knew from my first pre-triage sample that it would be beautifully soft:

I broke each piece of top in half, and spun the same strand of singles twice over - all seven shades in sequence starting with the white.

Plied it together and wound it off.

It’s 84 yards, and it works.

Oh, how it works. It’s almost exactly what I envisioned - in fact, I can hardly stop looking at it and fondling it.

How I’m going to bring myself to unskein this in order to swatch it, I don’t know. I love it just as it is.

That said… am I going to spin the whole fleece like this?

I am not.

It would be a great parlor trick. And another cool parlor trick would be to prep and spin it as a gradient REPEAT. I can imagine doing exactly that for someone else’s use… but not for my own.

I look at this little skein in all its beautiful mesmerizing greyscaliness, and I realize: that is not the kind of knitter I am. As a spinner, I’d love to play with the color sequence. But as a knitter, I want complete control over what color goes where. It would be worse than counter-productive to make a huge single-gradient or repeat-gradient yarn and then have to cut and paste it into what I want it to be when I’m actually making it into something.

So here’s the plan. I’m going to prep and comb each shade separately, and I’m going to spin most - but not all - of each of them into a separate two-ply. I’ll have enough of each shade left unspun so that I can blend intermediate shades if I want them when the time comes. And when I knit it I will make it LOOK as if I’d spun the gradient skein of my dreams.

One way or the other - I have the oddest feeling that Rifle and I have not heard the last of each other.

Wait for me next year, big guy. I’ll be coming back for more.

    “Now, this third handkerchief”, Mein Herr proceeded, “has also four edges, which you can trace continuously round and round: all you need do is to join its four edges to the four edges of the opening. The Purse is then complete, and its outer surface—”
    “I see!” Lady Muriel eagerly interrupted. “Its outer surface will be continuous with its inner surface! But why do you call it Fortunatus’s Purse, Mein Herr?”
    The dear old man beamed upon her with a jolly smile. “Don’t you see, my child—I should say Miladi? Whatever is inside that Purse, is outside it; and whatever is outside it, is inside it. So you have all the wealth of the world in that leetle Purse!”

Lewis Carroll,
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

 
 
 
So the question is… when is a sock not a sock, or indeed when is a tsock not a tsock?

Why, when its inside is contiguous with its outside; when, therefore, it contains both your foot and everything in the universe other than your foot - including, of course, your other foot.

And then - riddle me this, Batman - what happens if you make a PAIR of them?

Yeah… if that don’t give you no ringin’ in the ears between Being and Nothingness, as Leo Rosten might say - at least I hope it’ll be good for a laugh.

“This” being Tsock #3 for this year’s Tsock Flock Club: “Quantum Paratsox.”

Which is really PERFECTLY NORMAL. I mean, doesn’t every sock begin with a Möbius cast-on?

No?

OK, OK, so maybe not so much. But really, I don’t see how I was supposed to resist.

I love to see two truths at once. Every good comparison offers this benefit to the spirit.

That’s Joseph Joubert, and he neglects to point out that the real benefit comes from the two truths being mutually exclusive. So I am kindly doing it for him with my weird little salute to paradox.

This is the sock that ties itself into a knot - so that you don’t have to.

It really does start with a Möbius cast-on, and you work the Möbius strip until it’s a couple of inches wide and then execute a fold that converts it into a fearfully and wonderfully made figure-8 thingy that goes around your foot and ankle kind of like an Ace bandage, if you see what I mean, with a twisty bit up top…

… that has an opening hidden under it, because of the whole inside being continuous with the outside thing. (Yeah, I’m sure there are some shoes that won’t fit over it. But there are others that will.)

And then… then you fill in the heel. And then you pick up the edges and start working down the foot, and/or up the ankle, and… well… that of course is when Schrödinger’s Cat makes his appearance. Or doesn’t make his appearance. Or both does and doesn’t make his appearance. Because this is the reductio ad absurdum where quantum physics meets slapstick comedy.

    One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

Erwin Schrödinger,
article in “Naturwissenschaften,” 1935

Now, I don’t actually claim to know from quantum physics. But I know from paradox, and I know from surreal. According to how you interpret this…

The cat is alive.

The cat is dead.

The cat is simultaneously both alive and dead.

You may call that “thought experiment”; you may call it “quantum superposition”; you may call it “environmentally induced quantum decoherence”; me, I call it farce, and it gives me the giggles.

Alternatively, you can take a more Heisenbergian view of the problem, according to which there is simply no way to know whether the cat is alive or dead, because thanks to the “diabolical mechanism” the intrusion of the observer is enough to affect the outcome and invalidate the experiment.

So is the cat alive, or isn’t it? In fact… is the cat even present, or isn’t it?

We Just Don’t Know…

… no matter how we look at it.

But that doesn’t stop me from looking at it. And the lens through which I see it - or don’t see it, as the case may be - is a form of Illusion knitting. Only… done in the round, like Festive Intarsia. Which is why I call it Festive Illusion.

That’s what those contrasting stripey boxes are, here and there on the sock - representations of the steel chamber in the original thought experiment. Depending on how you look at it, each of them may or may not contain a cat that may or may not be alive or dead or both; or indeed it may or may not simply contain a question mark as a representation of the Uncertainty Principle. How many such boxes there are, and which of them contains (or doesn’t contain) which symbol, is up to you.

Look straight at the box, and you can’t see through it; it might or might not contain a cat.

Look at it from the right angle… and you might actually SEE the cat, and even be able to tell whether it is alive or dead or both.

Then again, even if you can see inside the box, you may not be able to see the answer to the question.

The medium is the message. That’s Illusion knitting for you: now you see it, now you don’t.

In case that isn’t twisted enough for you… there’s a cuff in angled ribbing that appears to twist in one direction…

… overlaid with another mind-bendy strip (you can make it a true Möbius or add further twists, as you please) which appears to twist in the opposite direction, although in fact… it doesn’t.

So… when is a tsock not a tsock?

Um… actually… I don’t know. Do you?

Tour de Fleece, Day 2

More spinning on the Abby silk. And I washed the Beauteous CVM, for which I’m starting to have big plans. And the day ain’t over yet. Pictures in next post. Promise.

PSA: The Karma Goose Flies for Abby Franquemont

So… Abby has been having a rough few months, lately. And a bunch of us may (or may not, as Heisenberg might see it) be plotting something extraordinarily cool that we want to do for her. In a secretive sort of LALALALALALAMOVEALONGNOTHINGTOSEEHERE sort of way, so as not to spoil the surprise, but it might have something to do with handspun, and it might be very compatible with the Tour de Fleece, and there might be a couple of weeks left for you to get in on it. If you’re on Ravelry you can learn more about this (or you could, if anything were happening which of course it isn’t LALALALALALALA) by reading as much as you can bear of this thread, or by sending a PM to westfaire, who would be the ringleader of this operation if there were any operation to ringlead. Or if you’re not on Ravelry but are still interested in participating, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

That is… I would, if there were anything to get back to you about.

Tour de Fleece, Day One.

What a difference six inches can make! And it doesn’t even matter where you measure from.

What? I meant six inches of drive wheel diameter, of course. What did you think I meant, hmmmmmm?

Got off to a slow start today, Tour-wise. Which is fine - I had lots of other stuff to do, and I wasn’t aiming for volume at this stage anyway.

Spent the first part of the day at Lauren’s, and I knew I wasn’t going to get any production spinning done over there, but I did have a spindle project with me.

That’s tussah top dyed by Abby, colorway “Brackish,” on my beautiful low-whorl Connie’s Mjolnir. Mmmmmmmm, Abbysilk. Mmmmmmmmm, Greensleeves. Mmmmmmmm, burl. Three great tastes that taste great together. I’ve been spinning on this, on and off, for mumblety-mumble months. I’d bought the last two ounces of this colorway (hey, I live on a creek, after all, so how could I not?), and I’ve been savoring it. There’s no hurry. But there is some progress. (And this is not the first copp - not by any means. Note to self: locate the rest of the singles for next photo-op.)

Then when I got home in the late afternoon I settled down to the serious business of the day: another time trial. I wanted to see just how much of a difference those six inches would really make - that is, how much faster I could spin for the mile on the 30″ CPW instead of the 24″ that I used for the warm-up.

Answer: Quite a lot faster.

In spite of the fact that I lost a little momentum to take-up adjustments at first, I bettered my time by approximately 20%. And that’s still at pretty nearly a default treadling pace.

That cuts my worst-case time estimate for the mile to somewhere around 12 hours, which is not too shabby.

It’s a whole different dynamic. I really love that 24″ saxony (don’t tell the CPW, but actually the 24″ is my Desert Island Wheel) because I can fine-tune the drive-band tension on it to a fare-thee-well, and because it just, you know, fits me, somehow. I didn’t even notice until after that first time trial that I hadn’t had to cross-lace at all, not even on the first pass down the bobbin - unusual for me when I’m spinning this fine. On the CPW? Oh, I had to cross-lace, all right - in fact, for the first few yards I was double-cross-laced, until I got acclimated and got the tilt-tension behaving the way I wanted it. Still, there’s no getting around it - that beeg wheel, she is FAST. A 20 % improvement in speed? Nothing to sneeze at.

Altogether, not a bad first day’s work, I’d say.

Note to self: Blog the Teeswater, the Teeswater, the Cheviot, the 18-ply, the Russian Underpants challenge, the Infamous 8-ply, and the combs.

Teeswater

Once upon a time, there was a recurring theme in a spinner’s life. This recurring theme was an incredibly beautiful, and incredibly long, longwool, and its name was Teeswater.

I heard tales of this marvelous stuff when I was but a wee spinner (this was in the high and far-off times, O Best Beloved - nearly two years ago!), and I shivered with anticipatory delight, because here, clearly, was the Grail of Longwools, the very Granddaddy of Longwools (literally, in fact, because Teeswater is one of the parent breeds of the wonderful Wensleydale). The vision of long shiny curly Teeswater began to haunt me.

For complicated reasons having to do with Hoof and Mouth disease, there are no purebred Teeswater sheep in the US. There is this fascinating thing (please note that I use “fascinating” here in its lesser-known sense of “extremely dull unless you happen to be as geeky as I am”) called the Breed-Up program; through which, thanks to imported semen and a hell of a lot of hard complicated work, US breeders have been developing an increasingly pure cross - I think they’re now producing a sheep that is somewhere around 98% pure Teeswater. But the real and rare breed itself, the true original Teeswater, is to be found only in the UK. And the very best of that pure and true original Teeswater comes from one place and one place only: Higher Gills Farm.

One day, not quite a year and a half ago, a wonderful thing happened. I ordered some little thing from Beth at the Spinning Loft. It arrived in a box that was, well, a little too big for it, and so of course Beth - who had already infected me with the longwool love - had packed it with ample padding. Which padding was soft and shiny and curly and… long. Which padding proved to be a few ounces of those legendary Teeswater locks.

I gasped.

I played just a little with the long soft shiny, and then I carefully put it away, because I was still new to the ways of fleece and I knew I was So.Not.Ready.For.This.

One day, a couple of months later… another wonderful thing happened. I was corresponding with Tsock Flock club member woolforbrains, and I must have waxed eloquent about my fascination with Teeswater, because not long after that I got a package in the mail from England, and it contained… several ounces of the same wonderful Teeswater locks.

Then one day last fall… another wonderful thing happened. Actually a wonderful thing within another wonderful thing, because it happened at SOAR. (Oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard about SOAR yet, have you.) During SOAR I got to meet a lot of the imaginary friends who live in my computer, and one of them, SarahW, brought me a gift: half a pound of - you guessed it - Teeswater locks, from you-know-where.

But wait… there’s more. Just when I’m thinking my cup runneth over, along comes another imaginary friend from inside my computer, and danged if yet another wonderful thing doesn’t happen. This time it’s Chalyn, another Tsock Flock member, home on Christmas break from veterinary school in Glasgow. (Oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard about Chalyn’s visits yet, have you.) How she could even afford the airfare, after what she must have spent on gifts, I don’t know; suffice it to say that MORE THAN TWO POUNDS of Teeswater locks from you-know-where constituted only about half of the loot I brought home from that meeting.

Christmas indeed. Here I am with three pounds (POUNDS!) of some of the loveliest fleece on earth, come by in the nicest way imaginable, and obviously if I don’t start spinning the stuff I am some kind of a danged fool. What am I waiting for?

I’m not. Not any more.

There are three kinds of fiber acquisition and application. There’s the fiber bought for a particular purpose; you set out to find it because you have a certain project already in mind. There’s the fiber you buy because it oooohhh-shiny speaks to you, even though you’re not sure what it’s saying; this fiber will marinate in stash until its message becomes clear, because until then you don’t know how you want to spin it. And then there’s the fiber that you just spin. And spin. And spin. Because the the making of the yarn is enough in itself. Anything that may happen to it afterward… well, that’s a possibility for tomorrow, but the spinning is now, today, this minute.

As of late December, the Teeswater was now, today, this minute. I scoured it in batches, and I started flicking it and spinning it right from the lock. (Oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard yet about my obsession with spinning from the lock, have you.) And when I say “lock” - well, I’m talking 14-inch staple AFTER maniacal flicking, AFTER all the debris and tangles and brittle tips are removed.

(You’ll have to forgive me here. Do I have pictures of all this beautiful fleece? Yes - somewhere. I know I do. But it was six months ago.)

I’ve been spinning it on-and-off ever since. Filled six bobbins with singles. Spun two good-sized skeins of mediumish laceweight just from the flicking waste, carded up with some silk. I’ve saved the last few ounces of locks because I hate to come to the end of it all - but I’ll probably spin these during the Tour de Fleece, because after all the sheep are making more. And the other day, in the interests of clearing the decks for said Tour de Fleece, I ran a Ply-a-Thon and plied up all the singles to date. (Unlike many people I know I didn’t really need to clear bobbins - I only have one bobbin per wheel, so I wind everything off to storage/plying bobbins, of which I have quite a collection. But I still like the idea of the gesture, of starting the Tour with a fairly clean slate.)

That’s just under 2,500 yards of Teeswater 2-ply, plus a skein of silk spun from mawata and a remnant of Bond spun from combed top. (Oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard about the Bond yet, have you. Or the combs. Or the mawata.)

(See all those tags? That’s part of my Tour plan: developing good handspun-labeling habits. Bet I don’t need to tell you why.)

Glamor close-up of the Teeswater:

Ditto of the silk:

Bonus effect from the Teeswater - another 1,000 yards spun from the waste:

That’s about 80% Teeswater flicking waste (I flick in two passes; the debris from the first gets thrown away because it’s all garbage and brittle tips and such; the second batch gets saved for the carder) and 20% tussah silk. It’s about the same grist as the other yarn, but has a smoother hand because it’s more processed at the prep stage. That’s what I love about spinning from the lock (Oh, that’s right, etc.) - you end up with a yarn that bears a really strong visible resemblance to the original staple.

Teeswater story does not have its happy ending yet - but it’s only a matter of time.

Cheviot

Once upon a time - oh, never mind. Long story long: at some point last year I got a note from Dan telling me that he had found some Romanov, and was I interested? Of course I was; what’s a Tsarina if she’s never spun Romanov? Then he casually mentioned that there was also some Cheviot available from the same source - extremely reasonable prices, etc. Well, I had just destashed a Cheviot cross because I wasn’t enthralled with the dryness and overall texture, but I’ve had fleece dealings with Dan before and I had a feeling about this - of course I went for it. (Oh, right, you haven’t heard about my fleece addiction yet, have you.)

Excerpt from Dan’s report after fleece acquisition:

I predict liking of the Romanov…. The Cheviot is small and cute….

He was right on both counts. After a preliminary sample, the Romanov is still on the back burner until I can decide how I want to work with it. But the Cheviot…! It’s more than “small and cute” - it’s some kind of a freak. A sport. A mutant. It’s unlike any Cheviot, or indeed any other downs wool, I’ve ever heard of let alone spun. It’s incredibly fine and soft. I sat down to spin a few sample locks, and next thing I knew I had this crazy-fine singles. I swear I hardly felt as if it was me doing the spinning, at all - the Astonishing Freak Cheviot was calling the shots, and the shots were fine and delicate and even. Also mesmerizing.

When I finished spinning the sample I set about plying it, and that’s when the mayhem really started. I tested a few inches plied back on itself into a 2-ply, and it was clear that the yarn was still going to be ridiculously fine. So I doubled that. And then I doubled that. And then I had an eight-strand plying ball… and that became yarn. A 23-yard sample of fingering-weight 8-ply yarn.

Seriously. That blue strand? That’s a bit of our 4-ply custom millspun sock yarn, for comparison.

Dudes. Fingering 8-ply.

I’m still not sure how it happened. It just… happened.

But wait… there’s more.

A couple of months ago I joined a discussion on Ravelry about improvised Lazy Kates. This is a subject rather dear to my heart; I confess I’m proud of my own plying rig. So I sez on this forum, sez I:

I use my squirrel-cage swift as a Kate - if I had enough old straight needles I could do up to an 18-ply on it if I wanted (no, I’m not really that crazy - maybe - but it’s nice to know one’s limits). And lately I’ve taken to putting it on its side, slightly leaning away from me. That way gravity is your friend for the tensioning aspect, because if the bobbins are not horizontal they won’t free-spin and back-spin. Makes a huge difference. The other day I used this rig for a 4-ply with super-fresh lively singles and had no trouble at all.

And a certain wiseacre replied…

Oh, I don’t know… I’d love to see you do 18-ply…. I would bow to your greatness, then.

So I thought, OK, maybe I am that crazy - maybe at any rate I want to call her bluff.

And now - I’m doing it. I’ve combed up a big whack of the freak Cheviot. I’m going to spin a mile of it for Team Suck Less, and then spin a little more… and then I’m damned well going to make 100 yards of 18-ply out of it. It will, in fact, be my Stupid Wheel Tricks Challenge for Team Russian Underpants. And when it’s done… I’m going to demand that bow.

Can it be done?

It can.

Of this I am sure, because yesterday I did a trial run.

I spun up 11g of that Cheviot top at my normal speed, and I clocked about 120 yards/hour. Even if I don’t step on it, at that rate I can produce the mile in under 15 hours.

Behold the Counting Swift/Skeinwinder; no way I’m winding 18 bobbins of superfine singles by weight:

Behold the 99-WPI singles:

Behold the 225 yards of Cheviot singles wound off for future use:

And behold the 1-yard 18-ply sample:

I plied it on a spindle, of course, but at 13 WPI the full run of it will certainly fit through my antique orifice.

With room to spare.

The Tour de France rides today. Let the spinning begin.