7.4 TdF part 2

The second thing I'm working on for the Tour de Fleece is also on a spindle. Ultrafine merino, dyed in Murex purple by Freyalyn. I have 100 grams and I'm shooting for cobweb. Dunno if I'll succeed at that, but I'm trying.



I'm making progress on it, but I doubt I'll finish in the next two weeks...

7.2 Tour de Fleece time

I'm working on several things for the TdF this year. One of them is starting out with the silk hankies from my box-o-fun.



I had given up hankies a few years ago because prepping them hurt my hands too much. ¹ I had been prepping them by poking a hole in the center and then slowly stretching them out into a large circle, before breaking the circle and spinning the result. This puts too much sideways pressure on the fingers and I gave it up and got rid of all my hankies.

Recently, however, someone mentioned spinning hankies by sticking the hook through the middle of the hankie and spinning without pre-stretching. This is working. I still am careful not to spin for too long at a time, but mixing the movements of stretching with spinning in short lengths is being much kinder to my hands that doing the stretching all at once.

I like the result of spinning hankies and caps - long smooth bits of silk mixed with the slubs and bumps. It looks like I'll be able to continue to spin it this way, at least for a while longer.

1 Developing osteoarthritis in the finger joints - it's been mentioned before that getting old is hellish, but now it applies to me. Grump.