Handspun Friday - The BFL project

I'm really surprised how many of you liked my simple Evilla shawl! Thank you so much for all your kind words. I'm not going to write a pattern for it though. If you are on ravelry, there's a very similar free pattern called Deirdre by Linden Heflin. You just need to pop in some of those gathered stitch rows from Nancy Bush's "Knitted Lace of Estonia", if you happen to have this book.

And now to my finished, long term BFL (Bluefaced Leicester) project:
I've started this in April 2009 by dyeing up some of my natural brown BFL fiber, seen here with a wet Biko:

(I bought this fiber on eBay in May 2007)

I was a little to enthusiastic dyeing this up, stirred the fiber in the pot too much, and it was all a little felted. I did not look forward spinning this up, but ripping stripes from each color, loosened up the felted fiber, and I also did a real good job in pre-drafting. After I spun the first three skeins, I put everything aside, because there kept gorgeous fiber coming into my house, which distracted me from this project.


But as you can see, I finished it! Over the last 3 weeks, I've spun the last 4 skeins. To tell the truth I got pretty sick of it by the end, also because it didn't quite turn out the way I thought it would. And to make it worse, my spinning kept getting thinner with each skein.



At the top there's the natural brown undyed skein (which looks rather grey here, but it's not). It's the smallest one, but for whatever project I'm going to use these skeins, if I need more of this, I still have plenty of undyed fiber left to spin. All the others are half/half with the color before them until I came to the last color, which is also only a 2oz skein of pure dark red colorway.





There is a total of 3468yds of 2-ply yarn here. As I said, unfortunately not all the same WPI. I still want to use it all together for an as yet unknown project in the future.

I've still plans on giving this color play another go. Now that I have a clearer picture of what I really want.

I just realized that I have another long term spinning project, which I have badly neglected! It's the Shunklies Humbug project (official name for this project as of now) :o).
I've just read The Beebonnet report and it looks like America has discovered how cool dyed Humbug fiber is! (at the end of the blog post). You should see more of it all over the place soon! :o) Something like this for instance (Jacobs Humbug):
I really like this kind of fiber.

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I'm also sharing this with you, against my better judgment, since it decreases my chances of winning! :o)
Wandering Cat Studio is having a contest, and I'm telling you this because I've had the pleasure of knitting with some Fluffy Cat yarn I bought from their Etsy shop, (and I would not mind winning another skein of it) and because I like to support this mother and daughter team, spreading the love of their wonderful hand-painted yarn! ravelry link. There's still time to enter the contest!

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