Sunday, July 3, 2016

Tour De Fleece - days 1&2

It's my first year participating in the Ravelry Tour de Fleece.  For those unaware, spinners commit to spinning every day during the Tour de France, resting on the Tour rest days, and giving themselves an extra challenge on the more challenging days of the bike tour.

I prepared some fibre in advance.

 My starting plan is to 1) spin a 2-ply rainbow gradient yarn dyed by Waterloo Wools, 2) spin up the remainder of the jewel toned superwash merino that I carded with a little bit of white alpaca for fun, 3) make progress on the support spindle project, 4) spin up the locks as an art yarn for one of the challenges, and 5) spin my two braids of browns Falkland.  For the latter, I carded one braid with some yak and angora (for fun) and blended the colours in the process. I'm going to spin the other braid as-is (with some fluffing up of course) and ply them together.
If I get through that, there's more fibre. Not a ton of fibre (excepting All The Fleeces that are not ready to spin) like some of the stashes I've seen featured on the TDF discussions, but a couple more braids and a couple bags of alpaca-silk.  When I'm done, I can fully justify buying more fibre at the Manitoba Fibre Fest this year.

For the first two days I was camping, but that wasn't going to stop me from spinning. I packed up fibre and spindles. I was spinning while kids ran around. I was spinning at the playground. I was spinning in the middle of the night around a camp fire. On the way home we stopped at the "Bison Day" event in Birds Hill Park where we were camping and I enjoyed spinning with some bannock (just to say I did spin there).


When I got home I gleefully started on my rainbow gradient.

(I also have a new phone and am playing with a collage app for the first time.)