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Spinning Saturday: Tour de Fleece Week 1 Recap

It's a week into the Tour de Fleece and I have actually been spinning every day, despite still being a little swamped with work. Of course, I would like to devote more time to spinning, but that's pretty much how I feel about everything crafty I do.

My first order of business was to ply the two BFL singles I had finished right before the start of the Tour. They looked pretty next to each other, right?


I'm not totally sure I'm happy with the results of plying these two singles together. I really like the blue/brown color combination, but for some reason this yarn just didn't turn out how I had pictured it in my mind! It's still pretty, though, and very, very soft. Perhaps it would make a good giveaway on my new Facebook Fan page, which reached 200 likes yesterday!


I do have a considerable amount of the blue BFL left over (my last hand-dyed braid from the now-defunct Kitchen Sink Dyeworks). I'll have to find a worthy single to ply it with this time.

I didn't want to dwell too much on my spinning fail right out of the gate, so I decided to work on the June shipment from the Sweet Georgia Fibre Club - a pretty BFL/silk braid in a colorway called "Wine Country" (below left).

Once that was spun up, I was hard pressed to find something that would be a good plying buddy; everything I'm destashing is not nearly as soft or nice as this fiber, and I think it would be a shame to stick them together, even if the colors are right. I ordered some merino/silk fiber from The Woolery that I think might work, so while I'm waiting for it to arrive, I am spinning up some leftover wool mix top that I custom dyed back when I worked at Lorna's Laces (above right).

I also spent most of the holiday spinning up some leftover random bits of wool that have been taking up room in my fiber stash. I sorted them by color family; most of them are just a "wool mix" type of roving which I hand-dyed myself, but there are some sample bits and other fibers left over from past spinning projects. Now that I'm more excited about breed-specific wools, it's been hard to get motivated to do something with these fiber orphans, so I set up the Louet Victoria that I have on loan and spun up a couple of singles.


How is your Tour de Fleece spinning coming along?

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