Tour de Fleece – week one

Good morning and happy Saturday! We are now one full week into the Tour de France and Ravelry’s Tour de Fleece. How is your spinning coming along?

This last week has been a bit crazy here. The normal household routine had major disruptions because of jury duty. I did find myself with some extra time at home in the mornings and with the exception of Monday, I was able to make good use of that time for spinning my Tour de Fleece fiber. Most evenings this past week were far too hot and humid to even hold wool in my hands so it’s a good thing I did as much as I could in the mornings. Weekdays are difficult for me anyway, and if I remember correctly, during last year’s Tour de Fleece I did most of my spinning on the weekends.

The Queen of Sheba colorway that I have in a BFL and tussah silk blend is as beautiful to look at as it is to spin. The addition of the tussah silk in this preparation adds a little extra shimmer and sheen. It’s also makes the preparation a little more enjoyable to spin. I’ve grown a bit weary of BFL on its own.

Rather than completely fill one bobbin at a time, I chose to spin a section of the fiber onto each of the bobbins before starting the next section of the fiber. There are two reasons for doing it this way. First, it is allowing me to keep an almost even amount of fiber on each of the bobbins at all times in case I cannot get through all of my fiber and need to start plying towards the end of the tour. There is that possibility, even though I have chosen to work on only 8 ounces of fiber during the tour. Second, I attempted to split up the fiber into sections that are approximately the same order of colors so that they would line up a little better in the final 3ply yarn. I am still expecting colors to run into each other and do a little barber poling before the solid sections, which is perfectly fine.

Aside from encouraging me to spin every day (like I need that 🙂 ) events like the Tour de Fleece and the Fancy Kitty group’s Gradient Challenge that I recently completed encourage me to participate more on Ravelry, and to engage in conversation with my fellow Ravelers, share what I’m doing, and see what they’re doing as well. That is something I admit I don’t do much of, at least as far as my participation goes. I tend to lurk a lot, reading various groups and threads for topics that I’d like to know more about, which can sometimes be so old that it’s not worth resurrecting just to add my two cents. I also have been very bad at updating my projects in Ravelry. I need to change that too.

That’s it for me this morning. I am off to do some more Tour de Fleece spinning. We would love to see the Tour de a Fleece projects you are working on. You can post links to your projects on Ravely or your photos stored on Photobucket, Flickr and other photo sharing/storage sites right in the comments below.

Have a great weekend everyone!