Friday 28 June 2013

Tagging Along On The Tour

This year I'm taking part in the Tour de Fleece, where spinners from around the world spin every day that the Tour de France rides.

You set your own goal for the Tour based on what is a challenge to you. As I've only been spinning since last October I figured a good goal would be to spin, on my spindle every day for 15 mins. But then I asked myself what I'd really want to achieve from spending the best part of a month spinning. I had two answers:

  1. Enough yarn for a jumper.
  2. To get a whole lot of the alpaca to a state where I can knit it.
I don't think I could manage the first one on a spindle with less then one years experience but I can make a dent in the second.
Morning Boys!
The alpaca I have comes from Chieftain and Captain Kid. Two animals I spent a great deal of last year feeding. I love those little babies and I miss them an awful lot (though they seem to remember me, if I visit they come over to say hi) but I do have four bags of their fluff to remember them by. All I've managed to do so far is run a few dying experiments and spin enough for a hat. 

It's not that I'm shocked that their hair is neater than mine... just disappointed

Which is cute and all but every fibre of it that remains unspun is waisted potential. And it;s time to put a stop to that. So my Tour de Fleece goal is to card and spin between one and three rolags of the Alpaca each day. 

My tour fibre: washed (Captain Kid if you where wondering)
Between one to three gives me the ability to stop at one if I'm just feeling blah but I'm hoping I can do three most days. That works out at 350g of fibre which I picked out, washed and dyed and gorgeous red. I applied the dye unevenly to give variation in the finished fibre.

A bit more me
So the tour starts tomorrow and finishes on the 21st July. Hopefully I'll be able to give periodic updates. Best of luck to anyone else riding this year.


2 comments:

  1. That red is beautiful! One TdF rookie to another, "good luck gurllll!"

    ReplyDelete