Osborn Fiber Studio

It’s definitely a week late to be writing about my Tour de Fleece, but I’ve been… busy. On the plus side, I now have a completely transformed office to work in.

For Tour de Fleece / Tour de Fleece Femmes, July 5th – August 3rd, I was traveling almost the entire time. So I planned ahead!

Please ignore the sock yarn for present purposes. I brought, from top to bottom: 100g of Cheviot, 100g of romney, 80g of Icelandic thel hand carded into rolags, and two bags of qiviut blends that had been made into batts previously and subsequently turned into puni-style rolags on my blending board.

I had about a week of travel before TDF started, so I took that for a warm up, and spun the 100% Icelandic Thel. These were hastily-made rolags from rather felted, un-crimpy wool, and spinning them was not super pleasant, perhaps especially because I was using supported spindles. I plied it on my CPW at Mom’s house, and with some slow going and liberal rolling of lumps, it looks pretty OK.

Qiviut Blending Project: 100% Icelandic Thel Lambswool.
Stats: 86 g, 160 y, 844 YPP.

When TDF proper began, Mom and watched and spun together a little every day. We parked with our wheels and spindles in the living room, sometimes with the parrots for company, and watched the drama of the tour.

On my wheel, I spun those about 80 grams each of the two 100% wool braids I’d brought. Both were from Small Bird Workshop. The Romney, a natural white, is a roving from a small flock on an island in British Columbia. The grey is Cheviot top from the UK. I’m using both in the Qiviut Blending Project, and decided that after all I wanted to include some 100% wool in the project. These are good candidates for my CPW as I can spin them fast and even in my usual technique, without the extra love necessary to spin on supported spindles.

Qiviut Blending Project: 100% Romney Wool roving, Brampton Island Flock.
Stats: 88 g, 220 yd, 1133 YPP.

Qiviut Blending Project: 100% UK Cheviot Wool top.
Stats: 81 g, 207 yd, 1157 YPP.

The rest of the tour was spent on my supported spindles. I didn’t spin for a long time every day – 40 minutes at the absolute maximum. It was often in the car. But it was just a little thing, a little box to tick every day, to mark the time as we traveled and feel that I was making progress. I spun these right through the end of Tour de France and into Tour de France Femmes, without a satisfying end point between them.

Our trip ended just a few days before the end of TDFF, with all my rolags spun and the four spindles I brought completely full. I could have plied them on my big drop spindle while traveling, and even brought it for this purpose, but when it came down to it, I didn’t want to. It would have taken a lot more work to finish the singles in time to do that step while traveling as well, and I just didn’t want to give my focus during travel for that. Instead, the last two days of the tour as we adjusted to being home again, I plied them on my Ashford Traditional.

Qiviut Blending Project: equal parts Targhee wool top, Muga silk, and qiviut.
Stats: 76 g, 217 yd, 1301 YPP.

These two skeins, singles lovingly crafted on supported spindles during our weeks of travel, are both equal parts wool, silk, and qiviut. The above is 1/3 Targhee wool (white, commercial top), 1/3 muga silk (gold), and 1/3 qiviut. The below is 1/3 Icelandic thel (black, from fleece), 1/3 pedencal silk (dark grey), and 1/3 qiviut. The Icelandic blend was the easiest to spin: properly processed and blended, the short staple of the Icelandic made for an easy woolen spin. The Targhee wool was longer stapled, so despite beautiful prep it was just a little bit more challenging. But both were lovely. I’m very pleased with how they turned out.

Qiviut Blending Project: equal parts Icelandic Thel Lambswool fleece, Pedencal silk, and qiviut.
Stats: 84 g, 196 yd, 1054 YPP.

If you leave out the Icelandic (spun while traveling but not during TDF/TDFF), for this year’s event I spun 329 g, 841 yards of yarn. Counted in what I still think of as Spinzilla terms, that’s 2,523 total yards of spinning. I remember a time many years ago when this would have seemed like a ton of spinning! Now it seems like a modest effort. Funny how our perspective changes.

From left to right: Romney, Cheviot, Targhee/Muga/Qiviut, Icelandic/Pedencal/Qiviut, Icelandic.

These were skeins 20-24 of the Qiviut Blending Project. I have projected 39 skeins, so this means I’m finally past the halfway point. I have some decisions to make and some carding to do. For the Icelandic and Targhee blends with silk, I made three blends with different ratios of qiviut, wool, and add-ins (in this case, silk). That was supposed to help me decide on two different ratios to use with the other six wools and add ins. Trouble is, I like them all. I think I’ll use different ratios with different add-ins – particularly, with cotton I will for sure go with a lower ratio of add-ins, and with alpaca, silk and silk, I may go higher. I’m undecided with mohair.

Now that I’m home, I’m dug in deep on my beautiful hand-combed Wensleydale, and I’ve made up a huge plan for spinning art yarns for the podcast all fall! So it may be a minute before I get back to these. But hopefully before next summer. The bigger my collection of these natural-coloured skeins, the more excited I am to complete them.

I hope your Tour de Fleece / Tour de Fleece Femmes was a success, if you participated! Thanks for reading about my journey. You can here myself, Rachel, and Dionne discuss our TDF/TDFF journeys on the latest episode of the Wool n’ Spinning Radio podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your audio podcasts.