Tour De Fleece Started on 5 July

 The Columbia Spinning Ladies who took me in last year and have helped me tremendously in improving my spinning have a wonderful plan for Tour de Fleece this year.  Every Saturday in July will have an event/workshop to improve our skills.

On Saturday just past we learned how to create our own self striping yarn!  TJ, our leader, had a big pile of fiber and instructed each of us to take three colors that appealed to us to make the yarn.  I chose red, yellow, and blue.  Not very creative but...that is what I chose.

These are the rolags I made on the Ashford Blending Board I purchased earlier this year.  I had only tried blending on it once or twice before.  This was what I made on Saturday.  The next thing we did was to spin up the rolags into singles.  I did that.  When I came home I spent about ten minutes spinning some white singles to ply with the colorful striped yarn to tone it down a little.  I have not plied yet as there was more red, yellow, and blue to turn into rolags and spin into singles.

Today I finished blending up the remaining red, yellow, and blue fiber into rolags and now have six more rolags to spin plus a big fat "rolag" or maybe better call it a sort of batt.  I will spin that last.  If all goes well I will get this done tomorrow.  The spinning of these rolags, I mean.  I expect that the following day I will get to plying. Hopefully.  I will show the yarn off  after that.  One of the Columbia Spinners has already finished her spin and has knitted it up into a swatch.  It looks so good.  In my heart of hearts I hope to complete my spinning, plying, wet-finishing, skeining up, rolling into a ball, then knitting a swatch by next Saturday.  I will let you know how it goes.  At this point...not too sure that is a reasonable expectation, but I will try.  Will let you know!

The Ashford eSpinner 3 which is upstairs is where I am spinning the white Thetford Roving to use for plying.  Last night I spun up 5 grams of roving.  Today I spun 10 grams of roving.