#tourdefleece

#TourDeFleece Stage 11 Plied up the singles of 2:1 TM/Espresso merino yarn that I split up yesterday. Oddly, despite precise yardage measurements, and each cone holding 21g of yarn, the blue one ran out considerably earlier than the other two! 😭 My only explanation is that I wound from the EEW 6.1 with slight tension on the bobbin to keep it under control on to the blue cone, but then transferred 105 yd each from the blue cone on my Lazy Kate to the other cones, and perhaps the difference in resistance impacted overall stretch, which therefor translated into different length calculations. No biggie, though! I just tied in a marker where the 3-ply ended and continued with 2-ply for the other two, which were much more closely matched in length. After that I repeated the cone-winding process with the 3:1 TM/Espresso singles. Interestingly, while both were spun from 60 g fiber total, the 2:1 measured 319 yd, while the 3:1 came out at 265 yd. #TourDeFleece2026 #Chiengora

Time to catch up on #TourDeFleece posts! Stage #12 (last Thursday) This day I finished up my Tibetan Mastiff / merino blend experiments. First I plied up the 3:1 TM/Espresso, which was a MUCH better success, yarn-chicken-wise, than the 2:1 blend. See photo! Then I split the 2:1 TM/Dark Chocolate (lighter brown) onto 3 cones, which went fine, and then plied them, which did NOT go fine! Perhaps I should have stopped when I was ahead, but I felt determined to finish before bed and started making mistakes. First one of the singles broke. No problem! I'll just splice in the free end and keep going. But while doing that the other two singles got horrible tangled. I fought the tangles for a bit, but eventually just cut out that whole section, tied a knot, and kept going. This one also ended with a 2-ply section when one of the singles ran out well before the others. And in the end, you STILL can't really tell the Espresso vs. Dark Chocolate blends! (Both 2:1 blends are shown here.) #TourDeFleece2026 #Chiengora

Stage #14 (yesterday) A year ago I picked up the 2022 and 2023 "Conservation Breed Fiber Bundles" from The Woolery, which contain 250g of top from Devon, Exmoor Horn, Manx Loaghtan, Welsh, Wenslydale, Swaledale, and Jacob, plus 500g of Lonk. I've done nothing with them since, but now seemed a good time to do so! I measured out 50g (1.8 oz) of each with the plan to just spin each one and experience the differences in the fibers. Simply handling them demonstrated just how different each is from the others! I chose 50g as it was a perfect amount to spin on my Nano's 2 oz bobbins, leaving the EEW 6.1 free for other projects. Or so I thought! I started with the plentiful Lonk because it felt the best pairing for husky fur in future blendings: soft and fluffy and very white. However, I REALLY fought with the Nano, trying to get the speed and tension right. I just could NOT get it to take up properly! After getting through about 1/3, I gave up on that setup, but in one final act of desperation I tried putting the Nano bobbin on the 6.1 and it fit! I was able to continue with much better control over tension. I managed to get in some pretty decent long-draw drafting and finished the batch. I was trying for a bit thicker, loftier yarn than I'm used to with dog fur, and I'm pretty happy with the final results. There are still some thin sections I might have gone back and fixed, but I kept these in as part of the learning process. #TourDeFleece #TourDeFleece2026 #HandSpinning

#TourDeFleece Stage 15 Tonight I spun Exmoor Horn, which according to Fleece & Fiber is "a meat breed, so their wool is an interesting, overlooked by-product. Wool data is scarce." The book's hands-on description comes from a single sample that "felt very crisp, nearly crunchy, with some spring to it." I'm not sure if I'd call the fiber I got crunchy, but it is definitely not as soft as the Lonk I spun last night. The fibers were long (6") and relatively straight, more than I'd expect from the photo in F&F. It was quite easy to spin! (F&F notes this too.) I easily got into a smooth rhythm of semi-woolen long-draw (long, slow drafting, but with lots of little releases of twist along the way). I was able to get even results, thicker than my usual fur singles. Kemp was rare enough that I didn't mind pausing to pick it out as I came across it. However, F&F suggests a worsted spin, so I did a bit of inchworming the last ~25%, which also was nice and smooth, and tended towards finer singles even though I tried to keep it thicker. Sadly, I didn't mark the transition between the two, because now I want to ply the woolen and worsted singles independently to see how they compare. I guess I'll just have to see if I can spot it by eye. #TourDeFleece2026 #HandSpinning

#TourDeFleece Rest Day # 2 No spinning, but I did transfer my Tibetan Mastiff / merino blends to skein/hank format for better side-by-side comparison. Making up for my unofficial rest day last Friday.

In these photos, top to bottom:

• 2:1 TM/Dark Chocolate (purple ties) 3-ply -2:1 TM/Espresso (orange ties) 3-ply large & 2-ply small
• 3:1 TM/Espresso (yellow ties) 3-ply

I'd already done a 1:1 TM/Espresso blend, and found that it really didn't have the fuzzy halo you get from 100% fur yarn: it was just a brown yarn. So, the bottom 2 blends are to see if I can get more of that halo back with a smaller fraction of wool, while still keeping the benefits of wool's "memory". The fur is much harder to come by, so the more wool I can get away with, the longer I can make the fur last.

The 3:1 does indeed look fuzzier than the 2:1, so I'm quite curious now how it'll compare after wash, thwack/snap, and swatch.

The Dark Chocolate is a slightly redder brown merino from a different sheep from the same flock. It's still subtle, but you can see the difference from the Espresso a little more here than on the bobbins. It brings out the redder tones in the fur, whereas the Espresso is a better match for the dark browns in the fur.

#TourDeFleece2026 #HandSpinning #Chiengora

#TourDeFleece Stage 16 Gave the Tibetan Mastiff/merino blends a wash in doggy shampoo. Forgot to give them a thwack! I usually don't with fur, but wonder if it might be good to do with the blends. Tonight's heritage blend: 50g of Manx Loaghtan top, a breed from the Isle of Man that almost went extinct. According to Fleece & Fiber, originally, brown was a rare color, but was selected for during its recovery and is the predominant color now. It's mostly a meat breed, but has a soft fleece (which I can confirm! It was light and soft!), "a relatively soft fiber with an exceptional amount of bounce, a quality that can be maximized through woolen-style preparation and spinning." I enjoyed spinning it woolen long-draw style. My camera doesn't quite capture the sandy/mousy brown correctly. I can see why F&F concludes, "Unusual color and softness. Should be better known than it is, because of its resilience and all-around appealing character." #TourDeFleece2026 #HandSpinning #FiberArts

Starting on #TourDeFleece Stage #1 I finished off 2.5 oz of 50:50 Husky:wool blend on the e-spinner. This is 390yd of ~30-40 wpi singles which I plan to ply 2:1 with 100% husky yarn, spun on my Turkish spindle, trying to work up to 20 wpi. My goal is to pair this with my ~20 wpi heather gray 100% Rio husk yarn in a double-knit pattern. Also spent time preparing and organizing a month's worth of spinning to come! I have plenty of projects to keep me busy. #TDF2026 #Chiengora

#TourDeFleece Stage #2: plying the singles from the previous day. The good: The yarn sources were almost perfectly matched for length! The husky blend cake only had a tiny amount left when the 100% husky ball ran out. The bad: It's not my best work. In fact, it's pretty ugly. The center-pull cake of thin and energetic singles required full-time attention from my left hand, leaving my right hand to manage both the meeting point of the singles and occasional tangles from the Turkish ball. It went slower than I'd like AND the results were still uneven and mostly under-twisted. This may be the first yarn I go back and add twist to. I may also not end up using it for the project for which it was originally intended: my Rio heather gray deserves a better pairing than this! #Handspun #TourDeFleece2026

#TourDeFleece Stage #3 Added twist to my husky/wool blend 3-ply, and I'm quite a bit happier now. It's a much better match to the Rio heather gray. After a short rest I'll give it a bath with blueing shampoo to see how much whiter I can get it. After that I started spinning singles of 2:1 Tibetan Mastiff/merino blend. This is a project on pause since last winter (fall?), where I started with 50:50 TM/merino blend (the cake and swatch in the 2d photo). My goal is to find a blend that benefits from the structural properties of wool with the fuzzy character of #chiengora. The 1:1 seemed to lose its doggy character, so I'm testing 2:1 and 3:1. So far 2:1 is still spinning nicely! The wool grabs onto the slippery fur, allowing a not-quite-long-draw drafting motion. It wants to be thin, but I've been working to keep it a tad thicker to give it some more loft, squish and body. And yet, I only got through about 1/3 of the 60g prepared tonight. #TourDeFleece2026

#TourDeFleece Stage #4 Spun a couple more hours last night to finish off the 2:1 fur/wool blend. I was initially going to do only an hour, but it was going so well and I could see the roving getting quickly smaller, so I was inspired to keep going, even if it kept me up later than I'd wanted to! I don't remember much at all of the cycling playing in the background: I'm currently sitting kind of cross-ways to the TV, so I rarely look at it while spinning. And apparently I'm so wrapped up in my spinning process that the race commentary just goes in one ear and out the other!

#TourDeFleece Stage #5 I started on the 3:1 Tibetan Mastiff / merino blend and OMG is this nice to spin! Compared to the previous blend, drafting is so much smoother, with plenty of slip for even drafting and just enough grip to keep the fibers in contact along the way, perfect for long draw drafting. Now I'm wondering if I should blend up something with even less wool, like 10-15%, for comparison. At what point do you lose the benefit of grip from the wool? This is about half the 60g of fiber that I'd blended at this ratio. #TourDeFleece2026

#TourDeFleece Stage #6 Finished the 3:1 TM/merino singles. I have some plying I can do, but it looks like I'll need to do some fiber prep before I can spin singles again! #TourDeFleece2026

#TourDeFleece Stage #7 No photo today. I just wound the white husky blend into a skein ("hank" for the sticklers) for a wash and blueing. It looks whiter than before (wash water was a little dirty) but maybe not as crisp a white as I'd prefer. We'll see once it's dry. I washed and let it dry loose, and it's still rather twisty and energized, so I think I'll re-do it under tension and see if that helps.

#TourDeFleece Stage #8 Making up for no photos yesterday, I guess! This is a 2:1 Tibetan Mastiff/merino blend, but with a lighter, richer brown: "Dark Chocolate" instead of "Espresso". (I may have mixed up the names in previous posts/replies.) I'd weighed it out, but didn't get around to blending it back when I did the Espresso samples. I'd chosen the Espresso for the primary blending work because it matched the dark browns best in the TM fur, but the Dk Chocolate is nice at matching the redder tones that can be found in it too. It's difficult to see a difference on the singles, so I'm really curious how it'll turn out plied and worked into a swatch! Mostly spent my time blending on the drum carder, but I did sneak in time to spin about 1/3 of the batch before calling it a night. [Edit to note that these browns are natural colors from different sheep at Fleecewood Farms where I got the wool.] [Edit #2 to correct the year in the TDF hashtag. Sorry for extra alerts!] #TourDeFleece2026 #HandSpinning

#TourDeFleece Stage #9 I finished the 2:1 Tibetan Mastiff / Dk Chocolate merino blend. When I went to photograph the bobbin next to the one with the 2:1 Espresso merino, it was just way too similar under indoor lights, so I brought them, and the source wool, outdoors to see if natural light would help. The results are different, but I'm not sure if it helps! My usual photo spot on the patio table was in shade, so I started there, and that was worse than indoors! So I dragged a chair into direct morning sun. That's better. You don't have to pretend that you see a difference between the two balls' tints. But, ultimately, at 1/3 wool, the singles are effectively identical. I think I can end this experiment concluding that I don't need to worry about which wool I use to pair with the TM, and in fact I might combine them both just to get a little more visual texture in the yarn. Now for a rest day. I'll probably spend some of it prepping more fiber to spin, not that it's restful, but because I'm anxious to move on to the next project! #TourDeFleece2026

#TourDeFleece Stage 10 No actual spinning, but plenty busy nonetheless! The white husky/wool blend was now dry after a second wash, so I removed it from the PVC frame and wound it into a cake. It's nice and white, and a close enough match for the Rio gray for me to move forward with that double-knit project. I blended up another 4 oz of 1:1 Tibetan Mastiff / Espresso merino for a project where I'm more interested in color than maximizing fur content and character. That came out really well. And finally I transferred the 2:1 TM/Espresso merino singles to 3 cones for plying. More on that in the next post. Overall, a productive day! #TourDeFleece2026 #HandSpinning #FiberArts

A quick video of my fiber transfer setup. Please excuse the mess of my Fiber Corner that is still under construction! Here I'm transferring the 2:1 TM/Espresso merino from the EEW 6.1 bobbin to the cone winder via the yarn counter. According to the counter, the whole bobbin had 319 yards. After accounting for the weight of the cone, this was 63g of singles. The nice thing about the EEW system is that I was then able to wind off of this blue cone onto the two others, again via the counter, but this time automatically set to stop at 105 yd. This resulted in 3 cones with exactly 21g yarn each! Oddly, the EEW cones don't have adapters for the EEW Lazy Kate, so I have to improvise there. (EEW Nano bobbins + chopsticks! See the previous post.) but all together it makes an efficient system. #TourDeFleece #HandSpinning

#TourDeFleece today was a rest day but I spun anyway and will likely take a different day off. I finished plying my Blanket Octopus spin. As I mentioned yesterday, the second bobbin was a lot finer than the first. I ran out of singles from the first while I still had about 1 oz left on the second. I made a center pull ball with what was left and plied from the inside and outside of that ball. It’s been soaked and snapped and is now drying. #Handspinning #TourDeFleece2026 #TextileArts #FiberArts

#tourdefleece day 5, more yarn on the bobbin ^^ I am hoping to finish spinning all of this alpaca, and maybe ply it with some merino. That's my TDF goal - but we'll see. #fiberarts #fiber #alpaca #spinning

Today is the first day of Tour de France, and therefore also Tour de Fleece, where spinners spin each day the bikers race. I'm starting with spinning up these amazing braids of Rambouillet dyed by Fossil Fibers - Bee Hummingbird colorway. I'll post another pic EOD but this is where I am after the opening TdF Zoom with Darn Knit Anyway. #handspinning #TourDeFleece #TourDeFleece2026 #TextileArts #FiberArts