Tour De Fleece

This was my view for most of my Fourth of July weekend. It was great! I spent Thursday through Saturday doing spinning demo's with the River Cities Fiber clan at the Mountain State Arts and Crafts Fair. This was the first time I got to spend all three days and it was so much fun. Although today is the first day I haven't noticed any soreness. Spinning/carding/picking for 10 hours a day for three days straight is tiring. Not to mention all the shopping and fair food. Oh and MSACF has so many wonderful booths (like ours) where you could make something using older techniques. I forgot to take pictures of the paper marbling I did. I got in when he didn't have anyone and he just let me play until I though my booth would fire me for going missing. A tote bag with nature printing on it. I think I am going to add some embroidery to this to make it pop.

Stained glass WV. I got to use a soudering gun for the first time. I am very proud I didn't burn myself. Now the picker and great wheel might have kicked my butt. Did I mention I got to spin on a great wheel for the first time, and with cotton for the first time and in front of people. Every time I stepped up to the great wheel I had my picture taken like 5 times. It was fun.
The MSACF also fell on the weekend that started the Tour de Fleece. Nope, I spelled that last word right. We crafty people like to take over sporting events for our own purposes. First it was the fiber Olympics, now the Tour de Fleece. Anyway, the point is to spin (fiber spinning not like bike spinning) every day of the Tour de Fleece. It takes place on Ravelry(the website above is from last year) and there are prizes and whatnot. My goal for the Tour is to spin up as much of my Romney fleece as possible. I would love for it to actually be a sweater some day. And thanks to the MSACF, and needing to demo the picker and drum carder I got about half of my fleece carded up and ready to spin. I only wish I had been more optimistic and taken the other bag of fleece. It would probably be done too. But now to the spinning.

I want to make sort of a heavy worsted, bulky weight yarn and I thought the best way to acheive that would be to do more plies. So I am aiming for a three ply (we shall see after some sampling, I have lots of fleece to play with). I am also only running the batts through the drum carder once. I want it to have lots of character and still look like it used to be on a sheep. If I wanted it to look like commercial yarn, I would buy commercial yarn.

I have to say the one thing that amused me the most about this weekend (besides Judy's terror of the fiber butterflies we were making) was how many people were shocked that this brown was the natural color of the wool. A lot of them didn't beleive there were brown sheep out there.