Tour de Fleece 2011

Well, to begin with, I finally got several spinning fiber options posted to the shop! Many things, from Merino to llama, to flax, to Churro...

And, I have 5 alpaca fleeces coming this weekend! I'm really excited about this, they are gorgeous colors, very very soft, and very clean fleeces, which means I should be able to wash them quickly and get them available to you! Pictured are locks from all 5 fleeces, I'll have photos of the animals themselves soon.

Now, on to the Tour de Fleece! If you don't know what that is, the best place to go is the Tour de Fleece group on ravelry. Basically, its a fun challenge to spin along with the bikers "spinning" in the Tour de France! This year it runs July 2-24.

I have a shop promo to go along with the Tour- use shop code TDF11 during checkout for 15% off anything you buy, now until the end of the Tour. Happy Spinning!


Last year, I hopelessly over committed myself during the tour, and as a result I pretty much gave up after the first few days. So this year, I'm trying to keep it somewhat more reasonable- I want to finish the 3 spinning projects I have going right now, and IF I do, then I want to work on spinning and Navajo plying something hand painted. I have several somethings hand-painted, I'm not going to pick which to spin until I get that far.

What I have in progress- Bison down and Cashmere, both to be spun as finely as I can on drop spindles, haven't decided how to ply yet. The 3rd project is some Peruvian wool on a Peruvian drop spindle, from which I'm theoretically learning Andean drafting. Trust me, its much harder than it sounds. I'll post periodic updates here, as I (hopefully) make progress with all this spinning!