#tourdefleece2026

#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

Tour de fleece part 3 3 braids of Bluefaced Leicester, I'm spinning it a bit thicker than usual and then chain ply to keep the color sequences. At least that's the plan. @fiberarts@fedigroups.social @handspinning@fedigroups.social #tourDeFleece2026 #handspinning #fiberarts

#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 #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

#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

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