Addendum to Tour of My Tour de Fleece

It’s already been too long since TdF ended and I got my projects mixed up in my last post. I did just finish spinning a batt of merino naturally dyed with indigo and butterfly bush, but I started that after TdF. I forget about two other yarns that I spun between the last part of my TdF and the blue-green batt: two batts that I got last spring as part of a fiber exchange.

The first batt had my favorite colors: blue and green. The maker also included brown, and lots of different fibers and textures that were quite an adventure to spin. I started spinning the batt on my wheel from the brown side in May and then paused, taking it back up at the end of the tour. During Tdf, I split the batt into roving (not dizzed, just torn/split) roughly along color lines, brown to green to blue, to make it easier to spin and to preserve the striping in the final yarn, which I chain plied. Regrets: not taking a picture before spinning (I promise, it was a beautiful batt), not weighing it. The finishing yarn is 46g and 90yds.

The second batt was brown and very obviously hand processed by the maker from a specific sheep breed. What was the breed? Did she really prepare it, taking it from fleece to batt? I don’t know – she hasn’t been on Facebook since I posted in the group about my finished yarns. I was hoping she would remember the breed and maybe have pictures of the batts, but alas, it’s ultimately my bad for waiting so long to spin them and not keeping her letter with them. You may think my memory is really bad (it probably is) but she also sent chocolates and I still remember how delicious those were.

So the second batt I also split lengthwise into a continuous strip of roving-like wool. I also chain plied it to use up all the singles at once, and ended up with 30g, 66 yards yards of fingering weight yarn. It seems I can only spin fingering; I need to try spinning larger, which is at odds with my deep-seated desire to get the most out of the fiber by spinning it thick enough for the singles not to break easily but thin enough for me to feel like I’m stretching it.

Well. I can’t let that inaccurate information in my last post stand, so feel free to check out the new updated version (probably with lots of strike through) if you haven’t already.