The tour de fleece is a spinners challenge to spin everyday in line with the Tour de France, there are rest days and challenge days but basically you set your own goals.
I don't follow the cycle race ( no television) but I use it most years as a chance to spin daily. exercise my spinning skills and build up the yarn stash ready for winter. I also belong to a couple of Facebook groups of spinners who are doing the same.
This year the start of the tour coincided with the Wool Experience which is a small friendly festival in a barn at Blaze Farm near Macclesfield and I can highly recommend the ice cream that they make there.
I had intended to buy just one fleece, a Castlemilk Moorit as I have never spun one before and they are a sort of mid/light brown which will neatly plug a hole in my palette of natural shades.
So I ended up with a Castlemik Moorit ( small 750gm) a grey Jacob/texel, a beautiful black/grey Shetland and half a white fleece that I need to check the breed name on the label. I also grabbed 4 of the 100gm grab bags of locks, 3 manx laoghtan and I light ryland.
2 comments:
That is just heaven!!! How lucky to live in place with such wonderful resources. Our fleece choices are becoming more and more limited. The popularity of spinning has driven up prices and flooded the market with poor quality fiber.
the prices are creeping up here on sales pages like ebay and often for not very nice fleece. The people who run the farm all spin themselves so the fleeces are excellent and fairly clean. The son is a shearer as well as a spinner so obviously has a good eye for fleece. I am lucky to have another contact whose sons shear and she sells good spinning quality fleece as well.
I have seen the prices quoted over the your side of the pond, scary !! I paid £6 for the Shetland and £8 for the Jacob, both beautiful.
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