Its June and time to prepare !! Tour de Fleece is getting closer.

Even though things are a little different this year and the Tour de France has been cancelled, the Tour de Fleece , a major spinning event in my calendar is still going ahead.

Never heard of it? the event is open to all spinners no matter how experienced and is hosted on Ravelry. These days many facebook groups also take part. Challenges are set for those who want to push themselves, rest days for those who want to take a breather. The usually starts and finishes on the Tour de France dates and many spinners watch the race whilst spinning. A major difference this year is that the event will have two parts as it will resume when the postponed Tour de France takes place in September ( obviously this may still change)

 Many spinners set their own challenge, anything from spin every day, learn and master a new technique to spinning  a large quantity for a jumper.

This year the dates are 27 June through to 19 July so a 3 week period of spinning every day for me. Historically I have spun at festivals for at least two of these weekend so this year will be different. I may have to challenge myself as to where to spin that I can reach on foot from where I live. The drop spindles may have to get some exercise.

                                                         TDF spinning 2019

I first took part in this in 2010 !! you can find posts for the previouse events here , some years I was very productive as you can see. Looking back, it looks like although I did spin last year. I didn't document it, In fact I didn't post much on this blog last year for various reasons.

So, what am I doing at the moment? I'm getting prepared, washing fleece, prepping fleece, emptying bobbins of oddments that have been hanging around, still spinning some bits as I go. I intend to document everyday during TDF, we will see how that goes :-)

Garden prep station 

Two more bags of fleece arrived this week and I suspect that these may be the last for the time being. Not whole fleeces just a kilo or so of a nice zwartbles and 500 gm Jacob which makes up an order that was dispatched incorrectly.

I have prepped around 200gm of the BFL cross purchased a couple of weeks ago and will probably spin it up over the coming week

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All of this helps build my stock of yarn up for knitting and the occasional sale, plus keeps me out of trouble ( apparently)