Tour de Fleece Recap & Yarny Events in Chicago

This past Sunday was the final day of this year's Tour de Fleece, and while I can't claim to have spun every single day that the Tour de France rode, I did manage to spin some nice yarns along the way:

Two of those yarns are from the fiber I dyed and blogged about last week; the other yarns are spun from rolags and batts I've made on my Strauch drum carder, plus I have some singles left to weave with (I've recently discovered that thick-and-thin handspun singles are really fun to weave with).

I spun nearly all of the fiber I'd earmarked for this year's event along with 2/3 of the new fiber I acquired and dyed midway through. Not bad!

Last weekend, the Chicago Yarn Crawl kicked off, and although I don't plan to visit a ton of yarn shops, last night I did make a stop to one of my favorite newer stores, Firefly Fiber Arts. And, of course, a skein of yarn followed me home!

This yarn was part of a special trunk show to showcase the yarns from this German yarn company, Ovis Et Cetera. They source all of their wool from local European farms, and the beautiful jewel tones are made with GOTS certified dyes that don't contain heavy metals. The fingering weight skein that I bought is 100% Corriedale wool and it's super soft. I plan to combine it with some mini skeins for my next shawl project!

Stitches Midwest is this weekend, and I'll be trekking out to Schaumburg on Saturday to do a bit of shopping, see some friends, and work in the Zen Yarn Garden booth for a few hours. I haven't been to a Stitches event in the last 5 years (!!), so I'm interested to see what has changed since then. Surely I will have an easier time getting there than I did back in 2014, right?!

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