handmade by stefanie

The Tour de Fleece ends tomorrow, which means that I am going to be spinning like mad this weekend. Before I left for vacation, I was nearly done with a merino/silk single to ply with one of the first singles I completed during the tour (Wine Country BFL/silk from the Sweet Georgia Fibre Club ). This week, I managed to finish what was on my wheel and ply the two together, and I am so thrilled with the results! I also took some leftover singles and plied them together, with not-as-exciting results: Today, I am going to try to finish the Polwarth that is on my Ladybug: And I am also going to try to finish the second Merino/Silk single that is on my Victoria so that I can ply it with this overfilled bobbin (I may have gotten carried away) of the same fiber and color: With any luck, I'll be spending Sunday plying up a storm!  Thanks for joining me for another Spinning Saturday! I'd love to hear about your Tour de Fleece progress in the comments!  ...

Note: I do realize it's not Saturday today! This was the post I wrote yesterday before my internet connection went haywire. I decided to take my Ladybug out to the back porch to spin up my Wensleydale top, and now that my internet connection has mysteriously righted itself, I am sharing this post today!  I'm still spinning up a storm! This week, I pulled out two fibers from my stash: the first, 5 oz. Finn top from Spunky Eclectic in natural cream that I've had in my fiber stash for several years; the second, a braid of very pretty hand-dyed Wensleydale roving from Northbound Knitting , which I purchased earlier this year. I thought it might be interesting to spin singles from both of these fibers and ply them together, but a lot of that depends on how the Wensleydale spins up. The Finn (also known as Finnish Landrace or Finnsheep) was surprisingly lofty - you can't really see the halo in the photo below, but trust me, it's there! It was really a dream...

The arrival of my first shipment from the Sweet Georgia Fibre Club proved to be the perfect motivation to finish the spinning project that has been on my wheel for several weeks now: some very pretty merino roving I purchased at the Yarn Barn in Lawrence, KS a long time ago. That night, I finished the second single, and then on Thursday afternoon I plied both singles together. I'm still not sure how this happened, but I only have a few inches left over from one of the singles once the plying was complete! What I like about this fiber is how it looks like a grayish-brown from far away: But when you get closer, you can see that there are lots of heathered colors that blend together to trick the eye from far away: Before delving into my newest fiber acquisition, I wanted to be sure to spin the custom batt which I purchased at YarnCon earlier this month (I'm not sure if you can request a custom-made batt from the  Knitspin etsy shop , but they have plenty of other fibe...