Tour!

Yes, you know what time of year this is!  I just love the Tour de France and with it goes the Tour de Fleece.  Yay!  If you've read my blog from summers past, you know that during the Tour my knitting takes a nosedive, and my spinning goes front and center.

This year my goal is to spin fibers that I haven't spun before and not stress about quantity of fiber spun as much as quality.  To up my chances of getting my hands on rare breeds or at least rarely seen by me breeds, I joined the fiber club at Paradise Fibers. My first shipment contained 8 ounces of Masham.

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These sheep look like long haired horses to me.  What I learned about this breed is that they are from Great Britain and they are a cross between a Teeswater ram and a Swaledale/Dalesbred ewe.

Of course, when my fiber arrived, it looked like this:

It's a whole 8 ounces of Ashland Bay Masham which is a lot of fiber:

The color is a gray/brown and is soft and still has it's crimp, which is amazing to me because Ashland Bay fiber, in my experience, is usually over processed.  Not so with this batch.

So I made my little uneven nests and prepared myself to deal with sitting on a little hard chair for an hour or so, watch the race and drink my orange juice on the rocks.

This fiber practically spins itself!  And since I purchased a WooLee Winder to go on my Prelude, I was spinning like the wind!  I don't have to stop, I don't have to make adjustments and I don't even have to look much - which isn't a bad thing.

Here's how far I got:

I'm in love!  The fiber has a halo which I didn't see until I saw this picture and I love that about it.  I plan to fill two bobbins and make a two ply yarn so that I get as much yardage as I can.  I have a vision of making myself a cowl or a scarf, or, depending on the weight of the fiber, maybe I'll have enough for a pair of mittens.

For the knitters out there who don't give a hoot about spinning, know that I am knitting and will have something to show next time.

Today I went to knitting class, and Mary Jo and I had a pleasant hour of knitting before I had to get home, shower and dress for brunch with friends.  We had breakfast and lunch at the same time at Giovanni's and maybe, just maybe, there was a bellini or two.  We ended up in the restaurant for almost two hours and left out in the heat of the afternoon.  It was too hot and humid to knit or spin, so I ended up waiting until after the sun went down.

So that's my day, which is Day 1 of the Tour, and it ends on July 21st.