Tour de Fleece: week 2

In this second week of the Tour de Fleece, I have spun some SpinJones fibre. I started the spin during the first week already, and I managed to finish the yarn in only a few days time! That’s what happens if you spin thick.

Freya was there to help, of course. Or rather, she slowly moved onto my lap, pushing the spinning bowl out in the process until I would start petting her!

Spinning only 100 grams, especially thick, suddenly feels like nothing after those 380 grams of thin purple singles. In only 5 days, I had spun the singles and plied them on my wheel!

This was a wonderful, very enjoyable spin, not in the least because of the happy colours and the bits and bobs of yellow silk! I can really recommend spinning those Dreamer batts.

So I continued with another SpinJones creation. Or rather, two of them. I selected two tops, Jamboree and Secret Garden, that were still in my stash. They looked like sibling tops, one the dark version of the other (but with the same pink silk stripes).

Jamboree contained ochre and Secret Garden contained brown, so I expected the resulting blend to be rather warm in tone.

I divided each top in 32 equally long bits. Then I blended them into rolags on my blending board. And I got a nice surprise!

These rolags don’t look warm-coloured at all! And I think that I know why. The main colours of the tops were light and dark turquoise, which is close to blue. Adding some gold/brown to blueish fibre would probably act in a similar way as adding yellow to blue, but less bright. The result would be a muted green, warmer than turquoise, but still rather cool in colour. If you get close, you can see the separate colours that form the rolags, but if you move away further, a blue-grey-green emerges that is quite striking.

I love this blend! I started spinning it right away and it spins up beautifully.

This almost one-third of the rolags spun up. I still have 23 to go. Will I finish before the end of the Tour? We shall see. The Netherlands are expecting a heatwave this week. Tomorrow it will be 30 degrees Celsius, and the days after that will be even hotter. I hate the heat, my body can’t really handle it. Once it gets too hot, my blood pressure drops and I can’t sit up straight anymore. So I’m not looking forward to it. Let’s hope it won’t be too bad this time so that I can still spin.