Wearing My Yellow Jersey

Today marks the end of the Tour de Fleece, which really seemed to fly by this year. Traditionally the leader of the Tour de France wears a yellow cycling jersey, so spinners are encouraged to do the same on the final day. Yellow is not a great color on me, though so I am only wearing one in spirit.

My goals for this year's Tour weren't very lofty -- I just wanted to spin at least a little every day and finish a small number of skeins. And that's exactly what I did. I didn't even have to spin up to the last minute to finish my last project, my HipStrings custom-blended batts. I had finished spinning the last bobbin of singles on Thursday, so I plied a bobbin each on Friday and yesterday and skeined and washed the resulting yarn last night.

I've had to edit these photos quite a bit to get them to even somewhat resemble what the yarn looks like in real life; for some reason, every photo I take comes out looking washed out and much lighter than the actual color. So the surface the skeins are sitting on is actually white, even if it appears blue here.

I ended up with two bit skeins of three ply, falling roughly in the sport to DK range, and a tiny mini skein of the remaining singles from the dark purple batt. The yarn is reading overall as a blue, but I love how there are not only two different shades of blue, plus purple, in the plies but also pops of many other colors from all the bits of silk and sari silk and other add-ins. I still have no idea of the actual fiber content of these batts, but that's just fine -- they were a delight to spin!

My two big skeins gave me nearly 780 yards, which is more than enough for a little sweater (I have my eye on Zero Crops Given, though I might work the body plain and lengthen both the body and the sleeves just a bit). My mini skein is only about 8.5 yards, and I only spun it to use up the rest of the singles, not with any real use in mind.

This may not have been my most prolific Tour ever, but by my count, I finished a bit more than 1,500 yards of yarn. Not too shabby! These most recently finished skeins also put me over the 10K mark for Stash Dash, thanks to the way that handspun is calculated (you get to count the length of each ply plus the total final length of the skein). In fact, I'm almost to 11K!

I am still on a long-term effort to spin down my stash, so don't think that because the Tour de Fleece is over you'll be seeing any less handspun from me. But you just might see me knitting with the handspun more in the months ahead.