The TdF and a PSA

It's the most wonderful time of the year for spinners: The Tour de Fleece is here!

For the uninitiated, the Tour de Fleece is a handspinning event that was created to coincide with the Tour de France. It's a three-week-long celebration of handspinning and handspun yarn, and the gist of it is that on all the days that the cyclists are riding, we spinners are spinning our own wheels (as well as our spindles). In past years I've gotten very competitive about it and challenged myself to spin large quantities of fiber, but this year I'm being much more realistic and just taking the event in the spirit in which I think it was originally intended -- to enjoy spinning.

While I had hoped to be able to finish spinning up the singles for the purple gradient I started last week before I started my Tour spinning, I didn't quite manage to do it. So I spent my spinning time yesterday working on finishing those up.

I had been spinning short forward draw but discovered that I could spin from the combed top using a supported long draw, which is a much faster way to get the spinning done. So the whole skein might not be consistent (using long draw, for instance, results in fuzzier singles), but I wasn't really aiming for perfection here, and good enough is good enough. I'm planning to chain-ply these singles, so I'm letting them rest on the bobbin for a day or two.

Today I got started on what I was planning for my TdF project, and that's the pile of little fiber bundles you saw here last week. I've got a total of 550 g/19.4 oz. of Polwarth to spin into what I hope will be a sweater's quantity of yarn. Here are a couple of bobbin shots so you can get a sense of the colors.

I really love these colors and am excited to see how they play out as a three-ply yarn.

Now for the PSA, which will really only apply to you who spin and buy fleece: When you've bought a fleece, please wash it as soon as possible after bringing it home, even if you don't get around to prepping it for a while.

A bit of back story on this one: Some months ago, a friend of mine posted that her mother was looking to sell some fleeces from her sheep, so I bought one. She sent it to me, and I promptly put it in our laundry room so that I could wash it "soon." I think you can all guess what happened -- I never got around to. Fast forward to about a month ago, when I kept seeing moths every now and then. Like any knitter and spinner, that concerned me a bit. Though most of my stash is safely stored in various bags and bins, I do have some yarn and fiber out, particularly if it's yarn or fiber I'm working with at the time. I saw quite a few moths in the laundry room, and I very quickly discovered the source: an infestation in the fleece. Yuck. So this past week (on the 4th of July, actually), I took it outside, pulled out a big portion that seemed to be where the moths and eggs were concentrated, and tossed all that into the composter. The rest of the fleece I decided to clean outside using the easiest method possible: the fermented suint method. I pulled a spare plastic bin out of the stash room and a contractor's trash bag (because the bin wasn't opaque), popped the rest of the fleece in it, and used the garden hose to fill it up. It's now sitting on our deck and, I hope, getting clean over the next week.

The trap on top is just to keep critters from sneaking under the lid.

Next weekend I'll dump out the water and rinse the (fingers crossed!) clean fleece. If it needs further cleaning, I can always wash it in our utility sink as I normally wash fleece, though my hope was that this method would save water and allow me to dump the wastewater out in the back of the yard rather than down the drain. I'm also hoping that this method will kill any moths or eggs that were still in the fleece, but I won't be precious about what's left and will happily toss any compromised wool. Assuming it comes out okay, it'll also be quarantined from the rest of the stash until I'm sure there are no more critters coming out of it. Let my laziness be a lesson to you: wash your fleece!