The ultimate Tour de Fleece 2010 report

The Tour the Fleece was a real challenge! I managed to spin almost every day, but more difficult was, to report the progress outside the ravelry group. So here comes - with a bit delay - a complete show & tell of the yarns I spun.
I already introduced you to "Spinning Onions to Gold" and "Don't cry, Argentina".

After that, I spun "Fireflies", which is a cute yarn from black, blue and dark green merino and some wensleydale fiber, plied with a thin thread holding bright green seed beads and neon green sequins. Afterwards, I thought it would be so cool, if the glass beads were actually glowing in the dark. A long search later, I found a supplier of bright green glowing glass beads and ordered them. They should arrive soon and then I can make a firefly yarn which actually glows in the dark.



The "Moonlit Garden" yarn took 3 days to finish, but I like it best of my yarns this year. It is a single yarn from a merino batt of black, dark and bright blues, containing many many things, like blossoms and flowers of different kind, some sections have blue sparkling eyelash yarn, and different beads, pearls and sequins.



The last worldcup yarn is the one for the United States (though I might still spin one inspired by Paul, the octopus), consisting of blue, white and red merino, spun to broad blue stripes, interspersed with thinner red and white stripes. It is plyed with a dark blue and a blue glittering thread, holding silver sequin stars in the blue parts.



A while ago, I met the shepherd of the university's flock of sheep, who allowed me to take some of his fleece. I only took around 100 g to start with and spun a two ply yarn from the unwashed fiber. It turned out to be not that good an idea, because it was quite greasy and held lots of straw particles. From now on, I will give it a thorough wash before I process it. The result is quite interesting, though. As far as I understood, his sheep are crossbreeds from mainly local species and the fiber was quite frizzy and elastic. It is a bit rough, though. It borderlines the comfortable bare-to-skin-wearableness and I am thinking to make a carpet from that and other raw fibers, maybe with some color accents. But then I would have to spin much much more of it first.



I had a short intermezzo with a soot sprite (those of you who know Hayao Miyazaki's animes "Spririted Away" and "My neighbor Totoro" are probably familiar with them) under heavy usage of black eyelash yarn, containing little pompons thereof and eyes made from white sequins and black seed beads.




Next was a merino single yarn in greys, blues, whites and a hint of green and brown, including pieces of Tibetan prayer flags. I always liked them and got the idea for that yarn a while ago. It resembles the landscape of himalayan mountains, and combines it with the cheerful colors of the flags, in the traditional order of colors.


I always liked that Android operating systems are named after deserts, so I spun a chocolate eclair yarn from merino and alpaca, plyed with a golden thread, and a cupcake yarn, from brown merino, some alpaca and pink and violet merinos, plyed with a pink thread, containing plastic flower beads and seed beads which look like sugar beads. The gingerbread, froyo and doughnut soon to follow.




And last, but certainly not least, I had another go on a fabric stripe polkadot yarn. This time from different colors, the usual blue, but in combination with red fabric I bought in Osaka (Japan is great for fabric shopping, too bad I discovered that fabric shop street in Tokyo almost too late), and white fabric with bright green dots from Vienna. I also added white seed beads. The fiber is merino in shades of red, blue and green.


That's all, folks! I am glad that it is over and that I did not bad, especially in catching one of the daily prices, but I also can't wait for the next TdF!