Tour de Fleece 2026 Wrap-up
This was my second year participating in tour de fleece (I started spinning July 2024 and my first spinning guild meeting was their TDF wrap up and my first time hearing of the event) and it was my first TDF with any sort of plan!
My goals this year broadly were to spin consistently according to the schedule I put together for myself. The schedule gave me three days a week of personal spinning, two days of breed study spinning, and two days of rest because my body gets cranky quickly if I'm not vigilant about resting.
My specific goals were to get some progress done on my breed study and get a good workflow going on that and for personal spinning, I wanted to spin some of my Fossil Fibers fiber that I've been too precious about to use. Specifically, my goal was to spin For the Whimsy and the Magic Buffalo art batt
I'm very happy with my results this year! Most importantly, I stuck to my schedule, which mostly means I did a good job setting it up!
I got three breeds done for my breed study (Eider, Exmoor Horn, and Lonk) and got a good workflow set up to get a breed done a week with a bit of an inertia boost for the next week, which I did by spinning up the maim sample Fridays and winding it onto my plying tool and then Saturday plying that, doing my 1-3yd personal sample of the next breed and wet finishing both of those so I was all ready to go the following Friday. Next up is working out when I want to dedicate time to doing the write ups for them based on my notes bc I really want to share the spinning experience. This project wad the main reason I came back to tumblr actually!
I didn't fully finish my goal for my Fossil Fibers stuff but I am extremely pleased with what I did get done! Of the 4 oz braid of For the Whimsy, 2 oz got dedicated to be plied with the Magic Buffalo art batt, 1 oz was separated to experiment with tiny spinning, and the remaining ounce became some color management experiments! I didn't even get to the braid and art batt spin so we'll set that aside.
The For the Whimsy braid is a mirrored gradient so my plan for the bonus ounce was to try spinning 1/2 as it was dyed, the other half mirrored but starting from the center color and then plying those two. What I ended up doing was spinning the singles as planned and then plying them on themselves. One was chain plied and the other was 2-plied from a center pull ball. I would have liked to have seen the original plan too but I only had so much fiber to play with and I'm okay with it.
Now, the tiny spinning. There was no fancy color management plan and I knit with the tiny yarn as singles so no color management in plying either. It was just a simple spin from one end of the dye pattern to the other. But oh man. It took most of my time, and I'm *so* glad I had that eew nano because we worked together so well! Besides the new spinning tool, I also re-combed my fiber (a tip from my tiny spinning mentor) and committed to being okay with some waste wool. (I find that less scary when you see how many yards you can get out of several grams spinning at this weight. I also spun all the waste wool on my chaos cloud project spindle.)
Okay. Enough yapping. Tiny yard stats time. I started with 10g of fiber for this spin. I expected to have lost a few grams from combing and little broken sections as I spun. I didn't quite finish the whole colorway as it was 10:30pm the night before guild and I still needed to wind off so I could return the nano the next day. Winding off took me close to 4 hours, a lot of snaps and spit splices, and 5 mini skeins so they could be weighted properly for drying (I know, I don't weight my yarn except for the tiny stuff which is destined to be heavily blocked lace).
Sorry. I lied about the yapping. Final numbers:
Giving us 58 yards per gram
I'm so pleased with it! My previous record for my tiny spins was 44yds/g and I started at 21 yds/g just a few months ago so I'm very proud of myself. (For the record, the finest commercial spun yarn I've found is the 1 ply Jamieson & Smith Shetland Supreme Lace which is 17.44 yds/g according to the stats on the Quixotic website.) Looking forward to more tiny spins!
Besides mostly fulfilling my goals, I've also had so much fun posting here and interacting with people! I love the support but also getting to share tips and ideas with people! An excellent Tour de Fleece. Thanks y'all!
