Tour de Fleece week 1

Goodness me! Such a week of spinning and allsorts going on in the family! Ill girls (hand foot and mouth! 5 ulcers on the tongue sound like fun?), birthday girls, party time, last week of steiner school Summer term ( an intense time of festivals and plays and celebrations ). I also read "The Journey" which promises to be life changing and discovered that maybe what I really want to do is free form knitting!

And aside from all that I spun one of the hardest yarns I've ever spun! On the face of it not so hard: I was just using the scraps I got from UK Spinners Scrap Swap into a rainbow sequence and then Navajo plying it. I slightly struggled with spinning from the fold longdraw, which got so much more natural and easy as I went along, but the major problem was that I was using SYNTHETICALLY dyed fibres! I really struggled with enjoying the colours because they were so bright! No doubt there were other more esoteric reasons bubbling under in my subconscious too... But here it is: Sea Rainbow, because it has a tendency towards Sea colours with a rainbow above and below the seascape. It's the yarn for one sock, there's another similarly sequenced equal amount of fibre (80 grams) awaiting spinning, for the other sock. It worked out well for what it is, and my spinning is good, but it was such a struggle!

Anyway, I need a break from these bright colours for now so I've drum carded and started spinning something I'm calling "Shetland wander" a combination of natural moorit Shetland fibres and naturally dyed (by me) British wool fibres in oranges, pinks, random dashes of other colours with some tussah silk and copper trilobal fibre for a bit of bling lift: It's a relief  to spin it, but I can't seem to resist longdraw at the moment, partly because it's a whole body activity....