3 Feet of Sheep

During the Tour de Fleece, spinners rest on the days racers in the Tour de France rest.  July 13 was the first rest day for the Tour de France, so most spinners rested today.  I am not resting on the official rest days as I won’t be able to spin for the last week of the Tour since I’ll be in San Diego for the TKGA Annual Conference.

Since I finished plying the cormo yesterday, today was the day to start something new!  The next fiber in my spinning queue was 3 Feet of Sheep.  This is 8 ounces of Blue-faced Leicester hand-dyed by Frabjous Fibers.  The colorway I have is “Colors of the Capital.”  It is 10 bumps of fiber, each a different color and each weighing 20 to 21 grams.  The fiber comes packaged in a long tube:

I toyed with the idea of fractal spinning this fiber, but decided to spin end to end so that when I knit it I’ll have a gradient.  I plan to Navajo ply to maintain the color sequence.  I didn’t do any pre-drafting, but I am splitting each color into multiple strips and spinning from those.  The colors aren’t solid; they are tonal and look like they are probably space-dyed, with concentrated dye applied in certain sections and then wicking out into the rest of the fiber from there.  The result is subtle striping within each color.  I spun each strip starting from the same end so that this subtle striping happens multiple times throughout that color.

My goal is to spin 1 color per day until I’ve spun all the fiber.  I’m spinning this fiber about twice as fast as I spun the cormo, so I had time this evening to spin up two colors.  Here’s how my bobbin looked when I stopped for the night.

Looks like I’ll be spinning yellow tomorrow 🙂