Tour de Fleece 2015

Since I always seem to be traveling during the Tour de Fleece, I end up focusing on spindle spinning. This year was no exception. I had started a very fine thread spin last year during the TdF and didn't make much progress on it during the year. I continued with it during this year's TdF

 This was the starting point. That little Trindle is about 5" long and weighs 4 gms empty. I am spinning Corgi Hill Farm camel/silk in the Deep Purple colorway.

 Along the way, I took a little detour and decided to decorate some of my spindle storage. I had bought some washi-like tape at the dollar store and found that the lace trim (on the right) didn't stick to anything. So I put it away discouraged. Then I finished up some awful powdered greens that I had bought years ago. One adds it to smoothies but it is gritty. Anyway, I slowly finished it up and the container seemed like a good size for a spindle case. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get the remnants of the glue off the outside. I tried solvents and soaking and scrubbing to no avail.

Then the lightbulb moment happened! The trim that wouldn't stick! I pulled it out and it worked beautifully. The other trim - the colorful one - is sticky. I used it to decorate a plain white cardboard box in which someone had given me Japanese cookies. My little Trindle has been living in it for a number of years. Now it is colorful. I used the rest of the colorful tape to finish off the greens container. I haven't found the spindle for it yet but I am sure I will.

 I made progress on the camel/silk, almost finishing the first half of it. However, somewhere along the way, at Camp, the top part of the carbon fiber shaft splintered and the hook fell out. After checking with Trindleman that I could super-glue it and not affect his ability to make repairs, I did exactly that. The wonderful thing about Camp is that there is a hardware store right across the street so the glue was easy to come by. I continued spinning till I got back from Camp and then I mailed the shaft out for repairs and started spinning another project. Trindles are warrantied as long as Trindleman continues in business so he is going to fix it and send it back.

 I had another spindle project going on my Jenkins Delight. I continued that project on the Turkish spindles till I was done with the first single. It ended up being four turtles. This is alpaca/silk from Lisa Souza.

After that, I started spinning the second single on my standard Trindle. This is a waterfall mahogany shaft. I picked arms so that the weight would be the same as the 16 gm Delight. I filled one shaft full by the end of the Tour (on the right). Now I will start with another shaft and continue. Once it gets too heavy, I don't enjoy spindling so it is better to move to another spindle.

And so ends my Tour 2015. I think I will be spindling a bit more this year outside the Tour than I did last year. Somehow last year was a Hansen spinning year.