What, more stash??

23rd July heralded the last day of the Tour de Fleece 2017.  It also heralded the 2nd day of Le Lot et La Laine, the wool festival which takes place every two years here in south west France.  I usually buy lots of luscious fluff to last me until the next one happens in another two years.  This year was no exception.

The first thing to catch my eye was this merino fleece.  I really need merino fleece - like a hole in the head!  But I'm sort of addicted to the stuff, good quality stuff anyway.  This was gorgeous, and once I'd had my fingers in there I just couldn't walk past!

I think the first thing to attract me was how uniform the locks were.  The photo above looks a bit disorganised, but that's probably because I've been fondling it so much!  The second thing was the softness, and the third the crimp.  Just look at the crimp on that!

I did hold myself back with this, buying only a kilo instead of the whole fleece!

Normally when I visit this wool festival I walk around once just looking.  Then I walk around a second time buying those things that particularly caught my eye.  Then I walk around a third time (laden with bags!) and hoover up all those little bits and pieces that I missed previously.  Well, that didn't really work this year.  When I saw this next fleece I snapped it up immediately!

This is "super kid" mohair fleece that I first spied two years ago.  Unfortunately she didn't have any fleece for sale then, she just had a small sample on the table.  I grabbed a sample and her card hoping to snag a fleece when she'd done her shearing, but it never happened.  This year there were 500g bags of the stuff, so one of those immediately went into my shopping bag.

The next item was also a "snaffle it first time round" buy.  This is 100g cashmere top.  What more can I say, it's gorgeous and I had to have it.  I'm looking forward to dyeing this and blending with some of my other super-duper purchases.

After that lot, I started my second trip round (by now hubby had slunk away back to the car park and sat in the shade of a tree playing his ever-present guitar!). He did take all my bags with him though to put into the car.

A bit of colour was needed next and I can never resist pink!  This is a mix of kid mohair, suri alpaca, Teeswater fleece and tussah silk.  The first of my "easy spins" which I save for those days when I need to spin but don't have any raw fleece prepared.  These are my treat days when I look into the cupboard and pull out something soft and colourful.  Quite often these go with me in the camper van when we're planning to be away for a few days.

This next one is only 35g, but I was looking for "ingredients" for making batts.  Kid mohair again - seems to be a theme this year!  I know I could just have dyed some of the mohair fleece I bought, but the colours drew me in and I was hooked.

These next two bags contained two dyed batts each.  The batts had been carded into a sheet and then hand-painted with dye.  I would have been afraid of felting doing it this way, but these are definitely not that - they're still very pliable and easy to pull apart.  The first one is a mix of Blue Faced Leicester, Merino, and Polwarth with a bit of glitz, baby alpaca, tussah silk and gold angelina thrown in.

The second was Merino and Polwarth again, but this time she'd used brown BFL plus a bit of glitz and tussah silk.

My final bit of colour isn't what it looks like!  I tried to adjust the photo to reflect the true shades, but I'm stuck with it looking brown.  This is actually mostly grey with a bit of brown.  Here it looks mostly brown with a bit of grey!  This might not seem important, but when you hate brown with a vengeance, it matters!!

Oh, and this was 60% merino, 20% silk and 20% yak (I've never spun yak before!)

Last but not least, I needed to top up my batt-making supplies.  So into the shopping bag went 50g each of bamboo, rose and milk fibre.  The last two I've never used before so something new again.

Our next door neighbours came (separately) too, so after our exciting afternoon (well, exciting for Tammy and me!), we all met up in Cahors on our way back south and had an enormous ice cream.  No photos of that, they disappeared too quickly!

Spinning Feathers

Last July I bought this huge batt of fibres at the Festival Le Lot et la Laine.

It was a really crazy batt full of texture and colour.  I have absolutely no idea of the different fibres that made up this batt, but I just loved the colours.  There were all sorts of lumpy bumpy bits that cried out to be spun erratically and un-uniformly.

I managed to save it until December before spinning it, even though I periodically had to go and get it out of the bag and admire and pet it!  Eventually though, I succumbed when I took my spinning wheel to a Christmas market being held in a local cafe.  It was a delight to spin, especially when I realised there were feathers in there.  Imagine - feathers!  I'd often thought about spinning feathers into my yarns, but somehow never got around to it.

This batt could just not be spun smoothly and finely, and I didn't want to do that anyway. However, during the afternoon an older lady called in and sat watching me spin for a while.  She kept telling me I should try and spin more smoothly and evenly and get a nice regular yarn.  I tried telling her it just wasn't possible with these fibres, but I don't think she understood.  I hadn't the heart to tell her I'd spent the last 26 years spinning smoothly and evenly and it was time for a change.

Anyway, this was the bobbin at the end of the day.  Yes, there is a bobbin in there somewhere!  I was determined it was all going to fit on that bobbin.

This then sat around until last week when I finally decided what to spin for the other ply.  I dredged through my bags of World of Wool botany lap waste and came up with these colours, which I thought complimented the fibres I'd already spun.

I fed these onto my drum carder and added some sparkly white tencel for highlight.  This is what it looked like after one pass, but I thought it would benefit from another journey through the tines.

After the second pass I was happy that it would compliment what I'd already spun without stealing the limelight :-

The finished bobbin

And here it is plied together (note the fluffy feather in the centre) :-

210g, 292 yds/223m.

Here's another feather :-

I think this yarn deserves something a bit different, and I may just summon all my courage and have a go at weaving with it.  I've only had my loom 23 months, so it's probably time it had an airing.  In the meantime, I'm so pleased with the way the feathers performed, I need to spin more.  Now, where can I buy lots of feathers?  We live in a duck-producing area of France and have a friend who has a duck farm . . . maybe duck feathers would work?

Faerie Cashmere

This spin included something I've never spun before - 100g cashmere from Hilltop Cloud.  I've had it for months, but was waiting for that special occasion to spin it.  One of those "down" days when I needed a treat!  Not sure if I spun it on a down day, but I obviously thought I'd waited long enough.  Especially when this came out of the cupboard, and I decided it would be the perfect 2nd ply :-

I bought this plait at Le Lot et La Laine in the summer from Faerie Fiber (Toulouse).  It's the first plait of fibre I've ever bought, mainly because they quite often seemed a bit compacted and I worried they might not be too good to spin.  Not so with this one - it was gorgeously soft and very easy to spin.  I loved the colours as soon as I saw it, and when it was still on the stall towards the end of the afternoon, I had to have it.  Unfortunately, having turned my new spinning room cupboards upside down, I can't find the label that came with it which said what the fibres were.  I know I won't have thrown it away - maybe it's still lurking in the old cupboard which still hasn't been emptied.

Because this was a real treat to spin it had to have a worthy partner for the other ply.  Out came the cashmere I'd been saving for that rainy day.  Another brilliant spin, and it contained some of the same colours.  I failed miserably (again) at getting a photo of the raw fibre, but the spun single is on the left with the Faerie Fiber on the right.

The finished yarn (as usual the sparkly bits don't show up on the photo) = 175g and 387 yards/357m - probably enough for a shawl (you can never have too many shawls!)

So now to trawl through patterns on Ravelry to find the perfect one.

P.S.  I finally found the label for the FaerieFiber plait - it was "Extasy" made up of 58.5% Merino,  25% Tussah Silk, 12.5% Bamboo and 4% Stellina.

Le Lot et La Laine

The wool festival Le Lot et La Laine was held again this year in the Lot department of France during the second weekend of July.  It's only held every two years, so I had to go, didn't I?  It always seems to fall in the  middle of the Tour de Fleece, so I made sure I packed my wheel into the camper van so I could carry on while we were away.

As usual, I was too engrossed in looking at all the stalls to take photographs, but I did get a few :-

Someone had spent an awful lot of time on these characters!

I've been saving my pennies for a while now, and was determined to have a good spend. I think I did OK actually.  My first purchase was some lovely mohair top from a lady who'd travelled all the way from Italy for the weekend.  She had lots of gorgeous alpaca too, but I have plenty of that.

I'd been looking for raw mohair actually, but no-one seemed to be selling any, except one lady who had a small amount of delicious kid mohair in the middle of her table.  She gave me a sample and her contact details because she will be shearing her animals in August. Think I might just be ordering some of this.

Then I found some dyed mohair locks that I just couldn't leave behind :-

The only raw fleece I bought was Bizet, which I'd never heard of but have since read that it's generally a meat sheep.  I did notice though that quite a few vendors had used Bizet in their prepared batts, so thought I'd give it a try.  It's not the softest fleece I've ever bought, but it has character, and it was only 6 euros per kilo!

There was one lady there who was selling silk products and I was rather taken by this dyed raw silk.  These are actually degummed cocoons that she's dyed and then just pulled into fluff after drying.  It gave me the idea of doing the same with my cocoons.  So I had to have some of that!

She also had some reels of spun silk which I thought would come in very useful as an additive to my own spinning, so some of that went into the basket as well!

I went a bit batty after that and bought some ready prepared batts for spinning.  I loved the colours in these, and the fact they contain nettle fibre as well as merino, alpaca, silk, soya and the obligatory bit of sparkle.

The next ones took my eye quite early on in my travels and I kept going back to look at them.  In the end I decided to buy them - just in time too, these were the last ones, the rest had all sold.

I loved the "wild" appearance of these batts, but they're ultra soft too.  A few detail shots :-

One of my last purchases was something I've always avoided buying until now - plaited fibre.  I've looked at lots and always thought they felt a bit compacted.  Not so with this one, this feels superbly soft and has that "fluid" feel which makes me think it will be a delight to spin.  This was made by Maria from Toulouse, one of the organisers of the festival.

I love this so much it seemed appropriate to photograph it this way!

I almost missed the dye plants!  Most of the plants on offer I already have in the garden, but I've never grown indigo.  This has gone crazy since I brought it home and repotted it. I'm hoping it will flower and give me seeds for next year.

Last but not least, the trees around the parking area are covered in lichens, and there are always lots of windfall branches on the ground.  I stripped a few of those to bring home for dyeing.

I had a lovely day wandering around in the sunshine (it was really hot in the afternoon) shopping, talking to other spinners and just generally "being there".  Eric was very taken with one of the spinning wheels we saw being used.  It was an Ashford Joy 2 - a folding wheel which has its own shoulder bag.  He thinks I should buy one for when we go away in the camper!  I've never come across so many spinners all in one place here in France before.  I loved every minute, and I can't wait until the next one in 2017.

Absent

You may have noticed I've not been around for a while!  No excuses, BUT . . . over the last three months we have been rather busy - not too busy to blog, just too busy to do anything to blog about!  We finished odd bits and pieces in our new kitchen, the old kitchen was completely knocked out (all the units and cupboards were concrete block), had the old kitchen/sitting room replastered, painted the whole lot, stained all wood, put in a new floor in the new dining area (old kitchen), cleaned and polished the old tiled floor in the sitting area, put a new shower into the guest's toilet room, removed an old shower from the guest bedroom, and made two complete new bedrooms (new floors, paint, etc). You get the picture?  Well, all this had to be finished by 2nd May, and was - just!

So, what happened on 2nd May?  Eric and I had a huge party to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary (which was actually 5th May, but that was a Tuesday, and who wants a party on a Tuesday?).  We had guests coming out of our ears!  Three of Eric's sons arrived with wives/partners - unfortunately Matthew and Rona couldn't come with Brody (grandson) - a friend arrived from Germany (he had to sleep in the camper van as there was no room in the house), my sister slept in the lounge, another friend that we hadn't seen for 23 years came from Holland (he was farmed out to our neighbours), as were Eric's brother and sister-in-law, his nephew and girlfriend.  More friends filled the local b + b.  On the day of the party we had over 70 people, and a friend came and made a huge paella. Fabulous day.  I've included a few photos for you to see - note the size of the paella pan!

Tents being erected in the garden

Paella man arrives

Patrick and his Paella

Easier exit from bedroom than stairs!

Little inserted note : you see that room with the balcony - that's going to be my new craft room!  Can't wait to get that up and running!

Of course there was music :-

and kilts :-

The girls :-

and, of course, there's always one who has one too many!

So, that's probably the biggest party we'll have until our 40th (if we live that long!) - good job too, we were completely exhausted at the end of it.

Now we're having a bit of time off from working, which means more time for hobbies! Spinning wheels await!