For those of you unfamiliar with the tour de fleece (have you been hiding under a rock?), is you spin everyday that the cyclists participate in the Tour de France. You get to rest on the two days that you rest. Most people also set a personal goal. The idea is to challenge your spinning ability and develop new skills. A lot of knitter also find that it can be hard to make time to spin, and this is a nice way of building up a stash of hand spun.
River croft farm is run by Joe and Judy Miller, it is located in Starks, Maine. They specialize in fleeces for handspinners. Most of their sheep are coated (meaning they wear little jackets in the winter to prevent them from getting hay and straw in their coats) and they do an amazing job of properly shearing the fleece and caring for the animals. I have been very impressed with the quality of fleeces that I have seen from them before at Common Ground Fair and Fiber Frolic, but since I was unable to attend either of those fairs this year I decided to go right to the source and buy one.
We had a really fun trip up, Bristol was very helpful when picking out a fleece for me, and manage to find a great one for herself too (which she totally 100% NEEDED). I came back with a Moorit Ewe fleece that is about 5.5 pounds. Moorit refers to a colour, not a breed, but Judy thought it was likely a Merino/long wool cross, so it is likely similar to corridale or polwarth. In any case it's beautiful, soft, and I loves it.
This morning I filled a Tupperware basin on my deck and I have laid the fleece out to soak and ferment for at least 3 days (although if you can wait a week it's better) to get out as much suet and dirt out, after that I will do a hot wash and get as much lanolin out as possible.
Check out the crimp on it, totally drool worthy. Now all I have to do is complete the agonizing wait to start spinning with it.
1 comments:
I'm still dreaming about that merino!
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