TdF round up, Bendigo, and Etsy!

Welcome to Fibre Arts Friday! I'm sorry I missed posting last week, got a bit carried away with TdF and other stuff... anyway, this will be a longish post so please bear with me :)

First up, Tour de Fleece has drawn to an end last weekend, it was my first TdF and I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially with Team Wonder - such a wonderful group of like minded people. Thank you everyone on the team, I wouldn't have had so much fun without you, and the beautiful creations are so inspirational.

Here are my achievements during the tour: a total of 7 skeins and 1620 meters, not bad for a rookie :D

Before the TdF started I'd set myself some challenges, posted here, these were:

• spin 100% alpaca (I only spun alpaca in a blend before)
• intentionally spin sock yarn
• perfecting the woollen long draw technique
• spin from stash

How I did: 

• I can honestly say all my spinnings were from my stash that's at least three months old. 
• I spun two 100% alpaca skeins (top right in the collage), the natural coloured one was from alpaca fleece and the brown one was some mill end rovings (actually only one single was spun during the tour). Out of these two I prefer spinning from the fleece. 
• I "intentionally" spun two sock yarns (first & second in the right column). The first, dark red, was spun into a thin single and Navajo plied, it did come out at a fingering weight. The second, candy sherbert, was spun into three singles and plied, also at a fingering weight. The verdict? you will have to wait till I knit some socks with them and give some wearing ;)
• I practiced and practiced and practiced woollen spun: the first alpaca, the two in the left column, and the bottom right, were all spun using the woollen technique. Apart from the alpaca which was spun from rolags, all the others were spun from the fold. I DO love woollen spun, and I got better at it, but far from perfection. So I need to practice some more...

Last weekend was also the Bendigo Sheep & Wool Show,  the weather was terrible, it was cold and wet and miserable. But the spirit was high, my friend Rachael did a fantastic job manning the booth for three days, she told me that about 1/3 of my stock sold. That's not bad for a first timer, consider the allocated booth was in the very end row of buildings.

We went up to Bendigo on Sunday, I helped a little bit at the booth and made some sales, yippee! And of course fun was had by all as you can see from the photos here :)

Elli was stuck at the Ashford booth for ages playing on their knitter's loom, we met Mr. Richard Ashford himself, who was doing a really good job trying to get us walk away with that loom and a matching bag. I felt a bit mean not buying it for Elli, but I'd set my heart on a cricket loom - thanks to Andrea's raving review :) ... we will be getting the cricket loom when we visit America in January, can't wait!

And the last but not the least, I have finally managed to list something in my Etsy shop: Cat's Cauldron Fibres.

At moment it's mainly my handspun, once the weather gets better I will be dyeing again. So stay tuned :)

Oh yes, you might have noticed that my blog has a new look, I've adopted a more traditional format because Vivian brought it to my attention that sometimes the comments don't load properly in the other format. Fingers crossed it should work now!

Thanks for dropping by, there is more fibre arts fun at Wisdom Begins in Wonder. Indulge your creative side and join the party!