Tour de Fleece 2024 — I'm spinning Charollais. What are you spinning?

this July for tour to fleece my goal is to experiment with a new to me wool fiber and spin up this little bump of charolet to see what it can do welcome to the Sweet Georgia Channel I'm Felicia from Sweet Georgia and in this video I would like you to consider spinning some new to you spinning fiber this summer so every summer for I don't know how many Summers During the period that the tour to France runs there is a parallel event called called the tour to fleece during which Spinners will spin now during the weeks of the tour to fleece Spinners might set themselves a challenge maybe you want to spin the most yardage you've ever spun or maybe you want to spin every single day that the tour is running for me for the past couple of years uh it was just really about trying to see if I could spin maybe even just 10 minutes a day for as many days as I could manage during the T to fleece mostly I was getting my spinning time in the evenings just before bedtime spinning on my Saxony wheel or even my e spinner now July is a great time for getting into a handspun habit and then you will have handspun yarn later on to knit up either into hats or mitts or weave into scarves for the fall and winter now in recent conversations in our Zoom meetings for the school and for Discord I realize that I have been almost exclusively spinning my favorite fiber blend which is the blueface Lester and silk so the bfl and silk I've been spinning that almost exclusively and I realize now that my hands haven't really touched or felt or tried any other wool fiber for a long time now and so this year for the tur of fleece my goal is to spin some Fiber that I have never ever tried before and so the fiber I'm going to spin is a sheep breed called charet now here at Sweet Georgia we dyed up some of this charet into a super fun colorway that we're calling summer sunsets and this is our special limited edition colorway that we are dying just for tour of fleece this year and you can find this online on our website at shop. jorger yarns.com I'm actually really pleasantly surprised that the shower light dyed in such clear colors in my mind I thought that it would be a little bit hard to dye or it would maybe make for a really faded color result but these colors are really great they are soft and clear but still bright they're still showing a lot of vibrant color so charlet is a sheep breed that originates from Eastern France and it was developed by crossbreeding the sheep that were indigenous to that area with British long wool breeds like Lester and cwal sheep and the goal here was to develop a dual-purpose sheep breed that would be good for meat production as well as for wool now cholet might be classified more as a meat sheep and the wool itself is classified as a down breed so we can pull out a few fibers to see sort of what the staple length of this is so this is basically what we're looking at here so looking at the staple length of the showet It's relatively short it's not a very very long fiber It's relatively short so these fibers are great for spinning Woolen style using either a long draw or you can do a short backwards draw so let's look a little bit closer at the staple length or the fiber itself it's very elastic it's very bouncy and springy very poofy it doesn't have a very very strong crimp to it but you can see oh it has like a lot of spring a lot of Bounce even though Chevrolet is relatively fine the fiber itself is very strong end durable and so it produces finished products that should wear very well and endure a lot of wear and tear so I've always been told that down breed or meat sheep produce fiber that is great for hardwearing socks my approach to this little bump of fiber is going to be spinning it into three ply fingering weight yarn for cranking into handspun socks so in order to loosen up the fiber a little bit I am going to split this fiber into three parts and then I'm going to take each length and then run it through the DI and the Hand cards as I've learned recently this year and then we're going to spin each one to a bobin so I have been really enjoying the colors that come out of the yarn when you sort of split the fiber into three sections three long strips and then you try to get theor colors to realign by plying them back together and so my goal with this is going to aim for spinning 32 wraps per inch for the singles and then make a three ply traditional three ply yarn with a finished wraps per inch of approximately 15 and so that will allow me to crank it on my circular socket pting machine using 60 stitches or 64 stitches around I have compiled all the details about how I generally spin my yarn and Crank That handspun yarn into socks um and I put it all into a PDF guide called knitting CSM socks with handspun and it includes all my notes about the handspun the measurements of the yarn the CSM cylinders the links to the supplies the tools everything so you can download that guide by going to the link in the description box below so that is what I'm am off to do I would love to hear if you have plans for t to fleece this summer if you have a goal to spin for yardage or if you have a goal to spin to develop a habit of spinning every day or if you want to join me in spinning a new fiber that you haven't tried before we have a good very active running conversation about tur of fleece and about spinning going on in our sweet Georgia Discord server and if you want to explore and learn how to spin many different sheep breeds we have an amazing and super in-depth course taught by Rachel Smith of wool and spinning and it's called spinning sheep breeds and it's on the school of Sweet Georgia you can find all our spinning courses at school ofet georgia.com spinning now to go along with that course we also produced these sheep breed kits where you can have sort of a taste of many different wool fibers and so this one this is the down and down like wools kit it has Chevrolet chevet and suffk wool in here we also have a long wool kit and this one has gotland Kent robney and wydale wool in it we also have a fine wool kit that has Finn Marino and roule and also a primitive and double-coated wool kit that has Icelandic Jacob in Shetland so maybe exploring different sheep breeds could be a goal for your tour to fleece or spinning challenge so that is it for this week I would love to continue this conversation about what you're spinning or what you're planning to spin for tour to fleece let me know in the comments below if you have ever spun cholet or if you have a new sheep breed that you would be interested in learning about thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one all right bye for now this is going to be nice and fun to spin

Channel: SweetGeorgia

Views: 2,566

Keywords: sweetgeorgia yarns, knitting podcast, knitting vlog, knitting podcasts on youtube, hand-dyed yarn, felicia lo, sweet georgia yarns, knitting yarn, knitting podcasts canada, sweet georgia podcast, hand-dyed yarns, school of sweetgeorgia, hand dyed yarn, fibre arts, knitting vlogs, knitting blog, fibre arts vlog, sweet georgia yarn youtube, yarn stash, hand dyed yarn techniques, weaving vlog, learn to weave

Id: irvsRK1davE

Length: 7min 7sec (427 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2024