TdF23, D+3 – Well, my FB is blowing up…

I posted to the Tour de Fleece 2023 Facebook group about my Shapwick Blaise wheel and I think it’s had the most engagement of anything I’ve ever posted on social media outside my Quora content!

She is an absolute beauty, but there’s so little information about this wheel that I’m slightly despairing of ever putting her in working order. I found someone via Google who had recently (May ’23) reconditioned a Herring Gordon, but their website no longer exists apart from a few scrapes on the Wayback Machine. Frank Herring is still in business, but the website doesn’t even mention their history of producing these beautiful and unusual wheels… I will email them, but I’m almost as fond of email as I am of cold-callers so it will take some time for me to work up the courage to engage.

I’m on #TeamWoW, World of Wool‘s TdF team, and today being Stage 4 (I think?) the challenge is to spin some Shetland. I got another delivery this morning from WoW with Shetland wool – the Woodland Collection, and the Breed Discovery pack – but I’ve decided to spin from a colour pack of Shetland top that I picked up at Woolfest instead. I picked the dark-ish fawn colour for a change of pace – I have lots of black, grey, and white fibre to work on, but not much in the brown spectrum. I think the Shetland word for this colour is Moorit. I also have dark brown, fawn, and Musket, a greyish mid-brown. The plan was to spin the whole 25g, then ply it. Here’s the whole thing, wrapped around my homemade wrist distaff:

And the Fates must have been smiling on me, because it went to plan! I cannot stress how rarely this happens for me. I am a disaster magnet. The house could have burned down, I could have been struck by lightening, the wool might have had hatching tarantula eggs in it – none of these happened. The phone didn’t even ring! Okay, I cheated a bit – instead of plying on my wheel, I used my ancient Daruma Home Twister, a ball-winder which has a plying attachment. It’s not ideal, so the yarn is not perhaps as tightly plied as it should be – I don’t care. Today, I have done what I set out to do, even if the end result is kinda half-arsed. Gotta say, too, this Shetland top has survived brilliantly for being shoved in a paper bag in my junk room for years. It fed beautifully through my hands, and there’s only the tiniest dot of waste – you can see it at the bottom of the balling attachment:

Allons-y!