Special thanks to Van Waffle for taking the pictures in this post.

Back in November I took part in the Sheep to Shawl competition at the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto.

My guild had two teams in the event this year. Team A was made up of the seasoned members who’ve done the competition for many years. Team B was made up of first timers and others who have been in the competition before. This was my first year in the competition, so I was on the second team.

There were ten teams in total with sixty people competing. It was awe inspiring to see that many weavers and spinners all going for glory!

Both of my guild’s teams did well. Team A placed in fourth and my team came in third!

You can follow this link to Facebook to see my team receiving our third place ribbons. From left to right we are: Hazel, Barbara, Kelli, myself, Melanie and Susan. Susan was the weaver for the team.

Both our shawls were made with hand spun and hand dyed warp. The yarn for the warp was spun by many guild members over the summer and early fall. We were given bags of fibre with a sample card of singles to spin the final three ply yarn for the warps. The fibres were various blends of Dorset wool and mohair. Some of the yarn was left white and most of it was dyed by Donna at Wellington Fibres. I don’t remember the breed of the sheep fleece provided to us to spin at the fair. It was a fairly fine and crimpy fibre.

The warp for my team was made up of white, light blue, and variegated dark blue / purple skeins.

The finished shawl measures 18.5 inches wide, 70 inches long woven and has 4 inches of fringe at each end.
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The shawl was woven on a Schacht 8 harness Baby Wolf loom.

After the competition was finished we got to rest for a couple hours before the awards ceremony and fleece auction.

The auction was a lot of fun. I ran into a few other spinners from Toronto I know and it was great catching up with them.

I was wanting to get a fine grey fleece for doing blending and dyeing experiment. Alas, it was not to be. There was a very nice 3 pound fleece that would have been perfect, but someone else wanted it more than I did. I stopped bidding at $30 / lb. I couldn’t justify that much!

I did come away with a very nice fleece though. I got the Reserve Champion Fleece for $7 / lb. This is a wonderful fine white fleece from Allison Brown of Norwood, Ontario. She is creating her own Rambouillet cross and it is quite amazing. It has all the fineness and crimp of the Rambouillet with a long 4.5 – 5 inch staple length. The fleece went home with Donna of Wellington Fibres to be processed into roving. I’m really looking forward to that!

They also auctioned off most of the shawls from the competition. The first team from my guild put theirs in and got $165 for it! I helped get the bid up on that, as I really liked that shawl as well. My team kept our shawl to be auctioned off by our guild.

After not getting my guilds shawl I bid on a couple others and got the shawl of the 7th place team from Belleville Weavers and Spinners. I haven’t washed it yet, so once that is done I’ll post pictures of that.

On Wednesday night my guild held their December pot luck meeting. Part of the meeting is a silent auction of various items. The shawl was one of those items and I was lucky enough to get it! One of the members of our team had taken it, washed it and braided the fringes after the competition. It came out very soft with lots of bounce and drape. The weft yarn didn’t bloom as much as was expected, so the sett on shawl is looser than they were aiming for. Nonetheless it is a wonderful shawl and it did keep my head warm for those pictures outside!