Tour de Fleece progress so far: 1.4 ounces of singles spun in two 45 minute sessions and enough rolags to keep me spinning at that rate for a few more days. I am down to my last storage bin of this fleece. The end of it is actually in sight.
After several years cheering my friends from the sidelines, I decided to participate in the fun this year. I joined Team Rookie, Team Spindle, and Team Spin for Peace. My only goal is to spin for at least 30 minutes every day including any days that I am traveling (I have one trip planned for July so far). Since I want to finish spinning the fleece I have been hand processing, I expect to spend at least 30 minutes prepping wool for spinning every day, too.
The fleece is from Elihu Farm in upstate New York. I bought it at the Massachusetts Sheep and Wool Festival in 2004. I enjoy spindle spinning and hand carding, it is the picking and wheel plying that challenge me. The fleece is a bit tippy and sometimes fragile, so I'm pulling of the tips and opening the locks by hand to prep them for carding. In order to end up with nice big skeins, I have been winding 3 or 4 spindle cops onto a nostepinde and wheel plying 2 of those balls. Today, I plyed the 4 balls of singles I've spun in the past year or so and made enough rolags for about 2 hours of spinning.
L to R:Washed locks, rolags, 200 grams of yarn. As always click for big.
This is a good start to my rookie Tour. Tomorrow I plan to spin a bit and try to finish prepping the current bin of locks. I'll also spend most of the morning on the sofa with a sock watching the Wimbledon Gentlemen's Final.
Tonight D and I are headed into the District to watch the fireworks from the roof of his building. We'll be about three blocks north of the center of the Reflecting Pool. I saw the fireworks crew setting up on Wednesday while visiting monuments with my sister's family.
So, we rent our townhouse. Everyone else on our block owns theirs and spend a lot of time cultivating their postage stamp gardens. Last summer, ours stuck out like an uncultivated black thumb. I am unwilling to invest in prettier shrubs or perennials for a garden I will leave soon. I travel far too much to cultivate anything that requires more effort than plant and ignore. Back in March, I took shameful advantage of Mom's visit and put her to work helping me weed, plant a few pansies, and mulch our tiny garden. Then it rained a lot in April and May and the pansies exploded.
I am pleased with the results. Our garden is still under-cultivated relative to the neighbors, but it no longer looks so out of place.
So, I have been home for over a month, and I never did post the vacation sock contest results. Work and visitors took over for most of June. I did not travel much for a change, I just spent so much time attached to my computer during the workday that I had no desire to fire it up at night. Then we had visitors in and out for the past two weeks—which also required a fair amount of preparatory cleaning and organizing since kids slept in the wool room. First, my college friends Rachel and Hilary and their three boys visited for a long weekend. Then, my sister and her family arrived for a week. I had lots of fun entertaining all those kids, but I have no idea how their parents can do it all day every day. Just a few days wore D and me out.
To answer the big question, I knit about 1/2 of one sock on vacation. I also added a few inches to the summer shell while we shuttled across central Maui getting from our home base at Kanapali to fun activities. Amy was right—there is just too much fun stuff to do in Hawaii to spend time knitting. I knew that, but for some reason I thought I would spend more time knitting at the beach and pool and less time reading. I think I read about 10 novels on the trip (close to one a day on the days we lazed around). The random number generator picked 1 and 8, so the first and last entrants Susan and Angela win.
Amy wins her choice of blue or pink silk yarn from Japan—I'm keeping the other color. Susan and Angela both win a lovely little change purse (also from Japan) that is perfect for storing knitting notions. I found both the yarn and the purses at Yarn & Friends in Honolulu.
Thanks to everyone for commenting and being patient while I completely ignored the blog during June. And here's a new contest for July: I'm closing in on 300 comments. The 300th commenter will win a prize from my bin of handspun yarn.
