NOUS SOMMES LES CHAMPIONS

Le Tour de Fleece est finis! Nous avons une gagnante!



From top to bottom: Corgi Hill Farm BFL in "Candy Corn", chain-plied, 18wpi, 294 yards (between both skeins); Pigeonroof Studios Falkland in "Green Ocean", three-plied, 12-13 wpi, 200 yards; Waterloo Wools Merino/Tencel in "Message in a Bottle", 16-17 wpi, 183 yards with a tiny bit left over. That's nearly 700 yards of spindle-spun yarn!

A winner is me!

Oooh, I won a prize in the TdF! 2oz of chocolate alpaca roving from Corgi Hill Farm! I'm really excited since I never win prizes AND I happen to LOVE spinning alpaca! Now I'll wait anxiously on my porch 'til the mailman arrives and hope that it cools down enough for me to be able to get down to some seriously soft spinning. AnneMarie has some seriously awesome and luxurious blends available. Right now I'm spinning a bunch of merino/camel/silk I bought at the beginning of the summer and it is just so dreamy to handle. I know this alpaca will be gorgeous. Thank you so much! <3

Ugh.

It is eighteen thousand degrees outside. Muggy, sunny, no breeze. Not good knitting weather, and definitely not good spinning weather, either :(

Attack of the Seven-Foot Fleece Monster!

As promised, here are photos of my little fibre station.

 The shelves are about a foot-and-a-half deep, and the whole thing is around seven feet high. On the bottom, just below the edge of the photo, are three deep drawers, the first of which is currently storing my needles and miscellaneous supplies. I like the spinning fibre shelf most of all since my spindles are all hiding in there and it is all just a mess of colour and softness. And the top yarn shelf doesn't look like much, but I've got more hanging out in containers at the back.

There, can you see those little spindley heads poking through?

And here's a bonus cat-in-a-knitting-basket. He's never, ever slept in there before! Isn't he just darling?

This photo also reminds me that I very badly need to vacuum. Ahem.

Summer hatin'

Go away, Summer. You are too hot and not nearly stormy enough for my liking. The only nice thing about you is that my apartment is air conditioned and so cold that I wear knitted socks to bed. But you still suck, Summer.

I have been spinning, spinning, spinning for TdF, although not nearly as much as I had hoped since classes have started up again for me (Latin! Vae mihi!) and I am also working on an independent research project as well as trying to, you know, plan a wedding. I've been in major productivity mode since being back in class every day and I am getting shit done. Last weekend Nathan and I reorganized our entire apartment, moving furniture around and throwing crap out and dumping a lot of stuff on the curb for other people to recycle (seriously, it was ALL gone within 12 hours!) It was an awful lot of hard work, but really rewarding, because now our tiny, tiny apartment has very clearly defined areas -- study, living room, dining, kitchen -- and it flows so nicely. We even have a coffee table like REAL GROWN-UPS. And we have room to put the leaf in the dining table and seat six people around it!

As part of our huge cleaning effort I did an overhaul on my knitting and fibre stash and made room on one of our larger storage units for all of it. Now I have a pretty big fibre station which is wonderfully organized and stores all my stuff very nicely and I like to sit on my armchair and admire it all and sometimes even knit some of it. Pics to follow! :D

My chair is also right next to the a/c vent. Oh, glory!

TdF finished projects.

It has been a pretty productive week for spinning! Keeping up with the TdF crowd is tough, but I've managed to finish or nearly finish a couple of projects I've had on the go for a bit.

I'm almost done my very first handspun sock yarn! It's a chain-plied sw BFL from Corgi Hill Farm. I plied and finished the first 2 or so ounces before the Tour began.

I started on the remaining fleece just the other day (Thursday, maybe?) and finished spinning them up while I was at work last night. Tonight, we ply!

I also finished my four ounces of falkland from Pigeonroof Studios. I've never spun falkland before, but I quite liked it: it has a long-ish staple, but it's not quite as coarse as the corriedale I was spinning last year. It's also quite crimpy, too, and is deliciously squishy once it is spun up. Ms. R. suggested I spin it from the fold, which I sort of regret not doing, but even spinning it with a short draw, worsted-style, it wound up fairly sproingy. I did a true three-ply by splitting the length of top into relatively equal thirds and spinning each, and I had very little leftover. I finished it by giving it a hot water bath and letting the water cool, then doing a short cold-water soak, and then thwacking it a bit so it fulled a little, and I'm pleased with the result. If I were to spin this colourway again, though, I think I would two-ply it because some of the nuances of the colour are a bit lost. Here's the original braid of top as it came

and here's the finished skein:

It's still pretty and I am still happy with it, but the green sort of overpowers everything else and I think I would have liked to have seen a bit more colour definition. Up close, though, it is super pretty. Oh well, another excuse to keep buying PRS fibres. Next time I see this colourway posted, I'm going to snatch it all up <3

A Royal interruption of my regularly scheduled knitting.

I took a bit of a break from schoolwork and knitting and TdF spinning so I could go to Queen's Park with Sophie in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the Queen. Well lemme tell you, we were not disappointed: not only did we see her up close, but she came up to us and talked to us <3





*happy sigh*

TdF, ATTACK!

I've started on my Tour de Fleece spinning, although day one was a bit of a washout due to the fact that it was my partner's birthday and we spent the day running around doing birthday-ish things. But! I did sample a bit of the roving I intend to spin, and having finished that I got to work spinning my actual challenge piece.



It's a 50/50 merino/tencel blend from Waterloo Wools in "Message in a Bottle." It's an awful lot more purple IRL and soft as anything. It should end up as a three-ply fingering-weight sock yarn, but it wants to spin very thin so it's a fight to get my singles just right. That's my Kundert walnut spindle which I love, love, love, love.

I have other projects on the go on my Rav page, but mostly the thing I am most excited about is the pair of socks I am knitting from the toe up AND two-at-a-time! It is managing to keep my interest mostly because it's got the most complicated cable chart I've ever knitted from to date, and also it is satisfying to know that once I am done knitting one sock, I am done BOTH socks. Hooray!