And endings...

I feel kinda like the cat did two weeks ago. A bit bewildered and a bit ashamed, but knowing full well there isn't anything more to do about the situation.



So, the Tour De Fleece ended two days ago. This is what I have finished:



Four measly bobbins of singles. I didn't find time to ply anything, and I didn't even finish one of the four bags of fiber.

Since starting off with my best intentions, I've also finished my summer classes, got a cold, went to Disneyland, planned a birthday and an anniversary celebration, and taken the cat to the vet twice (once to get a cyst removed, and once for accidentally jumping out the window). To answer your questions: Yes, we have screens on our windows. No, they didn't help. The cat is fine now (see below), although he did split his chin open and I think he chipped a tooth.



Life has gotten in the way, and I wish I could blame my slow TDF performance on all that, but the truth is I've been less than faithful to the spinning wheel.



The fabric is from the first shipment of Verb's new club: The Pressed Seam.



I love the club so far, and have taken half of a machine quilting class at Verb so I can avoid little slip-ups that I made on my first quilt in subsequent projects. But lest you start to think I should change the name of this blog to "Starrycraft", which to my mind doesn't flow at all, I do have some actual knitting content! In addition to being distracted from the wheel by sewing, these were far more interesting than brown wool by the last week of the tour:



I finished this one at the annual San Francisco Ravelry Meetup. It's some precious Gothsocks yarn in the "Goblin King" colorway. This yarn was an incredible hassle to get (the Rainy Days and Wooly Dogs shop is almost always sold out), but so worth it. The striping is fantastic, the base yarn is awesome, and the solid black Koigu KPM is a good match for heels and toes if you can't get your hands on a skein of all-black Gothlings yarn. I've got another skein of this yarn, and it might just hop right onto the needles after I finish this pair.

All in all, I only feel a little bad about not doing as much as I hoped to do for TDF. The point of the tour is to challenge yourself and (for a lot of folks) spin more often than they normally do. Could I have spun more? Sure. Did I spin for an above-average amount of time this month because it was TDF? Absolutely. If it hadn't been for the tour, I would have plodded along much more slowly on this project. So although I'm not going to go so far as to say that I've accomplished my goals (I reckon I only have about 1/3 of the yarn I need for a Husbeast sweater), I can still say with confidence that I did well this year.

Hopefully I'll be able to make more reasonable goals one of these years!