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!

Beginnings!

I'm excited about starting three new things right now. First, on the spinning front: Yesterday was the first day of the 2011 Tour De Fleece, and although I didn't make a strong start, I have big plans for today and the rest of the tour. Here's my progress from Day #1:



I spun as much as I could yesterday morning before we had to leave for a wedding. I'm making up my TDF goals as I go along, and I might only get to this one.



The husbeast has been hinting that he'd like a sweater. It's a little bit funny because normally he never gets cold, but I think he'll need one if we ever end up on another camping trip like the last one. Since I've got more than 5 pounds of fiber in there, that will be plenty for a large man-sized sweater. Goal #1 is to spin as much of this fleece as I can before going crazy-bored out of my mind. If I have to, I'll sacrifice a bobbin or two for my sanity and spin some Hello Yarn fiber.

The second thing I'm excited about starting is exploring sewing. The quilt, as I hinted earlier, is finished:



I hand-stitched the binding to the backside of the quilt during the drive to and from Yellowstone, and finished it up when we got home.



It was a fabulous first project, and made me realize that several guidelines that I like to tell beginning knitters hold true for beginning seamstresses as well. A simple pattern executed with beautiful materials and solid tools will be far more pleasing than a project done with cheap tools or materials that you don't love. The simple rectangles were very forgiving when my cutting was less than perfect, and although the quilting lines tend to meander a bit, I can't resist running my hands over the smooth surface and smiling at the tiny owls on the underside of the fabric.



We put the finished quilt on the bed immediately, and it hasn't come off since. I can hardly wait to make another one.

The third thing I'm super excited about starting is this:



The book arrived on Tuesday, and the yarn was formerly a very ill-fitting cardigan. I've read through about one-third of the introductory material, and I've already learned a great deal. I think the first sweater I'm going to swatch for will be Cria, the short-sleeved version.

What have you all started recently that you're excited about?

I'm starting to miss knittting...

But I don't think I can stop spinning yet. I'm pretty sure I won't hit my goal of spinning half the stash, but I'll get close to spinning all the fiber I set aside a month ago. The problem is that I didn't take into account that at the end of the tour, I would simultaneously be inundated with grading (it's the last week of summer session) and getting ready to attend a wedding in another country that takes place on the second-to-last day of the tour. I did get quite a bit accomplished last weekend, though. I finally got sewing thread to ply the Sanguine Gryphon wool/silk yarn, and I've got all six bumps of Pigeonroof Studios fiber spun into singles. I'm inspired by this yarn, so the singles are rather fat and low twist.

I'd planned on having a marathon plying session last night for the challenge day, but it was all I could do to not fall asleep in my dinner plate after class. I managed to stay awake long enough to get the singles off the bobbins and into center-pull balls, but not long enough to take photos. The spindle project will be coming with me on the weekend, but even if I finish the plying tomorrow (our flight leaves in the afternoon, and I still have final exams to grade! See how my brain loves to torture me?) and the spindling in transit, I'll still be falling about 8 ounces short of my goal. Once we get back, I'm off for two weeks until the fall semester begins so I'll have time to baste up my sweater and gasp wash some more fleece!

Tour in Tahoe

We spent the weekend up at a friend's cabin near South Lake Tahoe, and although I didn't have a very large amount of time to spin, I did get a few things off the bobbins before we left and squeezed in some more spindle time while we were up there.

These got wound off and washed last night:



Here we have two singles yarns: the Ripe Olives Merino/Mohair from Hello Yarn, and 2 ounces of Dew BFL from Tactile Fiber Arts. They're both going to remain singles, so we've got 6 ounces of fiber to cross off the list! Since I've finished one spindle project, this got started up in the woods:



It's the 3.4 ounce batt from Aunt Janet's fiber mill, and I'm doing an airy, low-twist lumpy bumpy singles that will probably get navajo-plied for some bulk. No project in mind yet, it will depend on how rough the finished and washed yarn is. It was lots of fun to spin this out on the deck in the warm sunshine, and compare the greeny-blue of the fiber to the green of the pines and the blue of the sky. We had a great time hanging out with friends surrounded by nature. Some highlights:









Today I have lots of chores and unpacking to take care of, and it's officially a rest day for the Tour. However, I'm hoping to get at least one bobbin of Pigeonroof singles done so I can stay on target. I may need to convert one of my spinning projects from wheel to spindle so that I have enough to keep me spinning every day of the tour even when I'm not at home.

Quick Tour Update

So I still haven't gotten plying thread, but I've started spinning a bobbin of Hello Yarn Wool/Mohair in the "Ripe Olives" Colorway:



I got inspired by another Raveler's project, who knit a lovely lace shawl by splitting off individual colors from a multicolored roving and spun one long color transition. So over the weekend I spent a bit of time making these on my handcards:



I think I'll leave the yarn as a single, so I don't have to worry about one more thing to ply (or with splitting the fiber any more than I already have). I also got about halfway through the Tactile BFL on one of my drop spindles, and began the second half. I was a silly nilly and didn't read the Verdigris pattern too carefully before beginning to spin, and my singles are too thick to make a two-ply. On the other hand, I think this fiber will look pretty good as a single and in the pattern.

In knitting news, I've finished the Rainbow Brite socks. I haven't been able to accost the significant other to take my picture with them on, so we did it at knit night on Tuesday: check it out here on the Pink Viking's flickr. Plus, I am just about ready to start sewing up Halcyon! I think I'm going to baste the pieces together (hopefully this weekend) and decide if I want to add an extra cable repeat on the sleeves. I think I'll have enough yarn to do so, and if it's the difference between wearing the sweater more often, then it'll be worth the wait!

First Day Blues

Yesterday we had a big ol' 4th of July bash to attend in the afternoon, so I got up early to spin some and get myself off to a good start. I kinda hoped I'd be able to spin and blog the spinning before we left, but it was not to be (I'm sure nobody wanted to read the post that was forming in my brain around 1AM last night). So here's my first day's progress, the Arabian Nights wool silk all prepped:



And spun into thick-and-thin singles:



It only took me about an hour to spin both bobbins, and maybe half an hour of prep and wheel cleaning beforehand. It makes me think that perhaps my problem with spinning (or knitting, for that matter) is that I no longer have large chunks of time to devote to a single activity. By the time I got to the second bobbin, pulling a big tuft of fiber into the drafting zone every now and then was becoming second nature, and it was a real treat to get two whole bobbins worth of yarn in such a short time, when my last two spinning projects have been laceweight yarns!

Today we're visiting with family and probably not returning home until dinnertime, so it's a spindle grading day. I have a stack of homework that needs to get done, and I'm bargaining with myself that if I get through the whole pile before going home, then I can allow myself to spin all evening. I am also allowed to look for a beautiful shiny binding thread to ply the singles with while I'm out and about today.

Anticipation and More Tour Training

So I've got my 6 bobbins all emptied this morning, and I realized that I desperately need to blog/knit/do something to keep myself from starting my Tour de Fleece spinning too early! Yesterday I finished up one spinning project that I started a while ago, and am very excited about:



This is "The Silent Undergrowth" Falklands wool from the Verb fiber club. I'm very glad I didn't decide to make this project part of my Tour de Fleece goal, because it was a bit of a time suck and I wanted to take it slow with the spinning. I mentioned that I knew the color was perfect for Anne Hanson's latest Twist Collective shawl pattern, but when I spun up the first 3 ounces, I didn't really get enough yardage to do the full shawl. So I put the word out there on Ravelry that I was looking for more, and would trade another club shipment so I could spin a double-dose for Artichaut. Another awesome Raveler came through, and now I have just over 1,000 yards of yarn! The weight of my yarn is actually somewhere between the two weights the pattern calls for. It's written for either a fingering weight yarn at 100 yards per ounce with a size 7 needle, or a laceweight yarn at 312 yards per ounce with a size 3 needle. Mine worked out to be around 180 yards per ounce. So as far as the weight goes, I'm going to pretty much split the difference and knit in size 5 needles, and just knit until I run out of yarn. The second skein of yarn is drying as I type, so maybe I'll cast this on once the knitting on the Halcyon is finished.

In other news, I wanted to officially announce my intentions known for tomorrow's grand beginning. As per yesterday's preliminary rules, I have three categories of spinning that I will accomplish as part of this year's Tour De Fleece:



1. Spin for specific projects. I have earmarked 25.4 ounces of Pigeonroof Studios fiber in various wools (BFL, Merino, SW Merino, and Shetland) and various colorways (Millefiore, Circus, Calla, Persimmon, and Cornucopia), to be spun in a worsted/heavy worsted weight for the Danish Heather Shawl. Additionally, the Sanguine Gryphon wool/silk blend will become another thick & thin yarn so I can have a deliciously bouncy Morning Surf scarf all my own.

2. Spin on a spindle, so I can keep spinning every day of the tour even when I don't have my wheel. There are two projects here, one with a project in mind and the other without. I'll be spinning my 2 ounces of Tactile BFL (in "Dew") for the Verdigris pattern on my Cascade Ranier spindle, and the lovely 3.4-ounce jewel-colored batt from Aunt Janet's Fiber Mill on the good old dependable Maggie spindle.

3. Spin for the joy of spinning. Here my sub-goal is also to spin up more of my Hello Yarn fiber, so I've got three 4-ounce bundles to be spun as the mood takes me, without committing to a specific project. Two are club fiber shipments, and one is some merino/mohair blend that I was lucky enough to get during a shop update.

The overarching goal of all this is to reduce my stash, and this is where my declaration gets really scary. If I spin all this, I'm cutting the fiber stash in half. Yup. Half. Whew. Is it just me, or is it a little stuffy in here? Maybe I need to sit down. Pre-draft some fiber into little bundles for spinning tomorrow morning. See you in the morning, I kinda like this blogging every day thing!

Le Tour de Fleece est Fini!

Well, I'm off to Rothenburg ob der Tauber this morning for my last trip out while in Germany. I finished washing my yak fiber on Friday, and it dried all day yesterday. Here's the finished product:



If you're looking at the color and thinking, "Hmmm, that's a bit different than what it looked like last time...", you've got good eyes (or you trust your computer monitor more than I do!). The yarn got a soak in lukewarm water with a little bit of shampoo (since I don't have any wool wash here in Germany), then two rinses to make sure the water ran clear. When I got the skein out, I thought it looked a little darker, but figured that was just because it was wet. When it finished drying, however, I was fairly certain that the pale tan areas had significantly changed color, turning a more pinkish color. I got the skinny from Kristine, and she explained that this was probably a confluence of the cochineal dye making friends with new parts of the yak fiber, which is finicky to wash.

I still love the yarn, because now it has a completely different dimension. The new colors remind me of red clay earth. The label has gone missing, but comparing to other AVFKW colorways, I'm fairly certain this is the "Headlands" colorway. Either way, it definitely reminds me of the Marin Headlands. I drive over the Golden Gate Bridge every other day to go to work, and most days I get a nice view of the headlands.

Anyway, back to the spinning! I got about 210 yards (195 meters) out of 2 ounces, so this is a fingering to light fingering yarn, just right for the mitts! I'm really glad I decided to not do the Navajo ply, because I wouldn't have gotten enough yardage for the intended project. Now that the yarn is dry, I think I have my airplane project figured out! It'll be on bamboo DPNs, so I should be fine with the security folks. Or I might start another sock. I haven't decided. But I'm ready for le maillot jeune!

Tour de Fleece Update

I realize I've gotten a bit mopey on the blog lately, but in all truth, I will miss the freedom I've experienced here this summer. I don't really have any commitments or constraints here, other than not spending too much money (easy to do if you forget that the Euro is closer in value to the British Pound than the US dollar!). The most difficult decision I have to make is what I should eat for lunch and the only deadlines are self-imposed knitting or spinning ones.

Originally we weren't going to go anywhere special this weekend, as it's the significant other's birthday and we'll be celebrating with a good old American bbq in the park on Saturday. It's my last weekend in Germany, though, so we're throwing a train trip together for Sunday night, which means that I have to finish my Tour de Fleece spinning a little earlier than I anticipated. Luckily, when you're not procrastinating in the first place, it's easy to pick up the slack! I got the yak singles finished yesterday morning while listening to back episodes of the CraftLit podcast (I'm working my way through A Tale of Two Cities).



The first time I ended a color repeat and saw the dark blue against the light cream, I got a little panicked because I didn't immediately love it. But seeing the colors blend a little more as I wound the singles onto the TP cores put me a little more at ease. It looks a little better to my eye now, and they've been resting overnight. As soon as I finish posting this, it's plying time! I'll let the plied yarn sit overnight again, wash it tomorrow, and hopefully have time to photograph the finished skein and post before we leave on Sunday.

I'm also still plugging away at the Honeybee stole. I finished the first half, and spent a good hour doing battle with the provisional cast on. I think my cast-on row got slightly felted, and it was hard to find the one dropped stitch because the yarn was so fuzzy! I'm reasonably happy with the joining row, but I've lost some momentum on this project. I want to cast on something new, with German yarn, before I go home. Maybe. I really ought to find a project that's airplane friendly, since the Honeybee stole isn't. I keep seeing the PERFECT project for my new Wollmeise, and it's hard to make up my mind. I just scored a win with the German postal system, because I got a skein of Hello Yarn sock yarn from Mrs. B while she was destashing. It's amazingly colorful, and I love it. Reminds me of old quilts, fruit salad, and insanely bright swimsuits my sister and I used to have as children. I'll have to think a bit about what pattern will make me happy with this yarn. Here's a close-up (color turned out not so great on the full skein shot).



I'd like to digress into a little meta-blogging now, and I have no more yarn or Germany news for today, so you can unplug if you'd like. I feel like I could get to a point where I get stuck with blogging again, although I'm in a rhythm that I really like right now. During this trip, I've been blogging about twice a week: one travel post, and one fiber post, typically. There are a few stories about our trip that I'm sitting on for various reasons, even though they are perfect blog post material. One thing I've learned so far is that I don't think I'll ever be a post-a-day blogger. It's too easy for me to be a hermit while I'm blogging, and not just because it takes a lot of time. But I don't want to be a hermit. Blogging is great, and I'm not going to stop, but it doesn't exactly help me get exercise or fresh air or relax my eyes. While I'm blogging, I can't read, knit, spin, pay any serious attention to podcasts, or get any other work done. It's interesting, because I consider myself a queen of multitasking, but right now the most I can do is have background music on while I work on a post. Blogging is a multitasking activity in and of itself. There's the photo-taking, the editing and uploading of photos, the composition, the editing of writing, wrestling with html, and fickleness of the internet all in that one little verb. I fall into a little blogging Alice hole, and I hate to leave a post half-way finished. The best times to blog are after dinner (especially if I don't have to clean up the dinner dishes), or on weekend mornings. Basically, whenever I have nothing else to do for the next few hours.

I think this might be something I need and/or want to get past, the idea that I must sit down to blog and must not arise until I have a completed post. As I said before, I currently have three or four post topics rattling around in my head (they are mainly travel-related), but I'm finding it difficult to know where to insert them or how to phrase things since they aren't up-to-the-minute current anymore. The other half of the problem is that I might drop down to one post a week again once I get back to work, which is not necessarily what I want. I remember finding it difficult to post more than once a week last semester, and perhaps training myself to blog more in bits and pieces will help me stay at two posts a week. Anyway, I'm babbling a bit, but this is helping me sort out my ideas, which is part of the reason I started blogging in the first place. :)

Tour de Fleece Update II: The Plan, The Burn, and The Language

Hooray! I finally got the Intertron to work in my favor, and was able to force-feed some photos down its wiry gullet. Here's a shot of my Tour de Fleece spinning, at the end of Day 2 (I am still about three days behind on photos).



The colors are not that great in this photo, because I am working off a foreign laptop and at this point, I'm just happy I have photos at all to show you. Behind the drop spindle I have spread out roughly half of the yak locks, in a vague color order. I'm spinning darkest blue to lightest (grayest) blue, then the dark brown-ish ones, then increasingly light tan. I will either navajo or andean ply, based on whether I can get enough yardage from a 3-ply. My bet is that my singles won't stay as thin as they should, and I will end up doing a two-ply. If I get a two-ply, I'm not sure what I'll do about the color changes. We'll have to wait and see. But the goal is to spin fingering weight.

I've been spinning about two locks per day, mostly in the mornings right after breakfast while our traveling companions finish getting ready for the day, except for yesterday. Yesterday I spun in the evening with a glass of rose wine out on our hosts' tiny but incredibly charming balcony. This has become one of my must-haves for a living space. Right now the list includes easy parking, clothes washer/dryer (or at least hookups), dishwasher, and a balcony. Can you tell I live in a big city? :) Anyway, yesterday I didn't spin in the morning because we decided to go to the beach and wanted to get out there for the hottest part of the day, so the swimming would be nice. The Mediterannean was a gorgeous clear blue-green, and both of us got pretty sunburned. After I cleaned all the sand off and put on some aloe vera, the wine and spinning helped immensely to take my mind off the sunburn.

It's amazing how much French I'm remembering here, considering that it's been 9 years since I took any French classes. One of our hosts is French, and I think he was a bit impressed at how much I understood our waitress at dinner two nights ago. I shudder to think how much more I would have remembered a few years ago. But my understanding is still good enough that I can pick up tiny snippets of other peoples' conversations, like the dad at the beach asking his son what sound a horse makes. My German is nowhere near good enough for this, and I never realized how disconnected one can feel when you don't understand any of the random conversation around you. My trip is about three-fourths over, and while I'm enjoying myself, I'm interested to see what it will feel like when I get back home and hear people speaking American English everywhere. I wouldn't say I'm homesick yet, but it will be nice when communication takes a little less effort.

Very Quick Update from the Road

We are in France. I travelled through four five countries over the past two days (hint: Lichtenstein is indeed very very small) and I'm typing this post on a borrowed computer with what I think is a Swedish keyboard programmed to act like an English keyboard. I don't want to intrude on the very lovely people who are putting us up for the next few days here in Nîmes, and I'm doubtful about my abilities to upload photos from a strange computer, so I'll have to leave off the pictures for a bit. I was indeed able to spin while we were on the road, so I have a little bit of yak singles on the spindle to show you later.

I'm off in search of some breakfast. I hear they have some good food in this neck of the woods.