The tour is complete as of last Sunday and I can honestly take the yellow jersey this year. I finished almost all of what I set out to do. I wanted to complete all my unfinished spinning projects. I was close and finished 3 out of 4. I also finished one full skein of 50/50 merino/tencel roving on my spindles. It turned out to be a fingering weight yarn at 23wpi and 375yds (the orange toned one below). I started a second merino/tencel roving on my spindles intending it to be laceweight after plying. While I didn't finish all of the roving (I finished 3.3oz) during the tour, I did finish it this week and it is laceweight at 29wpi and 500yds. yippe! Can't wait for next year- not sure what I'll challenge myself to but I'll be ready anyway!

Day 6 and Still spinning...

It is day six of the tour de fleece. I am not completing as much for Tour 1 as I would really like, but have just been in love with one of my rovings for tour 2 so I've been spending most of time with that.
I have however still completed some spinning- I finished the Chili and Pepper silk roving and plied it up. For some reason it was h-e-double hockey sticks to ply. It ended up more than once with a huge tangle. Ah well- it is done. :-)


Here now are my Twisted Fiber Arts rovings (first pic) which included the one I am currently spinning up for tour 2 (of which I am a member of the Drop Spindle team and Team Twisted Twisters). It is the first time I have tried spinning the merino tencel blend on my spindles. I am using one of my custom made Cascabel's spindles for it (love the littles ones that Gabe turned for me!) I started it on Wednesday evening (2nd pic) and as of yesterday I had finished 1/8th of the roving (3rd pic). Doesn't seem like much but it's being spun pretty fine for me and it takes a little longer. Working on more of it today and should be able to finish a good chunk of it.

Before I started the Twisted roving, I finished plying up the little bit of Merino that I had spun. It's OK- I'm still not that great at navajo plying :-( but will keep on practicing!

I also finally finished up this baby blanket I am going to give to my younger sister-in-law as she just had her first baby girl on Mother's Day. Hope she likes it. I like how it turned out. I used the Homespun Baby and a slight modification on a pattern for it from the Lion Brand website. I wanted the squares concentric and that isn't how the pattern works so.....
This is a picture while it was blocked and drying.

Still sorting through the vacation pictures so will put some of those up as soon as I'm done. More to come....
Toodles :-)

Le tour........

Well the tour de France and the tour de Fleece have begun.
Well the tour de Frane and the tour De Fleece have begun. I am a few days behind. Saturday I had a travel day and Sunday was the clean up day :-) We did have a great time on vacation though and I'll post about that later.
The Tour de Fleece 1 (the one linked to the black button on the right) is the spin from your stash challenge. I will start with some stash/spinning that's been waiting for waaayyyy too long. The first is a silk roving from Treetops in Chili and Pepper. It is destined to become a necktie. I hope ;-)

The Tour de Fleece 2 (the button with the gloved hand) I am challenging myself to spin everything for that on only spindles. I have one spindle full (it is a Cascade Ranier spindle) of some merino I dyed myself. I will ply that up later today and then will start on spindling another Treetops silk roving in the retro colorway. This one will be started on my apricot Bosworth mini. My son has had all-stars for baseball in the evenings so that is where I have done my spindling so far. So I am working on my challenge and in public at that!

I am enjoying this so far this year and hope to get lots more done than last year.

Mor fibery stuff in another post- I've got at least one FO to show.....
Toodles!

A quick catch-up

Well- it's been a while now since I've put my thoughts into blogland. I've been busy, but that's no excuse- blogging has to be one of the easiest things someone could take a little time to do. Maybe I just hate having to adjust pictures etc, etc, etc to post things. So I'll try to cut down on the pics so I can just do some entries.
Knitting- not much going on in this arena lately. I'm working on a couple of things for a friend- some fingerless gloves, and a couple other items that I won't divulge yet.
Spinning- I did get two more yarns done for the Taos Wool Festival on Oct 6th. I managed a proper boucle with a polypay core, wool/mohair blend wrapping yarn, and a poly thread binder. I liked the colors but spinning the blend was horrid! I've never had so much work involved with spinning as this one. I think it was just the mill that prepared it because the other roving I had purchased from the company was a pain too (though not nearly so bad!) It ended up pretty nice. I also spun up a quick two ply to enter in the Expert division of the handspun yarn contest. The colors turned out really pretty I think. So all in total I had three skeins to enter.
The boucle went into the novelty division (I entered my first boucle attempt last year and got only 64 points out of 105- not so hot!) and managed a third place. This year I got 102 points of 105, so there wasn't much between 1st and 3rd!

The two ply went into the Expert division- I put it as smooth and even, but there were a few thin spots so it got moved to novelty within expert. OK- I can live with that, I've only been spinning about a year and a half. I also took third on that one- with 90 points of 100. So again a close race. :)

The one I thought would do well was my spindled yarn, but even with 90 of 100 points it didn't place at all. That was only 6 points behind the 1st place too! The spinners are definitely getting better every year!
Now for the new hobby (as if I have time for more- HAH!):
Tri-weaving- I built myself a loom, but managed to mess up the nails. Didn't find out until I was weaving my first shoulder shawl for my MIL. In my engineering self's defense I was sick and had a monster headache that day I was making the marks for the nails. ;) It was still pretty.
OK- tried again. A little bigger this time (5ft instead of 4ft). I am working on something on it now (can't divulge too much since she's one of the very few who actually read this!) but it's going well and I like this. No warping and the lack of floor space taken up by the triangle loom is great!

One more thing- I opened an etsy store- Twisted Sheep- to destash some fiber and to list some of my handspun yarns, hand carded batts, handmade stitch markers (I finally have some to list in the next day or two), hand dyed yarns and fibers, and whatever else goes up as well!
Time to tend to some little monkeys, but I'll be back (much sooner I hope) :)

Time for an update- I'm waaayy behind on that!

Things have been busy with the kiddos and all their respective stuff. In that- it's mostly my son because he has had baseball going on for a while now. He's got all-stars left so a couple more weeks of practices and games.
I said I would try to stress less- it's getting there. Spin more- definitely not as much as I would like for this one!!! I did finish up some fiber for Fiberswap. I blended up a mix of some Polypay roving I picked up in Taos year before last. It was a prize winning fleece in 2004 (but I can't find the card that says what prize right now :) ). It was 60% Polypay, 20% Angora, and 20% Soysilk. I had a little leftover wool and the other fibers so I did a 65/20/15 blend and kept it for me. Then I had something (just enough at 1.9oz) I could spin for the spindle spun yarn contest in Taos for this year. I did get that spun up- one of my resolutions! It ended up being a total of 433 yds. The contest requires it to be a single, but once that's over I will most likely ply it back on itself to be able to use (I don't have much love for using energized singles in knitting- I'm not that good to begin with!) I also did a demonstration on spinning in early May at our local Fiber Arts Museum. It went well and I got some soy silk spun up that I dyed the night before.
I have managed a few felted flowers and one pair of knitted calla lilies, but now I am done with the fiberswap stuff and spun up that single for Taos, I am back to work on my brother's birthday socks (waaaayyyy overdue!)
In other news, one of our mallards hatched her babies (about three weeks ago now) and has six little ducklings following her around everywhere now. They're cute and growing so fast- even faster than my little ducklings! Our male goose seems to think he's the dad though and makes sure that they are following mom and not getting into trouble. At least he does, our male mallard doesn't seem to care! Also, my daughter did get a new bed- yay! So now we are all set for the baby as far as that is concerned. Just waiting now! Not too long to go- my doc said 32 weeks on Monday, but according to the latest possible date of conception (yep I know exactly when now that I think back) I was closer to 33.5 weeks on Monday. Well- time to get the girls bathed and get dinner ready!
I will try to be posting more often, but no guarantee on that of course- I'm terrible with taking the time to do it!!!!

Happy fibering!