Tour de Fleece Update

I'm making some progress on my spinning for Tour de Fleece:

I've just got a bit of this fiber left:

I'm very much hoping that I can finish this spinning project before Sunday so I can play with my new alpaca fiber, but we'll see.

My goal for this year was just to spin at least a little each day, and I've already ruined that by getting sick and hurting my wrists, causing me to take a few extra days off. I'm trying to do a better job of taking breaks to stretch so I don't hurt my wrists more. Lesson learned, I think!

In other news, my son has learned to lounge on the couch:

Adorable, right?

 

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Progress (at a price)

The boys in front of Griffith Observatory, where we hiked last weekend.

I've made good progress in the first week of Tour de Fleece:

It's surprising what can happen when you actually make time for something! It hasn't been without a cost, though... The time I've spent spinning has mostly come out of sleeping time, so I've now come down with some kind of cold in the middle of summer :(. And going from no spinning for an entire year to spinning for, on average, an hour a day for 8 days in a row has done a number in my wrists, and I had to take my rest day one day early. But I spun some today to make up for it, and I'm now almost done with the first half of my roving:

The roving is Sea Wool from Creatively Dyed, and it's been in my stash probably since the summer of 2008 when I first started spinning, so I'm honestly not even sure if you can get this stuff anymore. It's a wool and SeaCell blend (which is mostly tencel, if I remember correctly) and it's pretty much like spinning any kind of wool/tencel or wool/silk blend, with some nicely blended parts and a few places where you get a glob of the silky fiber that doesn't draft well with the rest of the fiber. The colors in the roving are gorgeous, but with the amount of light-colored fiber it's all ending up a little more muted in the yarn.

Anyway, I'm spinning an approximately-fingering-weight singles, S-spun (because of the two times I've knit with my handspun singles, the Z-spun singles fell apart and the S-spun singles knit up nicely), with a worsted draw at roughly a 4:1 ratio on my Spinolution Hopper. I originally started this spinning last year for Tour de Fleece with the idea of knitting up a shawlette I saw in a knitting magazine last summer... But we'll see if that's what this yarn wants to be or not when it's finally finished.

I can't wait to finish this spinning project (which, at my current rate, might actually finish up in another week), because here's what I have waiting to be spun next:

More about this fiber later. Happy spinning this week!

 

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