Another day of only a small amount of progress. I have a good excuse though. Yesterday afternoon we went up to Stratford to see As You Like It with the inlaws and stayed with them over night, coming home in time for tea today. The production was excellent, it was laugh out loud funny, but with a lot of depth too. They also had a lot of excellent music being performed by the actors which is always good 🙂 We had a great time.

It was a bit dark outside by the time I managed to take my progress photo, but I think it is just about do-able.

I have been doing a bit of knitting too, but failed to photograph that. These are some samples for the Patchwork knitting workshop on 22nd August. I am doing demos of some edgings, so have been knitting some strips of mitred squares to edge. Hopefully I might get a picture of them tomorrow in between the predicted rain showers.

Oops. In my excitement yesterday I failed to actually say anything much about the knitting project that the pattern sample was for. This is for my second City and Guilds project, and will be a jumper with set in sleeves and a round neck. I am going to make it slightly A-line to fit me better.

Katya had an excellent idea in the comments yesterday about using stripes to blend the colours better. I will definitely be doing some colouring to try this out and see if I can make it work for this project. Once I have measured my stitch and row tension I will know how many rows I have to play with over the length of the jumper, and so how many rows of each colour.

There has been a very small amount of progress on the spinning. I have started on the white Dorset.

This is surprisingly different to the grey Dorset cross. The white is very crimpy, and the yarn I am making is quite fuzzy but not as hairy as the grey.

Barcelona seem to be having today the weather we had a couple of days ago. It looked nasty cycling weather for the finish of today’s stage. Interesting trivia: today was the furthest south the tour is going this year.

Luckily the weather here has cheered up a bit. I spent some time up the ladder poking at the gutters, and have hopefully solved part of the watery carpet problem. Once the wasps have been removed I might try pouring a bucket of water or two into the gutter to check that the downpipe isn’t blocked too. Oh the joys of home maintenance.

It has been a busy day here so I only got a chance to do about an hour of spinning this evening. Here is how the bobbin looks now,  still not finished, though I am now down to only 2 net bags of grey fibre.

Paul chose today’s coin. It is a Nebraska quarter. I think he chose it because it had a pretty picture 🙂

There are a couple of category 4 climbs in today’s stage. Today I had a little bit of a climb myself as Lisa taught me longdraw at spinning group. I haven’t got the hang of it yet, but I think I understand what I am meant to be doing, it is just a question of actually doing it 🙂

She let me use some of her rolags too. She is also doing the Tour de Fleece and one of her challenges is to spin a mile in one day. Which she has calculated will take 240 rolags. Crikey. I don’t think I have spun a mile altogether since I learned to spin, the idea of doing it all in one day is rather boggling. Go Lisa!

So this is a bit of longdraw:

Lisa spun the good bits, I spun the wonky bits 🙂

Indoor photos again today as the weather is still wet and grotty. The carpet is drying out and we think we have solved the mystery. The gutters didn’t seem to be draining and the rain was so hard that it was flooding the area just outside the back door and welling up through the concrete floor inside. I went out this morning to see if I could sort the gutters, and discovered rather a lot of wasps, so I think the problem is a wasps nest blocking the gutter. I have booked someone in to sort it out on Friday so I am hoping it wont rain too heavily before then!

I have been having a break from the grey Dorset today, and have been spinning a bit more of the black Shetland. It is lovely stuff to spin, very soothing. Paul has a collection of US quarters (25 cents, quarter of a dollar, they are about the same size as a 10p piece) so I thought I would borrow one of them for today’s photo. So here is my Shetland, with a New Jersey quarter:

I picked NJ because we have been there a few times and Paul lived there for a few months when he first started his current job. The area of NJ he lived in was actually rather like Surrey.

Team time trial day today. I haven’t really replicated that in my spinning! Although I did go to spinning group yesterday, and am going again tomorrow so that counts for my team spinning in person, and I have been contributing a bit to the teams I am a member of on Ravelry as well. I am finding it jolly hard to keep up with all the posting on the ravelry group!

We have been having some bizarre weather today. Real monsoon stuff this afternoon. At least it means I don’t have to water my pots on the patio! I need to buy a new hose head before the weather dries out again. The current one has cracked, and every time I try and water the plants I end up watering my leg. Due to the weather, we have an indoor progress shot today.

Surprisingly enough there was enough light in the lounge to take this. The weather having prevented outdoor photography. My second favourite photographing spot is by the back door but we seem to have an unexplained wet carpet there after this afternoon’s rain, so the carpet is up to try and dry the floor, and also so we can hopefully work out how the water is getting in. It is all a bit of a mystery since the door itself and all of its edges seem to be dry.

I thought I would attempt a scale shot showing a 1p piece (aplogies that the penny is a bit grubby, it was the best I could find). This is partially to distract from the fact that despite having spun for a couple of hours today the bobbin looks jolly similar to yesterday. I am making progress, it is just rather slow.

Day Three of the tour conveniently coincided with spinning group at Ash. I took Suzie along for her first outing and she was very well behaved.

I have been spinning some of my black Shetland tops practice fibre on her, and this is the progress so far:

This evening I managed to catch the tour highlights programme and spun a bit more of the grey Dorset.

I should hopefully finish this bobbin tomorrow. I am still thinking I will probably go onto a second with the grey, but it looks like there will be not very much yarn on a second bobbin. We shall see.

In solidarity with the cyclists I started today with 10 minutes on the exercise bike, followed by a lie down in front of the fan! The exercise bike is a new addition to the household and is really Paul’s toy so this was only the second time I had had a play on it. I found even 10 mins pathetically difficult.

Today I have been spinning along to Wimbledon, rather than the Tour de France. I watched the men’s singles finals (epic match!) and the mixed doubles final.

One of my goals for the tour is to spin as much as I can of my first two fleeces. One is half a grey Dorset cross fleece. I am not quite sure what the cross is with, but we think it might be Black Welsh Mountain. The other full fleece is a white Poll Dorset. I have washed all the fleece and it is in a pair of bin bags ready to go. I am combing each lock as I go so it is a bit time consuming and I am very slow.

This is how much I had done before the tour started:

And this is how the bobbin looks now:

I am making progress! Although rather slowly. I am coming close to having to make a difficult decision with this. I had been thinking that there would be less than 1 bobbin of grey, and probably about 2 of white. So the plan was to spin one grey, two white, then ply all three together and knit socks. I might dye it teal after plying depending on how the colour comes out and whether I like the grey and white barber pole. However it is looking like there is going to be more grey than will fit on one bobbin. So I think I will go onto a second bobbin of grey. The only difficulty is that I only have 4 bobbins. However I think I might do the plying on the Suzie which has bigger bobbins anyway. I didn’t want to swap wheels half way through the singles because the ratios are different and that might much things up, but hopefully plying on a different wheel wont make too much difference.

Here finally is the finished spindle spun skein from yesterday.

It may be a bit wobbly, but I am still proud 🙂

Well here we are at the start of the Tour de Fleece. I’ve joined the Peloton, Rookies, Team UK, Spin Our Socks, and Team Jelly Legs so I think I had better stop joining teams now.

I have started off the tour in a bit of a lateral direction, by not making progress towards any of my goals, but instead learning to spindle spin!

I was concerned that I would start off the tour on the back foot as I was out all day today at the Knitting and Crochet Guild AGM. (did you know that when your TomTom stops working part way up the M1 a crochet hook can be the ideal tool to poke it up its reset button with). I’m afraid I have been my usual appalling self and although I remembered to take my camera with me I completely forgot to take it out of the bag. After the AGM itself we had a very interesting chat by Pat, Steve, and Ben from Woolly Thoughts. I have been to a couple of their talks before, and they are always very good. Also I am biased and enjoy hearing about a nice bit of mathematical knitting 🙂

After lunch there were some workshops, and while unfortunately I wasn’t fast enough to get into Mary‘s workshop on wire knitting, I was just quick enough to get a place on Terri‘s workshop on making your own spindle and learning to spin on it!

My DIY skills leave something to be desired so Terri had to help me out rather a lot with the spindle construction, I am going to superglue it now I have the yarn off it since I was having a bit of trouble with the CDs wobbling.

I got home with just enough time to watch the last bits of the tour highlights on the telly, so here is the spindle, watching along with the maillot jaune.

Here is a close up of the singles:

The yarn we were using was English Wool tops. I found it a bit hard to draft at first, and so the yarn I made this afternoon was rather lumpy and bumpy. I was thinking about it in the car on the way home and thought it would be worth varying the way I was trying to draft and spin to see if that would help. I was finding the fibre very grabby with my usual woollen-ish spinning style. I got home and switched to a more worsted style and did much better.

I also managed to ply on the spindle!

As you can see the light was going here by the time I managed that. The plying is rather wobbly. I was having a lot of trouble with getting an even amount of twist, both in the singles and in the plying. More practice needed!

There is about 24m and I haven’t measured the wpi yet as it is currently spinning in the washing machine after setting the twist. Photo of finished skein tomorrow!

It all looked jolly good fun, and I do enjoy the Tour de France (mostly for the French scenery, I am never very good at keeping up with the whats-what of the cycling), so I have rashly decided to sign up for the Tour de Fleece. If a thing is worth doing, its worth overdoing 🙂 So I have signed up for the Rookies (beginners), Team UK (fairly self-explanatory), Team Jelly Legs (Jo‘s team), and am considering signing up for Team Hopelessly Overcommitted too 🙂

I am planning to get to grips with the new wheel, and to spin every day, although I am going to be starting on the back foot as I am going to the Knitting and Crochet Guild AGM on the day the Tour starts, so wont get very much spinning done then. Hopefully I will do a bit of knitting though. I got my first ever raw fleece (well fleece and a half) from Janine at knitting and spinning group a month or so ago, so I am hoping to finish spinning that during the Tour. I have cleaned it all now, and had a slighly unfortunate felting moment with some of the grey, which has now been given to Mummy for her to do something artistic with. I have started spinning the grey (the half is grey, although it is a big half, and the other fleece is white), but haven’t got very far yet.

I have even got a new ravatar to mark the occaision.

I hope that all those going to Woolfest have a fantastic time! Stroke some yarn for me 🙂