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 🙂