Tour de Fleece time!

The Tour de Fleece starts today and, oh yeah, some bike thing does, too. The whole concept of the Tour de Fleece is to set goals for yourself and work to achieve them. If possible, participants try to spin everyday, July 5th - 27th, which is the length of the Tour de France. On the 23rd, the last hard climb of the bike race, the spinning participants are supposed to challenge themselves by doing something difficult. The last day people are supposed to wear yellow, the color of the winning jersey.

I have a few different goals for the Tour. My first goal is to spin at least once a day for 10 minutes or more each day while the Tour lasts. I have plenty of fiber in the stash and am really looking forward to using some of it. Looking through my flickr pictures, I realized that I have about a quarter of the fiber stash not actually recorded in the blog/flickr/ravelry notebook. Ooops.

Another goal for the Tour is to break out my new lace flyer and bobbins. Can I even tell you how excited I am to spin lace? Spinning lace has been a goal since before actually learning how to spin. It happily coincides with my recent lace knitting binge. (I don't think that it is a bad thing that I have a different shawl for every day of the week.) In order to swap bobbins and flyers, I had to finish spinning up the tencel/merino roving I had gotten in Maryland. Yesterday afternoon, I finished plying it and washed it. The weather has been so wet recently that it wasn't dry yet this morning.

Yesterday afternoon, I prepped the Finn roving and started playing around with the lace bobbin. It definitely took me a lot longer to get comfortable with my tension and drafting for lace. I'm still overspinning but hopefully that will even out. This morning, I serious attacked the project and am moderately happy with the first results. It reminds me a lot of my first yarn, very thick and thin (well, as thick as lace gets), but I'm happy with learning a new goal.

The Tour has definitely inspired me to pull out languishing projects and start using up roving. I finished spinning up some merino I got from CJ Copeck a while back in the Cowgirl Chic colorway. I started it on the drop spindle while at the Equine Affair back in April. Now I just need to pull it off the spindle and ply it up.

I also pulled out the other drop spindle I bought while in Maryland and started spinning up the sparkly silver roving I got the same weekend. Let me tell you, this drop spindle is soooo nice. I've decided that I really love working with it. Tuesday, I started spinning the sparkly roving while walking around the July 4th fair seeing what there was to see. (The new low of fair food is fried coke. What will they think of next?!) Yesterday, I was spinning during the entire July 4th parade. It seems to be much easier for me to drop spindle while out and about. At home, I just use the wheel instead.

All of this spinning makes it sound like I haven't been doing any knitting. Well, I've been doing a tiny bit. Mainly while at the bar with high school friends in town for the weekend. That definitely requires simple knitting so I've been working on baby bibs and dishcloths. So far I've done 4 of the Mason-Dixon washcloths and 1 baby bib. I also need to work on a pair of socks which have been languishing since October. The recipient is going on a Scandinavian cruise and I feel like she will need wool socks. So that means finishing them before the 13th. Hmmm, 7 days, I think I can do that.