What I did on my spinning vacation

I took a bit of a break from knitting this summer to participate in the Tour de Fleece. The idea, if you haven't heard of it, is to spin every day of the Tour de France. (And by this I mean spinning fiber with a drop spindle or a wheel, not the kind of spinning you do on a stationary bike. Although the bike would be better exercise, I guess.)

The Tour starts on July 4th. So, with a house full of people drinking beer and eating barbecue, I got going on two different fibers, an all-bamboo roving and a Butterfly Girl batt with an indescribable number of fibers and sparklies in. I initially found both of these fibers to be extremely difficult to work with. (This might have partially been the beer, to be honest, but my prior spinning has been mainly things like Blue Faced Leicester, which is incredibly easy to work with.)

But all I got the first day, whether because of beer or good company, was this:

This was a rather disappointing start. But I went on spinning every day, alternating between the two fibers as I reached my maximum level of irritation with them.
















At some point, the bamboo suddenly made sense to me, so I finished it:



That's four ounces of Navajo-plied bamboo, a new fiber to me, plied by a technique that I learned while plying it. I'm pretty pleased.

This left me with the sparkly stuff, which I finished the next week:



It's not the most even yarn I've ever spun, but considering that it dearly wanted to be Art Yarn while I had other ideas (I hate art yarn), I think I did pretty well. It's a two-ply, but I'm not going to hold it against it.

But this left me with nearly a week of Tour and I'd finished both of my goals. I picked up the Romney I'd bought at DFW Fiber Fest this spring and finished it. After the slippery stuff and the sparkly stuff, working with a fiber that practically spins itself was a real relief. Unfortunately, the three-ply I got out of it is just not the most appealing yarn. It's scratchy and it's kind of hairy, and not in a nice way. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. But here it is in the basket with the rest of my TdF spinning.



What I have now: three new yarns, a messed up plying spindle (the hairy brown yarn ate it), and no desire to pick up a spindle for at least a week.

So that was the longest and hottest part of my summer. I'm now back to knitting.

Also, can I make a teeny tiny little gripe here? I am so tired of logging on to Ravelry and seeing nothing but news about the Sock Summit. I would love to have gone, but the money and the time just weren't there, and the classes filled up so quickly that I might not have made it in if I had decided that I had the time and the money. I admit that it's mainly envy typing here, but I'll be glad when the damned thing is over and I can begin saving my pennies for next year instead of feeling all bummed because I can't make it this year. At this point, all the attention to it is just rubbing it in for those of us who can't go. /whine

ETA: Although there probably won't be one next year. ::sigh:: Really, I guess I'm just depressed because it seems like all the cools kids can talk about is a party that I can't be at.