Friday, July 23, 2010

The Tour de Fleece keeps on trucking. . .













My hand-dyed roving stash is getting pretty low at this point--lucky Rhinebeck is in 2 1/2 months!

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Drifts of Wool in the Summertime

It seems like forever that I've been home, but it's only been three and a half weeks; it's been time well-spent. While I'm still in the limbo of trying to figure out schedules and jobs and housing, I've also had ample, wonderful hours of knitting and spinning in the sunshine, sitting out on the back porch for hours with NPR or audiobooks on in the background and cats underfoot (or underchair, as is more likely). There's been knitting for me:


Cecily Glowik MacDonald's Goodale (Rav link), a lightweight, quirky sweater in a cashmerino I overdyed. This only gets play at knitting nights at this point, but is about three-quarters done.

Knitting for design publication:


a variation on the shawl I knit for Betty, this time in commercially available yarn.

And knitting for others (no pictures, sorry!), in the most lovely and gorgeous new yarn from Quince and Co. There are big benefits to living in Portland and getting in on the ground floor of this awesome new company!

And there has been spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning: it's the Tour de Fleece again! For those of you that think I'm crazy, it's a spinning event where you spin every day the Tour de France is running. This is my fourth year doing it, and I've scaled it back a bit from last year, where I spun enough for three sweaters. That hurt!

This year, my big goal was just one sweater's worth of light worsted weight 3-ply, out of the most gorgeous moorit Romney that Barb gave me at Tally Ho. And some other stuff, as well, but that was the big project. It's for my Rhinebeck sweater!

1,234 yards, about 20 ounces. Now to design and knit the damn thing. . .

The other yarn I've spun so far (the Romney obviously took me a while) is a softly spun laceweight single, from a merino/cashmere/nylon blend I had dyed for PortFiber and then couldn't bear to part with. 768 yards, 3 1/2 ounces.
I've still got about a pound of wool to spin for various other projects, and more knitting, and more designing, and did I mention the various jobs? Not to mention the music festivals, or the theatre in Deering Oaks, or the walks on the beach, or the. . .

It's going to be a lovely, busy summer.