The Knitting Scout badges come for all sorts of things. This one happens to be for stabbing myself in the foot with an aluminum US3 DPN; had the resulting gash been much larger, I would have gotten the level II for having stitches.

I can't believe I forgot about the alpaca that I was spinning during the tour while my fleeces were being prepped! As soon as I process the 52 lbs of yarn that was delivered to me this morning, I'll be posting pictures of all my tour work.

Tour de Fleece - finish line!

So today was the end of the Tour de Fleece. I managed to get 3 fleeces skirted, one whole one of those got washed... the Corriedale-Border Leicester cross (it's the grey one.) 1/2 of that one was beaten with a stick (not really, I use my dryer) and then half of that got carded. I'm half done with spinning the 5 batts that I carded up, at least in single form. I have about 4 oz spun up so far.

The singles are fingering weight (mostly!) The current plan is to make a 3 ply just-under-worsted (what I think of as worsted) that I can use to make myself a cabled sweater of some sort. The alternate plan is to make a two ply and make a thinner cabled sweater of some sort.

Tour de Fleece

This past week, I've managed to get through sorting three fleeces.

This one is a really dirty grey merino with brown tips. The only reason I wound up with it is that it was super cheap.



This one is from a sheep named Brian, who was (I think) a corrie x. x what, I'm not sure, but it's *really* greasy. It's mostly a darker grey, also with brown tips.


how much of that brown is sun and how much is dirt... I can't wait to find out. part of me hopes it's dirt.

Here's a close-up of the second fleece, just for the color variation.... which I love.



This one is one of the few white fleeces I have. For some reason I'm drawn to grey fleeces, (I like grey, I'm just surprised i have as many grey fleeces as I do.) This one took first place, I'm not sure if it was first place in white fleeces or overall. Either way it was well skirted, unlike the other two.. that was somewhat gross. Thank goodness for rubber gloves. I don't remember what this one was either, but I also have it written down.


Next up, washing the fleeces. This takes care of one of the 3 or four shelves of fleece I have.

Near miss with total disaster.

Hope everyone had a good Fourth.

Early last week, my laptop started acting weird. The taskbar changed color, then Excel wouldn't open properly. Then about 2 hours later, it had 4 or 5 blue screens of death and would no longer turn on.

After 3 hours of tech support, my hard drive was pronounced fried. [insert mild frantic panic attack] Some weird black box thing and a new hard drive later, and about 4 days of work... and I'm almost back to normal. Though it wasn't my work, I only know enough to really screw up the computer really well, not fix it. I really need to be better about backing things up, I nearly lost all of my pictures from the last 2 years (yeah, I really need to back up more often) and all of my business info.

Now to finish installing all of my software so I can get back to dyeing.

Tour de Fleece

The Tour stars this Friday. My goal is to thin the stash a bit... there is some major herding issues in there, and hopefully I can reduce the amount of raw fleece to manageable proportions, rather than the .... 50+ lbs that I think I have. (It's so bad, I don't even want to know. )

I realize my goal is rather generic. There will be a plan later. I think.