Tour de Fleece 2011, yippee!

Oh, Tour de Fleece! I almost forgot about you! I’ve joined Team Yarn School Alumni, Team Browncoats & Team Wicked Stitch, the HY/SE/SCF Amalgamated Uberteam.

I don’t want to defeat myself, so I’m going to start with 3 basic goals and go from there.

1. Spin every day.

2. Spin up the rest of what was supposed to be my April uberlist pound of fiber, the Yarn School Spring 2011 fiber orphans (4 big dregs batts + assorted abandoned batts and rolags)

3. Spin up something directly related to each of my 4 teams. I can kill Yarn School and Hello Yarn with one rock, and I have some great Whirled roving from ages ago; but I’ll have to get my thinking cap on for my Browncoats selection. Maybe dusty Western colors that I spin whilst watching Firefly for the thousandth time?

So here’s my first dedicated batch in queue:

I’m not sure yet how to combine my Hello Yarn Yarn School stash. There’s a big mix of colors and fibers, and I’m a sweater spinner, so I may be introducing outside fiber for my mixemups. On the other hand, I might just be ballsy and play against instinct and group them by fiber and totally ignore the colors and see what emerges!

I can not WAIT for Ron to put in the ACs for the season. I’ve had about enough of sitting in a puddle of my own sweat all day. Hopefully, I won’t have more than a few days of TDF sticky, icky, sweaty, gross spinning before I’m in my beautiful, luxurious, hermetically-sealed, AC-filled bedroom or office. Sigh.

Knitting in the heat ain’t fun. But at least I finally got a good-looking Brioche. I have no idea how I’ve managed all this time to avoid Brioche, but when I was fucking around with all those maddening sortofbutnotreally YOs and k2tog and p2tog, no matter how I tried, I could not get it together. I tried lots of different instructions from lots of different sources and always ended up with something that looked right on the wrong side but very wrong on the right side, variations of this mess:

Finally, I checked YouTube instead and found the much-easier row-below method, which gives the same result as a slip/YO on one row and a work2tog on the next by simply working alternating stitches into the row below. FAST, easy, happy-making.

I was kind of astonished at how LOOSE a stitch it is. If I had guessed before knitting it, I’d’ve thought the above worsted sample was worked on 7s or 8s, but it was on 2s!

I’m feeling bitter that A) today was 97 instead of the promised 91 degrees and B) that the rain clouds passed coquettishly overhead without putting out. I WANT LOWER TEMPERATURES, SOME GORRAM RAIN, OR MY AC, DAMMIT! A weak box fan blowing hot air on your legs is a lot less refreshing than you might think.

Took advantage of the heat (figured if I’m going to be gross and sweaty, may as well add productive) to dye up a bunch of carder fiber, both for me and for the free fiber melange I include with drum carders:

Okay. Ice water. Then spin. Then shower. I’d rather shower first, but there’s no point before the sun goes down.