My inner Yankee is curled up in a ball in the corner of a dark room, whimpering

As the days hurtle by towards 21 September, Allison and I have been spending a lot of time trying to pull together some cool schwag for those brave folks who will be joining us on the Great London Yarn Crawl. And as she is currently on the North American continent, much of the recent outreach for donations over the past week has fallen to me.

This is, quite possibly, my worst nightmare. Ask people for things? People I don't know? You mean, send them an email completely out of the blue asking them to give me, some faceless Internet stranger, something for free? It gives me heart palpitations just thinking about it. This is so far outside my comfort zone, that I have managed to procrastinate for a surprising amount of time on some of these emails, only to be goaded on by Alli sending messages saying "Have you heard back from So-and-so yet?"

But here's the very cool thing I'm finding: for the most part, people are happy to help out, and very often quite pleased to be asked. It's such a lovely surprise to email one of my super-dooper fan-girl knitware designer crushes and have her agree to send us a signed book for a door prize. It's fantastic to email a local designer and have her offer to give us pattern coupons for the goody bags AND donate a pattern for a door prize. It's a serious thrill to see people getting excited about the event.

All of this is balm to my wounded knitter/dyer psyche because I've had a bit of a set back on that front of late. I've been working on a sweater, using some lovely Green Mountain Spinnery sock yarn I dyed a while back. At the time, I was paranoid about dyelots, so I did all the skeins at the same time, and felt pretty confident that I'd managed to get them close enough.

Except, well, no:


And in case it isn't glaringly obvious from that shot:


Excuse my French, but fuck me. And having slogged though the entire stockinette back of this project, my enthusiasm for ripping out and alternating rows to blend the yarns, or trying one of the other skeins to see if it works better is non-existent. This puppy is going on the naughty step for the forseeable future, and I'm starting something new. Something reasonable. Like a lace shawl...

Holiday

If it's summer, it must be time for Porpoise et al to head across the Channel for some good wine/bread/cheese and some athletic insanity. This year, however, it was just Himself participating in the physical endeavours, while the girls and I played in the sun, went swimming and ate ice cream. Once he recovered a bit from his exertions, there was hiking, tadpole/grasshopper catching, snowball throwing and lots and lots of eating things that were not terribly good for us (fondue with bacon and onions, I'm looking at you) (you too, Cote du Rhone). And there was spinning.

Of course, my husband vehemently insisted that "There is no spinning on Alpe d'Huez!". Clearly his traumatized legs were affecting his visual acuity, because look:

There certainly was spinning on Alpe d'Huez, although in the interests of clarity, I should make it clear that this picture was actually taken on the Col de Sarenne, next to Alpe d'Huez. Perhaps he was thinking of a different type of spinning...

I did discover two things about combing spindling with hiking.

1) It's best not to try to spin silk singles on an alpine mountaintop with a sheer drop off when you haven't spun silk before and are finding it a bit slippery and difficult to manage.

2) Plying while hiking is a much more successful project then singles. So definitely go for plying if you have the option.

There were a few other yarny-adventures while we were away. There was this cute little guy, spied by my children one evening after dinner,

(I believe that's a knitting marmot)

And then there was the realisation that I may have yarn on the brain when I mistook some scarves in a kiosk in Annecy as some lovely skeins on display.



But let's be honest - you all would have made the same mistake, right?

Tour de Fleece 2013: The Final Reckoning

The stats:
1615 yds/30.6 oz total finished yarn spun.
783 yds of 3-ply, for 2349 yds of singles.
832 yds of 2-ply, for 1664 yds of singles.

Total singles length: 4013 yds, 3.7 km, 2.3 miles spun over 23 days.

The yarns: top left corner is 607 yds/14.4 oz of 3-ply bulky black Shetland, spun from drum carded batts, from a fleece that I bought at Wonderwool Wales this past April. This was my second fleece-to-hadnspun-sweaterlot I've done for Tour de Fleece - my first was last year, and it was a total failure. I credit this year's success to the fact that I was able to borrow a drum carder, which made the fiber prep so much easier! The finished yarn is soft and squishy, and is going to make a really cozy sweater. I'm hoping there's enough yardage for a full jumper, but we'll see! Top down sweater knitting is going to be my friend on this one.

Circling around to the right side is my project specific spin: Hello Yarn Finn in "Winter Storage"

I split the multi-colored top into 6 groups and spun a 2-ply sport/fingering weight to knit Brenda's Now in a Minute shawl. I think I might have to cast on this week. It's lovely soft stuff, 590 yds/7.8 oz - I'm about 10 yds short of the amount called for in the pattern, but I think it will be ok. We will see...

Next up: I had to take a break in the middle of the never-ending Shetland spin to do something with color, so I spun up a bag of ends of my own Euglena Suffolk.

One skein of 2-ply, 229 yds/3.3 oz, and one mini-skein of chain ply from the left over singles. It's about 14 wpi, so fingering weight, and is going to make some seriously awesome green socks.

The final yarn, singles started on Thursday, yarn plied and finished on Saturday:

Spunky Eclectic Bluefaced Leicester in "Autumn". I bought this top in a whirlwind stash enhancing trip to Amy's shop in August 2009, and it's been marinating in my stash ever since. I've got one more braid left from that trip, so I think I'll need to be stocking up again next month when we visit my parents.

I managed to make a collage for every day I spun during the Tour, and I've uploaded them all to a flickr set here if you're interested.

My only TdF letdown this year? I didn't manage to get as much spindling done as I wanted to.

I only managed to get through 10 gr (of 78 gr) of cashmere carding waste. But I've made a good start on it, so I'm going to keep trucking!

So how did your Tour de Fleece come out? Did you meet your goals? And are you going to keep spinning? My wrist is due for a bit of a rest, although spindling is ok, so I think I'm going to get back to that knitting thing and start using up some of this new stash. 

One Fund Boston

I've just made a donation for $170 to One Fund Boston, funded by your generous purchases of the Travelling Hats. Thank you so much for your support, and every penny of your purchase price will help the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings.

So far, over $64 million dollars has been donated to the fund, and it will continue to help the victims of the bombing and their families in a number of ways. Thank you again.

(I promise to go back to more fibery-related posting next week, starting off with the plethora of yarn that I've spun during the Tour de Fleece - stay tuned!)

And we have a winner!

Hooray Carroll! The random number generator picked your comment for the copy of American Sock Knitting. I'll PM you on Ravelry and get your mailing address, and I will post out the book to you as soon as I can.

Thanks to all the commenters - I loved your ideas about sock designs. It's been a while since I actually designed a pair of socks, and I think your comments have sparked some ideas!

Have just noticed that pre-orders have been extended to the 25th of July, so apologies to anyone who comes along after this post!