The Closest I'll Ever Get to the Tour de France

The Tour de France started yesterday, July 5th and goes until July 27th, with only the 15th and 21st as rest days.  That's 21 days of riding a bicycle, in other words, a lot of damn bicycle riding.

In the fiber world however, that means it's time for Tour de Fleece!  Yes, fleece, as in the wool off of a sheep.  The primary goal of Tour de Fleece is to spin every day that the Tour de France rides.

There's no official website, but there are a lot of groups and teams on Ravelry participating.  Each person chooses their own goals for the event, and some of the groups do prizes for meeting your goals, but it's really just about setting a goal for your spinning and trying to achieve it. 

This is my first year participating since it's the first year I've been a spinner.  My goals are pretty modest in my opinion.  My primary goal is to spin at least 10 minutes every day of the event.  This week should be relatively quiet at work, so I should be home at a decent hour every night, but who knows what it will be like after that, so just making time to spin every day might turn out to be a challenge.

My secondary goal is to get as much of this box of fiber spun as possible.  That lovely dreaminess is 40 ounces of Three Waters Farm polwarth/silk.  The plan is to spin it into a 3-ply yarn, dye it an as yet undetermined color, and knit a sweater out of it.  40 ounces is probably way more than I need for a sweater, even for my larger size, but I wanted to have plenty to mess up with in both the spinning and the dyeing.

I started spinning this fiber a little this week before the official start of Tour de Fleece, but I've almost got one bobbin full of singles.  That's not quite 4 ounces on the bobbin at the moment.

Knowing me, 21 days of spinning the exact same thing might get a little boring, so I may spin something with a little color a few of those days (I can already imagine how handy it would be to have a 2nd wheel), but right now I'm motivated to get a lot of this done.  The polwarth/silk blend drafts wonderfully so it's very relaxing to spin.

That's not all I've got going on though, stay tuned tomorrow for a peek at my newest fiber craft.