Sad

The last couple of weeks have been frenetic.

Spinning every day during the Tour De Fleece,

My third grandchild / eldest granddaughter Asher’s first birthday [ requiring over 400 km driving in one day ]

A delightful day at the Opera down in Melbourne

The Australian Wool & Sheep Show last weekend with Nadie & Abigail

Getting back to clogging class after a two-surgery / two-year absence

all worthy of blog posts that didn’t get written except in my head

SO

today I was going to rectify that

until I received a phone call from my goat guru  friend Brenda to tell me that a damn snake [ who shouldn’t even be out of hibernation yet ] had attacked and killed Bear’s litter-sister Molly and two half sisters, Kira and Spotty.

Part of me is relieved that Bear wasn’t having one of his holidays at the farm.

Of course I’m also relieved that his mama is still okay [ but fretting so badly they’ve had to go buy her a puppy ]

mostly though I’m just so sad that I’ll never be greeted again by that hysterically happy tumble of  furry little bodies as I open the car door.

damn bloody snakes

 

 

 

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Le Tour continues

I think it would be fair to say that my first efforts as a spinner could quite easily have been used as an emergency substitute for fencing wire.

At that stage I was pretty chuffed if I managed to produce yarn of any variety. Thick, thin, underspun, overspun. I was making actual yarn

As time wore on, I discovered that my ‘default’ setting was, and remains, fairly fine, and this was quite okay because it makes sense to try to spin the gauge of yarn that you do most of your knitting with, right? I mostly knit shawls, baby stuff and hats.

It does not, however, make for hugely noticable differences in the amount spun from one day to the next. So rather than post a bunch of nearly identical pics every day of the TDF, I’m giving them to you in batches.

You’ve already seen my ‘progress’ on day 1, so here’s the what’s happened since then:

Day 2

Day 3: [ ever so slightly more of the same ]

Day 4 [ yadayada ]

and then, when the desired length is reached, the whole lot, along with the bobbin I started at LAST year’s TDF, gets fed through the wheel again, but with it rotating backwards, so that the two ‘singles’ [ each one is referred to as a singles. I don’t know why. They just ARE ] get plied around each other. So that’s another almost 350 metres of spinning.

So by Day 5, it looks like this

which has since been: wound off onto a niddy-noddy, skeined up, soaked, whacked into submission on the side of the bath, and is currently drying gently by the wood heater.

Tens of dozens of hours work. 347.5 metres of yarn weighing in at 90 grams.

To put it into perspective, this is enough to knit an average sized lace shawl.

Based on last year, I thought that would take me the whole three weeks of Le Tour.

I hadn’t really thought any further ahead as to what I’d spin next but there’s no lack of suitable candidates in the stash room, so a bit of rummaging around unnearthed a pretty braid of merino/bamboo that i’d pretty much forgotten about.

I’m back on the bike for the next Stage,

Allons-y