The Tour de Fleece* has come around again, and I’m sort of participating, in a half-assed kind of way. There’s a lot going on Chez Cusser, including eleventy dozen shelves to finish and put up, a pile of designs to get out for the fall/winter season, and an ongoing search for ways to use the ridiculous amounts of fruit & veg I keep bringing home from the farmers market. (It’s as though I forget there are only two of us, and himself is not a huge consumer of produce. No matter how good and healthy it is, I cannot eat every fruit and vegetable produced within a 50 mile radius of this city, and I should probably stop trying.)

Given the general crush of things that need doing, and the fact that I’ve had enough stress in the last year without adding to it voluntarily, thank you, I’ve decided that this year will be the Tour de Slack. My sort-of-goal is to spin this Shetland top for a blanket.

That’s 2.25 lb/1.02 kg of Shetland from Shetland, which I hoarded like a magpie when Michelle over at Widdershin Woolworks started dyeing it. It spins up into a lofty, springy, wooly yarn that I just know will make a great afghan. I’m spinning it long draw from the fold and chain-plying it for stripey goodness; done this way, it seems like this fibre practically spins itself. I’m spinning the singles pretty low-twist and adding extra twist in the plying for a soft-ish, bouncy yarn. I’m fulling the yarn to finish it (alternating hot and cold baths with agitation), the shock of which negates the unbalanced twist, giving me one less thing to fuss over.

I may get it spun up. I may not. Hopefully I’ll at least put a dent in it. I plied the first two skeins last night, so that’s something,

though I’d actually spun about 1.2 oz/34g of the lighter skein before the tour, so it doesn’t count against the bin total. That’s fine. It’s not a contest. At least, it isn’t for me, not this year. This year, I’m just along for the ride.

*If you’re wondering what I’m blathering on about now, the Tour de Fleece is a spinning event, in which handspinners from around the world spin along with the Tour de France. The idea is to spin each day the cyclists ride, spinning something challenging on the toughest day of the ride. It didn’t start on Ravelry, but it’s become quite a thing there, with over 7,000 members and 96 teams in the Tour de Fleece group (my apologies, but you’ll need a Rav membership for that link), posting progress photos and cheering each other on. The things we do for entertainment, eh?