Sixes and Sevens

That's where I am, at sixes and sevens.  I'm still having a hard time writing, although I have been doing some great preparation, gathering of resources, and general thinking.  I didn't start the Tour de Fleece on July 2, but I did get my wheel out and have been doing a little daily spinning this week.

The grey roving... ah, I remembered why it's taken me so darn long to spin.  It's full of VM (vegetable matter, i.e. grass, stickers, and the like) and I have to keep stopping to pick at it.  I don't know how I got so much spinning done before!  But this morning, I had an epiphany, as the Emperor puts it.  Back when I first started spinning this roving, I tried my favorite technique of hand carding the fiber and then spinning it; I prefer spinning a nice handmade rolag over all but the finest rovings.  But this particular one had silk and some interesting dyed parts, and hand carding smoothed out most of it.  The texture is what drew me to the fiber in the first place, so I decided to bite the bullet and just spin straight from the roving.

Even at the beginning, I struggled with it.  I'm usually pretty good at the long draw, and when I tried to do it with this stuff I could not get a nice smooth yarn.  The silk in it hung on to the grass and stickers, creating lumps and bumps and not for good reasons!  But I soldiered on, and got something like 600 yards spun and plied before I just couldn't face it any more.  I set it aside, taking it out every now and then to give it another go, but the frustration level was too great.  Nearly four years went by, between the 600 yards and this week's Tour de Fleece.

Here's the yarn.

This morning, I was at my wits' end.  I wanted to pitch the whole thing and just forget about it.  But then, I remembered my hand cards.  I finished the bit I had in my hand, and I'm going to ply it with what I had on the bobbin for those four years.  That's it -- I've got about 700 yards of "interesting" yarn.  Now I'm going to card the rest of this roving and just spin it up and probably have about 700 yards of smoother, less interesting yarn. When it's finished, I'm going to get out one of my beautifully colored rovings, card that up, and spin the heck out of it, and enjoy it.  I have made my sacrifice for art -- now it's time for craft, and for having some fun with fiber again.