Tour de Fleece

Every year during Tour de France someone organises a Tour de Fleece. I've nver joined before but decided i would this year as I've been keen but frigntened to spin some camel fibre I've had for ages. So that's my challenge. The tour started on Saturday and I spun NOTHING!. Last night I got my act together and spun for 30 mins while watching Desperate Housewives. Camel is challenging to spin. It's the shortest staple fibre I've spun and I'm trying to aim for laceweight. Don't think I'll get quite laceweight but it's looking okay so far.
This is what I got last night:

Don't think I'll have time to spin tonight. Got some urgent knitting to do.

I've also forgotten to share my Woolfest shopping:

yes this is all I bought.. oh and bough the latest issue of Spin Off. the bags above are merino top dyed in Norway. the main reason I bought iwas that it was dyed in Norway and I love merino and the colours ae gorgeous and I have very little solid coloured fibre. Most of it is hand-dyed. So a bit of solid might be a good idea.

I've had quite a productive weekend really but not much public knitting. I've done some work on 2 secret projects. One should be off the needles by now and I'm hoping to finish it tonight. Then I really need to get a move on the next one as it'll be making an appearance at Knit Nation at the end of the month. Lots of patterns to write too.

I did some machien knitting this weekend too. On Saturday afternoon, while i had the house to myself, I cast on for Simon's machine knit sweater knitted in my own Super Merino. After a few mistakes and 3 false starts I finaally managed to get as far as the neck shaping. I did one half of the neck shaping yesterday and then did the second side this morning. Made a mistake while I did it and had to undo several rows and re-do it. When I got teh front off the machien I thought it looked a tad small. So tonight we measured it and it's too small. So time to rip back and re-start. I cast on again tonight. This is the first time I'm knititng a sweater using my ribber. After the rib all the stitches (half the total stitches) have to be transferred from the ribber onto the Knitter. This takes quite a long time, about 20 mins. Whne I did my first row afterwards I forgot to change the carriage and nearly lost a bunch of stitches. Fortunately I managed to rescue them and did over halfway to the armhole. The magic of machine knitting is the speed. I did about 140 rows of 188 stitches per row (in sock yarn) and it only took me about 10 mins. You can't beat that. I've got  quite a few plans for machine knitted stuff. Even some designs for some garments and accessories that may be for sale if everything works out.

I had other things I'd planned to blog about but it's late so I'll leave that for next time.

Nite x