The Rhinebeck Readiness Campaign and an Update

First, the update, in which I do not come off looking like a particularly smart person.  This is where the project that "disappeared" went:

Do you see that little red bag on top of the short chest of drawers, the one with little white & black sheep on it?  The one that is within arm's reach of my computer on the table to the left?  Yup, that's the project I tore the house apart for two consecutive days because I couldn't find it.  Evidently, my "safe place" is really "out in plain sight."

Onward.

I sat down to my spinning wheel the other day for the first time in ages. I pulled out a multicolor batt from Loop that I bought at Rhinebeck last year (and I forgot to take a picture of it before I started spinning.  Oops.), oiled the wheel & got to it.  About ten minutes in, my tiny brain squeezed out a thought: maybe I should spin a little bit every day between now & Rhinebeck and then 1) I would work through the stash fairly efficiently and 2) I would have room in the stash for whatever comes home with me this year from Rhinebeck.  I'm calling it the Rhinebeck Readiness Campaign.

As I spun, I tried to figure out how much that "little bit every day" should be.  Sometimes I only have fifteen or twenty minutes of time, so it has to be a smallish amount.  Something small, but enough to make me feel like I accomplished something.  An ounce every day is what I came up with.

This is what an ounce of the Loop roving looks like:




A perfectly reasonable amount of fiber, right?  The Goldilocks amount, not too little, but not so much it's overwhelming.  The amount that's just right.

There are forty-four days between now & the day I leave for Rhinebeck. That means forty-four ounces of fiber need to be spun up by then in order for me to reach that goal.

Did I mention that I was a French major in school?  Aside from learning to speak the language and learning a lot about French society & culture, the big thing going for it was that it did not have a math requirement.

I just realized that forty-four ounces is the equivalent of 2.75 POUNDS. YIKES!!  This little campaign of mine makes the Tour de Fleece look like just a little bike ride.  Just to get a better idea of what was in store, I dug around in the stash & weighed out about 44 ounces of fiber & put it all together in a storage bin.

This is what THAT looks like:

Gulp.  (There's a bit of everything in there: the rest of the Loop roving, some blended batts I found on Etsy, various rovings from Rhinebecks past, a Mystery Bump from Still River Mill, even some baby camel, angora and quiviut.)


I had better get busy.