One of the downsides of posting your adventures on your blog is that you often have to admit failure.  Of course, I could just sweep this all under the rug and never mention it again, but in the interests of full disclosure I will confess.  For the Tour de Fleece my goal was to finish spinning the yarn for Ben's sweater.  I came pretty close with all but a few singles left to ply.  However, that was not my failure.  It only took another day or so to finish up and the skeins were washed, dried and ready for knitting.  This is where the failure comes in.  As I started my gauge swatch I realized that this was nowhere near the worsted weight I had thought I was spinning.  It is more like a bulky weight.  I figured out the numbers, cast on and it only took a few rows for me to realize that I hate knitting with bulky weight.  Not only will it not come out to the sweater I had envisioned, it is unpleasant to knit with and hurts my hands.   I am really disappointed.  The skeins are so beautiful:

All is not lost however.  Someone is going to love all this bulky weight yarn and I'm going to skein it up nicely and perhaps offer it at our guild's sale in November.  In the meantime, I have ordered some nice, predictable Cascade 220 for Ben's sweater.

I guess this has taught me that I really have a long way to go before I can expect to be successful at spinning a sweater's worth.  I'll stick to small projects for now..

I also decided that the vest I was making for myself out of handspun was not pleasing to me, so I have frogged that.  However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had 10 skeins of Silky Wool in my stash that I had forgotten about.  So Ylva has been resurrected in a more appropriate yarn.

I've gotten in a lot of knitting time this week because I've felt too crappy to do much else.  The antibiotic that did such a good job of knocking down the infected wisdom tooth also caused an allergic reaction.  I've spent the last few days broken out in an ugly rash.  The Benadryl that helps also makes me very groggy.  So far, I have to admit that turning 60 has certainly been a challenge.  I hope things stop breaking down!

On the bright side, a couple of weeks ago we had a lovely dinner out with Ben & Abby.  As a belated anniversary present they took us to Ivar's on the water at the Mulkiteo ferry dock.  It was an outstanding meal with wonderful company.  Kind of makes up for the rest!