The white's been spun.
The brown's been spun.
There's a light at the end of the tunnel for this project, and it's not a train coming towards me.
Unfortunately, I got turned down on the residency application, so I took matters into my own hands and set a goal: join Ravelry's Tour de Fleece (where one spins every day the riders ride in the Tour de France bike race) and finish off the chessboard yarn component of this project.
And I have, with a week to go, no less.
That's the good news: the bad news is that I have a lot less yardage than I probably need to execute the chessboard as I had originally conceived it, with four-inch squares, and use some silk noil from my stash for the chess pieces. I opted to three-ply both the white and the brown instead of keeping it two-ply (like the sample several messages below): easier and faster to knit were my main reasons.
Thus, the squares will need to be made smaller, and the silk noil is going to be just too bulky to work with. What to do? Dig out a 100 gm bag of 50/50 tussah silk/camel, spin it up in the remaining week of the Tour, and use that for the chess pieces.
So tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday, when the boys are grunting up HC climbs in the Alps or recovering from them, I'll be whirring away on my lace flyer with the fat hollow-core bobbins and spinning from the fold. After filling three bobbins (one a day), I'll two-ply it on Friday and start swatching all over again.
Now, where did I put those 1.25 mm Inox needles?
