TdF Day 6 and an injury!

I have had another productive day of spinning, albeit hampered by injury....I finally finished plying the Parallel Universe Lincoln singles, and they turned out to be 350m/385yds of Navajo plied 18WPI yarn (which goes a long way toward explaining the injury!)

The Parallel Universe yarn took me a grand total of 19hrs - 15hrs spinning the singles over 3 days, and 4hrs to ply them. The singles were 36WPI (for those of you who are non-spinners, that's wraps per inch - so basically I can wrap the thread 36 times around a 1 inch section of a ruler without crowding it up against itself too much). 

The singles were not without their share of dramas - I wrote  yesterday about the blowout and how I had to replace the leather at literally the last minute, with only 7 minutes of Day 5 left! But I finished them and then spent another 4 hours this morning N-plying. But the result of the combination of spinning a very coarse fibre for very long hours over several days and spinning it very fine, is that my fibromyalgia has decided to rebel - my left/leading hand (the one that controls the twist) is swollen, very stiff, and extremely painful :( But I  have well and truly found my spinning mojo, so no way was I going to quit - I not only finished the neverending Parallel Universe, but I spun the first half of the Turtle Sky Navajo Churro (although I DID spin it fairly chunky and low-twist to give my hand a break, and I did take most of the day off and not spin anything till this evening once I finished the Parallel Universe). 

Tomorrow, injury permitting, I will be spinning the remaining half of the Turtle Sky and plying it, and prepping the next braid to spin as I don't think I will get much more than that done with my hand the way it is. But for now I present the results of my Day 6 spinning:

Top row: on the left, the plied Parallel Universe yarn on the jumbo bobbin. On the right, the finished yarn.
Bottom:  on the left, Turtle Sky Navajo Churro braid. On the right, the first bobbin of singles.

Once I finish the Turtle Sky, I will be prepping this pretty fibre for spinning - GaGa Bunny, "Fire Star":

In spite of the injury, I am so far very happy with my production over the Tour - in 6 days I have managed to spin 3 skeins of yarn totalling 711m/785yds between them, plus the bobbin of Turtle Sky. So if I take it easy for the next couple of days and don't spin anything too thin or any particularly coarse fibres, I should be ok (and there is a rest day coming up on Monday which will help) and should be able to catch up somewhere close to my personal goal of 1 skein for every spinning day of the Tour (which will total 21 skeins for 21 spinning days, since there are 2 rest days over the Tour).

I have also decided that next year, Whorled Domination! will be fielding a team for the Tour de Fleece! And I have already started planning things like team challenges, prizes, incentives etc (nothing like having a whole year to plan ahead for it!) :D So watch out for us in 2012, we will be a spinning force to be reckoned with ;)