My goal for Le Tour de Fleece this year was to spin at least 500 grams of fibre out of my stash. I thought that was a modest goal, and quite do-able…. and it should have been. I’m not really sure what happened.
I thought up a lot of excuses – I did get many other things done, I do work full-time and have a small business on the side, I did get a couple kilos of yarn dyed using some new processes, and I did knit some swatches for a design I’m working on – but when you come right down to it, excuses are just – well, lame. I simply set a goal and failed to reach it.
But you know, I’m alright with that. Failure is important – if your life is nothing but successes, then you obviously haven’t set your goals high enough. There are other areas where failure would be very bad – making a mistake in my business costs hard-earned money, screwing up in my job would be not good at all, falling short in my commitments to spouse and family would suck. Somewhere in the circle of my life I need to give myself room to fail without beating myself up over it… and for the month of July, I guess the Tour de Fleece was it.
Of course, it was not just your regular garden-variety failure either; I had to take it up a notch. Not only did I fail to spin 500 grams out of the stash, I actually added 200 more grams to it. I did get the 147 grams of brown romney plied:
Assuming that the Tour de France was about 3500 kilometers long this year, I divide that distance by the 500 grams I set for my goal which gives me the equivalent of 7 kilometers per gram. Subtracting the 147 grams of spun yarn from the additional 200 grams of mohair (mmmm, mmmmohair…..), then multiplying that by 7 gives me… erm, about 371 kilometers. In the wrong direction. If I were actually pedalling a bike in France, that would place me very far from Paris indeed – down on the Cote Vendee, in Sainte-Hilaire-de-Riez… which seems an awfully nice place to be, with beautiful beaches and a forest and a local market on Saturdays. The weather is lovely. Wish you were here.
One Trackback/Pingback
[...] a clue what I should set for a goal – maybe spin enough yarn for a pair of socks? Or – seeing as I failed so miserably last year – maybe I should avoid setting a specific production goal, and instead vow to spin every [...]
Post a Comment