Since I do a lot of processing, my planning for Tour de Fleece usually begins months in advance; planning projects and ensuring I have enough fluff to keep me busy for the entire tour. What can I say, I’m a list maker!
But even with three days left until the tour starts, there is time to get your game plan in place, even if you’re just now thinking of joining.
- Go stash diving – What do you have already that you can work on during the tour. Grab more than you think you can spin in three weeks. If you don’t get to it, that’s fine, but it is no fun running out of fluff mid-tour and having to spend potential-spin-time digging through stash, or worse, waiting for a fiber order to come in.
- Check out the teams – Go to the forum and take a look around. Explore the teams. See what their requirements are and find one or two that align with the fiber you chose and your chosen method of spinning. Look for people you think you might want to chat with during the tour. Making new friends in the fiber world is a great way to use your time!
Organize your fluff – Decide on a rough order in which you’ll spin your fiber. Save yourself from having to make a decision in the heat of the moment. Decision fatigue is the phenomena where the more decisions you make in a day, the lower quality your decisions become. You can think of it in terms of mental bandwidth. We all have a certain amount of mental bandwidth to get us through the day. When we run out, we start messing up. Since the tour, for some, amounts to added activity on top of our already busy schedules, it is already stretching our mental bandwidth. Save yourself these smaller decisions.- Prepare your wheel or spindles – Before the tour, make sure your tools are in their best possible working condition. Oil your wheel, check your drive band, clean the dirt from your spindles and wheel, have leader yarns ready to go. Clear off your bobbins, so you’re ready to go! Also check to make sure you have any parts you may need in reserve. If your drive band breaks mid-tour, it is mighty nice to have a replacement at hand.
- Carve out a chunk of time – Give yourself a minimum amount of time you want to spin each day and then carve out a space in your schedule for it. Whether you spin for 15 minutes every day before work or make sure you have a spindle on hand for that summer vacation you are planning, give a few minutes to think about when you can spin. It is very easy to say, “I don’t have time today” if you haven’t already thought about it. It is much harder to give in to “I don’t have time” when you’ve made the time commitment already.
Happy TdF!