Titles are the hardest part of blogging … other than the actual blogging part, that is

So, I’m sitting here spinning and knitting away, getting close to finishing a few things, and I start to think about what I’m going to say about them on the blog, and then I begin to wonder, you know, when was the last time I blogged?  So I checked.  Oh.  Okay.  I’m behind again.  Some day I’ll be organized enough to actually keep up.  Maybe a New Year’s Resolution?  Nah. :-)

Yummy Falkland from All Spun Up in the catchy colourway name of November/December Spin-a-Long.  This was an easy spin, but it’s hard to capture the colours correctly.  They’re deep purples and dark blues and intense greens, livened up with a bit of gold and yellow and brown. 

I spun up all 8 oz. and ended up with 756 yards, 15 wpi, chain ply.

I love it – deep and dark, with a few highlights.  And even though I took about 100 pictures, those are the only ones that even remotely get the colours right.  I guess I should read the manual for the dang camera some day and figure out what all those other buttons and knobs and switches are for. :-)

And from a totally different colour family:

Wonky!   A quick and easy knit for a thicker yarn, and yes, it really is that bright.  I used the yarn I wrote about here.  It was knit up as a last minute Christmas gift, and the giftee loved it.  Happiness all around.   

And switching gears yet again:

This is  8 oz of merino, Holly Berry colourway, from the CJ Kopec November/December Spin-a-Long.    I really wanted to make a thick and thin art yarn type thing, but my hands didn’t want to cooperate.  I ended up spinning it into two thin plies and then holding the two together as I chain plied.

I quite like the marled tweedy effect, and it’s a good way to bulk up some otherwise thin singles.  I wasted a fair bit of the fibre when I was goofing around with it, but I still ended up with 205 yards, 9 wpi, 6 ply.

There, all caught up, again … at least until tomorrow. :-)  

Round and round

Life continues to drive me round and round, seasonal stuff, work stuff, you know, life.  Gets so you just feel like you’re running around in circles and nothing is really accomplished.

Except for a bit of knitting in the round:

It’s the Fat Cat Knits yarn from the previous post that I spun into a gradient yarn to shift from pale through orange into blue, knit into a möbius scarf/cowl thingamajig.  No pattern, just used Cat Bordhi’s möbius cast-on and carried on knitting.  And then I ripped it apart and doubled the number of stitches, and carried on knitting.  Swatch?  Who needs a swatch when you can just rip out a coupla thousand stitches and start all over again?  Easy to knit, but I found scootching all those stitches around the circular needle and through the three-dimensional warp to be a bit of a pain.  I guess I’m too used to DPNs.

When I got close to the end, I started to realize that I had to, you know, end, somehow, so it wouldn’t roll.  I did some seed stitch.  Moss stitch?  Whatever.  Took it off the needles, and it rolled.  Blocked it, and it rolled.  Steamed the heck out of it, and it stopped rolling.  For a day or two.  And then it rolled.  And I’m going to leave it that way. :-)

I’m quite happy with it, though.  It’s the perfect size.  Wrap it around the neck three times, and it fills in that spot between the collar of your coat and your neck wonderfully. But I won’t make another one.  Unless I forget what a pain this one was.  But it might be nice to have a big, fluffy one.  Hmm.

Fluffy, sparkly Happy Hooves batts from Enchanted Knoll, Good Fortune colourway.  Yumm.  Spun up the singles a couple of months ago.

These batts are about 6 oz, so a little more fibre than usual.  I wound them into a plying ball and then, because I wanted to keep it all in one length, it sat, and sat, and sat, while I waited for my bulky/plying flyer to arrived.  Which it finally did, so I plied.

498 yards, 15 wpi, of squishy green goodness.  I was originally thinking sock yarn, but it might be a bit soft.  Maybe something else, maybe socks. 

I’m not sure I’m totally happy with the plying flyer.  The big bobbins do hold a lot of yarn, but it also makes it harder to treadle with the tension set for a strong wind on.  I’ll continue to play with, but so far, I’m kinda meh about it.

I am a big, fat liar.

Note to self:  Possibly change post title to, “I sometimes fear for my sanity.”  Think about it.

So, I decided I wanted to knit a scarf, and I decided I wanted to use some of my handspun.  I picked out what was probably the most colourful one, my Grafton singles.

Not the best picture, but it’s a felted single that graduates from blue through a yellowish to red.  You can read the details about the yarn here, but I’ll save you the trouble, because really the only pertinent detail is that I said it was 175 yards and about 10 wpi, or worsted weight.  That’s also what I filled in on the Ravelry page for the yarn, which is what I use to keep of myself.

Side note:  I read somewhere on Ravelry that when you make felted singles, you should carefully rewind the hank after washing and while it’s still barely damp-ish.  I read that well after I spun the yarn, so of course I didn’t do it.  It took a full two hours just to wind the yarn into a ball because it was stuck to itself.  If I ever do it again, I will rewind.  I was pleased, though, in that it held together quite nicely all through that process.  Yippee for felting!

Back to the scarf:  The other thing I noticed while rewinding is that the yarn was, well, kind of, umm, thin.  Like, quite thin.  As in, really thin.  Yes, there were some places where it was likely worsted weight, but for the majority, maybe fingering, possibly lace.  Yeah, that thin.  See the first line of this post?  Yeah. 

The thinness made me kind of revise my scarf plans.  I didn’t really want a wispy scarflette.  I do live in Canada, and we do have winter.  I decided to stripe it with another yarn to give the scarf more substance.  The Noro Striped scarf would be wonderful, non-concentration knitting, which was just what I needed after my father’s recent death, as my concentration really wasn’t up to much more than that.  After a bit of stash diving, I found a skein of Patons Classic Merino in Oatmeal,  Perfect!  Right? 

Maybe not.  I don’t know if you can tell from the picture, but the Patons skein is just about collapsed, so there’s not much left.  The handspun, on the other hand?  Tons left.  The yellow is just barely starting to peak through, and that would be about one-third of the way through.  So the Patons skein of 220 odd yards is just about gone, and the handspun, not even a third.  But I had measured 175 yards.  Apparently not only did I mis-measure the weight of the yarn, I mis-measured the length of it.  See the first line of this post?  Yeah.

Another problem is that the difference in the yarn weight was just too much.  The handspun stripes of colour were thin and drapey, and the worsted weight oatmeal was kind of puckery and tight.  Not the best matching of yarns.

The other problem, that you can’t really tell from the photo, is that the knitting is three feet long.  If I carried on, the finished scarf would be about, what, 10 feet long?  Who knows?  Not me, because at this point I have no idea how much yarn I have. 

So what did I do?  I ripped out three feet of 1x1 two-colour ribbing, with one yarn being a single.  See the first line of this post?  Yeah.  Not fun.

Time to go stash diving again.

This was given to me by a friend, and it was given to him by his sister.  I believe she just stopped knitting for some reason, and he wouldn’t touch anything remotely woolly, so it came to me.  The yarn is a DK weight alpaca blend.  I know the yarn store it came from, and it’s been out of business for several years.  Even in it’s heyday, though, it was kind of known for having, ummm, vintage yarn. I wasn't surprised that Ravelry has never heard of Marika Country.

Starting over, I decided that I would double up the use of the handspun by knitting one stripe with both the alpaca and one with just the handspun.  I added about a third more stitches and went down a few needles sizes.

Yuck, and also uggh.  So, what did I do?  I ripped it out, again.  See the first line of this post?  Yeah.

Back to Plan A, with the larger number of stitches and smaller needles.  I decided to just knit until the handspun ran out, because that's the kind of mood I was in.  Three and a half 115-yard balls of Marika later, it was done.

What did I learn?  Well, one, to measure my yarns more carefully  Maybe even two or three times.  It’s really hard to plan a project when you don’t know what you have.  Two, those people who say you don’t need to swatch for a scarf are wrong.  It would have helped in the planning process, and I don’t think I would have dug myself in so deep if I knew it was going to end up at eight feet long.  I’m short, and if I wear it looped like I would normally, it will hang down to my knees.  Folded in half and just draped around my neck, though, it will be fine, but the colour progression isn’t as obvious. Three, my neck is going to be nice and warm this winter. :-)

And also:

Ysolda’s long tail tubular cast-on is easy and a Thing of Beauty.  

Tech Knitting’s Easy Fake tubular bind off?

Also easy, but not quite so beautiful.  I should have just Kitchenered.  And no, I am not ripping it out and doing it over, and yes, after eight feet of it, I am very much over 1x1 rib for a while.

The wheel has also been busy.

This superwash BFL from a CJ Kopec spin-a-long is now …

… some three-ply sock yarn, and it *might* be 368 yards, 16 wpi.   

Mirage

According to Oxford, one definition of "mirage" is "something illusory."

The brief meltdown we had this week was just the illusion of the coming spring, a taste, a teaser, but still, a welcome reprieve during a cold and difficult winter. The illusion of spring was further enhanced by knitting my spring-coloured handspun into a nifty new scarf.


The pattern is Mirage (free on Ravelry) and it worked wonderfully with this heavy fingering weight and limited yardage. It's knit on the bias so the stripes go diagonally, with ruching for extra texture, and, bonus for a thinner scarf, extra insulation factor.

This yarn was much nicer to knit up than my last batch. It actually felt soft and bouncy. I didn't block the final result, as I liked the texture so much. Final dimensions, 6.5 in x 60 in - pefect.


Yes, it's maybe a bit foo-foo, and the colours just a titch loud, but I delighted in wearing it this week. Even if it isn't spring yet, I felt spring-like, especially compared to the black and navy crowd that seems so prevalent and .... dreary.

Norovember Scarf

One ball.


Two balls.


Three balls.


Four balls.


1 x 1 rib till the cows come home.


Easy peasey.


More fun than should be legal.


Silk Garden 230 & 208.


The Noro Striped scarf, as popularized by Brooklyn Tweed.


Go make one.


The hardest part is trying to winnow down the 237 pictures you'll take.

ISE4 - Scarf received!

Q: What's brown and blue and green all over?

Q: What's full of gorgeous little squares that go on forever?

Q: What's soft and warm and cushy-cuddley?

A: The fantastic garterlac Kureyon scarf that Kim sent me for the International Scarf Exchange!

In my semi-caffeinated state, I forgot to take a picture of the other goodies Kim sent. They included an extra skein of yarn so I can make a matching hat !!!, some yummy taffys, a mug and some coffee (which I should have drank so I wouldn't have forgotten - LOL!), some postcards and a fridge magnet ... and a nail and a yo-yo!! All very cool, and I am muchly pleased. Thanks so much, Kim! I hope the scarf you receive is as wonderful as the one you sent me.

ISE4 - Done!

It's been knit and purled, cat hair picked out of it, Eucalanized and blocked, and finally, after 510 cable crossings, the red cabled scarf is done!

What's that you say? You only see 205 255 (Ooops!) cable crossings? That would be because --

-- the other 205 255 are on the reverse side.

It's the Reversible Scarf from Melissa Leapman's Cables Untangled, 5 balls of Luxury Alpaca. My partner wanted a scarf that was at least five feet long, and after the first ball I had ... 11 inches. A quick trip the yarn store revealed that, since this was a gift and there was a deadline, no more of this yarn in this dye lot was to be had. Much gnashing of teeth ensued. In the end, it turned out to be just over six feet long. Thank you, stretchy alpaca and the magic of blocking!

Mods I made: The pattern calls for worsted weight alpaca, which I could not find, so I used DK weight. To make up the extra width, I added one pattern repeat.

Mods I wish I made: I should have added half a repeat. As it is, it's truly reversible; each side starts with a knit section and ends with a purl section. I think I would prefer to have either a knit section or a purl section on each side. You know, so each side is either framed with an inny or an outy. :-)

I enjoyed this project very much, and if I do say so myself, the alapaca feels absolutely wonderful. I'd love to make one for myself ... but not in red. That colour has been close to impossible to capture with my crappy camera. It's not scarlet, not pink, but red.





In the Other News Department, I've been tagged several times for the random things meme that has overtaken blog-land recently. Thanks for thinking of me, but I respectfully decline. I have one of these:

Continueing to continue

So, the red cables ... they continue.


About comments: That Lavendersheep, she's a smart one. It turns out that the new Blogger did NOT mess about with the ability to reply to comments and it actually works exactly the same as it did before. It also turns out that the new Blogger DID mess about with your settings. If your email address was public before, you've been reset to private. If you edit your profile and check off "show my email address," your email address will show up with the comment and restore reply-ability. Pass the word around, eh. I shall now return to my previous position: If there is no return address with the reply, that means you don't want one. If there is a return address, I'll use it. Thank you, Lavendersheep!

The red cables .... they continue to continue.



About the contest: About time I announced a winner, eh? Many of you correctly guessed that the knitted tube was a dying blank. Many of you suggested that it could be a neck or leg warmer for a giraffe, or a snake warmer, or a willy warmer. All cute ideas, but the one that made me laugh out loud was:

I’m rather certain “it” is a trunk warmer for a recently-widowed elephant. Such a comfort in trying times. Especially when one’s ankles tend not show off one’s socks to advantage.

Congratulations, blogless(?) Mike!

The red cables ... they continue to continue to continue.