A-long alonging

As I'd hoped, the slight pressure to get stuff resulting from joining a KAL or some-such has resulted in, well, getting stuff done.

This colours in this gorgeous yarn from All Spun Up re-kindled a yarn lust that I haven't felt for quite a while. I had to have it, and I had to knit it as soon as it arrived. Joining Sock-a-Month 8 helped keep the knitting from languishing and actually made me knit both socks. :-)

Plain socks, in a fantastic colourway, but a finished pair! Hurrah!! Mojo, are you back? Only time will tell.

The fact that I was able to finish the socks while participating in the Tour de Fleece on Ravelry kind of gives me hope that I can do both spinning and knitting. I mean, that was kind of my intention before the spinning took over.

And speaking of the Tour de Fleece, I managed to turn this ....


.... into this:

It's merino from Fat Cat Knits, in the Seaside Cottage colourway. I signed up for a three-month subscription so I would push myself outside of my normal colour range, and this certainly did the trick.

I was trying to spin it thicker and ended up with 306 yards at 11 wpi, which is on the thin side of worsted weight but not too bad.

Definitely a happy mix of colours!

Ready for Summer

It took a while, but I finally finished spinning up the fibre from the All Spun Up May/June Spin-a-Long -- a lovely superwash merino in watery, bluesy-greeny colours.


It is so much fun to see how everyone spins up the same colourway in different ways. There are so many gorgeous yarns out there. Of course, me being me, I just went with a standard old three-ply sock yarn.

I'm quite pleased with the way it came out. I ended up with 453 yards at 16 wpi -- perfect for a pair of socks!

It should knit up into subtle, monochromatic stripes, although you never really know until you actually knit it.

And speaking of knitting, the stitches continue to fly off the needle at breakneck speed! The sock that didn't have a heel two weeks now has a heel!

The craziness at work has settled down for the next two months, so I should have a bit more free time to knit. Now that I've joined Sock a Month 8, I'm also hoping to be a bit more motivated, but there is also that darn Tour de Fleece thing going on too. And tomorrow is spinning class. Hmmmm. I think I need a time management expert to come in and schedule my hobbies for me. If they do windows and clean bathrooms while they're at it, that's all the better. :-)

Breaking Outta the Rut

I seem to be in a rut. Well, not seem to be ... I am in a rut. A deep one. It's time to do something about it.

A while ago I was trying to move around tidying the stash room and happened to notice that, ummm, I seem to have a lot of blue, and brown, and green. One of the things I enjoy most about spinning is watching the colours mix and change as the fiber flows by. Although I'm still more likely to wear the blue/brown/green, there's no reason I have to actually wear the yarn I make; right? When I saw that Fat Cat Knits had started a fibre club called Mixed Blessings, I figured it was just the kick in the pants I needed. Each month, for three months, you get five oz. of fibre, but the catch is that it's in two different but coordinating colourways.

So, is this me?


How about this?


And when you put them together?

I'm really looking forward to playing with it, although I have absolutely no idea what it will end up being, if anything.

If that's not enough of a shake-up, how about this? I've signed up for a class. Yes, out there with real people and everything. For a socio-phobe like me, that's just about a nervous breakdown in the making. :-) What could possibly coerce me into such foolishness? A local yarn store is offering a spindle class with some different techniques, such as long draw, how to spin silk, and who knows what else. It will be fun; right?

The knitting, it continues. I've knit my fingers to the bone and produced .....

.... one sock leg. Sigh. Time to kick that up a notch too. I used to at least get one pair done every month, back when I was in the Sock-a-Month Knitalong. SAM 8 starts in July, so I joined up. One of the good things about this series is that you don't have to start the socks in that month, just finish them, so it should be good motivation for finishing up some of my WIPs.

I did a bit of round-up and ended up with this:


A box of bags. In six months' time, I'm hoping they'll be EMPTY bags. :-)

Why do I need a title?

Thanks to Battlestar Galactica Season 2.5 (what's up with that?), I got a bit of knitting done.

Noro Silk Garden, Colour No. 8, blues, greens, purples .... yummm.



This is the second time that I've run out of yarn. Luckily Noro just recycles the same colours in different combinations and I could use some leftovers to finish it up.



Can you tell which end I had to doctor?

I also finished plying the Enchanted Knoll Red Silk Kimono yarn.




As I was spinning it, I didn't really worry about how thick or thin it was; I just let it do its thing.


It ended up at about 136 yards, 12 wpi, and very textural and sparkly.


I'm surprised at how much I enjoyed the sparkles, and I might even have decided what I'll knit with it. But for now, I think I'll go out and enjoy some sunshine.

I have no clever title

It seems there's a large preference for Google Reader over Bloglines -- thanks for the recommendation, everyone! Just as comments were coming in on my last post complaining about missing blogs, Bloglines decided to pull one of those, "Oh, by the way, so-and-so has 200 new posts" dealies, so I made the switch. Google Reader is kind of wonky, as in what's up with alphabetizing blogs that begin with the word "the" under T, but I can live with that.

Last time I removed my blogroll from my sidebar, I got a few emails of ... concern ... that it had disappeared. I have spent over six hours trying to reinstate it from Google Reader, and it keeps screwing up. I'd rather spend my time doing other things, so my best advice at this point would be, "Get your own blogroll." :-)

I've been knitting a bit, thanks to Battlestar Galactica Season 2.


Noro Silk Garden No. 241A, a lovely mix of mostly greens and purples.


Yum!

I finished spinning the red sparkly stuff I was working on, but I have started plying it yet. That hasn't stopped me from starting to spin something else, though.

This is superwash merino, the May/June spin-a-long from All Spun Up. Greeny blues with a bit of white and rust, drafts like butter -- love it!

At least I'm consistent

So, you know how when a bunch of things go wrong, and then something goes right and you think the string of wrong is gone? That's not what happened. The wrong continues. It's kind of reassuring to know that my place in the universe is secure.

See, I've been knitting a secret sock, and it's coming along just smashingly. Very cool pattern, easy to remember, no charts to be glued to, just read your knitting and keep on going round and round. It even has a different construction technique than I've been used to -- toe up and a wonderful invisible gusset to help make the short row heel fit better.

And then the pattern is released, and I want to show you some pics of how wonderful it is, and then my camera decided, "Umm, nope. You can have this ONE pic and I am going to keep all the rest for myself." And it steadfastly refuses to release its hostages, even though I talked nicely and told him what a nice camera he was and offered to buy him ice cream. Ummm, nope. No go.

So, you get what I got. That's most of one sock. I'm sure my camera will eventually decide to cooperate, and I'm sure I'll actually knit the second sock, so I'll wait until the stars are realigned to do a proper FO post. In the meantime, you can see wonderful pictures of two socks here and you can download the pattern here. It's even free! Go for it -- you'll like it! Thank you, Bea, for sharing your wonderful creativity!

Any one else use Bloglines? Notice anything wonky? Like, it's eating people and won't let you see them? Kinda like my camera? Look over to the right? See that list of blogs? Way down near the bottom there should be someone that I've been reading for, like, forever. And all of a sudden she's gone! Not on that list, not on my list of subscriptions on Bloglines -- just gone. But when I try to re-subscribe, Bloglines says, "Hey, you're already subscribed to that blog." Sigh. There could very well be others that have been invisiblized, but I read enough that it's hard to keep track. If Wendy Knits and Bloglines doesn't see it, is she actually really knitting?

Still here ... barely

I don't know if I mentioned it before, but back at the beginning of the year I joined the Grafton Fibers ColorWays club. Every month, you get a big, fluffy batt of corriedale, died in wonderful colours and blended in interesting ways. I opened the first package and was totally petrified. The one time I'd used a batt before, I just grabbed handfuls of fiber and spun them together. Although you could use that technique with these, you'd lose the wonderful colour progressions. Yup, each batt so far has been carded so that the colours gradually shift from one end to the other. January went from red to turquoise and back to red, and February from red through yellow to blue, March from ultraviolet through blue and brown, and April from gold through green to burgundy. They have been gorgeous. Rather than end up the year with a stack of 12 nice neat boxes,, I decided it was time to just dive in.

I started with February. I must confess that none of these pictures accurately reflects the true colours. The original batt was sort of like this, but the red is way off, and it doesn't show much of the green:



I tore the batt into four sections length-wise, then pulled each section out width-wise into a tube (rolag?) and then dizzed them into a long strip (roving?).

To keep the colours true while spinning, I had two choices, either Navajo ply or singles. I did two chains of N-ply and got bored, so singles it was. :-)

One end of the yarn is red, some with a bit of brown. The yellow is gradually introduced, with some green, and it shades through blue with some black to clear blue.

Spinning a single is a bit scary, because normally the plies in a multi-ply yarn give it strength. In a single, you need enough twist to hold it together but not so much that it gets all kinky. I used a fairly heavy spindle -- my Bossie maxi --so I could try to keep my yarn thick. It took some planning to keep the colour progression so I had the right ends to join together as I built the total length. I finished it by alternating hot and cold washes, with a bit of agitation, to slightly felt it and give it some strength.

This picture shows the blue and green, but the red is off.

In this one, the red is right, but the blue and green are off. I'm not really a red person, but I do love this colour.

I ended up with about 175 yards, 10 WPI, of the softest, fluffiest yarn I've made so far.

I'm thinking it wants to be a scarf, probably like the Noro striped one that's very popular, but I haven't quite decided if I want to match it with some plain black or maybe wait to see if another batt later in the year will coordinate with it. I think I'll just pet it for a while. :-)

I finally finished a pair of socks.

I posted about these before and how much I was NOT enjoying them. The yarn is Regia Kaffe Fassett, and when I bought it, I thought I was getting the striped variety. Turns out I must have been distracted by some other nearby pretty and reached into the wrong bin and got -- whatever that is. I was determined to finish them, though, because I was in one of those "Next time you go yarn shopping, remember to check the bin!" self-improvement masochistic modes. A good way to just get through something that isn't appealing? Rent a couple of DVDs and just sit and knit and don't look at them. I have Battlestar Galactica Season to thank for getting these done. I hadn't seen any Battlestar before, and it looks to be a good series. I still kind of hate the socks, though.

With those two projects done, it was time to start another. It's been very busy at work, and stressful, and I've been generally grumpy and tired. But every time I pick this up, I can't help but smile a bit. If the red and purple sparkles don't do it, the spindle itself certainly does.

It's batts from Enchanted Knoll Farm, Red Silk Kimono colourway, being spun on my Tilt-a-Whorl drain strainer spindle. Big fun, and I have absolutely no idea what I will do with the finished yarn, and I don't really care. :-)

Turning the corner, or around the bend?

From Fiber Optic, Foot Notes pencil roving, 80% superwash merino/20% nylon, in the Dark Coffee colourway .... yummmm.

Should be perfect for socks. Spins up smoothly and easily.



Makes a beautiful yarn.

I love how the colours play in 3-ply.


Unfortunately, this project is a bit of a failure. The yarn came out feeling drapey instead of bouncy, perhaps because of the superwash. The bigger problem, tho, is that I likely enjoyed watching the beautiful colours too much and wasn't really paying attention. It's the most even I've been able to spin yet, but I ended up with only 209 yards. The WPI is either 17 or 12, depending on my mood when I measure it. :-) I'm quite disappointed, because I was really looking forward to knitting up these colours into some socks. They would have been glorious. Sigh.

So, spinning didn't work out the way I wanted it to, and the knitting was bleh. Time to re-group. In a comment to a previous post, Alwen suggested that one good way to get the knitting groove back is to put aside the projects that are annoying and do something completely different. In her case, the "different" was a Nielbing doily. I'm not quite that desparate. :-) Instead, I'm going to use this:

And in an even more radical departure, I'm doing this.

Yes, it's a toe. Are the two related? Maybe, maybe not.

Green Tailed Jay

Still no knitting to show, since there's still no knitting going on to show (although the bug has now nibbled and I'm feeling the itch), but I did finish a spinning project that's been in the works for a while now.

I'd taken out a three-month membership in the Butterfly Girl Designs spindle and fibre club, and this was the first batt I received. It's in her Green Tailed Jay colourway, a mix of one-third black merino, one-third green merino, and one-third green bamboo. There's more black than appears in the picture below and the colour is a bit off, but it's the best I could do to capture the shine of the bamboo. The spindle I started with was a Ledbetter with a lacewood whorl, .95 oz., although I later switched to a Bossie.


I liked all the colourways I received in this club so much that I actually went back and ordered a double dose of each one that I'd received: Buyer beware. :-)

This was my first time spinning from a batt, and it was quite interesting. Not exactly relaxing, more so ... absorbing. Each fibre drafted out differently and it was difficult to keep the singles even, so much so that I eventually gave up and went for "even enough." The green merino felt what I could consider to be normal, the black merino wanted to be extra floofy, and the bamboo was sticky and slippery and wanted to be very, very skinny. It took a lot of park and draft to play with it. It was kind of like one of those video games that sucks you in and you play and play and play and next thing you know, hours have disappeared.


I ended up with 470 yards from 6 oz., about 400 of which came out to 20 wpi and 70 yards at one end about 25 wpi. I'm not sure what happened there. I know that I drafted some from the end and then switched to spinning from the fold, as I seemed to get a better mix of the fibres that way, but one end of the skein is definitely different and I don't think the difference is all attributable to that.


In the end, I'm happy enough with it, although it is really hard to get a picture that shows the shine and drape from the bamboo. The finished yarn has a nice shimmer and hand to it, but I'm wondering if the colour differences might be too much for lace. A swatch is the only way to tell for sure.

So, where did I leave my knitting needles?

Up and Down

First, the Up.

I participated in the March/April Spin-along in the All Spun Up Ravelry group. Kristin's fibres and colours are always gorgeous, but this time around was a particular favourite of mine -- lovely, soft BFL that looked like this:

Double Yum!

I don't very often knit with worsted weight, but for some reason I've had a goal of spinning it, two-ply. No, I don't know why, and no, it doesn't matter. Spindles generally want to spin thinner yarns, and since my first awkward attempts, I've just gone thinner and thinner. This time, though, I made it thick.

I find spinning thickly to be difficult, so it's fairly uneven, but it averages 12 wpi. Despite my throwing fibre into the twist as quickly as I could, it still came out fairly dense and only 160 yards, but I think it will make wonderfully warm pair of mittens. I love these colours.

I am also amazed at how quickly it went. One evening per ply, and one evening to ply -- a finished yarn in three evenings.

I had meant to take a picture of the yarn on the spindle, but it went so quickly that I kind of forgot, so here's one of the spindle I used. It's a Forrester Dervish. It weighs 1.77 oz. The top whorl is hickory, the bottom whorl is Caribbean walnut, and the shaft is maple. I originally thought it would spin very fast, but it didn't. It was quite steady, though. I only mention it here so that the next time I get a hankering to make worsted weight, I know which tool to use.

So, now for the Down.

I mentioned in my last post that I've been suffering from a lack of knitting mojo, particularly as it relates to socks. Given the amount of sock yarn I have, this is rather distressing. I joined Sock Madness III in the hopes that it would give me the kick in the pants that I need to get back at it. The first pattern came out this week, and I duly cast on. Unfortunately, I'm just not feeling it. I've got the leg three-quarters done but have absolutely no desire to finish it. The inspiration behind the pattern is quite clever -- a quilt block translated into knits and purls. The heel is innovative -- an afterthought heel, but with a flap and gusset. The problem is that I don't think the pattern is translating well and the 32 stitch repeat is too big to read visually. To my eye, the sock just looks .... wrinkled. I obviously haven't knit it yet, but I'm pretty sure the flap will end up too short for my foot, and the gusset is to be decreased over only four rounds so I'm pretty sure it won't fit properly on my high instep. I hate dissing on people who volunteer their time and effort to organize and participate in all these wonderful "alongs," because I do think they are a wonderful thing that help build the knitting community. That is not my intention here. Neither do I mean to denigrate any one particular pattern -- everyone has their own likes and dislikes, and it's a very personal thing. Really -- it's me, not you.

Confession time: I've already got nine "trouble" socks sitting here. Yes, nine - 9! You know, the ones that don't quite work out the way you thought they would, or the yarn didn't work with the pattern, or whatever. You put them aside to cogitate on them or to wait for the right pattern to pop up, start something else in the mean time, and there they sit. If it were one pair, I'd chuck it and call it good, but nine? I can't do that. I'm tired of doing this to myself. It's draining. I have to do something with these, finish them up and move on. With the Sock Madness sock, it feels like I'm just doing it again. Argggh. I also have three singleton socks that I'm quite happy with, but they all involve sitting in front of a chart. That's fine when you're in the mood for that, but when you're not, it's also ... arrrgh.

I'm dropping out of Sock Madness. I apologize if I took someone else's spot and they really wanted to get in. It looks like I was the second-last person out of 200 to sign up, so I don't think there was a waiting line, but just in case you were trying and didn't get in, I'm sorry. I won't do it again. I'll add the yarn from those socks to the pile of "what do I do with it now" stuff, and get back to plodding through the ugly socks I mentioned in my last post. I figured they were so ugly that no pattern would save them, so I'm just knitting them plain. Maybe I'll go rent a couple of movies so I don't have to look at them while I knit them.

Speaking of which, some people wanted proof that they really were ugly. Well, here you go:

See? Ug-ell-ee.

Feeling not productive

I think I jinxed myself by commenting in my last post that I was getting things done. Turns out that working 12-14 hours a day the last couple weeks has the opposite effect. Go figger, eh? Not much time for blogging, and not much time for doing anything worth blogging about.

Still knitting. Working on a pair of socks -- slowly and sporadically. They're UG-LY. I wonder why I keep forcing myself to finish them instead of just chucking them. I'll have to keep that in mind as a topic for another post. Despite my dismal performance last year, I did sign up for Sock Madness again this year, in the hopes that it would revive the mojo, but now I'm afraid it will just bog it down even more. Guess we'll see what happens.

Still spindling. I actually have one yarn that's ready to be plied, and will likely finish another one this evening. Then I just have to ply. More about that when they're done.

So, why am I posting when I have really nothing to say? Well, I received an email the other day that I thought was pretty clever, so I asked for, and received, permission to share with you. So I am. It's a way to do the garterlac dishcloth that doesn't involve a cast-on. The following text and photo are courtesy and copyright of blogless Jane. Thank you, Jane!

I love your garterlac dishcloth. I make lots of dishcloths for gifts, and this has become one of my favorites.

I have found many loose cast-ons that work well but then I thought, why have a cast-on row? Here is a change I tried that is pretty neat:

Wind off enough yarn to knit the three top triangles and don’t break it. (I actually knit 8 rows of 25 stitches each, which will always be enough.) With scrap yarn, crochet a chain of about 32 to 35 stitches.

With the dischcloth yarn, knit an increasing side triangle. Pick up 8 stitches on the chain and knit the square. Skip 3 or 4 stitches on the chain and pick up 8 more for the next square. Skip 3 or 4 stitches on the chain and pick up 8 stitches for the decreasing side triangle.

On this first row, everywhere the pattern says SKP, just K1. Then finish the dishcloth to the end. Turn it around, and using the yarn that was wound off, knit another top row. As you get to each shape, pull out the crochet and pick up the stitches that the chain was holding.

This results in a cloth with 90-degree rotational symmetry. Yes, it’s just a dishcloth; but I am the Anal Knitter.

Thank you for sharing your great patterns.

Feeling Productive

I finally finished spindling the merino top from The Arts at Eagle's Find, in the Leaves and Stones colourway, that I started way back in December.

Plying seemed to take forever, but I did it in stages and that seemed to help. I tried a different way of wrapping the yarn around my plying spindle. I kept more weight on the bottom, and more open space at the top for twirling, and that seemed to make it easier. Not faster, just easier.

While spinning it, I tried to concentrate on keeping it even. Once my fingers got used to the merino, it just kind of flowed. I put a bit less twist into the singles and bit more into the plying, and I like the result -- it's much softer and bouncier.

Even though it's mostly shades of browns, it was a lot of fun to watch the colours slowly meld into each other. I'll be watching for more semi monochromatics.

End result: about 600 yards, 24 wpi - laceweight!

I was hoping for enough for a shawl, but I don't think it's quite there. Maybe a large-ish scarf? Haven't quite decided.

I also finished another Kaleidoscope.

This is Silk Garden No. 217. Again, no knots in either skein.

What a fun colourway -- me likes it lots.