Fledgling Spinner

So I have hopefully not downplayed my love for all things fiber related. In fact, my main love has been generous enough to take some ideas I have and translate them into actual drawings. A few of these have graced fabric used for bags in the Decor Noir etsy store. Now they are making their way to a new home, at Printfection.

In addition to the Live Yarns, there is one fellow making his long awaited debut…

I can’t wait to see what they look like and hope that one or two people will love them as much as I do! A few more designs will be coming soon, we are just in the early stages, but that won’t stop us for long!

In other news, I have been working diligently on a sample of a pattern, hoping to finish it by this weekend. Then I am off to tackle more unfinished treasures from the Ravelry queue as well as making an  honest two-ply out of that scrumptious butterscotch roving. Wish me luck.

I recently had an opportunity to participate in my first swap. I know there are all kinds of swaps out there….knitting, sewing, cooking, etc. Just a little extension on the old penpal idea I guess. This one was a Ravelry swap with a vampire and Beltane theme, and since I am practically a Beltane baby, I hopped aboard the swap wagon. I had been wanting to knit this cowl for a while. I had made one before with a very pale lavender mohair and purple beads for someone who was a fan of purple, but it was lost nearly two years ago between here and a city in Canada. Neither the USPS nor Canada Post claimed to have it, but somewhere there is a cowl with a set of handknit mittens, languishing.

I digress. Since this was a vampire theme, I decided that the beads could be red (for blood droplets) and we could call it Blood Queen. Behold, her majesty.

I honestly love the way it turned out, but still kinda hate knitting with kid mohair. There is absolutely no way to tink back rows when you spot an error. And forget an easy unravel of a provisional cast on. I used the smoothest yarn I could find and still struggled for almost an hour to take it out. Now that I have unleashed the swap package out into the world, I have turned back to my wheel. Since my energy levels dipped to the lowest station during the winter, this lovely basket of drafted wool has been gathering dust. It was a yummy “Cappuccino” batt that I tore into strips and drafted like you would prepared roving. I think this one has wee blobs of silk mingling in it as well.

I am still not sure if I want to make this a Navajo or two-ply yarn. I am leaning towards a two-ply, planning to fill two bobbins worth. I don’t want to get into a Navajo-plying rut (I adore it because there is no leftovers on the bobbin at the end. When you do two-ply, there is always one bobbin with more than the other.) but I do love the color. I have been imagining blues and ambers lately. Mostly because of a scene from a movie we watched recently that was done in those two colors and looked so inviting.

With Swatches!

So the Knit Witch roving in Vatican that I was spinning is now all done. I got a couple of 100+ yards of squishy two ply. It is a funny thing with two ply: two bobbins full of singles equal one bobbin with two ply and one with the end of whichever length of single was shorter. The math never makes sense to me….I mean it does. I get that I am stretching one of them a little more or when I predrafted one might have been thicker and ended up longer. I think it is the reason I favor Navajo ply though since that uses exactly that you have on the bobbin as it chains back on itself.

When I looked at the first bobbin with the sad leavings of the first skein of two ply, I figured I would save it for sampling. I would knit a swatch with the single, knit another with the finished two ply yarn, and a third swatch would come from a Navajo ply piece chained up from the other left-behind single.

My results were a fun, albeit kinda obvious now that I think on it, exploration into how the color play across the swatches for each:

The largest is the single ply, the so-called “energized” knitting that some books show. I am not a big fan of how the singles knit up, but it could just be me. The colors on that one obviously had the longest runs.

Looking at the two ply on the left and the Navajo on the right, I have to say I am glad at the way the two ply turned out. It seems to have softer borders or transitions between the colors (I am not sure what the technical term is). The same colors seem more distinct on the three ply and, with the “chain” in the Navajo, the color runs are more pronounced or concentrated to me. I can understand why the fingerless gloves with the Tuscany turned out the way they did. (Still love these colors).

In other news, I am being a button procrastinator. I don’t have  a large vat of buttons and these two seemed the best choices for the Sideways Spencer. I am kinda leaning towards the purple-y shell looking ones.

When I first started researching online to learn about hand spinning, I watched a few videos on YouTube. There was one by chicksinrubber that was a favorite – it made spinning on a wheel seem delightfully accessible. She has this sweetly honest part where she talks about how spinning keeps you from eating sweets, since you don’t want to get your spun yarns all sticky, it does make delightful sense.

Post Halloween, I could take it a step further and suggest my recent bout of wanting to start new projects (even though I have some lingering old ones) could be a good preventative for eating more lil’ chocolate bars and candy.

So far, I do have one knitted finished object to show the world – my first hand spun wool meets hand knit object. In fairness to the huge amount of pride I feel for this, it was a quick knit. And one of them is slightly larger than the other due to smaller spun product. Still – I have touched them and gushed over them a lot.

They are knit from the “Tuscany” roving from the Knit Witch. An Italian named roving becomes Merletto Mitts – Italian for lace according to the Ravelry description of the pattern – for a friend who is Italian. Hope she likes them!

In other start-itis news, I received some sock yarn from TurtlePurl – gorgeous and squishy and soon to be cast on for socks of some kind or another. I cast on a pair of Very Tall Socks for my friend in Toronto, I have gone a couple of repeats into a Sideways Spencer, and now I want a shawl. Oh, and I pre-drafted the “Vatican”. That is it though. Til I finish something else. Promise.

I have been playing with Ravelry far more than is likely healthy. It is kind of like an accomplishment to list all of the knitting projects I have on hand. However, there are far too many knitting skeletons that come out of the yarn stash too. The green sweater front and back are just one of the projects that haunt me. The other is a blanket I have been meaning to do for a few years now. Every time I think about it I remember how scratchy and unyielding the wool is. If having good “hand” is what one says when a yarn feels good and soft and pleasant to knit than I would say that the basic workhorse yarn I made the pieces from is not only possesed of bad hand, I would say it has foot. Dry, old, cracked heel foot.

But I digress – I have knit so many pieces that it would be impossible – nay – sacrilege to frog. It also looks mighty handsome in the images I snapped this afternoon so I could add it to the Ravelry pile, thus guilting myself towards eventual completion (hopefully).

Oh – and I finished my Spring Forward socks finally.

Note the mosquito bite – Florida can be cruel…even in October/November.

I guess that at least once, in the life of every blog – there is a gap of time that posts slow or stop altogether. I am sorry blog, for ignoring you. I honestly had a lot of things to do. There were handknit Christmas patterns:

The shawl is from this Knitty pattern – highly recommended it. It was a fun knit! The scarf is a hybrid of Jean Greenhowe-style animal heads and my strange imaginings for a man’s scarf. (it’s a market bull and bear, for those who wondered)

There was also gratuitous fiber purchasing in the form of Louet silk/merino in Lichen.
There was also a garden filled with yummy treats, some of them too soon gobbled by humidity and heat
So you see, there were genuine excuses. Things that were also fun. Reasons for not spinning the alpaca like I was supposed to…….

North Carolina is made for knitters. There are crisp fall days and fiber festivals. I brought back goodies and congratulated myself on my restraint:I saw sheep and goats and all kinds of fleece and fiber.


I accidentally climbed the mountain in the background before looking down and realizing that the bridge we wanted to get to was in the other direction.
Alpacas don’t judge.

I also finished the sweater which was worn while on vacation.
Now it is time for covert knitting since it is almost the gift giving season and I have suffered another bout of knitting delusion and I imagine I can make four or more things to give away in less than two months. It could happen.

…or a week. It has now been seven days – give or take a couple of hours – since I started down this road. It is an incredible thing to see what changes as you learn and also how restrained you can be when it comes to the urge to pet and/or cuddle the first two ply skein that looks so fluffy and soft and inviting.

I give you the yarn bounty:They are organized from right to left in order of completion with a sock stuck in for the day where I began to worry about wobbly spinner’s knee and the funny click my ankle was making. I told my husband that I will have a new rule so as not to overdose on spinning – knit one day, spin the next. Barring work interruptions, I figure that will allow me to process all the alpaca goodies sometime before mid-winter when I hope to present a multi-coloured shawl to the gifter of fleece.

I hope that it will seem interesting to her; a shawl with all the natural colors from cream to black to brown of her alpaca flock (are they a flock?). That is my beginner spinning goal. I also had my first fleece coveting experience today. Never having spun before and then being chock full of fleece, I have never looked on fleece sites to shop.

A quick peek at the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair website led me to a woman – Miss Babs – website which has all manner of beautiful colorways and dyed roving & top for spinners. These things will, of course, come later, when my singles lack the slubs (wee patches of thickness along my attempts at thin, even spinning).

I can still look though.