Fledgling Spinner

Knitters have stashes, at least, most do. I have yet to meet another fiber crafter who didn’t keep a reserve unit of projects to-be-completed. Sometimes they are built on impulse purchases or gifts. More often they are built on the remnants of those as well as best intentioned projects.

While working hard on the fiery wool for the wee devil hat, I realized that my yarn-to-be stash was growing to the same girth and proportions of my already-yarn stash of things -to-be-knitted.

So here is most of my stash shame. The only missing component is the fleece that started it all – the alpaca. I have, in my defense, fallen victim to the allure of the prepared (washed, carded, not sandy) fleeces seen below. Some of them are also shiny!

It did get me thinking, though, if I made yarn out of all of these, it will just make my knitting reserves larger….so I had better get a move on. I decided that I might be behaving badly, taking the fiery red wool away from the silk that came with it. That’s it there, in this image, nestled between mohair, cotton bolls, braided KnitWitch roving (the rest of that Tuscany) and just southwest of the two giant balls of Corridale meant to be blended with the fur beneath. That’s actually Newfoundland dog fur, ready to be blended for my mom’s knitting pleasure…or blending pleasure if I never get to it.

West of those goodies are some sparkling BohemiaFiber batts, ready for my experimenting with not-making-a-mess-spinning-batts. Then there are the handspindles, little changed from the last time I showed you.

Now you have the photographic evidence and I have a mission – bust down the spinning stash and then tackle WIPs and yarn stash.

It’s gonna be a long summer.

So I know this batt was called cappuccino something, but it keeps making me think of warm amber, more so than it makes me imagine a frothy beverage.  All told, it delivered nearly 140 yards of a scrumptious two-ply that was nearing even in some areas and seems fairly balanced:

When it was all said and done, I cast on to make the ribbed edge of a sweater (which ended up in the frog pond for size related reasons). My intent was to fill the body of the sweater, actually a vest, with this Arctic Blue heathered wool I got from KnitPicks. The two colors looked amazing next to each other, so all was not lost. I proceeded to use it again to make a hat….also ending up with size issues, which I think was still pattern related.

On the handspinning front though, knitting with this two-ply brought home an interesting point to me. First of all, I do not “set the twist”. I am not really sure what that means or why I should do it, but I haven’t had any issues with my handspun yarn, so I don’t do it. Maybe it’s like gauge, where you regret it only on occasion. What I did notice was random splitting….which ties in with a video I saw on Interweave’s previews which suggested that if you spin the singles clockwise, and ply counter-clockwise, sometimes the resulting “twist” of the yarn may not suit your final purposes. I never gave it much credence, but apparently as an English style knitter (sometimes called throwing in that I tension and move my working yarn with my right hand), counter-clockwise plying may be best for me….while someone knitting continental-style (where tension and such for the working yarn is done with the left hand) might prefer a clockwise spun ply…..Crazy the things I still have to learn!

Anyways, my knitting is growing along with my belly as I work towards more baby related knitting projects. I have a hat in mind for the wee guy that has horns and needed a red yarn. I only have red roving handy, but the fiery colors in it will hopefully make the perfect yard for a Lil Devil Hat. I’ll try to keep you posted.

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.

I may be blog-quiet, but I have not been idle. With a belly o’ baby, I can also say I am actively doing something no matter how idle I may appear! I have been trying to clean up some old projects, and hoping to reduce the active Ravelry queue on the right hand side of the pages. I finally started to spin again after what seemed like ages. The fibre-y highlight to the recent days, though, was a chance to glimpse into the long life of a fiber enthusiast.

Prompted by a Rav post for a nearly local artist’s estate sale, I (and my fearless escort) braved the early Saturday morning highway to a seaside home that was filled to the brim with spinning and weaving and dyeing products from a bygone era. Most of the items were rusty, touched with damp, and completely lovable. The preceding image was a cute little book from 1943 that was hidden among a few moldy primers on dyeing and weaving. The giant cone of wool behind it was a natural mill spun 1-and-something pounds from Augusta, Georgia in the 1970s.

There were also two great wheels. Not a euphemistic great, but a stand up and spin great wheel from the pages of a pioneer book. They were gorgeous, and my trunk was small.

Looms, hand carders, all of these things that we pursue with delight were laid out as people filed by and I kind of felt a sadness……who could go through our stashes when we pass and know what we meant to do with each thing? Would anyone be able to imagine why I bought a braid of pink and purple roving? Would the smallish balls of sock wool be treasures or would they seem like waste? I scooped up the big cone and tried to imagine what she bought it for……or if she had just found it in a sale somewhere. I can tell you, she had great taste in chairs and I found a comfy bottom-catcher for spinning more yarns….yarns I might label with their own little stories to share one day with strangers.

So I have been really lazy lately. Lethargic. No real new spinning or knitting since Christmas. I have been very active though. Passively. We found out around Christmastime that we are expecting our first munchkin and are now embarking on BellyWatch 2010. We got to hear the heartbeat for the first time this week and hubby was able to catch some of it on his phone. There are definite heartbeats at the beginning and the end, interrupted by my non-stop giggling that jiggled the doppler. For now, this is the best impression of what the belly bean is up to:

My own personal knitting evolution was slow…..my first piece was a raglan sleeve sweater that was all stripes and pieces stolen from my mom’s wool stash. Most lacked labels and was of different yarn weights…..I remember one pink stripe on the sleeves kind of buckled and bubbled cause it was a heavier, bulky weight yarn. I was also beginner enough to do the back collar on the back piece and then seam it to the front later…..but we won’t talk about that.

Following nearly a decade of knitting, I was gifted some wools which ran above the general acrylic found in superstores or craft chain stores. I couldn’t put my finger on why I loved them so much until a few more projects with wool or “higher end” stuff. Gone was the squeaky pull of acrylic on my needles…especially in the hot summer when sweaty palms made tension problems worse. More shapely were the sweaters in Knitpicks Peruvian wool offerings when compared to the limp body of the Simply Soft Sweater done a year earlier.

Needle evolution was likewise a trip from ignorance to bliss when the colder Boye metal made way for the swishy softness of Knitpicks wood or bamboo (although bamboo and I don’t get along with sock wools as my hot little hands seem to make them bend too much for my liking).

I know there are die-hard fans of acrylic and metal needles. Half of the stash box still houses full balls of Red Heart and the needle wrap is stuffed with metal needles, perfect for those times when a project calls for a size I lack. But I don’t love working with them. I am spoiled. I can see the merits, but my heart now belongs to other materials. I am sorry acrylic and metal, Boye and Carron, staple products of by-gone eras.

That being said, should I purge the remainder? Or hold on to the pieces of my knitting past in case I need them?

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.

I am fortunate to have a visitor coming soon, one who will explore the world of felting with me. Despite its popularity, I have never really dabbled in felting but was nearly immediately stuck with an idea for an experiment. A year ago, Interweave had this unusual pattern for bags, the Ravelry folk can follow this link – Dumpling Bags. Basically, it looked like a round bag once felted and I thought a quick bit of red eyecord to capture the idea of the optic nerve and a few needle felted pieces for veins post-wash, and it would look just like an eyeball. So I set about with my Patons scraps to felt an eye for carry oddments.

I played in the stash for color scraps and basically knit this monster without buying anything new. Even though the pattern calls for size 13 circular needles and double pointed, I only had straights and improvised. This was, after all, just an experiment. And here is the giantess eye prior to felting:

The pattern also calls for a couple of lucite rings to act as closures on the bit of I-cord at the end. I skipped that too! Apparently I also overlooked one more thing: the green iris yarn wasn’t wool.

When I plucked the eye from the washer I was so tickled at my first felted object I nearly overlooked the fact that one row was loose and….NOT FELTED!!

I was sure it was wool. I just never tested it…..to make sure. But! You can teach an old knitter new tricks. I am making it again and this time I might buy the circular when I go to buy green or blue yarn. Stay tuned.

I might have already mentioned, but I know myself and my craftitis pretty well. When I wanted to learn how to spin I bought a copy of this book and tried the “first spinning” techniques suggested in the book. I got a hooked piece of a clothes hanger…the wire ones. I just made a tangled worm of roving. I tried a dowel and CD contraption and ended up with rubber grommets all over the garage trying to get them over the dowel.

Somewhere between off-center cup hooks and twirling fiber in my hands, I got a small bonus and decided that if I liked spinning, I would want a wheel. If I was really bad at it or hated it, the Ashford Traditional tends to hold value enough to find it a new home…

I have never tried the drop spindle until this past Saturday. My mom, the original craft loving enabler constant support of my hand crafts sent me two drop spindles in a goody bag with my visiting sibling:

I must admit – not as tedious or frustrating as I feared! I translated the drafting techniques I am trying to practice and manage some decently even singles on both. The Ashford top whorl on the left holds practice wool of unknown origin. The lovely dark wood spindle has a  50/50 merino & soysilk blend that is a bit too fast for my fingers at my present learning curve, but I love the colors. This roving is from SugarBee Art & Fiber Studios and I found it in She Sells Yarn, my nearest LYS..

I can’t decide if the dark wood spindle is a top whorl on account of the notch/turning details on the end of the shaft. However, there is a hook on the same side as the whorl.

New toys need new homes so I repurposed what I would consider a modern day “train case” for makeup. Those square bags are cute, but I love the rigidity of this MIL b-day gift. Plus there is a wee pocket for my cell phone or scissors.

I knit a little more on my Sideways Spencer, practicing my first I-cord bind off. I still need to do the button band and collar, but after that I can move along and block it….if I am not too busy spinning.