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 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.

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.

My progress on the Very Tall Socks is not what I hoped, but nonetheless they are progressing. I am also about halfway through my Sideways Spencer.

Unfortunately, I am not sure about either one. The quietly deflated skein attached to the sock suggests to me that I may not make it all the way to the toe without running precariously low on fiber.

The sweater isn’t ready for its close up but investigations on Ravelry suggest to me that it may have been a too small choice. Is it possible to be bitten by a knitting pessimist bug?

Is it too soon to cast on something else instead?

It always seems like there is a universal joke in which all patterns have gauge to show you what you should do, and hardly any knitters actually test with a swatch first. I have maybe three or four swatches for every dozen things that get cast on. Like most people (I imagine….or I could just be projecting on the needlework masses) I kinda measure when I have knit on a piece for a while or if something appears to be going hideously wrong.

So it is with the hopes of the magic of knitting and yarns that I keep my fingers crossed that the Very Tall Socks I cast on which are written in a pattern for worsted will work in the fingering I am actually knitting them in. I have done several rows already and put them on waste yarn once to see how they fit…..just in case.

In other size news, I have also been playing with some 7mm drop stitch markers….something which required some tiny hand/eye coordination to get miniature stitch markers. I think they worked out okay – I still love the brains the best.

Those are Size 2 needles, for reference.

I also broke down and pre-drafted some of “Vatican”, I couldn’t help myself. I still haven’t given the Merletto Mitts to the intended wearer, but I figured they might motivate me to make my own.

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.

Halloween knitting somehow feels more appropriate with the yarn I spun from the Knit Witch roving. I am embarking on a small lace project and loving that the colors in the yarn worked out just like my handspun sample. Here’s to hoping I can draft the next one just as well. For now, I am trying to put aside that strong desire to see what “Vatican” roving looks like spun up. I might finish one half of this project and then reward myself…..a wee treat with a spinning trick or two.

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.