Knitting Updates

I suppose it is only fair that if I get to post something that I am very proud of, I need to post the ones that I am not so proud about.

Recently I needed a very easy mindless type knitting project and when I was going through the stash yarn I found four skeins of this soft and pretty acrylic yarn. I found an afghan pattern in Quick Knitted Afghans called Cross Stitch Squares that I really liked. I knew that four skeins of yarn was not enough for a full afghan, I was going more for a wheel chair lap throw, or baby blanket.
The pattern is fun and easy to memorize and I was enjoying the knitting. The recently I had my knitting with me at my mother in-law's house and she just raved over it. But when she took it out of my hands, what she did was through it around her shoulders, like a shawl. And insisted it was just the right length and would be just perfect for something to throw on in cool air conditioned resturants. Well. I first tried to talk her out of it, saying that it was too square in shape to really work, and she kept saying, oh it goes around my shoulders just fine. See, she's not a knitter, and had no idea that the reason it went around her shoulders just fine was because the knitting was bunched up on a circular needle, giving it that nice round shaping. I knew if I just cast off it would be a rectangle and not fit at all.

But I relented and said that I would have to do a few more rows on it, only increasing the length some. I knew during those rows I was going to have to figure out how to create a shoulder shaping 'after the fact'.

So I discussed it with my daughter, who is more of the knitting designer than I, and also consulted a sweater pattern with a circular yoke style. I was trying to get an idea of how many stitches I could go down over about 10 rows.

The final outcome of that was I took the shawl down from 140 stitches to 64 stitches over the ten rows. I followed the garter stitch pattern that was used at the beginning of the afghan, so it would match that. except that I purled on the wrong side on the three stitches used in the decreases. This made the decreases show up more, following the obvious block look of the body. Finally I cast off, made a loop and found a button and now have a shawllette to give my mother in-law.

A close up of the decreases:

I say I am not proud of it, not because the knitting is bad. It just really bothers me to be stopped mid way during a project. I can't even say I enjoyed the challenge of the design, because I didn't. It did turn out nice and soft, but I have a thing about acrylic garments. You can't really block them and it looks very unfinished to me for that reason. I don't mind that in a blanket, I do mind it in a garment. And I did not achieve the stash busting goal, I now have two skeins of the yarn which I know is not enough for even a baby blanket. I am still thinking about what to do with the yarn.

Other knitting news, I am working on a very fuzzy project, so it may lanquish awhile until the heat dies down. This is in Knit Picks Suri Dream in the color Woodlands. The pattern is Lacey from Knitty.

I am going to look like a big fluffy teddybear in this, but I probably will not wear it outside of the house. This is my solution for the extreme chilliness of my house in the winter and the fact I can not be under a blanket all the time. So I am making a wearable blanket.

What you see in the photo is a sleeve. The pattern is done with the magic loop method and starts at the cuff of one sleeve and continues to end at the other cuff. It's been a bit of a challenge for me since I had never done the magic loop knitting. It was very slow going until I got about six rows done and then everything sort of fell into place and the knitting has not been hard at all. I am interested to see how the how thing knits up. I know it's been really nice to be able to slip the sleeve on and check the fit as I knit. The cuff is intentionally tall in the pattern and I followed that part of the pattern, I think it will help the sweater stay on better to have a cuff halfway up to the elbow.

But as long as the heat lasts (and it's been very hot here for weeks now) I will stick to knitting socks and cotton washclothes.

Non wool fibers part 2

I just discovered tonight that this post was still saved as a draft and not really posted. My apologies to those that came to see the photos connected with the podcast episode 32 Silk soy and milk.

These are fibers for spinning of course, not food. It's part 2 of our non wool fiber podcasts. We talk a little bit about silk, since it was also covered in a previous episode. We focused on the soy fiber, talking about how to spin and dye it. And also a bit on the milk fiber. All of these fibers belong with protein fibers group, and dye like wool, with the exception that they should not be held at heat above 200 degrees.

Both my daughter and a vendor Natural Obsessions have a knack for dyeing these fibers. Here's a few pictures to prove it:


100% milk fiber, dyed by Natural Obsessions:

100% silk, dyed by my daughter:


100% soy silk, dyed by my daughter:
And my daughter spins it well too! 100% soysilk

Natural Obsessions http://www.artfire.com/modules.php?name=Shop&seller_id=28031

Spinning Tencel and bamboo

Episode 31 of Yarnspinnerstales is posted and is available here or on Itunes.

This podcast is part one of two podcasts on spinning non wool fibers. I asked my daughter to join me for these podcasts, because these are the types of fibers she spins all the time. Although calling them non wool is not exactly right (because non wool can include other animals like alpaca and angora) we can't just call them plant fibers either (because silk falls in this non wool category). So we decided to base the categories on their sources, which affect mainly how the fibers are dyed. The categories are cellulose and protein derived.

Cellulose fibers include bamboo, tencel, and cotton. Although hemp and flax are plant derived, they are considered bast fibers and will have a podcast of their own. And cotton was covered extensively in episodes 12, 13, and 15. So for this podcast we talk about bamboo and tencel, going into the process of their production, as well as spinning and dyeing with these fibers.




As you can see in the photo, bamboo and tencel have an amazing shine. They do feel slippery as you spin them, and for that reason require higher twist and want to spin very thin. This makes many spinners afraid to spin these fibers. We hope that this podcast will help those spinners learn how to handle the fibers so they can enjoy the lovely yarns they create.

Because sometimes a verbal description of a process is not always enough, I have posted a video on youtube that shows tencel being spun on a Lendrum wheel with a very fast flyer.

I am currently spinning a combined combed top of targhee and bamboo fiber on my Ashford with the lace flyer. It is a beautiful white, the targhee being non shiny and the bamboo shining through. The singles are very fine, and a test self 2 ply is measuring 23 WPI. It's going to be a lovely lace weight yarn.

The coolest birthday present

My daughter got me this fiber mystery box for my birthday. These boxes are the brainchild of Phat Fiber. Once a month boxes with samples from Etsy sellers is put up for sale on Phat Fiber's Etsy store. April box's theme was 'green' and so the idea was captured with either green color in the dyed fiber samples or yarn reclaimed. There was a very unique yarn created from soft cotton sheets, cut and plied with thread. A few of the natural fiber samples included angora, mohair and something called South Africian Fine Wool Top. There were patterns and also three wonderful stitch markers. It was like getting a present full of presents!

A few close up photos:

The grass is green, the socks are not

Finished in six weeks. Probably the fastest I've ever done a pair of socks. They fit wonderfully.

Project details:

Yarn: Sock It To Me! Collection
Color: Puzzle
Needles: two size 2 circs
Pattern: Cat Bordhi's basic sock on two circs sock pattern

Episisode 29 podcast pictures

The April Spin In podcast is posted, you can find it here or in ITunes under Yarnspinners Tales.

I took quite a few pictures that go along with the podcast, but you can enjoy the photos without listening too. The first segments of the podcast are discussions of two sheep breeds, both of which are double coated fleeces. The first called Spaelsau, is from Norway. A big thank you to one of my listeners Silja, for sending me some black and white fleece from this breed of sheep. I was able to wash it and spin some sample skeins to keep in my breed notebook.

Spaelsau was created from an original old breed of Norweigen sheep, bred with Icelandic, Finn and some Faroe Island sheep. The long outer coat of the fleece is rough but spins into a very strong yarn, useful for many non garment type uses. The under coat is softer and can be carded and spun into a bouncy yarn useful for hats, mitten and socks.

This is a sample of the unwashed white Spaelsau:
And this is the unwashed black Spaelsau:

Note the very long locks, and the obvious coarser outer coat in the black:

After separating most of the rougher outer coat, and washing the remaining undercoat the Spaelsau looked like this:

These are the sample skeins of the white, with carded and combed fiber (try clicking on the photo for a larger version if you want to read the tags)

And the black:

My favorite sample skein was from the black undercoat carded and spun into a very low twist, bulky yarn. Here's a picture of that skein (it's softer than it looks in the photo)

Since most spinners will not be able to get a fleece from a spael sheep, I did a second review of a more readily available double coated sheep, the Icelandic. Here's the sample skeins from that review:

In the Yarnspinners Tale part of the podcast I talk about a recent road trip to a spinning and weaving store The Woolery Recently this mail/catalog only business moved to Frankfort Ky, expanding the business to include a store front. This puts the store about 45 minutes from me, and I am quite excited about that. We spent over 2 hours browsing, talking to the owners, and trying out different spinning wheels. I focused mainly on double treadle wheels, and found one I really like, so now I am hoping there's a new wheel in my future.

Another wheel we spent time looking at which I want to write about here, is the Road Bug wheel by Merlin Tree. The wheel is small enough to fit on the floorboards at your feet in a car. Now, I really think road trips are for knitting and have no desire for a wheel this small, but the wheel has some interesting design features that made it worth a few photos here. The design feature is the fact that it has no drive band and that it works by friction (thus creating the term friction wheel).

First a photo of the wheel, from one side showing the treadle, bobbin storage and fly wheel. The fact it is sitting on the table and the hands next to it should give you a bit of sense of the size of the entire wheel.

If you look closely on this side you can see the friction drive. A black roller sits at the end of the bobbin/flyer and that same roller also snugs up next to the fly wheel. As the spinner treadles, the fly wheel turns, turning the black roller, which then turns the bobbin. Pretty ingenious design!

It took my spinning friend Viki a bit of fiddling to get it spinning, but we had just put the wheel together (straight out of the box) and after getting the flyer mechanism placed correctly, as well as getting the oil worked in, she was soon spinning just fine on it. There's a bit of a trick to getting it to treadle just right, it really needs a toe/heel motion. Also if you sit the wheel on the floor, it is way below your waist. That's not really a problem since you can angle the yarn up to you as you spin, but does mean leaning over to do anything with the bobbin.

While she was playing with that, I test spun four other wheels, two Majacraft and two Kromski. Then there was all that browsing of fiber, books, and yarn to do. All too soon we had to head back home, promising ourselves another road trip soon.

A Big blocking adventure

The Serendity stole (aka Mystery stole) turns out to be a hard critter to block. If I could get down on my hands and knees and if I had a stretch of floor that no one walks on, I could block it there. But my usual blocking place, the bed, just did not have enough length. And if I was going to do it in sections (not being able to find room to do it all at once) I decided I might as well put it on something of comfortable reach. So it's blocking on top of my dining room buffet on a thick tablecloth. Well, part of it is blocking, about 3/4 of the length. When that dries I will do the other end.

(Yes that is my wine cellar under the buffet).
I did run wires through each edge in the YO's that the designer conveniently put between the shawl and the scallops. This is also something new for me, I have not used the blocking wires until now. I had to run the wires through the top line, pin that down, run wires through the bottom line, pin that down, and then pin each scallop and the bottom edging.

The pictures are doing a pretty good job at showing the lace design, but the beading is lost in the color. The beading is much more obvious in person and really adds to the design. And the angle of this above photo did not quite catch the grafted area although there is just a hint of it in the lower right corner. The graft did not disappear completely with this blocking, I quess I could have pulled on it harder, but was already at my limit of space, sideways, to block it on top of the buffet. I can live with a slight line being visable at the graft.

I put the crocheted edging on it, that was not in the designer's pattern. I did not feel the edge would not roll, even with blocking and there is a lovely line of beads there that i did not want to get lost in the roll. So the crochet edging was something I found in a very old crochet edging booklet that I have. Usually I am not real fond of crochet edgings, but I like this one and feel it blends well with the scalloppy design of the long edges.

I spritzed the shawl heavily with water after it was pinned, I did not wet the shawl first which is another new thing for me. I thought it best not to wet the whole shawl if I was not going to block it all at once. I am sure I got the shawl good and wet though, judging from the 'wet wool' smell. Now the only problem is keeping the cat off the very inviting surface.

CW

Grafting the mystery stole

It's done! I joined the two halves last night and am really pleased with the result. I need to do something lovely on each edge, probably a crochet to keep it from rolling. And then I will block it and get photos posted.

It was a very unusual way to do the kitchner join and the actual process was not described well in the pattern directions. I did read everyone's input about the process on the yahoo group connected with the shawl, but still felt it was a process that would either present itself logically to me as I attempted the join, or fail miserably. I was not about to accept failure, because the thought of trying to unjoin something made of those tiny stitches was unacceptable. The alternative was for it to work the first time.

So I took the one piece of advice I had seen the most often, to first purl (wrong side row on each edge of the area to be joined) with a very large, and strongly contrasting yarn. I was knitting the shawl in lace weight yarn and so I choose a bit of worsted weight handspun in white that was conveniently laying around. Cotton was recommended and I can see why, because my choice of wool meant the lace yarn often wanted to stick to the wool yarn when I was removing the contrasting thread. But I didn't have cotton thick enough and all it meant was a bit more caution as I removed the wool.

The first step was to purl each section's wrong side row with that contrasting yarn. Then I slipped each section's stitches from the circular needle I had been using to a long straight needle, one size smaller than the circular to help the actual edges lay flat and not follow the curve of the circular needle. I made sure the two straight needles holding each section would line up right, so right sides of the two sections were on top and the end on the knitting needles were to my left. I started the kitchner stitching from the right of the shawl where the points of the needles were.

The first dozen stitches were very fiddly. For one thing I was trying to work with the shawl laying on the table and stretched out flat. As I completed the set of kitchner I would release the stitch of the contrasting yarn and pull it out. The actual sewing of the kitchner was going through the lace yarn, NOT the contrasting white yarn. So the sewing was happening below the stitch that was on the needle. However, it made it pretty easy to see the lace stitch and to slide my threaded needle through it, either knit or purl wise.

After that first dozen stitches I gave the sewn area a good tug, and that's a good thing because it really did need to be loosened and stretched along the seam. When I did that, the seaming practically disappearred. Kitchner is amazing that way.

Once I got the rhythm going, I realized it would be so much easier if I had the knitting needles up off the table and held in my left hand side by side. Then it was really easy to get a rhythm going and keep track, the front needle always had a knit direction, slip the contrasting stitch off and pull out, front needle purlwise in next stitch, back needle purlwise and slip contrasting stitch off, then knitwise in the next stitch, back to the front needle, etc etc.

It took about three hours to complete the grafting. The stitch markers had been left in place from the original patterning, and that really helped keep the grafting even. The only thing I would have changed was I did a few knit stitches with the contrasting yarn instead of purls, following the original pattern and it was harder to graft those stitches. I would purl everything for that one row, just to have all the stitches going the same direction. Otherwise, I really was impressed with how using the large contrasting yarn helped with the grafting process. I hope my explanation here will help me remember how it was done, and maybe help someone else that attempts it also.

Dipping in the dyepots

This is a picture heavy post, which I usually do not do. I promised lots of pics though on the podcast about dyeing this fleece. If you are interested in the podcast you can find it here or on Itunes.

Spring is really popping up all over my place now, and I have been getting the itch to copy to spring colors. Here's a few that got me thinking of yellows, oranges and greens:

Those lead to my version:

It all started with this fleece, a Romeldale (the white version of the CVM breed) that was a lovely soft fleece but which had some yellow coloring to it that I was not sure would wash out.

There was a pound of the fleece and it was very free from VM and otherwise really nice. Since I wasn't sure I would end up with a nice white yarn, I decided it was time to do some fleece dyeing. After all, there is no better time to dye a fleece than when it is wet from washing. I discuss the whole process on the podcast, episode 28. After splitting the fleece into four different parts and doing two dyepots, with two parts in each pot, I ended up with a dark and light version of yellow and orange.
The orange was much darker than I had planned, my first reaction was, oh my, I've made clown hair. The color is growing on me though, more so than the wimpier lighter version of the orange. It was my plan to card the fiber in mostly yellow batts with the orange striping through the batt, similiar to the orange pollen on flowers. After the fiber dried, I did some sample batts to see how I liked my idea.

The batt on the left is how it looks when you take it straight off the drumcarder. The ball on the right is the second batt I did, pulled off the drumcarder in a continuous strip, which not only makes it more roving like, but also shows more of the orange, which is buried in the middle of the first batt,
I will have too much of the dark orange, so I am thinking about another spinning experiments, of a cabled yarn in orange and yellow. So I did a solid yellow batt (far left) and a solid orange batt (in the middle). I will spin singles from those and try a cabled yarn from those.

The batt on the far right was my attempt to card a batt for a second carding. You can see that it did do the further blending of the orange which I like. But I have a very hard time carding the batt fiber, it was wrapping the small drum of my carder and really not wanting to feed in nice, no matter how small of an amount I tried. I believe this is because I have a fine teeth drum, which works fine with shorter fibers (which the dyed fleeces locks were) but not well at all with long stapled fibers (which is what a batt acted like once it was all carded). It is not going to be worth the struggle to me, just to get that further blending and I will not be carding the dyed fiber more than once.

After I had used the yellow dye pot twice, I decided to add blue dye for a green color and dye some yarn. Remember the summer Ravelry spinning olympics project, where I took raw fleece to a finished project (the cat bed) during the olympics? Well, I have four skeins of that Maine Island yarn still, and thought I would like a color other than white.

Adding the blue dye, without adding more yellow, meant the blue dye struck first, giving the yarn a more blue tone than I had planned. I still love the color, and the yarn is thick and squishy. I plan to knit a version of a pocket stole, something to throw over my shoulders while I spin, knit or read.

Don't you just want to squish it?

CW

1800 miles and very little knitting

Recently we rented a car and drove south to visit my mother. The round trip mileage is around 1800 miles and we divide the trip into a day and half drive each way. That should mean lots of knitting time for me right? With that thought in mind, I am sad to show the sum total of my travel knitting:



I chose to do socks in the car because it really is a nice small portable project that fits well in the lap space a car provides. And I chose a no pattern type of sock (letting the colors just do the work) to have even less to fool with. I did take the Socks Soar on Two Circular Needles book by Cat Bordi, mostly because I had made one of the sock patterns in that book before and really liked it. She does one sock at a time in the book, but I am a vetern two socks at once knitter and knew I would do both at the same time.

The pattern is actually her first in the book, the very basic sock. I like it for the ribbing all the way down to the heel (I don't really like doing the K2P2 but I like how the sock fits and feels) That's why the photo looks like I got started on the cuffs and forgot to stop, but it really was intentional. I am about an inch away from turning the heel.

The biggest accomplishment of the project was that I cast on the two socks with the circs instead of my usual cast on (with four DPN and knit several rows and then set up both socks on the two circs). I was too lazy to pack the DPN, so it was get the socks cast on, or not knit. Interesting way to make one learn a new skill (grin). It involved much fiddlely stuff, much moving stitches from here to there, and much finger crossing that I was not going to end up making mobius socks. After knitting about an inch I breathed a sigh of relief, all looked right and tubular.

I really do not like the way the set up causes one side to start with a P2. I can prevent laddering of the yarn when doing a knit stitch, there is a knack to tugging both the first and next stitch that causes everything to tighten up just fine. But that type of tugging is contrary to the way a purl stitch falls, and I found myself fighting really hard to try and get those stitches tightened up. It's a sad thing to admit that it took me until at least three inches of ribbing to realize I could just do four knit stitches in a row in that area, I mean, who would notice? But since I hadn't thought of it at the outset, I didn't switch. I am going to call the laddering a 'lacy effect'. Yeah, I am that type of knitter.

While actual at my mom's, I did the last 20 rows of the last chart of the Serendipity (mystery 4) Stole. I did not do the grafting, and still have not done the grafting. I followed all the posts about the shawl on the yahoo group devoted to it, and a pretty high percentage of the knitters had a hard time with grafting lace weight stitches. The designer has given specific directions to purl the back rows of each side in a very smooth, larger and contrasting yarn (like cotton) and use that yarn to show the direction of how the needle and thread should do the kitchner stitch. It helped many to do it this way, others who said they understood kitchner just fine, found the contrasting thread idea very 'in the way' of the kitchner process. I have no idea where I will fall in this debate, and it has me somewhat reluctant to start the grafting. The shawl is stunning, I really want to wear it, I just need to have about a day of no distractions and no urgent plans and get it done.

The other current big project was a partial stash toss one rainy day this week. I am finally starting to get actual pictures and listings on Ravelry of the stash, including some handspun yarns. This involved having the laptop in the stash room, internet on the laptop, a google document for a wonderful yarn inventory spread sheet I happened upon once, camera and many cups of coffee. I estimate I got photos and listings on the excel sheet for about 1/3 of the non fiber stash. I hit a point of being totally overwhelmed, went downstairs, and promptly went to knit picks for more yarn retail therapy. Only a junkie would understand.

Geeky bit alert, trundle on by if not interested, although I think it's really cool.

I had another hurdle too, which I solved just this morning. I have the photos from my camera on the laptop, but my camera takes photos at a nice high resolution, and that ends up being pictures kilobytes in size. And I am only using the free flickr account so there is a monthly limit on the photos I can upload and then show on Ravelry. I have a photo editing software on my desktop (which uses XP) but that software wouldn't work with Vista which is on my laptop. Upshot was I could not convert those massive pics into nice smaller versions for upload and storage on flickr. I looked through many descriptions of many photo editing software, and all would index, fix red eye, crop but not really change the size. I even downloaded the free version of my adobe software to see, but no, I would have to buy an expensive version to get that feature. So I hit the website freedownloadmanager and although it took going through pages of very out of date photo editing software, I finally hit paydirt. It is from a company Arclab and it is called Thumb Studio. It was free, it's amazingly easy to use, it takes your original photo and makes up to three different sizes (and lets you decide on the size) and even lets you bring in entire folders of photos and do them all at once. There are other features too I haven't investigated, but even if this is all it does for me, I am so pleased. The photo above was processed by the software, as well as others in a matter of seconds. I just love finding that perfect bit of coding that some developer sat and said, 'oh I bet someone would like to do this....'

That's all the geeky stuff

I will be traveling again, but driving, so no knitting. I will take the socks and hope to at least catch some time to knit now and then. And I hope to post again before I go, I have been at the dye pots and the colors are ummm 'bright'!

CW