Hexapuff Madness!

First, and for the record, I vastly prefer hexapuff over hexipuff. Hexagon, hexapod, hexadecimal, therefore hexapuff. Now that we've gotten that out of the way.

You know about the Beekeeper's Quilt, right? It's positively sweeping the (knitting) nation! I fell prey to it immediately because it's the nicest looking scrap project I've ever seen. Now I'm kicking myself that I've given so many sock scraps away over the years. Luckily I still had a goodly bag full of them.

I like this project for a bunch of reasons.

1) Puffy hexagons are cute.
2) I like that the puffy hexagons are knit in the round, no seaming.
3) Furthermore, no seaming the entire thing; it's actually tied together.
4) Since it's pieced at the end, you can make lots of puffs and then decide how the layout/color scheme will work.
5) There are lots of creative ways to puff.

Here are some of the ways I've come up with so far on how to puff, other than with sock scraps:

Handspun. This doesn't really even count as a creative way to puff per se as it's pretty obvious, but I can just sample up any little bit of fiber into a fingering weight, and make puffs from that. Lovely.



Silk Hankies. Knitting from silk hankies was certainly made popular by the Yarn Harlot, and recently I saw a very nice and informative blog post by Maia explaining the process in detail. I happen to have a bunch of silk hankies sitting around, some of which I dyed myself when Jenny Jo and I had a dyeing day at her place. I tried puffing with bamboo DPNs, and that was not happening--imagine me shaking my fist at the heavens and yelling "FRICTION!"-- so I switched over to my beloved ChiaoGoo RED lace needles, and it worked. It's a little fiddly magic looping them, because even though the join on the ChiaoGoo needles is miraculous, the silk has issues. Ideally these would be knit on very slick DPNs, which I don't think I own. It might be an excuse to invest in a set of Signature DPNs, but I'm not that crazy...yet.



Succumbing to my inability to darn.

Delusional me: La, la la, I have every intention of mending these socks. I've kept them for years. I've moved them across the country.

Tough love me: I've knit over two dozens socks while they've languished, injured. It's time to come to grips with myself. They are not going to get darned. There's still plenty of good yarn in those socks: to the puff pile!



The puff pile, by the way, she grows and grows.

Loop Spin-in Recap

Do you like rows of things organized by color?



I know I do.

How about bags of colorful things next to some cool-looking machinery?



This is what the loop studio is like. It's one of my new favorite places on Earth. I was there Saturday with a friend attending a spin-in. A few goodies came home with me.



Cleo thought about taking a fiber baby home.



This studio is in the Hudson Valley, in an old industrial complex converted into an arts center. Here's the stream running between some of the buildings.



You may have seen the article in the Times this weekend about the so-called Brooklynization of the Hudson Valley. While it's a tragedy that industrial jobs have gone away (probably) never to return, it's pretty great that these old buildings can be repurposed. I dream of being able to work in such a cool space. I'd spend my first few weeks organizing stuff by color.

Summer scrap knitting

What is it about summer?  I'm still daydreaming about epic projects and buying yarn in unreasonable quantities, but can't seem to get myself to knit anything that requires concentration or more than 50 grams of yarn ... so stockinette stitch in scrap yarn has been the name of the game.

Scrap knitting the first:  phone cozy

I threw half a ball of black wool (knitpicks, I think) and every gumball-sized ball of leftover Noro Kureyon I could find into a pencil case, along with some DPNs, as in-flight entertainment for my trip to Maui.  Making the cozy took the duration of the inflight movie (True Grit -- pretty good for airplane fare) and a couple podcasts (This American Life -- Father's Day; Planet Money -- Why Do We Tip?).  

I didn't realize until it was finished just how 1980s this project is.  But the neon colors, black background, and zig-zag stripes take me back to the days of my childhood.  In 1989, I remember saving my allowance for months to buy a pair of biking shorts, which were THECOOLESTTHING and looked a little like this:

Scrap knitting the second:  ankle socks

This is a much more sedate project, without actually being at all subtle.  I hope you guys appreciate that I shaved my legs just to take this picture for you!  Pretty easy knitting -- they took me more than a year to complete, but languished in my 'someday' bin all of fall, winter and spring.  

I love this yarn so much -- if you were to spin yarn from all the fiber you find in the jungle (tiger fur and vines and twisting rivers) I think this is what the result would look like.  I made my first ever pair of socks out of it last year, which (sob) ended up being too big for me and were given to Peter instead.  But there was enough yarn left to try again!  And I like them as ankle socks -- this way I can wear them in the summer and people can actually see them.  I think I maybe don't hate socks as much as I thought I did.  I can see myself making one pair every summer ... 

Thrilling conclusion of the Tour de Fleece + Maui Recap

Well, it was a little less than thrilling, because my spinning flagged toward the end. Not because I was sick of it, heavens no, but because I was engaged with other things. Namely, snorkeling.



Sometimes, with sea turtles.




Sometimes, with fellow blogger Emily.



Sometimes, tiki drinks followed.



It was, perhaps needless to say, awesome. I did actually spend a fair amount of time spinning. Sometimes on the lanai of our condo.



Once at a lavender farm.



The progress for the week I was there was not too shabby.



It's somewhat tragic that Maui has no yarn stores. Not a one! Granted, it's a little hard to imagine what one knits when it's 85 degrees Fahrenheit every day year round. It would be a lot of loosely knit silk, cotton, and linen, I'm guessing. Plus the one wool hat for going up to the Haleakala summit at 10,000 ft.

What Hawaii does have a great tradition of is quilting. I was incredibly fortunate to be able to take a quilting class at the delightful Maui Quilt Shop while I was there.

I have only flirted with quilting a little bit. It was long ago, in a galaxy far far away, when I rode the school bus to Mrs. Leerkes' farm to have after school sewing lessons at her screened-in front porch. That was all machine work. Hawaiian quilting is entirely done by hand. It's hard, y'all. I'm determined to eventually finish this one piece. It'll probably take me years, but I'll be proud of it, and maybe by the end my stitches won't look like a complete disgrace on the wrong side of the fabric.



To bring this back to the Tour de Fleece, here's a family photo of all the finished yarn for the week. I did not complete all my goals: the charkha cotton is still incomplete. Still, I'm quite proud of what I did get finished. Now back to regularly scheduled programming in which I also do things like knit, crochet, read books, etc.

What color is yarn?

Since I started dyeing my own fiber, I'm always on the lookout for new and interesting color combinations. That's why I was delighted to find out about a little web doodad called The Color Of. The concept is simple: you search for a term, and The Color Of searches Flickr for that term and averages the results into a single image.


I can't really stop playing with it!

Pour un maillot jaune

Spinning! I'm still doing it, every single day! With two spindle projects complete, I started in on the third, purple BFL from Fiber Optic. After one day of working on this fiber, I was here.


This is of course on top of all the progress that had been made on this fiber that is from MDSW 2010.

I took a side trip to ply the cashgora/silk yarn that was one of my original goals. You can see the little disk up in the corner here.



That little disk of yarn was a bit of a disaster. I think I didn't wind the silk and cashgora onto the spindle tightly enough before plying (I was plying using the traditional Orenburg method, which I may henceforth forsake entirely). When I started plying, the yarn slid up the spindle and started felting to itself and tangling up at the top. I fought with it as long as I could, but ultimately I had to throw some amount of the fiber away. I think I plied more than half of the fiber, maybe even 3/4 of it. It's sad, but there are always a couple of crashes in the Tour de Fleece.




I've moved on from the crashgora (see what I did there?). I finished the first cop of the purple BFL, with 2 ounces of fiber on the spindle, which is a personal best.



A few days later, another cop joined it.



Last night, I plied, and the resulting yarn is just under 400 yards of light fingering weight. I'm in love with it, I must say. I'm open to pattern suggestions at this point, but I'm thinking a simple-ish shawlette.



With my three spindle projects complete, I can't believe it, but my spindles are empty!



No spindle stays empty for long, however, because I just acquired a couple of new toys and took them for a test drive.



That tiny Turkish spindle? It's so adorable I just want to keep it in my pocket and feed it M&Ms.

Continuing Dispatches from the Tour de Fleece

Although I'm on team Hopelessly Overcommitted, my commitments for this year's tour have been surprising me in their ability to be completed. This may be due to the fact that I've been spinning instead of doing other things I like to do, like knit and read. I've also been spinning instead of doing other things I don't like to do, like cook and clean. I'm still eating, sleeping, and going to work, though, so no worries.

The exciting fact is I have more finished yarn! I bought this bump of roving from Loop at MDSW this year, and it took about 2 months to get it all spun. I spun it on a bottom whorl spindle I got at MDSW because I wanted to start spinning this roving immediately. Here's a sparkly champage-colored cop on the spindle.



Each time the spindle was full, I slid it off the spindle onto a douple pointed needle (I don't use them to knit anymore, so I'm glad they have found a new life for themselves). This is the complete collection of spun fiber.



Saturday I spent a long time plying. Like, I woke up with shin splints on Sunday. That was stupid, perhaps, but there was a Harry Potter movie marathon and I was transfixed. I plied the single with a commercially spun white silk thread. I did this so I wouldn't disrupt the color transitions and because making a chain ply would result in too thick a yarn for my purposes. Behold!



In case you're wondering about the fiber content of the yarn, dig this:
* alpaca
* merino
* corriedale
* bfl
* kid mohair
* yak down
* tencel
* nylon
* cotton
* bamboo
* ecospun (recycled soda bottles)
* tussah silk
* silk noil
* angelina
* firestar
* recycled denim