The February Surprise

I will post about some knitting or crocheting at some point, but right now, I'm super into what I've been spinning. January was a great month for me. Three skeins!

Yarn the first. This was spun from a batt I received for my birthday that I felt compelled to spin in December even though December was for finishing up outstanding projects:


Yarn the second. This was once ounce of C type pygora (that's the most cashmere-like grade), plied with silk. I'm in utter love with this one:


Yarn the third. The January self-imposed spinning club project itself, in batt form:


In cop form:


And as yarn:


On to February! The old random number generator gave me this project to spin:



That's some merino silk from Fiber Optic, and a Jenkins lark. For some reason I have a bit of a hard time spinning silk blends consistently, so I figured I wouldn't be that concerned about it and try to spin a beefy single to keep the color gradient intact. Here are my beefy turtles:

What was so great was that I knew a gradient was underneath. It was like an easter egg, or as one person on Ravelry likened it, an everlasting gobstopper. It's an apt comparison when it comes to the neverending task of winding yarn onto a niddy noddy. To paraphrase Gene Wilder, "You can wind it and wind it and wind, and it'll never get any smaller. At least I don't think they do."

Because I wanted the singles to be hale and hearty, I decided to give them a good fulling. Alternating hot and cold soapy water, agitation, a cathartic amount of whacking. So here's the surprise. I have a theory why the yarn turned out like this: I tend to overspin my singles, plus wool and silk don't behave the same when fulled. So, voila, my unusually textured finished yarn:


I'm into it! Who knows if I could have made this on purpose? It's one of the great things about spinning, really more of an art than I science the way I practice it.

Spun to finished: BFL Thorpes

Unlike my co-blogger, Malia, I do not have a self-imposed spinning club. But I do have projects!

The interesting thing about this project was that I loved the fiber, but I couldn't get excited about the yarn...the texture was nice, but I wasn't into the colors. The ugly yarn sat around for months, un-loved, until finally I decided to just get it over with and make something (also I needed a hat). Lo and behold, the colors that looked so muddled in the skein sorted themselves out again into very attractive stripes, and I ended up with a hat that I really love.

Here's the fiber: Abstract Fiber BFL. Funny story, I was on a multi-stop trip and bought spinning fiber both in Northampton, MA (at Webs, of course), and in Oakland, CA (at Piedmont Yarn), and by pure accident I bought Abstract Fiber BFL in both places. What can I say? I love the colors!

I spun it into a basic 3-ply. Behold! Color mixing!

This is about the point where I lost interest in the yarn. The overall color effect of the skeins is just brown, and at close range you can see the dreadful clashing of sage-green, orange, and red-violet. Some people might be into this yarn, but I was very dubious.

When I finally did knit it up, the colors settled down quite a bit, into nice fuzzy stripes. I like it!
The pattern is Thorpe, by Kirsten kapur. I kept the larger hat for myself and donated the smaller one to a handknits drive at my local library. The green edging is a millspun yarn.

Excuses, excuses ...

Between job interviews and baby J, I haven't had much time to knit -- let alone blog -- these days.  I'm happy to report that I've made progress on the first of these problems, though:

J is happy to nap all day -- as long as someone is holding her.  I discovered that, at least on my parents' couch, there's a sweet spot:  a way to sit so that friction keeps her in place on my chest, and my head is sufficiently elevated that I can knit comfortably.  Cuddling my baby and knitting at the same time:  is there a better way to spend a winter morning?  Oh, and I also got to watch my parents' nutso cat chase his own tail.

What's that?  You want some AKC along with cute baby pictures?  That's fair, I guess.  On the needles above, I've got the beginnings of a daybreak shawl. 

I've never made a Stephen West pattern before, and I'm excited about this one.  I love knitting shawls even though I never seem to wear them.  Recently I decided that part of the reason for this is that most of the shawls I've made are just too lacy for me.  So I hope that the awesome colorfulness of this one means I'll actually wear it.  (My contrast color -- which I get to start in only twelve more rows! -- is a fabulous deep blue-green that perfectly matches the blue-green bits in the first color).  

The story of my holidays

It's 2012, so I'm kicking off my self-imposed spinning club. In December, I was trying to finish various spinning WIPs from 2011, but I had a little stumble. A dear friend bought a batt for me at Rhinebeck for my birthday, and then as a reward for running a race on Thanksgiving, I bought myself a hot pink turkish spindle.

So, this happened.


Whoops!

Luckily, it was so much fun to spin that the whole batt had been spun before Christmas. I was hoping to ply it all up over holiday travel times, but instead I got really into the socks I was knitting (more on that later). Today, however, I finished plying and once I give it a wash and whack, we can call this one done.



Now I can move onto my randomly selected first fiber/spindle pairing of 2012, which is this Bosworth mini spindle in curly koa with 2oz of merino/silk/yak from Corgi Hill Farms. It's as delightful as it looks.



OK, so back to the holidays. Christmas Eve of 2011, I spent the time with my husband, my parents, and my brother. Food was eaten, stockings were unstuffed, and while we all hung out I finished these, the last on-the-go stockinette socks of 2011. Seven pairs!



On Christmas Day, things started to fall apart. On the way out the door to head to my grandparents', I get a text that my grandmother has been sent to the hospital. My husband, brother, and I visited her there, bringing our Christmas presents and spending a little time trying to cheer her and my grandfather up. At that point, the nurses thought she might just be there for a few days.

My husband and I continued our travels to his parents' house, and although it was great to be with all of his family, I was preoccupied with my grandmother's condition, to say the least. I did a lot of just sitting quietly and knitting. To me, the comfort of knitting plain stockinette socks is simply immeasurable. All of this worrying resulted in an entire sock in just a few days, which is probably some sort of record for me. These socks are in Sanguine Gryphon Bugga!, in one of their special nudibranch colorways.



You might know where this story is heading. My grandmother died on December 29, and I'm still reeling from the loss. I'm a very fortunate person to have had such a funny, generous, supportive, and generally awesome grandma for so much of my life.

So the travels continued. My husband and I met up with my brother to take us back to my mom's hometown. My grandfather, who is also a funny, generous, supportive, and generally awesome guy, was already in purging mode, wanting the family to take lots of her personal effects with us. I didn't want to be too grabby for a host of reason, perhaps mainly because I hit the mother lode years ago: my grandmother gave me her engagement and weddings rings when I got engaged. Yes, while she was still alive and married to my grandfather when she gave me those. Also, she told me if I didn't like them, I should "sell them and see what I can get." Sentimentality: not my grandmother's strong suit.



There was one thing that I saw and knew needed to come home with me (Well, two. The heart pin with BINGO on it is just too awesome for words). I don't recall her ever wearing this, but given her aforementioned lack of sentimentality, she must have liked it for some reason. It probably speaks to my obsession with fiber arts that this thought cut through all the grief I've been experiencing: this will make an amazing inlay for a spindle.



And it will. Tom Golding of the incredibly gorgeous Golding Fiber Tools is going to make it for me. Stay tuned for how it turns out.

As a final image in this rambling ramble, I wanted to share one of my favorite photos of Grandma, one that I saw for the first time just a few days ago while going through some of her old stuff. This is her on her wedding day over 65 years ago, and yes, that's my grandfather leering at her. It perfectly captures her sassiness. That last time I saw her, she was sick and frail, but the sass was all still there.

Starting Points

Today I found the first thing I ever spun and knitted. Ready? Here it is.



Check out the texture.



At the time I was totally new to both spinning and knitting. I remember that spinning felt like slow going, but I was so excited that I took my spindle everywhere and worked on it whenever I had a spare minute. There is a certain bench on the UC Berkeley campus that is inextricably linked in my mind with this cornflower blue fiber.

At the time, I was incredibly proud of this scarf. Nowadays, I recognize its flaws, but there's also something about it that still excites me. The thick-and-thin yarn is wonderfully cushy and full of character. The finished item is short and oddly shaped, but it's everything a scarf needs to be: warm, soft, comforting. I just might mix it into my winter wardrobe this year.

Do you still have your first FO, whether knitted, woven, spun, or crocheted? What was it? How did you feel about it then, and how do you feel about it now? What did you learn from making it?

Why I haven't been spinning

It suddenly seems as though a ridiculously long time has gone by since I made any new yarn. What's my excuse?

Well, for most of October and November, I was in another country.



Make that TWO other countries.



I did bring some knitting, but, strangely, had almost no time to work on it. I churned out a couple of hexapuffs for the Beekeeper's Blanket, but that's about it.

Even when I got back, I couldn't just sit down at the wheel. Know why?



Because I had a brand new unfinished spinning wheel waiting for a few coats of oil before I could use it! Sure, I could have done some spinning on the old wheel, but I suddenly found that I was saving all the good fiber for the new one.



I finally got a coat of tung oil onto her last week. I'm afraid she'll have to wait for spring to get the others...it's just too smelly and drippy a project to do indoors. But I did finally get to start spinning.



This wheel is a Tina II made by Jerry Jensen. I can't express in words how excited I am to have this wheel! She's so pretty, and so smooth. I love knowing that she was made just for me by a single craftsman. I love her so much, I'm calling her "she", which is something that has always kind of made me roll my eyes in the past, when other spinners do it. But I can't help it...she's a "she". I have come to understand.

Maybe the awesomest part--well, okay, not the awesomest part, but an awesome part--is the date stamp. Check it out. Magic!

weekends are for ...

Swatching and blocking!

Up until a year ago, these were the parts of knitting I just hated.  Well, not so much hated as just didn't do.  But when I started doing stranded colorwork I had to get over this, and these days swatching is one of my favorite parts of knitting.  A swatch is tiny and fast, and so full of potential ...you can swatch before you know whether you're swatching for a cowl or a sweater or a sweater with a crazy huge cowl neck or, I dunno, a refrigerator cozy.  A swatch is a little tiny nugget of pure knitting fantasy.

What do you think this will grow up to be?  I don't know yet, but I do  know this:  The book this came from, Barbara Walker's Charted Knitting Designs, is very dangerous.  It's basically the Kama Sutra of knitting books:  It will make you suddenly want to try, right now, things that never would've occurred to you otherwise.

These days (ie, the days near Christmas), I try to be a little more reliable than I usually am about sticking with one pattern until it's finished.  (Okay, maybe two or three.  But no more, seriously.)  Swatching is a great way to relieve just a little of that monotony without getting myself totally off-track.

Blocking is satisfying for the exact opposite reasons.  It has a finality to it.  As someone who's terrible at finishing projects, I feel a massive sense of achievement every time I pin down a completed project to dry.  (Hah!  Take that, stupid procrastinating brain.)  Not to mention ... it just looks nicer.  Here's a scarf I finished a couple weeks ago; I'm not showing you the whole thing because shhh, it's a christmas present!  I knit it from the bottoms up, blocked both ends, then knit a little more in the middle, grafted the two pieces together and blocked the whole thing again.  I don't have before and after pictures, but I have in-between and after pictures:

Yes, that's right:  I love blocking so much that I blocked this scarf twice.  I wanted the two ends to be exactly the same length as each other, and the whole thing to be as close to 60'' as I could make it, so I blocked when I was most of the way done to get a better feeling for the final dimensions.  Anyhow, isn't it amazing how blocking smooths things out so nicely?

What's your favorite weekend knitting?