Knitting is front page news...

...here in York, PA!




(just who are these experts?)

I call myself a gyroscope...

...because spinning keeps me stable. Or something. Anyway, I spun nearly every day of the Tour de Fleece this year. I missed one day--it was a very busy travel day, in my defense--but other than that, I did spin every day that wasn't a rest day. The total output for the whole shebang honestly doesn't look that impressive.


But then again, the goal wasn't production; it was just spinning. I obviously have a lot of plying to do. I actually finished spinning and plied my July self-imposed spinning club fiber by the skin of my teeth, and I'm very happy with how it turned out.



I'm thinking I might do a striped project with this skein and this skein from late last year, what do you think?

The real fun of the Tour de Fleece this year was that I got to spin in some really beautiful places in the month of July...





For August, I actually decided to take a break from the club and spin something else, because I'm ahead of schedule. That sounds like I'm an overachiever, but really, I'm a person who sets the bar pretty low. A big part of that was keeping my monthly goals very reasonable--of the twelve projects I'd lined up, two were one ounce projects and five were two ounce projects. By chance, the four remaining projects are all four ounces...Anyway, here's some beautiful Rambouillet from CJ Designs that I just started this month. It's so puffy, while still being easy to draft, I just love it.

I love it so much I finished the first ounce in about two days.

Indecision and Technoblogy twofer

Two blog posts for the price of one!  As of this afternoon, I've completed my first weaving project since 2003 -- yay!  And I'm getting excited for my second one.  I know that I want to make some sort of funky plaid, in bugga!  It'll be a table runner, or a wall hanging, or maybe become some pillows if my MIL agrees to help out with the sewing.  

So this is where the indecision comes in.  I'm choosing between two color combinations:  The Nauti Nudis (the pastel set), and Killer Bee and her posse (the bronze/brown set).

I love both of these color combinations.  But which one will make a better plaid?  To try to answer this question, I had to make mock-ups of woven fabric:

I'll tell you in a minute how I made these mockups.  (That's the technoblogy part of this post.)  But first, get thee to the comments and tell me which you like best!  Bonus points if you can say why, but one-word answers will receive full credit too.

Oh good, you're back.  Okay -- when I feel the need to do some sort of mock-up of a future knitting or weaving project, I always turn to Inkscape.  It's free!  It's open source!  It's so much more powerful than ClarisWorks was in 1999 !  (That being my main point of reference for what a computer drawing program can or can't do.)  Find-and-replace on colors?  It can do that!

So, in what follows, I won't assume you know anything about Inkscape -- I've tried to be very explicit.  The terminology is pretty simple: When I refer to a "tool," I mean one of the tools you can click on in the left column.  When I say "X>Y," the > symbol means that you go to menu X and choose option Y.  If anything here isn't clear, please ask!

1.  Import (File>Import) photo(s) of n yarns.

2.  Use the rectangle tool to draw n rectangles.

3.  Use the select tool (that would be the normal-looking arrow) to select a rectangle.  Then use the dropper tool, with the "Pick" option, to make this rectangle the color of one of the yarns.   Repeat n times.  (The dropper tool takes the average over a circle, whose center and radius are chosen by you.  Try a few times, until you get a color that seems representative to you.  Naturally, this technique works better with solid/semisolid yarns than highly variegated yarns.  As a digression though, I've sometimes found the dropper useful to help me figure out the overall cast of a very variegated skein.)  

4.  Duplicate your rectangles (use the select tool to select them, then Edit>Duplicate).  Stretch them (using the arrows that appear on the sides when the rectangle is selected) into tall-and-narrow shapes and arrange them (using the select tool, click and drag) in your desired warping pattern.

5.  In a separate area, duplicate your rectangles again, stretch them into short-and-wide shapes and arrange them in your desired wefting pattern.

6.  Select all the weft rectangles (Use the select tool and shift-click to select more than one object) and group (Object>group) them together.  Now change their opacity to 50% (Object>Fill and Stroke will give you a dialog box that includes an opacity slider.)

7.  Move the weft on top of the warp. 

All this is very fast -- it took me less than 20 minutes to do both mockups above.  But if you feel like spending extra time and getting amazing results, I have to mention the "mask" option.  This lets you take a picture of swatch (for knitting projects) or of an unskeined, straightened hank of yarn (for weaving), and use it in the place of a solid color.  Maybe I'll go into more detail about this later, like next time I make a sweater ...

Spinning Along

There is progress!



The turtle you see on the Turkish spindle is the new turtle after one was finished up on Day 3. I just adore Turkish turtles.



One of these years I'd like to actually watch some cycling while I spin during the Tour de France. My access to a TV is extremely limited for the foreseeable future, so instead I catch up on podcasts and eavesdrop on conversations about mathematics. Note that I might choose to eavesdrop on some other conversations were there any others on which to eavesdrop...

Actually, being dropped into a culture so intellectually over my head (on this particular topic, anyway) has been pretty fun. What I've been thinking about these days is if I can get budding mathematicians to explore a thing or two about math, or more likely physics, by teaching them to spin. Spinning is really a study in the moment of inertia (that's the measure of how much an object likes or dislikes spinning), and it's interesting that spindles come in different varieties. The purple silk spindle you see in my photos is like the super-fast spinning ice skater of the spinning world. Get all that motion out as quick as you can so you can dazzle people or get that silk to stick together before it slides apart, whichever one it was you were trying to do. My Turkish spindle with its arms all sticking out is like the skater right at the beginning of a twirl, spreading their mass far and wide so they can show a lot of tricks over time before they run out of steam, or get lots of yarn drafted out before backspinning starts. These spindle facts are kind of intuitive to anyone who's spent time spinning on the playground swingset, and once you know some things about the properties of yarn/fiber, it becomes clear why the variety exists. I'm curious now, though, what further ideas there are to explore here. I like the idea of navigating the intersection between theory and reality, and while I don't have the theoretical knowledge, I'm pretty good at the practical stuff, and that counts for something. It may be the kind of thing I need to set some nimble brains loose on...

Tour de Fleece 2012 kickoff!

Here's a little montage of the fiber I'll be working with this year for the TdF.

It's more fiber than I think I can finish, but it's all there for a reason. The batts at the top are my current work in progress. The blue fiber next to it is part of a breed study spin along for July/August-- it's Rambouillet. The blue batt is for spinning on my kick spindle, and the blue tussah silk is my randomly drawn spindle/fiber pairing for July.

Clearly I'm in a Blue Period?

I'm also trying out blogging from my phone, so bear with me as I figure out the capabilities of this shiny device.

Who else is vying for the yellow jersey this year?

Bad at goodbyes

Isn't everyone bad at goodbyes? Well, I've been saying a lot of them in the past week. I type this surrounded by boxes, as the movers come today, and tomorrow I fly away from New York, and the next time I come back I'll be a visitor and not a New Yorker. I don't know when that's going to really sink in, because it certainly hasn't yet. For the next six months I'll be traveling, and in my head I'm guessing New York will still feel like my home base. It's all so weird I can't quite process it. But I'm incredibly excited for the future, once I can get over the stress of the actual moving part.

Saying goodbyes is not without fun, though. Last weekend, I went on a road trip with many knitter friends to Northampton, MA, home of WEBS, a truly magnificent yarn store. We had two cars worth of people going, and I was in the car that was running earlier, so to stall for time, we went to the Pez factory. It was serendipitous that the moment we discovered we were ahead of the other car, we saw the sign for the factory. So we went!





We opted not to pay the $5 for the self guided tour, and we mostly just stuck to the retail area, sneaking peeks over into the museum/factory area that was in direct view. The retail area was amazingly entertaining all on its own.



Then we made it to Webs (after a delicious lunch at Paul and Elizabeth's) and we shopped!



This photo was taken in the warehouse half of the store, where you can get all the super deals. Given that I'm trying not to spend money or acquire things at the moment, I practiced some self-restraint and only bought one item, some spinning fiber.



This is Targhee fiber from Abstract Fiber. I love Targhee--it's so puffy!--and I love Abstract Fiber--such rich color! It's been packed and it'll be a fun present to my future self, rewarding me for diligently unpacking all the boxes, since it ended up someplace pretty weird.

I also had a fantastic goodbye dinner at Tio Pepe with another group of knitter friends. (Apologies to Jenny Jo about her absence from this photo; it's a long story, but she knows what I mean.)



Check out my super gothy stripey sock in the middle of the photo there! I knew none of the people in these photos before I moved to New York three years ago. Now, I consider all of them dear friends. All because of knitting! If you are a solo knitter/crocheter reading this, and you feel like meeting some new people, check out a group local to you. I didn't click with the first group I went to in New York, but then I found two that I adore. I am sad to be leaving these groups, needless to say. I will carry their big hearts in my heart as I travel.

Then we will reunite at Rhinebeck!

A Puzzling Kitten

Despite the promise of our header, I'm not sure we've ever had a puzzle!  (Aside from our about page, that is).  So here's a couple brain teasers for you.

1.  What kind of fabric do you get when you knit a patchwork of diamonds in knits and purls?  Ya know, like this (empty squares are knit, dotted squares are purled):

Well now, you might think "if you knit this, you would get a patchwork of diamonds" and you'd be right.  What I'm really asking about is the texture of the fabric, and here's what made this puzzling to me: purl stitches that are next to knit stitches get pushed down (like in ribbing), but purl stitches that above or below knit stitches get pushed up (a la garter stitch).  So what happens when you change between knitting and purling along a diagonal?
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2.  How do you knit this fabric?  It's like popcorn stitch on steroids, with high peaks and low sinks (dips? pits?  Is there a better word for these local minima?)

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Well, as you may have guessed: the answer to 1 is 2!  It seems that the purl stitches at the skinny points in the tiers of purl diamonds have upward forces on them from the above and below knit stitches, and no counteracting downward forces, so they become peaks.  Meanwhile, the knit stitches at the skinny points in tiers of knit diamonds have only downward forces on them and become sinks.  


I really like the waffley effect of this, and I'm hoping a light blocking doesn't smush it too much.