Still Torn

I'm still torn over which white to use with my handspun. I've even gone as far as knitting up a bit of a cuff in each white. On top is Tosh Sock in Filtered Light and on bottom is Koigu in 0000. I'm worried the Filtered Light is too orange. Of course the flip side is that the Koigu might be too plain. Anyone have an opinion now that there are swatches to compare with the handspun?

I'd love to get going on this sock. Decisions, decisions. Until then, the only thing on my needles is Onopordum, which is terrible car knitting. I suppose this pattern isn't great care knitting either, but the idea is to knit the leg in one go, which would make the rest of the sock great car knitting.

Meanwhile I managed to weave in all the ends and block my Drogue. It's a beast of a shawl. I had to fold it in half to block it because I didn't have enough blocking boards.

Just to give some perspective as to how long it is, here is Scooter helping out. 

Which White Is Right

Much knitting has been occurring as of late. Drogue is practically knitting itself. I was making the Captain size, but have come to realize that I will run out of the main color a few rows short of the edging, so I will probably do the Boatswain edging instead.

Onopordum is making great strides too. Although like every other sock I have ever knitted, I had a rip a little out. I'm doing the color work portions on US size 1 needles and the plain bits on US size 0 needles. Guess who forgot to switch to the smaller needles when knitting the heel.

I'm looking into what my next project will be and honestly, I still desire color work socks. I've decided on Sheep May Safely Graze with my handspun Enchanted. The question is, which white do I go with? On the left side is plain white Koigu, which has a slightly cooler tone. On the right is a skein of Tosh Sock in the Filtered Light color way that is a warmer cream with speckles. Since I don't have enough handspun, I'm planning to do the cuff, her, and toe out of the white.

Is Filtered Light too busy for the already busy handspun? Or is the plain white too plain for such large areas of knitting. And before someone suggests to use both, I'd rather use one or the other. Opinions would be greatly appreciated.

Enchanted Yarn And The Mysteries Of Twist Angle Revealed

It is done! The long awaited Greenwood Fiberworks sock roving in the Enchanted color way has been finished. I am pleased, but the yarn isn't as springy as I was hoping for sock yarn. I did some investigating on what it takes to spin better sock yarn and learned a thing or two.

I'm not sure why I believed this, but whenever I read about the angle of twist on yarn, I just assumed you held the yarn at a certain angle to the wheel when spinning it. (i.e., you spin the yarn off to one side) After reading an article on Spinning Great Sock Yarn and the additional article on Twist Angle by HJS Studio, it finally clicked: the angle of twist is literally what angle the twist appears to be in the yarn, not the angle you hold it to your spinning apparatus. Color me enlightened. The article also mentioned something about how more fiber can get used up with a higher angle of twist (more twist = more fiber used) This explained the great mystery to me on why my yardage kept ending so low compared to other people's sock yarn. The next time I spin, I will pay much more attention to the amount and resulting angle of twist I put into a yarn. I'm excited!

Bigger Mistakes Faster or 2014 Ravellenic finisher in 2015

I've been struggling to finish projects recently. What's unusual is that I don't have any startitus. I have stuckitus. At the moment I have two socks on the needles and that one stubborn spinning project from the 2014 Ravellenics. (I feel like there is a joke related to slow Ravellenic finishers... but I can't remember the word. But that would describe me and this project.) In order to combat this mysterious stuckitus, I've dutifully spun the last of the singles every Friday knit night. And last Friday I finally finished! I even waited a whole 24 hours to let it rest before removing it from the spindle. Then I recruited some help from Connor to wind off the yarn. 

Note how he didn't even have to leave the couch in order to help

I was so excited to finally get a project done. But Connor and I have been housesitting for my parents which means that it was necessary for me to forget the doodad that attaches the mother-of-all to the rest of the wheel. After stomping and angsting for 2 minutes I came up with a solution. It's not perfect, but using two of those rubber bands you find on broccoli works quite well.

Finally. Finally I was going to have my glorious yarn. So I sat down Sunday afternoon and started plying. I hadn't touched my wheel in quite some time and I've never done a true 3 ply yarn, so I was struggling. I figured it was because of inexperience.

As it turns out, I was struggling because I am an idiot I plied the wrong way. I don't know if I've ever done that. As an aside, when beginners knitters have told me that they wished they didn't make so many mistakes, I tell them that the only difference is that the experienced crafter makes bigger mistakes faster. Case in point. I plied all 256 yards of the three-ply and tried to wind it off before I realized my mistake. What's funny is that I still didn't know what was wrong until I let go of the end of the yarn and saw it un-plying itself. (Also, the whole time I was struggling, I made angry noises about how I thought I'd spun lace weight when my swatch said I was spinning fingering weight.)

Here is what yarn plied the wrong way looks like when you try to take it off the wheel

I wasn't sure how big a mess I made. I wasn't sure I could fix it. I wasn't sure I wanted to as I didn't want a lace weight. But I gave it a go. Pro tip: it takes twice as long to ply yarn the right direction if you plied it the wrong direction first. It took forever and two runs through the wheel, but I did eventually get the yarn plied correctly. 

The strand above my finger is plied correctly while the strand below is still going the wrong way

As it turns out, I did make a fingering weight yarn. Once the yarn was able to relax a bit rather than be spun within an inch of its life, it was what I had intended. 

The yarn on the left is what it looked like plied wrong while the yarn on the bobbin is plied in the correct direction, but has only gone through the wheel once

I hope I don't ruin the yarn some more before setting the twist and knitting it.

Anyone else have a face-palm moment and make a large crafting mistake recently?

Spinning All The Things

My Ravellenic project this year was going to be spinning a 3 ply sock yarn on my spindle. I was making really good time on it, but after having a bit of a design emergency, the project sat. I just wasn't motivated to finish once the Olympics had ended. However, my desire for the yarn grew, so yesterday I finished off the second bump of wool. I only have one more to go before plying! 

Greenwood Fiberworks sock roving in the Enchanted colorway

Unfortunately, after finishing the second bump I tried to slip it off the spindle onto a knitting needle and it didn't go well. I had no problem the first time. I'm not sure what changed. Tyler suggested I wind off all the yarn with my ball winder. It took a couple hours, but I was able to rescue the yarn without having to cut any of it. (I won't lie... I did get close to making fiber confetti.) Now the singles live on toilette paper tubes... because that is all I could think of putting them on after winding them.

I hadn't spun yarn on my wheel in quite some time because I don't feel like I should start another project for the wheel without finishing the epic blanket project I've been working on for the last few years. But you know how that goes: no spinning of any kind has gotten done. I'm too stubborn to break the arbitrary no-new-wheel-projects rule I've made for myself. Having such a big project still sit around really started to bother me, so I spun the singles and plied this beast of a skein in one day.

And now that it is done, I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I think I have one more skein beast and one slightly smaller skein to go before I am done with the spinning! 

Spincycle Yarns

While I was at Stitches, I had the pleasure of meeting the Spincycle girls, Rachel and Kate. I've long admired their yarn. This year, they debuted a new line and I can honestly say this is the most original, yet still practical yarn I've seen in a really long time.

They have developed a line of millspun yarn that looks like handspun! It is called Dyed in the Wool and it is stunning. It isn't obvious in these images, but the yarn gives long color repeats. It is unusual to find long color repeats in yarn and in most cases the yarn is a single ply, which doesn't wear well. This yarn is plied.

Dyed in the Wool is 200 yards of superwash BFL. The fiber is dyed by Rachel and Kate before it is sent to a local mill to be spun up.

Let's have a look at the color range. Oh look... it comes in every color. And it mixes well with other yarns. In the first image of this post, you can see Rachel knitting up a sweater in a combination of Dyed in the Wool and a grey shade of Cascade 220 fingering.

I came away with a skein in the Fallen Leaves colorway. Boy do I wish my knitting obligations were finished because I'm just itching to cast on with this yarn.

For the record, I'm not getting paid for my point of view on this yarn. But I can honestly say I haven't been this enthusiastic about a line of yarn ever. The thought and care put into this yarn deeply impresses me. And although I haven't knit up my skein yet, it feels like a hard wearing yarn. So if you want to get your hands on your own skein (and you know you do), hop on over to their Dyed in the Wool etsy shop.

Denature

Goal #4: Knit a pair of sock with my own hand spun yarn. Check that one off of the annual goal list.

This was one of the goals I wasn't really sure I would have time for this year. But I'm really happy I did it. Plus, I'd been wanting to knit the Denature pattern for nearly two years now. My weird gauge and lack of sock knowledge had kept me from them... until now.

I had divided the braid in half when I spun up the yarn. But one skein ended up being a little thinner than the other, so I had to take out lengths of yarn to keep the stripes matching. Usually I use a Russian join when joining yarn, but since this isn't a superwash wool, I went ahead and did a spit splice for the first time ever. (I used water, not spit) It might be my new favorite kind of join.

The official info:
100% Polwarth Top from Woolgatherings. The braid was split in half for the first ply, then was Navajo plied. It ended up around a heavy fingering weight. The size small sock called for 70+ stitches to be cast on. I did some editing and cast on 52 stitches instead.
Ravelry Project Page

(Thanks for modeling the socks Mum)

Slow Sock Progress

I had this great plan. I was going to have my wisdom teeth out, then I was going to sit on the couch and knit for a week. It was foolproof. Teeth out = knitting time. I was going to be done with a pair of socks. 

What actually happened is that I didn't have enough energy to even touch the needles until last night. So I've only knit 30 rounds of my second Denature sock. Ah well.

Electric Prince

Now that we are in the last third of the year, I thought it might be a good time to see how I was doing on my annual goal list. #4 on the list is to "Knit a pair of sock with my own hand spun yarn." I had spun up this yarn with the intention of making socks, and now it is finally happening. I think I'm in love with the way this yarn works with the Denature pattern. I had to subtract a bunch of stitches out of the pattern to accommodate my weird gauge. Hopefully I' haven't taken too many stitches out.

Last post I said I would cast on two new things. That didn't quite happen. As I was swatching with the Berroco Ultra Alpaca Fine, I decided it wasn't quite what I had in mind for the Antarctic shawl. It's a nice yarn, but I'm just not as in love with it as I was when I bought it a year or two ago. This year I've decided that I'm not going to knit with yarn that I don't love. Life is too short to do that. So instead I'm going to use the two skeins of RedFish Dyeworks Silk Sock that I bought this year at Stitches West. And I'm liking this swatch much, much better. The yarn is thicker than what the pattern calls for, but I've decided I don't care.

Of course before going wild with the yarn, I did finish my Velomeisters. I have named them Electric Prince since the yarns are Madelinetosh in Edison Bulb (the electric part) and Koigu in Prince (self explanatory).

I'm looking forward to wearing them on my next bike ride.

And a little bit of news about The Book. I'm re-graphing everything now that I've learned how to do a much better job aligning things in Illustrator. The bonus is that it is taking a tenth of the time it took to originally make some of the graphs and it looks so much better. I'm using video tutorials from Marnie MacLean for anyone who is curious. It's also giving me an opportunity to recheck graphs as I fix them all up. I'm also starting to edit the patterns to make sure the graphs and the written portions match. 

On a related note, as I was drawing up my charts, I found that there is no standardization for chart symbols. I pulled out copies of Vogue knitting, Interweave Knitting, Rowan, Coastal Knits, Little Red in the City, and looked at the Craft Yarn Council's Yarn Standards Charting Symbols. To make matters worse, some symbols in certain publications mean something completely different in another publication. And older copies of some publications sometimes have different symbols to more recently released copies. So I am doing a bit of a mixture from each publication. But I'm doing my best to build charts in a way where you only have to glance over to see what part you are on rather than stare at the chart key to figure out what the stitch is suppose to be. It should be intuitive. 

My Socks Rock

I've finished up with the Mediumweight Socks That Rock in the Farmhouse colorway. And my socks do rock. I could post a million pictures of them, but I'll just give you a link to the ravelry project page instead. I just improvised the design, but I'm toying with the idea of releasing a pattern anyways. The big question is should it be a pay-for, freebee, or should I not worry about writing up an official pattern.

I also finished up my sock yarn. As much as I wanted the barber pole effect, I had that nagging feeling that the yarn really would have been too light weight. So I went with a navajo ply instead. I'm much happier with the weight. Originally when I was going to do a 2-ply, I had planned to do another pair of ribbed socks. Now I'm not too sure. This yarn will have definite stripes, so it could hold up to a pattern. Does anyone have any good suggestions for a sock pattern that would work with striped yarn? Or should I go ahead and just do another pair of ribbed socks? I would like this to be an easy pattern since this was going to be my relaxing knit. And I'm not tired of ribbing. But I want to match the best pattern I can to this skein. (If anyone is curious, the braid this skein came from can be seen in my Stitches West 2011 post. It's the braid with the really bright yellow by Tanglebella. There was white hiding out in the braid, so the skein isn't as vibrant.)

And after many hiccups and trips to the frog pond, design #8 is almost done. I just have to weave ends and block. (And do the computery bit of the pattern, but I'm not going to count that towards the pattern being nearly done.) That means I only have two more patterns to go! They are both going to be large projects and I have another large secret project that is about to start. So it will still be awhile yet. But still. Two more patterns!

Goal #4: Make Handspun Socks

For the last few years I've made a goal list at the beginning of the year. Usually after I make it, I ignore it until I do my year in review post. I just like to see if my beginning-of-the-year goals match what I actually ended up doing. This year is going to be a little different. I peeked at this year's goals a little early and have decided to actually try to complete #4: Knit a pair of sock with my own hand spun yarn.

I've heard of spinners not liking the barber pole effect that handspun yarn often has. I personally love it. There are very few yarns that I have spun where I didn't want that to happen. Here's the problem. I may have spun the singles a little thin for it to be a two ply. I could chain ply it, but not only would I not get the color effect I want, I'm not really sure how much yardage I would have. (It'll probably become a two ply and I'll just have tiny yarn.) Although any encouragement/ thoughts on the yarn would be appreciated. And for those who might like to know, it's a BFL from Tanglebella. And yes, I did realize (halfway through of course) that it isn't superwash, so it isn't terribly practical for socks. Oh well.

Christmas Spinning

In addition to my "knit before Christmas" knitting projects, I had a few "spin before Christmas" spinning projects. I didn't want to show them off until they were delivered because they were a surprise. (And I know the recipients read this blog. Hi guys!)

I spun up three skeins of yarn for my three regular knit night buddies.

It's silly, but I had been worried that my buddies wouldn't like the yarn. I was of course completely wrong. The skeins were a big hit. I also put homemade cookies in the packages as well. I'm sure that helped.

The labels, as seen below, are organized by: skein name, dyer's name, breed of sheep, yardage, yarn weight, and wraps per inch. 

I am now officially done with all things Christmas. I'm now focusing my attention on a sock test knit and a sweater for myself. Go me!

No Longer Having A Yarn Emergency

When I was in New Zealand, back in September, I bought 10 balls of Tui to make a sweater. After casting on for the sweater, I decided that it wasn't my style, so I cast on for a different one. What I hadn't thought about is that I might not have enough yarn. (Yes, that is a big oversight. And yes, I felt stupid.) Seeing how I can't just fly over to New Zealand at any old time, I asked a favor. One that I wasn't sure would work out. But thanks to a blogging friend, Kiwiyarn Knits, I have enough yarn for my sweater!

She went out of her way to get me one more ball of Tui. And whats more, she sent me some stitch markers that she made. I've never had proper stitch markers. I always have used bits of yarn. There may have been an audible gasp when I ripped open the parcel.

I sent something back, of course. I'd been waiting to post it here because I didn't want to give away the surprise. I spun up a 2oz moonrover mystery batt. I love my moonrover batts, but this one truly could not have gone to a better person.

2010 Knitting, Crocheting, and Spinning

I hadn't realized how prolific my knitting (and bits of crocheting) had been in 2010 until I started to put a collage together. I don't think I even took a picture of all my knits. I did more than just knit though. I had also learned to spin.

I moved from a CD spindle to a nice wood spindle, to my Lendrum spinning wheel. Once again, I didn't take a picture of all my skeins. There is a sampling of the Tour de Fleece skeins next to the giant picture of everything I had spun for the event. The last picture is of all the spinning I'd done in December.
I can't wait to share what these skeins will make. But I have several more to spin before I reveal what that might be.

Once, Twice, Three Times A Spinner

I'm getting much more consistent with my spinning. This is my third try.

I love the colors. Purples, browns, and yellows all mixed together so beautifully. This particular color way is called Brew by Becoming Art.

I'm not entirely sure how many yards there are. I really could use a niddy noddy.

Yarn dog strikes again. This time he didn't roll in it. He only seems to like rolling in it when it is still in loose fiber form.