8 posts tagged “spinning”

Latest yarn purchase just came rolling in: 1 skein of Malabrigo worsted in Stonechat, and two skeins each of Tonalita in colors Flower and Stone & Ash from Yarn Country.

I have a skein of Pearl Malabrigo to go with that Stonechat, and I'm going to be turning them into a Center Square before long. (This year, I seem to have a thing for hats... Especially since the Tonalita are both slated to become Short-Row hats.  .. Minus the little i-cord at the top, but. Same pattern.)

Other good things: Also purchased some Noro Silk Garden, but traded it to a knitter friend for some sock-size circular needles -- She says she has the better end of the deal, which is probably true. The colors were fabulous, but the yarn didn't have enough softness for me to know what to do with it -- I'd rather it found a new home where it won't languish in the stash for eternity,after all. (And, I'm used to working with witchy little DPNs, so the circulars should be just fine for me.)

Now, confession time: These hats-to-be are Christmas presents. So my stash enhancement is really more for selection of gifts.

Lastly, I miss my spinning wheel. I really need to finish putting the finish on the thing, but the humidity this summer's been leaving me in despair: I suspect I'll have to re-sand the parts, which is really very disheartening, but I also can't put the varnish on in this weather because it'll never dry in the muggy wet conditions. (Big, big sigh.)
And I have all this roving lying around, begging to be turned into something, and all I've got are my handspindles.

... My handspindles are lovely, don't get me wrong. I'm just still not entirely sure I've got the talent to make more than fifty or a hundred yards of yarn. (And not all on one spindle, either. Aw.) Plus, those are singles, and I'm still kind of erratic, and... Whine, whine, complain, mope, you get the idea. ;) Which probably means I should be handspindling, darn it, because then I'd get better at it.

Another Christmas project this year: Socks.
I haven't really tackled socks recently, and it's frustrating to me: I was having fun with my two-at-once socks, but that project seems to have fallen out of my knitting bag and took my favorite sock double-point needles with it. (Grumble.) It's high time I tried them again, especially with as many socks as I have in my Ravelry queue.

Time's moving a little too quickly for me these days, it seems: I thought about posting my recent Etsy finds -- two weeks ago, not realizing how much time had actually slipped away.

Hoo boy.

So, I'll be backposting my finds for Saint Patrick's, and I'll just try to be better in the future. :}

First off: I recently joined a fiber and spindle club, from Etsy's Butterfly Girl Designs.
I originally found Butterfly Girl Designs thanks to the Winter 2008 edition of Knitty's Cool Stuff: She's featured in the lower third of the page, if you want to take a look, but it doesn't tell you a single thing about how very cool a person this seller is.  She didn't get irked when I went all bouncy-like and excited about the fiber club that I'd just missed buying -- and she did indeed let me know when the fiber club opened again.
(Also, she writes occasionally to comment on the other spindles I've found on Etsy; it turns out she was giving serious consideration to the Time Flies spindle, too -- though she said she was glad it'd found a good home.)  :)

So, a week ago, my first fiber/spindle club order came in, and this was the result:

Temptation is a blend of cashmere, silk, camel, and merino: And yes, it really is tempting. I'm almost half a mind to asking her to just send more of that so I can spin up a sweater's worth -- but then I'd miss out on all her other lovely possibilities. (And I know they're lovely, since I've bought Blue Morpho, Blackbird, and Tuscany, all merino/bamboo blends  -- with the latter two including firestar for glitz.)

And the Italian Resin spindle is just a happy, lovely coincidence, since I've recently decided square whorl spindles are pretty nifty. :)

And speaking of the Time Flies spindle -- Yorkieslave's another Etsy spindle seller that I can't seem to find enough good things to say to give you the full picture of how very awesome she is. She's actually taken a commission from me, because she had some really interesting Cheetah and Cougar spindles -- but no tigers. (I have a great love for tigers.)

Spindle in Progress, by Yorkieslave

I'm in awe.
Also, yes, that is a very large spindle: I wanted it that way, since my current largest spindle is a little on the difficult side. (No hook. And no, it's not a supported spindle.)

Also, her fiber batts are very creative color-wise, and so, so soft: I bought more of her colorway of Alice,  which is the mini-batt that came with my Tempus Fugit spindle -- mostly because I am a lover of yarns, and soft roving and batts are just an extension of that. :)

In the past twelve days, I’ve had a lot going on in my little knitting world. I’ve been to my knitting group twice, and enjoyed myself a lot: There’s also been a lost stash enhancement package along the way, though I’m hoping it’s less ‘lost’ and more ‘merely delayed’ -- after all, Robyn of the Robyn’s Nest says she has yet to have lost a package, and I would really, really hate to ruin a perfect record. Also, Ravelry has started eating my brain, in parts.

So, to start with Ravelry: I’m becoming more active as of late, writing up what I’m actually knitting -- and what the hell am I thinking anyway, casting on with no less than four projects at once? -- and getting some camera practice in while I’m at it. I’ve joined a Harry Potter group, specifically the House Cup competition, and I’m largely lurking around until the sorting in May. (Well, not entirely true -- I’m trying to come up with a cheer for the Quidditch Cup thread for no particular reason, but mostly lurking.)  
I’ve also joined a knitted kitty swap group, because some of the little stuffies coming out of that group are ADORABLE. (Also, I think I just want the excuse to give the ‘standard’ knitted kitty swap pattern a trial run.)

The rest, well, I think I’ll have to break it down by project.

The Kromski: Three weeks ago, I took my spinning wheel apart for the express purpose of putting a finish on it.  It’s been slow going as unfortunately, it’s not a project that can be properly completed in a single afternoon -- but the good is, it’s coming along nicely. There was a bit of ugly when I went to use the golden oak stain that my father suggested: Luckily, I only stained the matching niddy-noddy before discovering that I don’t really care for the color. (The natural wood itself is SO pretty, really!)  All that’s left on that project is 1) buying my polyurethane and 2) applying it, this coming weekend’s weather allowing.

The Husband’s Sweater: I’ve finally cast on for his long-awaited sweater -- A modified version of Jesse Loehsburg’s Retrofit,  adjusted to include Aija Goto’s Space Invader charts across the back.
And the bad is: Figuring out the vertical placement of said space invaders is driving me BONKERS. I’ve momentarily put the whole idea down to come back to again, although I’ve definitely decided that losing the bunkers on the Space Invaders ‘screen’ is going to take a lot of the crazy off my plate.

The Tilted Duster: In the past five weeks, I’ve cast on for the tilted duster twice. Why? Well...
The Ugly:  My completed Tilted Duster was made of Main Line in Ink, a green-based black yarn. It looked really good, it had a fabulous hand to it, and I loved wearing that sweater.  Matter of fact, I wore that sweater non-stop. Which was enough time to realize that the main line was shedding like mad -- all over my shirts, my pants, my arms, my car, my purses and knitting bags... My cats didn’t shed that badly, so something had to be done.
The yarn is billed as machine washable, so surprise! I machine washed it. (And I put it in on gentle / slow cycle and cold, but still -- machine washed.)  
And then it turned into a fur coat.
The shedding magnified, the sweater burst into a giant puffball, and eight times of re-washing has not yet convinced the yarn to stop with the damned shedding already.  I’m honestly about to give up on the thing, which is heartbreaking since it took me 3.5 weeks to complete -- but I’m intending to go find a soft-bristled brush and try that on the duster before I give it up entirely.

Honestly. So mad.
Which is probably why I cast on again, this time in a full wool. (I had about 10 skeins, and only need about 6 of them.)

Other than that, I’ve been a spinning fool: Apparently, I only need to take apart my spinning wheel to rile up the urge for it. Thankfully, I have a spindle collection, so I’ve been using those instead. And it’s probably about time I learned how to ply without a spinning wheel, anyway...

Last week, I finished my Tilted Duster in Knitpicks Main Line yarn.
During the next three days of wearing it, I found out that Main Line sheds horribly -- so I borrowed my mom's washer and washed it.
It turned into a poofy, fuzzy mess, and I'm still caught somewhere between severe irritation (Superwash yarn, fer chrissakes!), depression (oh my God, how much work wasted?), and the vague hope that it's all still salvageable. ... I really, really want it to be salvagable, because I'm already well in love with that sweater.
And that's most of what I was doing on Saturday, killing the time in-between by taking apart my Kromski Prelude and sanding its parts.

After two years of going around with an unfinished spinning wheel, I'm finally going to put a protective coat on it. The surprising break in the rain's helped a lot with that: I forgot my two yard niddy-noddy at home for the sanding job, alas, but I can fix that this weekend. Dad's even offered up his workbench for the staining and such -- maybe if I'm really lucky, he'll even give me a hand. I'm opting to use some of his Oak stain, rather than go with mahogany or anything else that's similiar to the finishes available for Kromski wheels: After all, why imitate if I can customize?

I've been playing with a lot of handspindles in the mean time, and while I don't have a serious amount of yarn made yet, I do seem to have a small and steadily growing collection of lace- to fingering-weight singles mounting up. I'm still debating if I want to leave them as singles or ply them: I'm probably going to go with the latter, since I have this abysmal habit of overtwisting my yarn that I haven't yet figured out how to avoid, and plying seems to help keep the yarn from twisting around and around and again on itself, once I've set the twist.  -- It probably also helps that I have two new, lovely spindles, weighing in at .6 oz and 1.2 oz, respectively.

Both were Etsy finds: That site continues to be a huge temptation for me. Really, I just need to start selling some of my knitting up there, if only so I have money for all the pretty things I can possibly find there!

First, from Yorkieslave:

Tempus Fugit Spindle

I'm perhaps a little too amused by the fact that it's a crazy clock-face on the spindle's top: On the other hand, I'm apparently not the only one that thinks Lewis Carroll, since the seller sent along a mini-batt of yummy bamboo-merino fiber in a colorway she calls Alice.

And the other, from Butterfly Girl Designs:

Tigereye Stone Spindle

I have a weakness for Tiger's eye. 

Awww. Swap's over for me. ;)

Juni: Thank you! The Summer Linen you sent over arrived safely yesterday, and I'm quietly going mad trying to decide what to do with it -- since, as you know, I've never used linen yarn before (and I was curious about it).
I'm also endlessly amused at the term 'muggle blog' -- I'm going to have to steal that one from you.
Thank you for all your work as my upstream pal -- It's been a really fun experience for my first skein swap. (And also, one more thank you for the birthday wishes -- It's been a blast so far.)

... But, I still have one more package coming for each of my downstream pals.
I've picked up the dye needed for Pal 1's massive skein of raw silk, and now I just need to un- and rewind the hank into sections a little longer than 4' around. (I'm going with the dip-dye method and depending on how pleased I am with the results, may over-dye the whole thing with a lighter color... but if I'm going dip-dye, I think a little more length in the skein keeps things interesting.)
Pal 2's last package is just waiting on some non-wool roving I picked out for her to show up on my doorstep: She's a spinner, I asked if she wanted non-wool roving, and I am also including some yarn, so. She's getting lots o' love through the mail in the next week or two.

I've discovered that I apparently spoil my downstream pals. Another of my knitty friends once told me she's guilty of the same thing: I laughed at her at the time, but I think I know where she's coming from. I tend to overbuy and grab more than one thing for my pals as I want to make sure they've got the thing they want -- I suppose I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to giving gifts. ;)

I'm really glad to have gotten to know a few individuals in this swap... And perhaps that was the point? :)

What a day.
I'm a wee bit tired, but I've been sleeping weirdly lately -- my dreams have been too odd and vivid, and I've been waking up intermittently through the night with feelings of off and discontent: If only I could remember what I'm dreaming, perhaps I could pick it apart and resolve it. C'est la vie.

Picked up a cheapie digital camera that was actually 2 whole megapixels, mostly so I can take pictures of friends, cats, and finished knitting projects. (And I'm going to mock Fry's Electronics a little here: 2 MP camera for what you were charging for a Spider Man licensed digicam with 'VGA Resolution' -- which I forget, but I think was something like 720 x 480. Or less. Hmm...) After all, isn't the whole point of having a blog mentioning knitting and food to share pictures with the world? :)

I'm so pleased that I finished that simple shrug yesterday -- It's done, it's over, woo hoo!
I have a rather guilty love for Caron's yarns, but I've decided their patterns (albeit their free ones) leave much to be desired. And alternately, I love Lionbrands' free patterns for ideas and picking apart, but I'm none too pleased with their yarn these days. There's no winning, is there?
Current project: Twinkletoes in Cascade Fixation, color: black. I couldn't give up that project for long; I'm clearly either stubborn, a glutton for punishment, or both -- but the stretchy cotton is proving so much more satisfying to knit than cotton-ease.

The fiancé asked me two days ago what I wanted for my birthday, and I had a lot of ideas: I was eyeing the dark blue dreadnought acoustic in the Guitar Adoption Center's window, but since my best friend is already responsible for me getting my paws on a tiger striped acoustic from the same place, it might be a little overkill on the guitar front.
I suggested some plastic containers from the local JoAnn's for yarn storage, and he gave me a look for asking for something practical -- I about died on the spot laughing, since there have been times in the past that he's accused me of eschewing practical gifts in favor of frivolous things. (Rightly, perhaps, but hey. Gifts are meant to be fun.)

And then it occurred to me. Rockler's.
I want to make a spinning wheel: A few months ago, I bought Richard Schneider's No-Lathe Saxony-Style Spinning Wheel Construction Manual with the intention of making a spinning wheel, though life conspired to keep me from getting into the project. And, we have a Rockler's Hardware locally, which is honestly the best source in our area for non-pine woods. Red oak. Maple. Exotic woods.
So this weekend, I've talked him into setting foot in the Rockler's with me and figure out what it's going to cost to pick up the materials for making my spinning wheel. If it's more than half the cost of a Kromski Prelude, he's agreed to go halvsies with me on the Prelude itself.
I'll be over here, doing a happy little dance over getting a spinning wheel one way or another and mentally running the benefits of finished vs. unfinished.

Guess this means I have to figure out the best way to make him a space invaders sweater for his birthday. ;)

Finished the increases on the shrug in progress last night, and now I'm just working in stockingette for 21 stitches: I anticipate I should be able to wear this thing to Dr. Who on Friday, which will make it a week's project. I like 7-day knitting projects: There's something very satisfying about seeing four to five skeins of yarn turn into something wearable in a week's time of free moments.
... Never mind that a large portion of said 'free moments' actually come from me being stubborn and foregoing things like, oh, sleep to get 'just this last row!' finished.

I have run into a small quandary: Friday is Funky Hat Day at work, and I had intended to wear this perfectly hideous muffin cap-esque affair in tiger striped velvet that I fell in love with and picked up at a Renfest many years ago, but I am having issues finding it. (I knew I shouldn't have ever let the thing out of my sight when we were moving. If it's gone for good, I may have to cry.) So the question now is, look frantically for my favorite Ugly Hat, or dive into the stash and make something worth wearing? Hum.

I'm debating what to do for my No Sheep for You secret pal, once I get notice of who s/he is on the 15th: I'm giving serious thought to hand dyeing some yarn (perhaps Dharma's Alpine Cotton, as it's a two-skein affair), since I'm interested in trying the technique. And that would be something special to get, I think... So something with larger yardage is probably more considerate, as that yarn will never be available again. Right? ;)
Also, I know I'd love to get hand-painted yarn... Personal weakness, but that still seems like a REALLY good idea to me.

Still wanting a spinning wheel. And I may be looking at Rockler's wood and thinking what I want to use to make it. ;) So many choices... And I really need to sit down and look at the materials in my spinning wheel construction manual, do the math to see exactly what I need.

...
I am now officially derailed.
I was looking through my knitting and spinning links to try and form something intelligent to add to the plans of making a spinning wheel above, and then I stumbled on this knit-along in an advertisment. Oh, wow.
And it has a related book, Charmed Knits: Projects for HP Fans. Oh, I want this. Want, want, want. Next week, I can buy it, but oh. I mean, it appeals to my inner geek on no less than two (no, three, or possibly more) levels -- Knitting geek, HP geek, and my poor, oft-quiet (save Faire season and Halloween) and internal Costume/Cosplay geek.
Squee.

Also, I just found Interweave Knits' free pattern for a Knitted Wedding Dress.

...

Am I horrible if I'm now looking at that with a 'Oo, can I do that?' glint in my eye?

I'm in trouble.
As some knitters do, I'd developed an interest in spinning. I have several drop spindles at home, but I've never really gotten the hang of them, unfortunately: I still have about 2 oz of this bizarrely thick silk 'yarn' (and I use the term very loosely) caught up on a drop spindle, since I have no idea what to do with it now. I suspect it's in need of untwisting and/or re-working. The use of spindles appears to be a skill I cannot teach myself. Alas.

It's probably not hard to see where this is going.

I'm wanting a spinning wheel.
There's no way on earth I can afford one, unless I have a ton of fairy godparents descend on me en mass for my birthday or something, but seriously. I've decided that the Kromski Prelude is the way to go, if I were able to buy one. Unfinished, probably, because I suspect I could head on over to the parents' and get something nifty to finish it, along with Dad's help. (Dad's rather handy with wood stain.)
Since I can't afford that, though, I'm picking up a copy of the No-Lathe Spinning Wheel Construction Manual that came up a lot when I was searching for suggestions on how to DIY. It'll take a while, and yes, I realize that I'll be responsible for getting the components, and putting them together, and so on... But I still think it's worth it to at least see what goes into it. Informed decisions, and all that.

Now, as for why I want a spinning wheel when spindles are frustrating... I honestly a wheel would be easier, as both hands can focus on what I'm drafting while my feet provide the spin: I multi-task better under that format.

My friends have helpfully been suggesting things like looking up clubs or local craft classes on spinning, be it spindles or wheels: I agree that they're good ideas, but there aren't any local clubs or classes that I'm aware of -- but that hardly means they don't exist.
However, I was lucky enough to meet pretty much all of the 'thread heads' in the local SCA chapter three years ago: They're the ones responsible for re-teaching me knitting and I like them, but on that day they all had drop spindles or spinning wheels and/or knitting needles and time to show me how to use things -- as well as the end result of their spinning and fun with kool-aid dyeing, so I know I've got a good semi-local resource right there. (They're only about 30 min away and meet one or two nights a week. I'd need to get off my duff and get back in contact, but they're enthusiastic about people interested in their arts.)

I've been interested in spinning long before the instant I met the aforementioned SCA ladies: It's one of those things that's always caught my interest, and my mom had a decorative but functional (minus the flyer) spinning wheel when I was a kid and I'd be fascinated with the thing, playing with it for hours.
Thanks to the ladies of the SCA, I found an interest in drop spindles and have taken to making several on my own, of varying types and weights: I have some double whorls, and he requisite low and high whorls, and a middle whorl I saw and was interested by ... but I'm lacking in the ability to both keep the spindle whirling and draft at the same time.

So. Find someone to beg for lessons and the use of a spinning wheel, or attempt to make one myself... Admittedly, the idea has merit, and I know I have at least one friend that would beg me for a finished one.