Gaff

As anyone who has recently peeked in my general direction lately has undoubtedly noticed, I have started trying my hand at spinning.

I'm absolutely thrilled to pieces with my new obsession but am not terribly good at it. However happily for me this seems to be a very common deal amongst new & intermediate spinners, so I have lots of cheerful company & lots and lots of blog posts to read on the topic.

So today, being almost physically unable to do any real work (this week has been a bit of a train wreck between crazy students in the library & a crazy waking-at-6-AM, temper-tantrum-throwing-toddler) I decided to catch way way up on my blog reading. And so I started reading some of my new favorites (Enchanting Juno) and some of my old favorites (Claudia's Blog) that I haven't read in several weeks with an eye towards any mention of spinning. {N.b. - as far as blogs go, I have favorites and then I have favorites. You know - the ones that you like to read yet let go unread for weeks, and then the ones that you like to read and somehow make/find time to read anytime/everytime you see that there is a new post....}

And I did some back reading in Claudia's blog and first came across this post where she shows her "fiber room" which totally made me drool like a Saint Bernard with a can of Alpo waved under his nose. Just LOOK at that bookcase stuffed with yarn and fiber and knitterly books and mags. Doesn't it make you drool too? Then I looked back even further and came across this post which talks all about plying. Something that I had just tried, in fact, and was pretty disappointed with my results.

I thought I had shown just the tiniest bit of improvement in the whole spinning thing, and so was very sad when I saw the over-spun, over-plied, hard, tight mess of yarn (and I use that term loosely - it's so hard and dense that there is no soft springy goodness left in it - it feels more like cheap rope that you need a hacksaw to cut through) that I was left with after I had tried to ply it.


Handspun singles that are still totally identifiable as a new spinner's work. But still, not as glaringly horrible as the very very first bobbin of work that I produced. Progress was made - however slight - and I was happy.

Overspun, overplied 2-ply yarn. Horrible. Uneven. Plied way too tight. Plied way too loose. Horrible.

And after I read Claudia's lovely advice/direction on how to ply, it hit me. I had plied the above yarn incorrectly. WAY incorrectly. Apparently you are suppose to spin the yarn in one direction (a non-spinner would consider this to be, say, counterclockwise, while a spinner would say that it had been given 'S' twist) and then you ply it in the opposite (i.e. clockwise or 'Z' ) direction.

I spun in the same direction as eventually I plied. Overspinning adding to overplying all in the same overly-tight direction. Hence why I could barely fit the horrid mangled mess through the orifice of the wheel, why it sprung into what looked like a skein'd Koosh ball when I was done tying off the skein, and why it looks so appalling in the above picture.

So what to do now?

I think I might bite the bullet and un-ply the yarn and either re-spin the singles again if they seem to need it or else just ply in the correct direction with the singles as they are. I hot-water soaked the yarn to set the twist after I plied it the first time, so I don't know if this is actually a total loss or not and if I'd be much better just chalking this up to inexperience and exhaustion (I was so excited to be done spinning my first true bobbin-full of fiber that even though it was 11 PM and I could barely see anything due to absolute exhaustion, I went ahead and plied the entire thing anyway.) or can actually salvage this pretty cotton-candy coloured stuff with a re-spin, re-ply attempt.

Any advice, from absolutely anyone who knows about this sort of thing, would be greatly greatly appreciated.

In the meantime, I've got new bumps of Piece of Vermont fiber to be eyeballed and fondled, and as soon as Gryphon's package arrives with my new hand-carders and baskets (today? today? let it be today!) I've got a full pound of washed fleece to start carding out. I also have 1/8th of a shrug back and a full sleeve to finish on Belle (not to mention the super-cool edging around the neck) plus the leg of a sock to finish designing, plus a 2nd embossed leaves sock to finish up for the daughter of a friend plus a shawl for a co-worker's retirement (thank GOD she retires in August of '08!)


In case anyone was curious, above is a picture of one of the (3? 4?) baskets that I have ordered from Gryphon. Locally handmade and collapses almost completely flat. Isn't that just too amazing for words???


Plus about a million pairs of Fetching that I have either agreed to or planned to knit in the past 24 hours. I knit myself a pair (FO pics coming soon) in 2 sweet evenings worth of knitting and so decided that they are my Christmas gift to hand out to many this year. I also have a finished EZ BSJ to post about - now that I have finally (!) sewn on the required buttons. However taking proper pictures requires not only sunlight (and my free time these days has lately only appeared after 9:15 PM) but also the ability to focus my eyes - something that I"m lately also lacking.

Which reminds me, I need to pick up my boxes of replacement disposable contacts this weekend. Must away to call the eye doc and make sure they're in before driving dangerously close to the fabric store to pick them up. No need to risk temptation if the desired object isn't yet on the shelf!

Still raining

It's still raining here (woe that I could send some of this steady, soaking rain over California's way!), I'm still missing crucial pieces from the loaner spinning wheel, and I'm still adrift in a sea of stockinette.

Blah.

My shrug is getting closer and closer to being finished in that the huge swath that spans my back is probably only 2 inches away from completion. I'd show you the picture that I bribed my husband to take showing this miraculous progress, but it unfortunately makes me look like a chunky linebacker after a huge pasta dinner, so I'll refrain from showing such amazingly unflattering pictures of myself in public.

The worst part of getting this close to finishing the shrug is that once I actually make the back section long enough I'll have to truly acknowledge the fact that the pattern is almost certainly and truly LOST back in the Outer Banks. I have searched for it high and low, but alas - still for naught. I don't know what to do. Wing it, based on the other half I've already knitted? Plead with the designer to send me the basics for the ruffle along the front (the only info I really & truly need) - plead with a fellow Belle Shrug knitter that I met via Ravelry to take pity on me and send me the missing specs and instructions?

My hemp paper bag is coming along well - my previous attempt at a increase/decrease - slipped stitch - decrease/increase technique was successful but simply too messy with this stiff hemp twine, so I have changed techniques entirely and am now working in single sections in a slightly nontraditional way - with much happier results. Hopefully an almost-finished shot to come soon.

I am also back to working on my design-a-sock project for Gryphon and Knitty with so far happy results - but alas in my enthusiasm to get started on it the unthinkable happened:

Can't see what happened? Look down at the bottom of the bag - just below where the bamboo needle crosses the "M" in PREMIUM. Keep going down. Keep going..........keep going.................

............see how there's NOTHING ATTACHED at the bottom of that bamboo needle?

*snap*! It made such a sad little sound when it just broke right off in my hand. I kind of caught my breath in a little sob, and then looked up in bewilderment like a small child does when the unthinkable happens to them.

I still have the original packaging, and I seem to remember somewhere that Addis come with a lifetime guarantee if you have the original packaging. Does anyone else seem to remember this hope-inspiring bit of information as well?

I was able to switch over to dpns with nary a problem - and it turned out to be a blessing in the end as the pattern stitch I'm using has a "traveling" sort of tendency where every so many rows you have to move a stitch from one needle to the previous or vice-versa - - very annoying to do when using two circular needles but easy as anything to do with dpns. So if I can get the circular needle replaced with a minimum of fuss then all will be well in the end, I feel fairly safe in saying.


Tonight Kim is coming over for dinner (and then bath & story with the Munchkin) and then after he's safely in bed she and I get to sit and knit and chat - and I get to wrap my head around a little challenge that Laura (of Fiber Dreams) sent my way! She's currently knitting a beautiful blue pair of socks that have a slightly little tricky two-cable-needle cable in there - and she and I got talking about cable needles and cabling without cable needles. So she sent me the cable specs and I'm going to mess around tonight and see if I can't figure out how to do this particular 5-stitch cable, 2-cable-needle cable without even one cable needle - and post appropriate pictures here for anyone who is interested to see.

If nothing else, the pictures that Kim will be able to take of me struggling along making a huge tangled mess should be good for at least a laugh or two!

Vacation Swag

I was able to pick up a few fun things while on vacation - sadly there was nary a single yarn shop on the entire Outer Banks that I could find. I had done some pre-vacation poking around online first to try and find the name/location/phone number of any LYS, but kept coming up empty. So once I was actually on-island I did the next best thing - I asked at my LCS (Local Coffee Shop.)

"Nope," they said. "Not a single one. You'll have to go off-island for something like that."

As off-island in this case meant a full hour & a half drive, I was quite unwilling to go through that just to potentially end up with some novelty yarn at the other end. So instead I contented myself with puttering around all of the beautiful places that we had already planned to go - and on the island of Ocracoke I hit the jackpot in a knitting-related way. (Note to any future vacationers - the island is a 45 minute ferry ride away - BRING KNITTING!)

View from the Ocracoke ferry. Happily, I had brought along my entire vacay knitting posse, so I had a plethora of projects to choose from during the watery wait! Plus, we saw dolphins.

In Ocracoke there are several little fun shops - if you want home-made fudge or hand-made candies there are several nice options (heh - ask my newly-gained 2 pounds how I know this!), but even better if you would like books or clothes there are two wonderful options. The first is called Books To Be Red/Red Drum Pottery an incredibly cool place that has just about everything you could ever want in there - fantastic wooden children's toys, fantastic books (local authors, Oprah authors, you name it!), wonderful cards, postcards, lotions, earrings, locally-made pottery, beautiful woven items like napkins and placemats, and just fun tchotchke items like what I found below.



Oops, that's right! I can't show you what I actually bought, because it is intended for someone who reads this blog, and I don't want to spoil the surprise.... And while I certainly did think about posting a picture of the actual swag behind a link or suchlike, I have to admit that I'm not 100% sure that I credit her with being able to resist the temptation & clicking on the link and peeking ahead of time.

;>

But after she gets her package, I'll share the picture.

So what I show you instead is the package that I will mail out to her tomorrow. Aren't the labels FANTASTIC? They are courtesy of Elli at Elliphantom Knits and I just luuurrrve them. If you visit her blog you can download them yourself for free too! In fact I lurve them so much that I went ahead and used them also on my Book Mooch package - even though the book I'm mailing has not a single thing to do with knitting.


Address blocked to prevent the poor recipient from getting lots of unwelcome attention from a bunch of rabid knitters! I will have you know, though, that the above address is blocked with a new purchase from Books To Be Red - my new little nifty goes-everywhere-with-me notebook where I have everything important written down - how to kitchner, the corresponding inches for men and women's shoe sizes, a list of things to do ("send thank-you note for tomato knife"), and the contact number of the garage where my car is still being worked on. (Three weeks now, folks, three whole flippin' weeks. My advice to everyone out there? Call up your car insurance now and make sure that you have a rental car replacement in your policy. Costs almost nothing to add it in. The cost of a rental car for three weeks? Probably absolutely staggering. I have no clue as to the exact amount because I wasn't even willing to shell out close to that much cash, nor was I willing to risk partial reimbursement from my rental car company who is currently taking the other driver to court...)

Book Mooch, for those of you who do not know, is extremely cool. Pile up books you own but no longer wish to keep around, list them in Book Mooch & send them off to folks when asked. Earn points for doing so. You search the database for books that you want to own, and other folks will happily send them your way when you correspondingly ask. One book = one point. Build up points, use up points. Except for the cost of shipping (and if you use book rate, it's very cheap) it's all free. So far I've sent off a good half dozen or so and we've requested maybe 4 or 5 - and have been thrilled with both sides of the transaction. Laura of Fiber Dreams was the one who turned me on to this - a brilliant idea! When I came home from vacation I found that my most recent request - The God of Small Things - was there waiting for me. Oh, what a lovely occurrence! Brilliant book - brilliant system!

The other really cool shop on Ocracoke that I visited and scored some knitting 'stuff' was a hemp-clothing shop where I found (what else?) some hemp twine. I snatched up two balls of it (400 yards each) and have already started messing around with a design to knit myself a hemp version of a standard brown-paper bag. I know that there is a felted version of this on Knitty, but I don't want a felted version - nosiree - I want a hemp version that I can toss in the washer/dryer and know it won't shrink or get funky. I want something that gets softer and softer with use but won't ever ever EVER wear out. I wanted hemp, and hemp I got. Pictures will come soon after my knitting progress looks like more than a small tan twine rectangle.

No real other knitting news to report - one more embossed leaves sock to finish - size 11 women's, so no small task, that. 1/3 of a Screw-y II sock to finish for Peggers. (God,but size 13 feet are looooong!) Hours and hours and hours left of Seraphim to finish before the really pretty lace parts at the end kick in. Miles of stockingknit to accomplish on Belle before I get to join it back in the round for the other sleeve. (Think I'm exaggerating? Not quite - I have 10" of the back finished - I need only 20" more. U.G.H.) Lots and lots of knitting slogging here at Chez Pointysticks. I do think, however that excitement is on the horizon. Once my current socks are done I'm thinking long & hard about starting a pair of Chuck's Cabled Socks after seeing Mel's latest pair and developing some major knitted-object lust. And once my Belle shrug is finished I'm thinking that it's most certainly the time for me to finally (!) start on my Cable-Down Raglan that I have all that luscious alpaca stashed away for............

Ummmmmm............sooooooofffffffftttttttt. And waaaarrrrmmmmm!!!!!

My only other minorly exciting news to report is that I purchased a new chair for the Munchkin yesterday, as he's outgrown his current highchair and both Peggers and I have grown tired with the constant squirming and feet-on-the-table behavior that a too-small chair causes.

Ducks, meet the Stokke Tripp Trapp chair.


Funky, a bit expensive, European, and I think about to become one of our smarter child purchases ever.

OBX

Sour Cherry Upside Down Cake

The view 50 feet from our vacation house

Kite flying

Vacay knitting - Belle shrug on the Ocracoke ferry

The North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island

Our last sunrise on the beach

Halfway There

We are halfway to our vacation spot - currently we're spending the night in Virginia, with a final destination of Hatteras, North Carolina, where we'll be relaxing and lounging for a full week.

I have brought with me (in addition to the norm of contact case, toothbrush, shampoo, children's books, beach toys, sippy cups, etc.):

1.) Embossed Leaves Socks - one is currently down to just decreasing the toe. One left to go.

2.) Screw-y Socks - first one is knitted, second one has yet to be cast-on for

3.) Belle shrug - I'm on the first sleeve, currently an inch and a half or so past the crook of my elbow

4.) Seraphim - I'm up to 100 or so stitches on the plain stockingknit part - I get to start following a chart when I get up to 250 or so stitches.

I have high, high hopes.

(And not just because of the 4 hours left to drive in front of me tomorrow morning or the full six hour drive home that we'll do a week from tomorrow.)

E. X. H. A. U. S. T. E. D.

Man o man, but it's amazing how much scraping and painting almost two full sides of a house can really knock the stuffing out of you! Honestly. I'm more tired & sore now than I was after delivering a baby.

Much more so!

We made very good progress last Tuesday, and then amazing progress on Saturday. We made only so-so progress yesterday due to massive & stunning thunderstorms that rained sideways.

Before:

After 3 solid days of work:

You can unfortunately now all-too-clearly see how the paint that I carelessly slopped on the front porch screens two years ago really shows up like never before. That is all of the white bits around the dark brown trim on the porch. You can also see how the white railings inside the screened-in porch now glow in their stark-white-paintly way. Once everything is said and done we'll bit by bit pull off the dark brown porch trim, carefully pull out each staple holding the screening in place, and then paint the backside of the porch moldings and railings - and then when dry and topcoated properly put the screens back up and then nail the trim pieces back in place. That should help a lot. I'll also work on carefully scrubbing that old white latex paint off of the screen so that it looks tidier in general. We'll also paint dark brown the pieces of (currently white) lattice that we installed on either side of the screen door. The lattice was installed to put a stop to the catfights that would happen between our two housecats and the neighborhood outdoor cats.

I still have to finish up some last bits of trim work on the 2nd floor windows and soffit - but once that is done the front of the house will be finished. Then we can turn to the work still left to complete on the cemetery side of the house. (Ahem - so called because we live next to a cemetery - in case you were wondering................)


The bottom half is single-coated green. That is why it's so blazingly bright & streaky. The top half is not. The left half of the top is scraped but not primed. The right half of the top is scraped & primed.

The boys needed the good 26 foot extension ladder to reach the absolute tip-top of the house, so you can see how high I could & couldn't reach when I was priming the window and side trim using just the basic stepladder to climb up and down.....

....and you can also see where the huge thunder storm literally washed my 2nd topcoat down the side of the house taking away the nice deep green even-ness that I had created and putting back a neon green streaky mess in it's place......

Bugger.........................

In the midst of all of this I have still been knitting. I have cast on for a pair of screw-y socks for Peggers in some Gryphon Traveller yarn. She custom-dyed a new colourway just for him - it is called Wales and it is stunningly beautiful.

I have come up with an idea for my Belle shrug - a way to do the cuff that is slightly different than the Laura Chau pattern calls for. I'm excited about that, and hope to start it this afternoon when Kim and I sit down to knit in approximately............oh...........4 minutes.

I finished Peggers' vest and have only to seam it and knit up button bands or zipper bands for it.

I am frogging my Mystery Stole 3 and instead will eventually purchase a different stole pattern from Pink Lemon Twist and will knit that instead.

I also knitted the Cinchy Hat from the latest Knitscene - but alas have no pictures of any of these things.

Just pictures of a green house.

:)

Newspaper Clipping Archive

p.s. pattern for Belle Shrug nearly ordered. Workable yarn partner found for chocolate alpaca. Snicket sock into frog pond to provide said yarn partner. MS3 progress stalled due to exhaustion, crossed eyes, and inability to read a knitting chart with botched vision. We shall see what tonight brings.

newly converted

For ages now I've been listening to everyone rave on & on about the Mason-Dixon knitting book. How fantastic it is, how brilliant the two authors are, yet every time I'd open it (while shopping/sipping coffee in Barnes & Noble) I'd flip through some pages, and then put it back, a bit puzzled as to what all the fuss was about. Then the other day, in my shrug-knitting-starting-designing frenzy I went to the public library to snag some Nicky Epstein books (hey, I've never knitted a ruffle before, and I wanted to be sure that I was going to do it right!) and there was M-D Knitting right next to my outstretched hand........so I added it to the pile. And over lunch I browsed it and was thoroughly entranced - not only the ball band washcloth but also the log cabin examples (and those mitered squares!) but also the possibilities of calamari knitting. That is when you take very looooong loops (think about cross-sectioning the body of a t-shirt into long loops about 1" wide) and chain them together then roll the whole long thing into a ball and knit up the resultant "yarn" with huge-mongous needles. In such a way you can recycle old t-shirts into lovely things like placemats, cushion covers, bathmats, rag rugs, etc. And you don't have to sew any rag strips together or other such malarkey! As Peggers owns roughly 500 extra t-shirts that he doesn't wear and doesn't like and totally need to be rag-bagged, this is a perfect project for the fall - and as t-shirts all take dye fairly well anything that comes out a blah-ish colour can easily be tweaked to a nicer shade with a packet or two of Rit dye and a spin in the washing machine. What fun! So after a read or two I'm now a Mason-Dixon convert. While I might not buy the book anytime soon, I'll most certainly check it out again from the library - ditto with their next one which is due out next year!

I also spent the weekend working on my shrug with very very very disappointing progress. The shrug that I ultimately fell in LOVE with and am absolutely dying to make is the Belle Shrug by Laura Chau. It's available via Lettuce Knits, yet so far I have yet to hear back from the shop (I contacted them via e-mail.) I know that I can guesstimate how the pattern is put together, but I'd really rather read it for myself. However this is a moot point, as I know that I need about 1,000 yards of yarn for it - and I have only 665 yds of alpaca to work with (either the grey or the brown - take your pick.) Which means that I need to go stash-diving to make up the difference - and here is where I'm TOTALLY stuck.

I sat and stared at various skeins and balls of yarn for two whole days - trying to figure out if one colour or another would work - or trying to figure out if I could dye some yarn a different complimentary shade instead. Above you see the most likely contenders. The chocolate alpaca (currently the winner in my "what yarn for the body of the shrug?" contest) you can see wound into a huge yarn cake, while the other remnants cluster around wishing they could be that big & mighty.

In the photo above you have (clockwise from the alpaca): a ball of blue/white twist wool wrapped together with a strand of what looks to be alpaca in a light blue shade; a lovely ball of pink bamboo/merino Sockpal sockyarn that was hand-dyed for me courtesy of Jessie at Piece of Vermont; next up are two skeins of brown yarn - the one on the right is a skein of Claudia handpainted sockyarn that was a gift from Miriam Felton - on the left is a partial skein of Knitpicks Essential sockyarn in a chocolate-y brown; and at the very top, last but not least is a ball of three-ply alpaca in white/grey/black. I had huge hopes for this, but alas it seems far too thick compared to the chocolate alpaca (which isn't quite laceweight, but is thinner than most sock yarn!)

Checking to see how the brown & pink work together, despite the fact that I am **so not** a pink kind of girl........

Claudia Handpainted above the yarncake of Chocolate Alpaca....

So all of these look.................okay but when you compare it to the original shrug I just don't know if I like any of them well enough. Part of the problem is that this is really a lot to try and visualize - so today I reached the decision that I'm going to have to go ahead and knit what my friend Susan referred to a as a "monstrous colour swatch". I'm going to knit a huge bit of stockingknit - I'm thinking maybe 4"x18" and then along the sides of this swatch I'll pick up with the various colours and will knit the ruffle just like on the real shrug so that I can get a true feel for what it will ultimately look like. At this point I'm planning on knitting a brown ruffle, a pink ruffle, a brown sockyarn ruffle, and a blue maybe-alpaca ruffle. I'd prefer the blue to be darker, so I might dye a test bit first before I knit. But maybe not. First I probably need to skein it so that I can even see if I have enough blue to bother with.

A lot of knitting in preparation, I know, but as I really do just adore this chocolate alpaca and as I've been wanting a kick-ass shrug for quite some time now I really want it to come out nicely - so in the end it probably is all worth it.......

The saddest part of all is that I started both of the cuffs last night thinking that I could knit them at the same time and then Kitchner across the back (to be 100% certain that I didn't run out of yarn!) but now the colour combo that I originally settled on just isn't looking too good to me. But that's probably because I'm impatient and fickle - I figure that knitting a huge gauge/colour swatch will probably calm me down and help me to get some of the ants out of my pants where this pattern is concerned. Plus this way I might - just might - actually get the pattern from Lettuce Knits after I've spent several several several days knitting huge swatches and ruffles!

This is currently what my knitting basket looks like. At the very front is a pair of Snicket Socks. Looooooove that Sundara sockyarn! To the right is more Claudia handpainted. Behind the Claudia handpainted hiding under a yellow tape measure is P's vest waiting for me to knit it's last few crucial inches. To the left of the vest is some leftover bright orange/pink/purple sock yarn that I will be able to *finally* post about once the recipient's package arrives in the mail and they find out the surprise first. And finally, hidden in the lower left corner is some purple bamboo yarn still in raglan form waiting to be frogged.

Hmmmmmmmmm...............now looking at this picture I'm starting to wonder. Should I knit the shrug ruffle in the Sundara sock yarn and the Snicket Socks in the Claudia? I wonder if the Sundara yarn (which is a bit lighter w/ shots of orange & green in it) has a better colour scheme in general to it for this particular project and might work better as the Claudia is currently looking too dark to me.....................?

{sigh. That's me. Fickle.}