July 25, 2005
Spinning and So Forth
The weather was much improved this weekend, so the house could be open and the back porch used, and so forth. A fair amount of spinning happened.
This is some Shetland fleece I bought on eBay.
I realized after I cropped the picture that I should have put a ruler next to them, or something for size. They are about 6 inches long. This is really beautiful fiber - it isn't going to turn into a ring shawl anytime soon, but it's not extremely coarse. This was the cleaner stuff - I have about 2 pounds, and I swear that there is one pound of hay in the bag and 1 pound of fleece. But it does comb out, I just have to sit over a tarp.
I'm spinning it long draw, because the fibers are pretty long and, as you'd expect, the Shetland is really grabby. So it's going fairly fast and making up in a lovely shade of silver grey.
Meantime, I finished my first four ounces of white merino.
This is not my most consistent yarn ever, but even Emily pronounced it soft:
It's 4 ounces and maybe 225 meters. I'm well into the second four ounces, and I think it's a little more tightly spun, so I'm trying to relax a little.
In knitting news, I swatched with my 3 ply cormo, on size 3.25mm needles, and got stitch gauge for my pattern but not row gauge, and a very firm fabric, so I decided to swatch again on 3.5mm. Now, my 3.5mm ebony needles were being held hostage by the silk-from-hell (last seen here). So - guess what - the silk from hell is in a plastic bag waiting to be dumped in a traveling stash box! I'm free! I had good intentions of putting it on a piece of yarn in case some lunatic actually wants to knit it, but I realized I haven't got the slightest idea how to get about 500 stitches onto a piece of yarn. Yahoo! Out it goes!
July 18, 2005
Sweating the small stuff
This weekend was one of those humid mid-Atlantic times when you can get soaked in sweat standing still in the middle of the floor. Even with my air conditioners running it was still pretty damp all around. We got a new refrigerator, and in between all the stressing over ice and coolers and what-the-hell-is-that-back-there, I managed to finish off some little things that have been hanging over me.
Emily's socks, from Fortissima Cotton.
I have to hide them on her, or she's going to want to wear them right away. She doesn't entirely have good sense yet about the necessary relationship between weather and what you put on.
I also plyed up the grey rambouillet that I had been combing. This is the first yarn that I made on my Mazurka, and the first yarn I made starting from fleece straight off the sheep.
I did make two skeins of yarn previously from handcombed top, but that fleece was already washed - this was most definitely in the grease. It was maybe a pound of fleece to start with, extremely dirty and heavily greasy. After 3 scours it still felt a little dirty, and it could have appeared in the spinner's dictionary under the entry for 'combing waste.' It seems unbelievable, but this is 5 ounces of yarn. I'd be unnerved by that figure (about a 70% loss in washing and combing) if it weren't for the fact that I only paid $6 for the wool.
The photo above shows the hanks before I washed them out. After washing, they didn't really change color any, but they bloomed even softer. I'm a big rambouillet fan now! I think I got about sport weight - it's somewhere around 450-475 yards. I'm pondering the idea of gloves - it would make the most lovely warm soft gloves. What else could I do with that amount of sport-weight yarn??
Update, Later
Here's what was in my mail today, a pound of bluefaced leicester dyed in Lisa's 'Elektra' colorway. All together, now: "OOOOOOOOH" Wonder if I can take a day off from work to spin...
July 13, 2005
Thought For The Day
"There's a lesson in life to adopt and interpret,
It applies to all people regardless their race:
Don't put your trust or your faith in a person
If sometimes they seem to have more than one face."
--from a song by Brian Warfield of the Wolfe Tones
July 05, 2005
Good news and bad news
The good news is, the Noro cardigan is finally done.
The bad news is, I had to finish it twice. Somehow when I took it off the needles and put it on, it came down almost to my knees and the sleeves hit my knuckles. How did I do that? Luckily it was knitted from the top down so I just had to undo the bottom edges and rip back and reknit. So now, the good news is, it isn't too long.
The bad news is, it's kind of wide and floppy, and because of the style of collar I chose, the neckline has no body at all and tends to slide down my shoulders. Sigh. I'm considering one button at the neck with a loop, or else I-cord ties like a big bed jacket. You can see in the in-use photo how much floppiness there is under the arms.
It's not something I can blame on a bad pattern, I sort of made this up myself so I would have a sweater made out of Silk Garden. I hereby solemnly swear I will not try to 'make it up' again, especially when using expensive yarn.
Meanwhile, as an antidote to 6 months spinning a pound of white Cormo, I quickly spun up 4 ounces of bluefaced leicester.
I was shooting for sport weight but ended up experimenting with the long draw so I got a sort of inconsistent yarn that tends to worsted weight. I plyed from a center pull ball which turned out to be quite easy. The best thing about this yarn: It's SOFT. Lofty. Not overspun or overplyed. Yippee. I intend to make a pair of socks out of it, I hope that I can do that with about 200 yards of worsted weight yarn.
So, what did I do after finishing this? Got out my pound of undyed merino. I intend to keep control of this fiber. Once I spin this I will have the confidence to tackle some of the silk/merino I have stashed. We'll see if I can stand to spin another pound of white.
