KnitMe

Mutter, mumble...

I feel like I got nowhere this week, and I have the pictures to prove it.

I finished spinning my one ounce of angora/silk/wool (ONE OUNCE - it took me 2 weeks) and am ready to spin the other one.

The remaining batt is blue with pink and purple, and the first batt was pink and purple with blue, so I think they will work plyed together. Please let me know if you think this is too nuts.

I plodded further on my Eleanora sock. I didn't get to spend all that much time on it; it now has a heel and most of a gusset.

I can't believe how long this is taking. And I have to knit a whole 'nother one. Sigh. Luckily we're in the million-degree-weather season and there is no hurry.

I finished the center of Highland Triangle and picked up for the border.

This is still impossible to photograph, you'll just have to take my word that it's not a grey blob.

I had extra knitting time last night because Emily conked out early, so here is how I spent it. Knit Highland border row 1. Knit row 2. Knit two thirds of row 3. Notice error in row 1. Tink two thirds of row 3. Tink row 2. Tink half of row 1. Knit half of row 1. Stop. So, for an hour and a half of knitting, I had one row done, plus a whole lapful of shed mohair from tinking the Brooks Farm yarn. Erm.

OK, here is my opinion after knitting this much with this yarn. It is a luxury yarn, and I don't mean only in price (it was $68 plus tax for my two 8 ounce hanks, which really weigh in at a total of 15.2 ounces). It can't stand up to abuse. It is making a lovely shawl, but the sections that have been tinked or frogged are a little furry and hairy looking, and I've had a lot of mohair in my lap. It is a stunning yarn to look at and to pet. Buy a hank and put it in a basket and pet it as you walk by. But don't make anything out of it that will have to go on and off over your head, or that will have sleeves put on arms used to carry stuff. A certain designer whose initials are DB responded to complaints about the durability of her yarns by saying that yarns containing these luxury fibers are bound to behave that way. Perhaps that is the case here too. So treat them like the luxury item they are, and be careful what you intend to do with them.

Rant over. I'm sure it didn't help my attitude toward all of this that as it unraveled into my lap, I was watching rain dripping through the sunroom roof into a pyrex casserole. Rain, good. Eternally leaky sunroom roof, way bad.

More pretty sock yarn. I think this may be it for the year... maybe.

This is more of the superwash merino from the eBay seller 'lotusblossom', similar to the one I used for the Dublin Bay socks a few weeks ago.

Maybe I'll have more progress next week. Meantimes, I get to attend the first meeting of the new Baltimore spinners' guild that Amie is starting up. Woohoo! I've always wanted a guild!

Backlogged

Will I ever feel caught up again in my life? Maybe when Emily goes off to college?

Before clearing the backlog, I just want to say welcome to Pink Tea to anyone who found us because Stephanie linked to Sam's wonderful spinning a couple of weeks ago. We manage one post a week here most weeks. Sam and Melanie tend to have the more photogenic and perfect work, but I can't badger them into posting as often as I'd like them to. Maybe you can help me with that... Meanwhile, I, Prudence, am the Monday-morning regular poster. My spinning is less perfect than theirs, but I have a really cute kid...

My first backlogged item is my 2 ply tussah silk that got finished last weekend.

I have about 14 1/2 ounces of two ply and I think about 1300 yards. This was really a thrill to spin, it was very easy and just flowed from the fold magically into the twist. I have whacked the heck out of these to try to get them to open up and shine again, and it's sort of working. However, this does make me wonder whether I will have to whack any garment I might make of them, any time it has to be washed. What say you all? whack in the garment?

I like the color just the way it is, and I want to make some kind of short sleeved pullover. I will have to swatch a bunch and then poke around in my Elsebeth Lavold books.

I started spinning one of the one-ounce batts of angora/silk/wool that I bought at MS&W. Tempting as it was to just unroll the batt and wrap it around my neck, I realize that durability might be a problem with that approach.

I'm going for a gnat-hair grist, and sometimes getting it. I am spinning fairly fast on the smallest whorl, but drafting as slowly as I can, so the stuff hangs together and the angora won't shed. It's a little scary to contemplate trying to ply something so thin.

The second batt seems to be made up of the same colors (pinkish lavender and sky blue) in the opposite proportions, and I'm thinking of plying the two together so I will have one two-ounce skein when I'm done.

I decided to frog and restart my Highland Triangle shawl out of my Brooks Farm yarn because I didn't like the gauge I was getting. The photo I took of this looked like a grey mess, so you have to be content with just a detail.

The pattern is pretty much a 'field of flowers' motif. The construction of this shawl is interesting - you knit a triangle, then pick up along the two long sides and knit on the border - but knitting that triangle is deadly boring. Thank goodness I only have about 40 rows to go on it. I should have started the border by next week.

I'm also plodding along on my 'Eleanora' sock.

I'm getting something I think will fit well and look nice, but my row gauge is totally whacked. It's probably partly because I went down a size on the needles to 0 (any sock that's 72 stitches around would be too big for me on size 1s) and partly because this yarn (Lisa's Merino Sock!) is so squeezably soft. The pattern says to repeat the 4-row leg pattern 12 times. Guess how many times I had to repeat it to get a leg that was about 8 inches long. 20 times. Enough to make me run screaming down the road at the thought of doing the second sock. But it's really quite beautiful and maybe after doing the toe, I can make myself cast on right away for the second one. Once it's cast on I think I will just work on it because it's there.

The color is 'St Valentine' which I think is just a perfect color for these, especially since the stockings they are modeled after were red.

In the who-needs-more-sock-yarn backlog department, two more hanks of Lisa's Sock!

On the left is 'Sky Drama', which I've been in love with since she made it but for some reason hadn't bought in Sock! yet. On the right is her newest color (at least, it was her newest color a couple of days ago... who knows what she's come up with over the weekend...), Gendarme! Thank goodness I like to knit socks. I clearly need to knit faster. At what point does one's stash become just one's colossal backlog??

Swatches and a Shawl Hanger

I've been spending some time with my stitch dictionaries sampling lace patterns for a wedding stole for my almost DIL, Sarah. We have decided to use Suri Elegance, 100% alpaca in natural white. It's very soft and has a nice halo when knit up. We had the first dress fitting and took the swatches along to see how they would go with the dress.

(Note that the swatches aren't discoloured as the photos would have you think - bad photographer that I am, I got my own shadow in the pictures).

These two are English Lace from Barbara Walker's Second Treasury, and an unnamed lace from Gisella Klopper's Beautiful Knitting Patterns, page 60. The Klopper pattern looks much better in a heavier yarn.

Diamond Fantasia from Barbara Walker's Third Treasury.

Frost Flowers from BW1

Dayflower from BW2

Dayflower seemed to compliment the dress the best of all. Frost Flowers was too busy, Diamond Fantasia too geometric and English Lace has too many single strand floats that could catch on the antique bracelet that Sarah plans to wear. So Dayflower it will be. Now to decide on edge treatments. I think more swatching is in store.

For some time now I have been trying to find a way to hang my shawls on the wall without damaging them. I had imagined using something like a very wide pants hanger where the fabric would be sandwiched between two pieces of wood. I bought a lovely piece of finished Brazilian Cherry wood and talked to a local woodworker about what I wanted to do. He suggested using magnets. Magnets! Brilliant! He countersunk magnets into the back of the wood. The shawl goes over the magnet, and a second magnet goes over the shawl, holding it in place. He used a router to cut a slot along the top that makes it easy to hang on two small brakets screwed into the wall.

And voila, the shawl hanger in action:

Spring shawl, October weather

Here's my finished object.

Oops, wait a minute.

{mysterious mutterings and wand wavings}

There, that's better.

This is difficult to photograph because the colors are so subtle - butter yellow, pale sage, blue and violet. The yarn was a hank of Blackberry Ridge handpainted silk (see it here on the right hand side of the page) that I got from Vicki via a stash box. It was about 560 yards but I felt like it went on and on and on - I got a wing span on this thing of more than 6 feet, and I could have blocked it bigger if I'd had a wider board. It's weightless and beautiful and I don't think I'll go anyplace fancy enough to wear it. I started it on Feb. 11th but laid it aside for a long time while I worked on St. Enda, and finished it on June 7th. I had enough yarn left to maybe do a couple of extra rows of the edging pattern but I didn't want to push my luck so I cast off when the pattern said to.

So now I have an ethereal silk Flower Basket shawl, and it's about 55 degrees and raining. Oh well.

I immediately pulled out the Brooks Farm 'Harmony' that I bought at MS&W and started Highland Triangle from Folk Shawls. I'm through about 100 of the 172 rows of the center triangle and I'm eating yarn like mad. I am afraid I should rip out and start over on needles a size smaller, as I don't have yardage to spare for this project. I didn't get a picture but it's knitting up nicely and has a great shine. I consulted Jessica's shawl completion spreadsheet, and it said that if I'd completed 100 rows out of 176, I was something like 30% done. Yikes! In that case I should definitely rip out, as I've used more than 2 ounces of yarn already and I think the border is going to take more than the center... Am I the only person who constantly frets during a project that I will run out of yarn???

My tussah silk is all spun and the hanks are drying. I will get a picture next week after they get an extended amount of whacking. I did pretty well on balancing my bobbins and ending up with not much single left after the plying, and since it was so little I tried spindle plying it from a bracelet. No good. How on earth does anyone ply silk without ultimately having to waste a bunch of extra singles?

Finally I give you a very creative use for a styrofoam soup bowl. See it?

Regularly scheduled programming

So, wasn't it great to see Sam's biannual entry last week? Maybe with all the nice comments folks left, she will be more easily persuaded to do it again before fall. Bwaha.

Anyway here's Prudence again with some ordinary knitting. What have we accomplished in the past 2 weeks? Well, two pairs of socks got finished.

These are Emmy's neon-rainbow socks. I hope they still fit her come autumn, I tried to make them a little bigger than seemed necessary. I do have plenty more yarn in case they are too short when she finally goes to wear them, and because she has little square toes the toe shaping is a lot less than I do for my own socks.

I also finished my Dublin Bay socks (you can get your pattern on Ryan's site).

I made a modification to the pattern, running 2x2 ribbing down the back of the leg between the lace panels, to snug up the fit a little. I got this idea from sock genius Nancy Bush who does it in a pattern of hers I've made before, something from Knitting on the Road but I forget which one.

The yarn is 'Treadsoft' superwash merino from the eBay seller 'lotusblossom'. I made socks with her non-superwash 'Twinkletoes' yarn before, but this is MUCH nicer - has a nice hand and will wash more easily and not felt with wear. It took me awhile to get reconciled to the way the colors knit up, but now that it's done I like the overall effect.

I am ready to mail off my Dulaan project knitting. My plan for this year was to send one more item than I sent last year.

The pink and white one is made from a hank of what I think is handspun in pink that I fished out of a circulating stash box, plus some white spindle-spun corriedale from my very early days learning how to spindle. I'm happy to be sending off this truly hand-made thing, and I wish I knew whose pink handspun that was...

You can find out about Dulaan from Ryan's site, too.

I started the Eleonora socks this weekend. After I saw them on Vanessa's blog I had to run and get the pattern, they are so lovely. I had some of Lisa's Merino Sock! in St Valentine red and I thought it would be perfect, since the pattern was based on some red socks.

I think a project like this exposes all the flaws in my knitting, but I'm going to persevere anyway. No matter how much I try to pay attention to where the leading edge of each stitch is and so forth, I just CANNOT get patterns worked out in knit and purl to show up. I don't know what my problem is but I'm consistent with it! I think I will lengthen the legs on these a little - there is enough width at the top to come up onto the fat part of my calf, and I have plenty of yardage in the yarn, so I will probably work more repeats of the 4-row leg pattern. This yarn is SO soft and cushy.

I fell victim to another Shetland fleece, too. I got a nice sample from a shepherd who said she was discounting her fleeces this year due to there being too much vegetable matter in them (she was laid up recovering from surgery so her husband fed her sheep and he flung the hay too freely). The staple is nice and long (about 5 inches) and has a soft but not limp feel to it.

This is the sheep herself, photographed last fall so she's wearing the fleece I ended up getting.

When I laid it out, there was more hay in the fleece than I expected from the sample, and the tips didn't really wash out as well as I'd hoped, but the quality of the overall fleece is higher than the mess I got into last summer, so I think I will have a better final product from all the outdoor combing I'm going to have to do!

I'll leave you with some interesting textile photos to pore over. I got hold of some handwoven Albanian blankets that belonged to my grandmother and date from the 1930s or earlier. They are very heavy and quite coarse, and woven mostly with singles I believe, but the colors and patterns are fabulous. I tried washing them because they had a heavy musty smell, but the first one bled so heavily that I quit and just did vinegar/hot water soaks - who knows what they used for dye. They are hung over a fence that is about 3 feet high, to give you some idea of size. I wish I had some idea who made them and when.