KnitMe

Yarn...

I spent a lot of time this weekend spinning on my Quebec wheel. I almost finished another bobbin of my flicked cormo, but not quite. I'm getting a nicer single now that I'm only flicking the bits that have good lock structure, and saving the disorganized poofs to get a trip through the combs.

I did, however, finish the first 8 ounces of shetland last week. I have 3 skeins of about 300 yards each of two ply. It's really nice - this Louet fine shetland top is awesome. I have 8 more ounces to spin.

I spun a skein of grey CVM/Romeldale roving that I got at my LYS. This is just over 3 ounces and about 200 meters give or take. It is much nicer than it looks in the photo, very springy and soft.

And I wound yarn. I couldn't decide which of my Lisa Souza sock yarns to use next, so I wound two. Hardtwist Petite in Blue Flame and Sock! in Sky Drama. I think Sky Drama is probably my all-time favorite Lisa colorway. I'm toying with several different patterns for these.

I finished my Widdershins socks, in Gypsy Knits bluefaced leicester sock yarn. I sized them up to 64 stitches and they fit great.

I quit the cables partway up the calf and did a picot bindoff, and they fit great - don't fall down!

I also finished Emmy's red and green socks, but no picture yet.

I finished the body of Tangled Yoke and started a sleeve.

I am loving the way this yarn is feeling in this pattern.

I also have two fronts, a back, and one sleeve of Tangled Yoke finished. Sorry for the strangely lit photo.

I should be done with the knitting of this very soon and ready to do the blocking, which will be time consuming.

Finally, here is a friend I made last Monday. He was wandering the parking lot of Sam's Club near a busy intersection. I scooped him up and put him in my car, where he proceeded to purr on my lap as we drove all over creation looking for a safe place to leave him. (My house is full.) He finally ended up at the Maryland SPCA where he can stay till he is adopted. He was the sweetest cat, I hope he finds a good home.

Rhinebeck

I would love to write you an essay about the lovely day spent at Rhinebeck but I'm just too late and too harried to wax eloquent. So, pictures with a minimum of chat. More pictures can be found at Laura's blog - she's in my spinning group and came along to be my roommate. She bought a fleece...

We were blessed with totally perfect weather although I could have wished it were cooler. This is one of the main thoroughfares at the fairgrounds at 10:30 in the morning.

What are two differences between this and any given equivalent at Maryland? 1) You can see a small mountain away in the background with some autumn foliage on it (although not as much as I expected - I guess fall peaks later now than it did when I was a kid). 2) You can see space to walk around. Rhinebeck seems not to really get busy until after lunch.

I really only bought 2 things, and the first one came at practically the first booth we saw when we arrived - I think they were called the Sheep Shed or at least that's who made this lovely rack of 50/50 merino and tencel.

Right across from them was a ceramics vendor with lovely tiles and this awesome sheep sink.

It made me wish I had the right kind of bathroom setup for it. Adorable.

Somebody's wall of autumn skeins.

We met up with Annmarie and Joanne and no matter how I fooled with the camera I couldn't get a shot with good lighting, so you'll have to have a shot with bad lighting.

We met lots of cute alpacas and llamas, and a giant German angora bunny.

Some pretty skeins, including merino/silk blends and other stuff.

At Carolina Homespun's booth, Nancy of Chasing Rainbows dyeworks had a lovely display of bombyx and bombyx/merino blends.

Not far away, I kinneared Stephanie in her gorgeous awesome Kauni cardigan, which she kept on despite the fact that temperatures climbed into the mid 70s. I would have done the same in her place.

It was Bluefaced Leicester year at Rhinebeck so there was a batch of pretty BFL sheep to visit. (No fleeces, alas - I think it may have been the time of year.)

Snack:

Yes, we hates the flash.

This girl is obviously a show veteran, she can catch some calm in the middle of things.

These little guys are Shetlands. Look how messy they've gotten just in the time they spent hanging out together in their pens. Now I know why every Shetland fleece I've laid hands on has been full of VM. It seems to be in their nature!

I think this curly kid is a Wensleydale.

This is what a big whack of knitters looks like having raffle drawings.

My pictures of Jess and Casey came out so bad they would thank me for not posting them... Ravelry and their sponsors threw a lovely party.

This is all I bought - sorry for the blur. One skein of Chasing Rainbows bombyx silk top in something she called teals but I call emerald.

Six ounces of Sheep Shed merino/tencel in a colorway called 'Ice' that had my name written all over it.

I would go back. I would stay in the same little humdrum Quality Inn, as it was the perfect location. (I would prefer not to drive 5 hours home with a rear tire I didn't trust, but that had a happy ending and new tires have been gotten.)

In which Prudence catches up

OK so where were we? Stuff I've been doing but didn't squeeze into last weeks entry. Yeah. But first how about Stitches East?

Now, last year I brought my camera and took pictures, sensible of the fact that the XRX people actually BAN cameras and will throw you out if they catch you photographing the wrong thing. I guess this is like nuclear secrets or something. This year, I decided that I would not sneak around under their rules to give THEM free publicity. I'm going to give the publicity just to my friends.

Here are my goodies I got from Lisa Souza.

From back to front: a hank of Hardtwist Merino in the 'Peacock' color, which I have had in the back of my mind since last year. Of all the different yarns she had this color in, the Hardtwist was the one that took the color the most strongly and really had that shade of green I wanted. In the middle: a hank of merino/angora in 'South Pacific', which Emily picked out for herself. I want to make her something that won't have to take a lot of wear and that she won't outgrow - maybe a vest like the Ribwarmer, just a tad smaller than mine. Finally, in front, a hank of 'Fat Bunny' angora blend in 'Sapphire', which was a gift to Emily from Lisa for a hat. She will have a hat from that very soon.

Here's my goodie from Sheila Ernst.

I have had this button on my mind since Maryland Sheep and Wool, and it waited for me. She had buttons just like this in the 3/4 inch size, a set of 6 or 7, but I decided what I really wanted was the one big one. And, I am nothing if not consistent. I brought this home and laid it beside the Sheila button I bought at Maryland in 2005 and they are the same colors.

There was an unplanned purchase, I got snagged on my way past Ellen's Half Pint Farm where I grabbed this hank of wool/bamboo sock yarn - a colorway I saw at Maryland a couple of years ago and passed up but not this time:

My final stop was WEBS - I wanted to pet some of their yarns and the new 'Sheffield' merino/silk/angora was the one I had to have this year.

Sorry for the dark photo, that yarn is a lovely light purple.

It was also a beautiful day in Baltimore and we enjoyed spending some time visiting with our west coast friends.

Now for the catching up, of which there is still a lot.

My rainbow dyeing experiment - it was pretty successful actually. I had a hank of the original Knitpicks undyed merino 'color your own' in fingering weight, and fortuitously a pack of Jacquard acid dyes had dropped onto my doorstep a couple of days before, containing just the colors I wanted to play with. My intention was to start out with primary colors just to get a sense of how this would work.

Here's my soaked yarn in a plastic-lined baking dish.

I wasn't sure the best way to lay it out so I just improvised.

Here it is with the dye dumped on it - scarlet, royal, and bright yellow. I tried to get a little color overlap so we could see the colors of the rainbow - I should have done more overlapping, as it turned out.

Then I covered the whole thing with more plastic, poked a couple of holes, and microwaved for 8 or 9 minutes. It was hard to figure out how much dye to put in, because in some places I had pools that I feared would lead to mud on the bottom side, and in a couple of other places I had white spots. But on the whole, it turned out ok.

It was pretty easy, the entire thing from soaking the yarn to rinsing the final product took an hour.

The interesting thing I've been doing is trying to spin my cormo fleece without sending it to process. I got a flicker and gave it a try.

This is what it looked like after flicking when I was ready to spin it.

And this is what a wool pig looks like when she's getting as close as she can to the goods.

Some of the fiber was not quite well organized enough to flick well - I think the stuff that has fallen out of lock shape too much will get one pass on the combs as I was not able to control the yarn as well as I wanted to with the less organized fiber. I have one skein - about 2.5 ounces and about 130 yards - it is incredibly yummy and just how I wanted it in most ways, but I need to strive for a bit more uniformity. Luckily, there is plenty more fleece to spin...

Now, not to be boring, but we do need to show knitting progress here. I started 'Tangled Yoke', Eunny's phenomenally popular cardigan from the fall issue of Interweave. Hundreds of people are knitting this, if you judge by Ravelry, and many are using Silky Wool as a substitute for Rowan Felted Tweed, so I felt like I had made a good yarn choice. It's working up beautifully. I just finiished the ribbing at the bottom of the body.

And I have two fronts for Tailored Scallops. You will have to excuse the blurriness as I didn't have time to take another photo. Here they are with the Sheila button in the center that I am proposing to use for a closure.

Oh, and this was supposed to be in the 'Sides' entry of last week. Two socks, not a pair.

Bee, Sides

Well, haven't we been lucky here, two whole weeks with wonderful entries by someone other than me! The downside of that is, during that time I've accumulated a large amount of stuff to show, mostly because I was nearly done with two big projects when last we met. But first I have to explain some of my title by showing the relevant items.

This is a side.

If you are scratching your head over this one, think Elizabeth Zimmermann. It is a side of her Ribwarmer from Knitting Workshop. The opening in the middle is the armhole and the straight edge without the tab is the center back. See it?

If I were to do it again I would do some shaping for the armholes but I love the curved front edges done with short rows. The yarn is the endless Rambouillet that I dyed in the fleece in 4 colors and then combed together and navajo plyed to get a sort of worsted weight yarn. It was an interesting experiment and I have enough yarn to knit a whole 'nother rib warmer if I feel like it. It was not a big project - I started it on the 28th of September and blocked it a week later. I used size 8 needles even though the yarn gauge was inconsistent, and it seems to be fine.

More conventionally, this is a side.

This is the right front of the Tailored Scallops cover sweater from Lace Style. I started this on the 29th and it is knitting pretty fast because it's on size 9 needles. I'm using Elann Peruvian Sierra Aran which is wool and alpaca, and it is a lovely yarn to knit - soft with just a touch of sheen. I'm counting on blocking to open this out, because when I used size 10 needles I just didn't like the look of the fabric - too open and floppy, and the one in the book certainly doesn't look open and floppy.

The reason I got to do all those sides was that I finished both the afghan AND Bee Fields, within 5 days of one another! I love it when that happens! Here is the afghan ("Saffron Cables" by Kathy Zimmerman from Interweave Fall 06):

Of the three photos, the top one is the most accurate as to color and the second one gives the best look at the stitches themselves.

It's really more like a throw - it's about 4 feet by 5 feet because I used smaller-gauge yarn than the pattern called for. Also, I can't exactly use it as an afghan with the little wool pigs in the house:

I worked on it from May 19th to October 19th and never was bored - the cables are lovely. I used 18 or 19 balls of Cascade Bollicine Holiday that I got on clearance from WEBS - superwash merino with a little acrylic, which is perfect for an afghan and didn't feel cheap.

It's been said that the photo in the magazine shows an afghan with 4 repeats of the main chart but that the directions only say to repeat 3 times. Because of my gauge I did 4 repeats, and I went back and picked up and knitted down from the bottom to lengthen the seed stitch border to use up all my yarn. I'm very pleased with it, except that I have to hide it...

I also finished Bee Fields. This was a really entertaining knit.

The bees and hives:

The swarm (this is my favorite because it looks exactly like what it's called):

The fields:

She wanted a consistent edging all the way across the sides so she had you finish by grafting the edge stitches in the center, and I suck at lace grafting. Can you see how the edging pattern doesn't exactly meet?

If I were to do something designed like this again I might try to figure out a way to do it without grafting.

This is what the edging looks like everywhere EXCEPT where I grafted it.

It came out HUGE. It was too wide across the top to fit on my 6 foot blocking board, and with the wool pigs in the house I had to be able to get it off the ground after it was pinned, so I couldn't lay down the side panel to make it a foot or two wider. Also it was too tall at the point for the 4 foot depth of the board. It is really decadently big.

I started this on July 21 and finished on September 24th. The yarn is Jaggerspun Zephyr in the color I think is called 'Real Red', and I used size 5 Bryspun circular needles. I didn't see any real errors in the pattern, just a couple of things to watch out for. On the side edge throughout, the instructions tell you to bind off two stitches and then knit one and then yo-k2tog-psso-yo. However, that 'knit one' is the stitch you knit in order to bind off the second stitch. DON'T knit a stitch after you bind off the two little extra stitches. It is clearer if you use the chart, but be warned. Also, at the end of the last chart before the edging there is some language telling you to move the markers to the arrows as you did at the end of other charts, but at that point there are no arrows and you don't need to do it - that must have been one of those famous copy and paste errors.

Phew! Isn't that enough for one day? We'll save other things for the future: spinning cormo using a flick carder, an experiment in rainbow dyeing, sock progress....