Heading into space with Stephen

So a few weeks ago I was randomly scrolling on Ravelry and noticed a pattern placeholder for Stephen West’s upcoming annual Mystery Shawl KAL. And I was intrigued. I”m not a huge KAL person - I tend to be the one jumping on the bandwagon of a particular pattern approximately 5 years after everyone else - and I’m not a huge fan of many of Stephen’s designs (So. Much. Neon.) But…I’ve been sorely lacking in knitting mojo for a long time now, and I was in the midst of cleaning out and reorganizing my stash closet, so I took a closer look.

Two key points that sold me on joining this KAL: Geometric and gradient - I could use colors that were related to each other instead of having to throw things together and hope that they would look good in the final product, and I adore geometric motifs. The shawl also only calls for 1520 yds (so 4 skeins of ~380 yds each) so likely won’t end up being large enough to need to be blocked on a king-sized bed.

And then there was my stash clean out - maybe I could spin the yarn for the KAL and kill 2 birds with 1 stone: kick start some knitting and reduce the pile of wool that I needed to cram back into my closet. Win, win, right?

I pulled out some Victoria Sponge batts from long ago and decided to take a whirl with spinning them up and seeing how they might work together for a “gradient”. These batts were an experiment from many years ago at layering one color/type of fiber in-between 2 outer layers, like the jam in a traditional Victoria Sponge cake. I didn’t have 4 sets of batts in a true light-to-dark gradient, but I did find 4 different colors that I thought could potentially work together.

Color 1 is 66% undyded BFL and 33% natural brown Corriedale. Color 2 is a mix of 2 different batts - one set was 50% BFL (green) and 50% Wensleydale (gold shades) and the second was 66% natural Romney and 33% BFL in green and purple.

Moving to the second row of the gallery, Color 3 is 50% purple Charollais and 50% Wensleydale. Finally, the pi nk batts for Color 4 are 50% grey Shetland, 25% pink BFL and 25% pink Wensleydale.

Sort of a gradient

All batts were stripped lengthwise into 3-4 pieces and spun with a short forward draw at a 1:15 ration on may Lendrum. They were then plied at 1:12 on the same wheel - for some of them (#3 in particular) I probably should have plied at a slightly lower ratio as it’s somewhat overplied, but so be it!

The good news is that I had a really good time spinning these batts and it’s great to have them spun up as examples of what happens with that type of color layering.

The bad news is that I don’t have enough yarn for the KAL - I needed about 380 yards of each, and what I ended up with is well short of that (Color 1: 290 yds; Color 2: 186 yds; Color 3: 177 yds; Color 4: 299 yds). It’s a good example of how longwools (like Wensleydale) can affect yardage - I find that they tend to create a very dense yarn, without the loft and spring of something with some more crimpy fibers like Corriedale.

So now I will have to stop by a yarn store this week and grab myself some skeins for the KAL - such a sad state of affairs! It might turn out that I have enough here to do the shawl, but since I don’t have any idea how much yardage of each color is needed, I’m not brave enough to start off with these and hope for the best! If it turns out I don’t have enough, I think the first and last colors will work really well together for a color work project - I have a bulky cowl design I need to get out that they might work well for if held double?

Growth of a turtle

I first picked up a drop spindle in 2007, and while spindling was my first mode of spinning, once I got a wheel my obsession with product versus process meant that I didn’t use a hand spindle very often.

Then I discovered Turkish spindles.

Turkish spindle are a type of low whorl spindle, but I like to think of them as a combo spindle-ball winder. One of my challenges in using drop spindles is what to do with the singles once they’re done. Winding each cop off into a plying ball is tedious, but I don’t have enough spindles of the same weight to just madly keep spinning on subsequent spindles to ply everything once the singles are done. Turkish spindles eliminate this issue by creating you’re very own center pull ball as you spin the singles.

Spinning on a Turkish spindle is a bit like knitting with self-striping sock yarn, or modular projects - I want to keep going to see what color comes next! For the last cop I spun, I took a picture of each layer to keep track of the changes - the cops are endlessly gorgeous!

Layer 1

First layer of brown and teal singles on Turkish spindle

Layer 2

Second layer of green singles on Turkish spindle

Layer 3

Third layer of brown and teal singles on Turkish spindle

Layer 4

Fourth layer of green singles on Turkish spindle

Layer 5

Fifth layer of brown, teal and light blue singles on Turkish spindle

Layer 6

Sixth layer of teal, brown and green singles on Turkish spindle

Layer 7

Seventh layer of green and teal singles on Turkish spindle

Layer 8

Eigth layer of brown, teal and green singles on Turkish spindle

Layer 9

Last layer of brown and teal singles on Turkish spindle

Of course spindling is much easier to fit into short stretches of free time during the day, so in the last busy week I’ve been spindling during the day (hello slow work calls!) and working on the sweater lot of fiber for a design project in the evening. It’s slow going but I hope to get through this braid of SweetGeorgia fiber by the end of the Tour!

Coming back in chaos

Oh my goodness it’s awfully dusty in here…*ducks cobweb, pretends massive spider isn’t glaring at me with murder in her 8 eyes, brushes off the keyboard and prepares to dive in*

It has been quite some time, hasn’t it? A brief rundown of the last 15+ months:

1. Got ourselves settled in Austin (moving to central Texas in mid-August is Not. Recommended)

2. Spent autumn and winter dealing with new jobs/new schools/major family health issues

3. Finally feeling settled in to new city and bam! Pandemic lockdown/cancellation of school/everyone working from home

4. #BlackLivesMatter/national and global confrontations with systemic racism

5. State idiocy resulting in skyrocketing COVID-19 cases in real-life

6. Ravelry redesign and accessibility issues

I’ve spent the last month or so mostly off of or briefly lurking on social media because there just so much and there doesn’t seem to be enough air in any of the online rooms I’ve been a part of. The Tour de Fleece kicking off last Saturday has given me a nudge to dust off Ye Olde Blogge for an outlet, so here I am. And here is my first Tour de Fleece 2020 spin.

Skein 1 for TdF 2020: Porpoise Fur Bluefaced Leicester in “Rita’s Bedroom”

I took this braid and pulled in apart lengthwise into four sections, spun two in the same direction end to end, then flipped the remaining two sections and added those to the bobbin spun the opposite direction. I wound off the singles into a center pull ball after they’d rested for a day or so and plied from both ends of the ball for a 2-ply yarn. Totally mindless comfort spinning.

Final stats:
235 yds/4 oz of fibre
Spun on a Hansen miniSpinner
2-plied, washed and hung to dry without weights
Started: 27 June
Finished: 30 June

Over the course of the spring I’ve been working on a big bag of reddish-purple fiber that was a gift from a London friend, to spin up for a sweater design inspired by Daughter the Eldest. Her version is done, but I’d like to do one in handspun for me (not that I will ever need it here, but I’ll go north eventually!) So that’s likely to be the next project on the wheel, but I’ll see where inspiration takes me.

I have been watching the current situation around Ravelry’s site redesign and the attendant accessibility issues with huge disappointment both in the way it is being handled by the Ravelry team and with my own ignorance and privilege - before 2 weeks ago I’d never thought about how people with different abilities access websites or knitting patterns, or known anything about the historically poor accessibility of Ravelry even before the launch of the new site.

I’m going to do the following moving forwards:

1) Make my patterns available on multiple platforms, including this website
2) Provide future patterns in accessible formats (with feedback from appropriate groups)
3) Update my old patterns and to more accessible formats
4) Review this website and make the changes needed so it is usable for as many people as possible (to start this weekend with the goal of finishing by the end of the summer)

I hope that I’ll be able to work through my old patterns in fairly short order once I’ve sorted out the first few, but I’ll update here and on Instagram as I go. Any questions or comments, please let me know!

Making New

Over the last few weeks (with the sudden surge in my designing mojo created by no day job!), I’ve been working on updating my older patterns and getting them into the current layout. Along the way I’ve realized that this necessitates knitting new samples, as the old ones are gone or stored in the UK somewhere (in other words: totally inaccessible).

First up on the table was my oldest self published pattern, Turkish Walrus.

I designed these in 2008 (!!!), wrote up the pattern, published it as a freebie and didn’t really look at it again. When I went back to update it, I was a bit stunned at how far my pattern writing has come since then (thank you tech editing!) So I ordered some yarn (Cascade 220 Sport) to knit a new sample, worked through the pattern (correcting all the errors), and spent the last week rewriting the pattern and putting it in the proper layout so it looks nice.

New Turkish Walrus samples and handspun for long version hanging to dry

While I was working on this, I got inspired to spin some yarn to knit another version - this one will be two colors only (one variegated handspun yarn, one commercial yarn) and longer with a ribbed cuff. Since these socks are worked toe-up, it’s an easy change to add one some length to the leg, but i’m also going to include spinning details and get the final pattern tech edited by someone other than me. So when that version is added, Turkish Walrus will switch from being a free pattern to a pay-for pattern.

All this will hopefully happen over the next month, so if you like the look of these and want to try them out before it goes behind a paywall, download now!

A Talisman

Waaaaaay back in 2016 I cast on Helen Stewart’s Talisman Shawl in some lovely Jaeggarspun Zephyr Wool-Silk lace weight in a gorgeous periwinkle color. And, as happens so often, life interfered and the project sat neglected in a corner of my studio for quite a long time.

Until last summer that is, when I was packing up projects to take with me on our gap year - I found my Talisman in a project bag and, realizing that I was more than halfway done, I took it back to Maine with me. It was the perfect project for recovering from jet lag, and I finished the knitting in October.

And then it languished for a few more months while Alex and the girls and I went off on our big travel adventure. Yesterday I soaked it in some warm water, rolled it in a towel and pinned it out on the bed to dry. Today it went back to DC with my brother as a very belated Christmas gift for his girlfriend. I hope she loves it!

Pattern: Talisman Shawl by Helen Stewart (part of The Shawl Society)

Yarn: Jaeggarspun Zephyr Wool Silk, in color #47

Needles: US 4/3.5 mm and US 5/3.75 mm

Start/finish: sometime in Summer 2016/23 February 2019 (!)

Gauge: forgot to measure, but I suspect its not the gauge given in the pattern (see below)

Comments: the pattern is originally written for fingering weight yarn, but I’d been dying to use this lace weight that had been in my stash for years. I knit the medium size and didn’t use up all of the yarn (630 yd on a cone). It ended up a good shawlette size, and the larger needles relative to the yarn weight mean it’s a lovely open airy fabric.

I also blocked the shawl I knit in Australia - stay tuned for more details on that project shortly.