Happy Porpoise Spin-Along

This is an example of how Twitter is either the greatest community builder of all time or a path to a lovely tropical hot spot paved with good intentions...spinner be warned!

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Jacqui Tweeted about her new book, and about how excited she was to spin in all sorts of new and exciting ways. Her Tweet reminded me about my excitement when I got the same book, and how I'd meant to spin my way through the entire thing. One Tweet led to another, which led to emails back and forth, which has now led to:

Button courtesy of J's brilliant children

The Happy Porpoise SAL, in which we work our way through the brilliant Sarah Anderson's "The Spinner's Book of Yarn Design", thereby expanding our spinning skills, and broadening our handspun horizons.

Everyone is welcome to join us in this quest: we're running it out of my Ravelry group, the Porpoise Pod for ease of having everyone in one place, so grab whatever is in your stash and come play with us! 

We'll be going chapter by chapter, and starting the frenzy tomorrow (April Fool's Day seems like a reasonable beginning date, no?) with Chapter 2: Singles for plying. One of us will start a thread tomorrow morning in the group, and we'll be off and running! I, for one, will be running to catch up, because I'm pretty sure Jacqui hasn't been able to restrain herself...

Hope to have you all join us in our spinning adventure!

Looking forward

It's always a bit of a struggle getting back to blogging when I've been away for a while. I don't know where to start, or what to focus on, or what direction to take. But what with the beginning of 2014, I've been thinking about what I want to accomplish over the course of the next 12 months, in my own knitting and with designing.

I listen to the Knitmore Girls podcast fairly regularly (if not always in a truly timely fashion), and one thing I like a lot is that they choose themes for the year instead of doing specific resolutions. It allows for focusing on one thing, but with the opportunity to find different ways to fulfill that goal. I like that a theme allows me to find new ways to address an issue, and perhaps will lead to new approaches or strategies that reach beyond the knitting and spinning world in to the rest of my life.

I have a large number of designs that I've been thinking about or working on in one fashion or another for quite a while now. But I've been frustrated with my inability to bring any of those ideas to fruition, whether in a print magazine format or as self-published designs. It always takes so much longer to get things ready then I think it will, and I find it very easy to get distracted along the way. So things flounder, unfinished. So my theme for the year is going to be Consistency.

Initially, that is going to mean a more consistent design output - I've drawn up a schedule with at least one design coming out every month this year. Most are accessories, but there are a couple of bigger projects in there too. The first up will be this set, which I wanted to get out before Christmas - sadly, as it does, life (and technology screw ups) got in the way.

The last sticking point is getting the blankity-blank charts to show up correctly in the final pattern pdf. It will be available by Friday at the latest.

So that's my very vague and general plan for 2014 - consistency. Consistent design work, consistent forward progress, consistency. We'll see how it goes.

So what are your plans for the upcoming year?

Planning

Because it's always a good plan to start your holiday crafting plans on 18th November, right? Here we go:

We'll start with the fastest first - weaving
one table runner
three wash clothes
set of dish towels
four scarves

Next fastest - crochet
2 scarves
1 cowl

Slowest - knitting
one pair of adult socks
one adult hat
four child hats
one child mittens
one child fingerless mitts
two baby sweaters -- already DONE

Oh dear...

Action plan

This blog is about to become an all-spinning, all-the-time zone, and for those of you with absolutely no interest in yarn making, I apologize! But Saturday is the first stage of the this year's edition of the Tour de France. Which also means that Saturday is the start of my favoritist -along of all time: the Tour de Fleece.

I've been participating in the Tour de Fleece since 2010, and each year I try to set some goals. In 2010, I had a list of fibers I wanted to spin. In 2011, my goal was to spin more fiber (measured by weight) then in 2010. Last year my output was somewhat hampered by the fact that I spent a week actually in the Pyrenees doing spinning of a different sort, so my trend of increasing weight of fiber spun came to a crashing halt.

This year I have again come up with some goals for the Tour de Fleece, and in the interests of accountability, here they are:

1) For Team Hello Yarn/Southern Cross Fibre/Spunky Eclectic, my plan is to spin up my Winter Storage Finn (of which I have 1.25 lbs...)

into 6x100 yd skeins of single colored yarns for Brenda's Now in a Minute shawl.

I will also (for variation and instant gratification amongst the other goals) spin up some more of my Amy stash. Maybe some Shetland in Tundra?

Or this BFL? (The name of the colorway escapes me at the moment...)


2) For my other team, Team Craftlit: spin up my "black"* Shetland fleece into a 3-ply sweater yarn.

All of the fleece is washed, and last night I drove two hours round trip (and a grand total of 40 miles - thanks London!) to borrow a drum carder. And then I stayed up until midnight playing around with said carder, giving me a lovely sleep-deprived day, but that's a different problem**.

I split the fleece into two main colors before washing - black and grey/brown. Probably a third of the fleece was black, and I'm about one third of the way through the first pass on the grey/brown, so this isn't going to be an early player in the Tour for me this year. I still need to decide whether I'm going to keep the colors separate or blend them together. Initially I wanted to keep them separate, but now I'm thinking that I'll need the yardage I'll get from combining them. Hmmm...

3) also for Team Craftlit: some silk top on my new spindle, as a running around, mobile project.



So that's it. Hah. Clearly last year's raw fleece failure experiment wasn't enough to deter me from doing it again this year. Or maybe I've just blocked it out...the drum carder should make things move quite a bit faster then the hand cards.

I hope.

Anyone else have truly ludicrous goals for the Tour de Fleece this year? Or am I the only insane one out here?

* I say "black" because after carding a bunch of it, it's really more of a dark, dark brown/grey mix.
** My other problem is that now I want to get the white fleece washed up so I can get it carded as well before I have to give the carder back - aargh!

Goals for 2013

Happy New Year everyone! We have finally made it back from our whirlwind tour of the Eastern Seaboard in winter, and I can attest to the fact that the Gulf Stream is alive and well and keeping the UK balmy (as evidenced by the fact that we woke up in Maine yesterday it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and when we landed in London this morning it was 10 degrees Celsius...). I had a lovely holiday, full of family and friends and food and lots and lots of sitting around knitting, reading books and drinking coffee. Now, I'm in the throes of jetlag and while it's getting on towards 10 pm here in London, my body thinks it's just about cocktail time and maybe I should grab a glass of wine or something. Bah!

So I have an ongoing list of knitting goals that are slowly taking shape in my mind, and now seems as good a time as any to start getting them down on (virtual) paper.

1. I have a group of four sweater designs floating around in my head, loosely grouped around the points of the compass, and inspired by four places in Great Britain. Three of these are cabled (dear God!) and one is inspired by a Penny Straker gansey I knit when I was in college. I have the yarn for all four, and I just need to sit down and get going on them. I'm leaning towards self-publishing these as a collection in the fall, which is going to mean cracking down and getting my butt in gear on the knitting. Because, as we all know, cables are so fast to work...
2. I have a shawl design to submit to Knitty for their fall issue - if it isn't accepted, it will become one of four shawl designs also inspired by the UK. I've got one of the others nailed down, and will need to dream up a couple more. These babies won't be finished until next year I'm thinking...
3. Stripey sportweight sweater, probably also for Knitty First Fall.
4. Spin and knit a couple of sweaters from the sweater lots of Hello Yarn fiber taking up valuable stash space. I've started on one of the sweater lots, and I know the sweater I'm going to knit with one of the others, but haven't started the spinning on that one yet.
5. More weaving.

Hmmm...seems like a lot of designing, doesn't it? If I'm being completely honest, there's two more shawl designs and a couple of other accessory type ideas floating around my head, so that would extend the list. I'm feeling like I need to get a massive whiteboard to hang in my office, just to keep all these things straight. It would probably also be a grand help if I managed to get my ideas a bit more in tune with the submission schedules of various magazines, but that remains a long-term goal.

What about you? Do you make resolutions or goals for the new year for your knitting? Or your spinning? Or just life in general? I find I'm really good at making lists and putting things down on paper with the best of intentions. But then the paper gets buried under something else, and I forget about the general plan, or I loose focus and get distracted by something else. So this year, I think that my goals can be narrowed down to "Follow Through". I'm looking forward to seeing how that goes.