Weekender scores

I managed to make it out of the weekend with only one skein of yarn:

Artist's Palette Smoothie Sock, to make some socks for Himself in gratitude for taking over when I abandoned the family for two weekends in a row. Not bad, right? Only one skein. Well, only one skein of yarn. There was a bit more rampant consumerism on the fiber side of the equation:

Superfine alpaca/BFL top from Fluff-n-stuff

Natural dyed pencil roving from Artisan Threads

Cashmere waste (!)(Like anything cashmere could be waste!!!) for £5/bag, also from Artisan Threads

1 kilo of raw Gotland Fleece from Well Manor Farm

I managed to resist buying "The Haapsulu Shawl" after my Estonian Lace knitting class, but only because I couldn't find any yarn in the entire marketplace that was fine enough. However, I now think that I have enough wool-based items to play with for a long, long time. Thank goodness I'm not going to any more knitting events until (maybe) April!

Information overload

I've spent the last 36 hours comfortably ensconced in the joy of my first big knitting event - the iKnit Weekender. I've taken my first knitting classes (!), and learned a number of new things. For example, I can now knit Fair Isle with two colors held in one hand. I've learned that all the math I ever needed for knitting I learned in grade school (yeah geometry!). And I've learned that Estonian lace knitters are supremely talented, supremely tenacious, or supremely nutty (or maybe all of the above). And that nupp rhymes with soup. It's been great fun, but I'm going to need a bit of time to process it before I can be coherent about it.

So instead, I'll leave you with some of the fiber I've been playing with of late - I went to Spunky Eclectic while I was in Maine for a dyeing class, and I came away with a new spindle and some Corriepaca fiber to play with. I don't do a lot of spindling, but I've been thinking about doing a bit more of it, just to fill in the spare seconds in my day. I finished up the first half of the top last night:

New spindle!

It's an interesting spin - the staple seems to be quite long, but I'm having a bit of trouble getting the single to stay together. Not enough twist seems the obvious answer, but I can't quite figure it out. Time to sit down with Abby Franquemont's DVD I think. I'm going to spin the other half on the spindle and ply them together in the same direction, so hopefully the colors will line up well. Then I'll have to go trawling the 4 Oz Challenge patterns to find something to make with it!

Fiber Friday: A pile of Clown Barf

Before we went off to the States, I managed to finish up most of the singles from Boo's dyed top.

A few days and some chain plying later, and I have three skeins of lovely squooshy yarn in the "Clown Barf" colorway.

Spun at 9:1, short forward (worsted) draw, plied at 7.5:1.
Total yardage: 381 yds/8.2 oz, 8-13 wpi, ranging from 700-800 ypp. Hopefully enough for a wee Boo sweater sometime this fall (as per the list). After ending up with some 4 Ounce Challenge yarn that was a bit too overplied, I made a conscious effort to chain ply this only more loosely. Going down to the biggest whorl on the flyer helped a lot too.

I have a new toy to play with in spinning. I discovered (probably through a post on Ravelry, but I honestly don't remember), plans for a PVC skeiner/swift. I was all fired up to build it, but realized that, instead of the $10 quoted in the plans it was probably going to cost me £50 to build. Umm, no. So I tabled the idea until our trip back to the States. A $20 trip to Lowes and some fun with a pipe cutter later, I had a lovely skeiner that wound off the clown barf in expert fashion. A far cry from my cobbled together 2x4 and CD swift that I never, ever use. It's all I can do to keep from winding all my yarn into cakes and then back into skeins.

So the girls' sweater yarn is done, just in time for school to start next Tuesday. It's pretty exciting. The girls even think so too!

My Challenge challenge

I'm participating in the 4! Ounce! Challenge! on Ravelry. This is a spin/design/create-along, in which spinners make a yarn, design a project, and then release the pattern on Ravelry. The motivation behind this event was every spinner's common problem: I saw some really pretty handdyed top, and bought 4 ounces, and spun this yarn - now what do I do with it? The idea is to end up with a bunch of patterns that are suitable for four ounces of handspun.

The Challenge occurs over the months of August and September, and prizes will be awarded to a few of the lucky folks who design and release patterns. My personal Challenge within the Challenge is this: spinning up 8 ounces in August while being on vacation away from my wheel for three out of four weeks. This translate to: spin, ply and finish 8 ounces of fiber in five days. Packing wet yarn at the final moment on Friday is not allowed.

I've started with some superwash merino top from Spunky Eclectic, colorway "Thunderstorm". This one is getting spun long draw from the top, slightly thicker singles then my usual, and will be chain plied.

So far (one viewing of Aladdin) I've gotten through a bit more then half of the braid. I'm hoping to finish up the singles tonight, and then I'll let them rest for a day while I spin the other bump. If nothing else, I think the Tour de Fleece made me a faster spinner. Thankfully!

23 Days in July (aka Tour de Fleece yarns 4-6 and a wrap up)

So, the last week or so of the Tour de Fleece I spent with a pound of Falklands top, half dyed in the colorway Five Plum Pie, and half in Grouch.

Grouch was the June 2010 Fiber Club offering, while Five Plum Pie came from May 2009. I decided to spin these two together when I browsed through my Hello Yarn stash and discovered that not only were they the same fiber, but they were very similar colorways. Five Plum Pie was mostly purples, with some greeny-yellow and brown accents, while Grouch was mostly greens and yellows, with a bit of purple.

I've been thinking of spinning up some yarn to knit a striped vest for a while now, using some lovely dark brown alpaca I've had sitting around for a long while. So I decided to do three different yarns: each colorway plied on itself, and one yarn that was one ply of each.

I prepped the fiber by splitting each 4 oz bump into five or six long strips and then mixing them together so they got spun in a random order.

Grouch got spun up first. I wasn't all that excited by the colors in the top, but as I spun up the singles, I got more excited about it. Yellow and greeny browns aren't really my thing, but these colors were amazing - mustard, bark brown, pea soup green, and dark plum.

I was aiming for a DK weight 2-ply, so I spun the singles a bit thicker then my default. Next up was Five Plum Pie.

This really could have been called Iris instead - beautiful blues and purples, with some bright green and beautiful dusty brown...gorgeous!

Then it was time to ply - first up was the mixture, Grouchy Pie.

After a warm soak, I ended up with 160 yds/3.4 oz of ~12 wpi yarn - right in the DK range. Then I did a bobbin of Grouch plied to itself:

Swoon...I ended up with 344 yds/6.6 oz of Grouch, and then did the rest of the Five Plum Pie plied together.

292 yds/6.3 oz. I was planning on alternating stripes of plain alpaca with each of the three colorways, but I'm not sure there will be enough variation between the Grouchy Pie and the other two to show up. So I may just use the 5PP/Grouch skeins for the vest, and save the combo for something else. But this is just another reason why this club is so good for me - I would never have picked out the Grouch on my own, and I think it's my favorite of the three yarns.

My 23 Days in July* ended up being pretty darned productive on the spinning front. Three different fibers, one of which (Wensleydale) I'd never spun before. Laceweight singles, matching skeins of 3-ply, color progression 2-ply and a colorway mixing experiment.

I ended up with 2420 yds of new yarn, 39.4 ounces spun, and a whole new level of inspiration for my spinning. This challenge was just what I needed to get my mojo back after the endless purple cabled yarn, and I had an absolute blast seeing what everyone else came up with. I even won a prize! I can see getting a bunch more yarn done before it gets cold, and then I'll have a wonderful fall and winter knitting with handspun!

*with apologies to John Wilcoxson