Bollocks, I did it again

The Pros: I only have to make one costume (Snow White), because Boo is vacillating back and forth between going as Ariel or Cinderella, both of which we already have.

The Cons: it's Friday, costume needs to be done by teatime tomorrow when we go to M and T's house to carve pumpkins, eat sugar, and imbibe copious amounts of adult beverages (with their parents that is, not the girls), and I am absolutely shattered by several days of ~6 hrs sleep, getting up before dawn* and getting everyone back on to the whole school/work continuum. This ought to be an interesting evening night.

I have been doing a wee bit of spinning as well - onto the second bobbin of merino/silk for a Christmas present, but my stellar walking skills*** have made the wheel a less appealing tool. However, I need to get this yarn done ASAP (like, by the end of next week), so I may have to SIUC**** and treadle through the pain. Ahhhh...the sacrifices I make for my family and my wool!

* which, to be fair, is pretty late** these days. But it still sucks to have to get out of bed when it's dark.
** 7:48 am this morning. Crap. We're practically leaving the house before dawn! WTF is up with that?
*** I turned my ankle walking down a perfectly reasonable sidewalk two weeks ago today, and it's still swollen and bugging me*****. Ehem.
**** Suck it up, cupcake. Or buttercup, if you prefer.
***** Speaking of which, anyone irritated by excessive footnoting yet?

Spinning Experiments

For my birthday, I signed up for a new Fiber Club. Or should I say, Fibre Club, given that the packages are posted from my current fair city. In contrast to the Hello Yarn fiber club, which feeds my ever growing need for a fix of gorgeous handdyed wooliness, this one comes with assignments. And directions. And gorgeous handdyed wooliness. Win-win-win. It's a bit like online spinning school, I guess, but without any deadlines.

In any event, the first installment of Spintelligence was a pile of the softest BFL I've ever felt, and the instructions to spin a bunch of small samples of singles yarn, varying the ratios. The idea was to demonstrate how just changing the ratio on the wheel can affect your singles/yarn.

Let me back up, just in case anyone reading isn't familiar with the mechanics of spinning wheels. There are a number of different types of "drives" for spinning wheels - aka, different mechanisms to introduce twist into the fiber and then wind the resulting yarn on to the bobbin. But, no matter what sort of drive system you have, there are different ratios for adding twist, which alter how much twist enters the fiber per treadle stroke. The "ratio" refers to the number of times the flyer or bobbin moves (introducing twist) per single rotation of the drive wheel. On my wheel (which is a single-drive, Scotch tension system), the ratios are changed by shifting the drive band from one sized whorl to another.

You can see in the above picture that the drive band is going around the smallest whorl on this particular flyer assembly - that gives a higher ratio then the larger whorls.

So, armed with the BFL and two flyers with six ratios between them, I set off to do my Spinning Homework.

I set the brake tension and spun all the samples at that tension, with a short forward draw without smoothing, and just changed the ratio, going from 6:1 at the top of the picture to 17:1 at the bottom. The obvoius result of this was as follows: higher ratios mean thinner singles with the same drafting and tension. Eureka!

Ok, maybe not Eureka!, since this is what was supposed to happen. The only misstep was that the 9.25:1 single had a wpi of 32, while the 12:1 single had a wpi of 28. However, that could easily be due to operated error in measuring wpi. It could also be due to the fact that the 9.25:1 ratio is the smallest on my regular flyer, while the 12:1 is the largest on my high speed flyer, so changing the flyers may have altered the tension a bit.

As the ratios went up (and more twist was added per treadle), it became really hard to draft quickly enough to keep the single from getting overtwisted. The sample on the left is 7.5:1, middle is 12:1 and right is 17:1. You can see that, particularly in the 17:1 sample, there's a bit of overtwist that wasn't taken care of in the finishing process.

The second part of the assignment was to pick one of the yarns and spin up a bunch of it to knit a swatch. I picked the 7.5:1 sample as my favorite, and spun up about 8 grams of fiber into an unknown number of yards. I picked a US 3/3.25 mm needle for my swatch, by virtue of doubling over my spun yarn and seeing which hole it went through on my needle gauge.

I knit a bit in stockinette, with a garter border, then did a couple of cables, and then a bit of lace. I was pleasantly surprised at how little bias there was in the stockinette section - singles yarn is inherently unbalanced, since it's not plied, and you can end up with biased fabric in stockinette. For that reason, singles are usually best knit up in stitch patterns that combine knit and purl, or in lace.

The cables were, unsurprisingly, pretty flat and mushy, and the garter stitch wasn't too good. The lace looked pretty good, although I think I would go up a needle size to make it a bit more fluid - this needle size made for a slightly too stiff lace fabric.

The second installment of the club arrived Saturday morning, and I'm itching to get the currently-being-spun bobbin off the wheel so I can get to work on it. The assignment this time is another singles yarn, but this time in some gorgeous handdyed alpaca/merino from The Thylacine.

FF: One week, two sweaters

Sweater #1:

Sweater #2:

Not surprisingly, Devil was uninterested in modeling her sweater, although I have managed to get her into it voluntarily. But Boo was happy to put her's on for our grey and drizzly Sunday visit to HMS Belfast.

Both sweaters: top down raglans a la Barbara Walker.
Needles: US 10/6.0 mm for bodies, US 8/5.0 mm for ribbing on the Technicolor Dreamsweater
Yarn: handspun from girl-dyed top (colorways Mermaid and Clown Barf). I used all of the Mermaid yarn and 95% of the Clown Barf.

These were great fun to knit, and have only increased my conviction that I will be much happier when I do most of my knitting from handspun rather then commercial yarn. It's so satisfying. I am also pleased that Boo's dye job ended up as a very bright, but perfectly 3-year-old-appropriate sweater. She loves it, and it makes it really easy to keep track of her in a crowd!

I've got to go back and fix the collar I think - add ribbing all the way around instead of doing a little Peter Pan deal - but then it will be time to move on to the next project. Spinning seems to be falling by the wayside these days, in favor of actually using up some of the stash. I think the next sweater should be the IM Aran, but a new Knitty (and a new Norah Gaughan pattern) is very tempting!

Handspun patterns

The 4! Oz! Challenge! ends tomorrow, and I'm happy to say that I finished my patterns and got them submitted before the last day (a miracle in and of itself, seeing as how I am the Queen Procrastination). Here they are*:

Lisbon Cloche**, superwash merino in "Thunderstorm" from Spunky Eclectic

download now

Shelburne Falls Beret, Targhee in "Garland" from Hello Yarn

download now

This was a really interesting process for me. Usually I spin without much of an end product in mind (although the TdF did change that a bit). For these, I had four days in between trips in August to spin up the yarn, and I knew two things: 1) I was going to chain ply both colorways to keep the colors intact, and 2) I was going to knit hats, but I didn't want them to be really obviously stripey.

For the SE merino, I ended up spinning a really fast, thick single. When it was plied up, the yarn ranged from 6-10 wpi and was super squooshy. I used a slipped stitch pattern (same as in an eye of partridge heel flap) to break up the striping, but since the colors didn't contrast very much, that was sufficient.

For the Targhee, which I spun second, I was a bit rushed - the final yarn was a wee bit overplied. But...there wasn't a lot I could do about that while on vacation, so I soldiered on. Since the colors in that skein were much more contrasting, I needed to take "extreme" measures to try and break up the striping. The stitch pattern I chose has two rounds of slipping the same stitch, which is then crossed over two stitches on the third round. I'm really pleased with how it came out.

The patterns include details about spinning the yarn and a whackload of specs (i.e. singles wpi/tpi, plied wpi/tpi, twist angle, etc). Both hats are knit from the top down, starting with i-cord in waste yarn, and can easily be adjusted in size as you go (patterns are written for only one size). Enjoy***!

* Please excuse the goofy pictures, but it's really hard to take pictures of your own head without looking like an idiot.
** Named for the towns in which the respective dyers (Amy of Spunky Eclectic and Adrian of Hello Yarn) are located.
*** If you knit up one of these in a commercial yarn, please let me know how it works out and I'll add that to the Ravelry pattern pages. Thanks!

FF: Speedy, speedy spinning

I have discovered instant gratification in spinning form: this,

to this.

Artisan Threads pencil roving, purchased 10-11th September, spun 10-14th September, on Golding Spindle (green) and Lendrum (white).

Finished yarn: 110 yds/2.3 oz green, 152 yds/2.4 oz white, both about 14 wpi.

It is amazing how much faster spinning goes when you don't have to draft. I started the green roving last Friday night, and liked it so much that I went back to the booth the next day and got some of the undyed. I spun the green stuff on my Golding spindle, and it was so easy! Start spindle, let twist into roving, wind on, repeat. The green roving had a bit of lanolin left, so it was a bit greasy on the hands. Some of that came out when I washed it, but there's still a bit left.

The white I decided to try on the wheel, and it was even faster then on the spindle (not surprisingly!). I "spun" the whole 2.4 oz of singles and plied the big skein in one evening. So much fun! Of course, as I was spinning I was desperately trying to come up with a project for these little bits and bobs. I think maybe the Northman Mittens, with a bit of the cashmere "waste" spun up for the lining yarn. A good chance to practice my new Fair Isle technique and get a christmas present out of the way.