Next verse, same as the first

I realized that for those of you not caught up in the ridiculous spinning/fiber-photo frenzy that is the Tour de Fleece, the next few weeks may be really, really, boring. I will try to do my bit to blog about something other then spinning - day after day of pictures showing miniscule incremental progress on natural colored fleece is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Here, have some knitting instead!

It is still knitting with handspun, but I'm 12 rows from the end of the body of my Garter Yoke Cardi, knit out of the Timber Romney I spun up last year during TdF.

Every time I knit with handspun, I am swept away by watching the color changes, and the way the different plies play off of each other and transition from one color to the next. These pictures are not quite right colorwise, but it's late and I can't be bothered to go back and redo the pictures tonight. I'll get a better color balance next time...

PS - here's today's spinning tally:

Between extremes

My "relaxation knitting"* these days is vacillating between opposite ends of the spectrum. First up is the fiddley-beyond-belief category:

A pair of socks I actually started almost a year ago. I pulled them out of the Works in Progress Bin at the beginning of this month, thought "hunh...", ripped them out completely (I had a toe and about 2 inches of instep done) and started over again. The worst part was trying to start entrelac on US 0/2.0 mm needles with a provisional cast on and splitty yarn. Fun!

Then there's the mindless end of things...


That is the Garter Yoke Cardi by Melissa LeBarre, which I have wanted to do every since I saw Caro's version (Rav link). The yarn is the whack-load of Hello Yarn Romney in Timber that I spun up during the TdF last (hooray for casting on one of my handspun sweater lots!!!), and I am operating under the deluded hope that I can finish it before the Tour de Fleece starts. On Saturday.

Oh well. At least there's always (always!) coffee.


* The "work knitting" being my hat project: 2 of 7 prototypes done, one almost totally tested and one about to go to testers. I am on track**. Woot!


** So far. Famous last words and all that...

Quelle disaster!

Over the Easter holidays, we took a lovely long weekend trip over to Paris, via the ever-fabulous Eurostar. On our previous trip to Gay Paree, the girls were three years younger, and it was the end of July (which means the end of Le Tour!), so the city was hot and mobbed. It's a much nicer and calmer place to visit in late April (with a 5 and 7 year old vs. a 2 and 4 year old), and spring was everywhere.

Devil had so much energy that she managed to get caught on some ironwork outside of Notre Dame, and tore a hole in her Sprout Tappan Zee that her Mummy so lovingly knit for her last summer. Argh!


She managed to not only put a hole in it, but also to snag and snap the bind off in several different places...


We came home and the sweater sat on the shelf in my wardrobe for about five weeks - I just couldn't face it. Then, last week, on the eve of a trip to chilly, rainy Somerset for part of the half-term holiday, I decided to get on with it already and fix the damn thing.

First step: remove wee hedgehog button and insert a circular needle through a row of stitches above the hole (note appropriate beverage companion).

Second step: unravel the bottom edge, picking out the little scraps of unusable yarn, and spit-splicing (with appropriate beverage) the rest.


Third step: pause and admire your handiwork (conveniently not documenting how off you were in the row of stitches you picked up).

Fourth step: reknit the bottom two inches of cardigan. Don't forget button hole. Reblock, and then pack still damp sweater in the back of the car to finish drying on the way southwest.

Wiktory! I had a big ball of yarn left over that I had ready to draft into the bind off if needed, but I think I ended up knitting a couple of rows less this time around, so I had plenty for the bind off.

Dev still seems enamored of the sweater, and Boo is looking longingly for another cardigan, made of softer yarn. Must sort through handspun stash and see what would work for her.

Question: does this count as an FO post? Methinks so...

Here comes the sun

It has been an absolutely spectacular week here in southeast England, which has lifted the spirits of all concerned. Except for on the way home from school, when the girls moan about it being "Toooooo hoooooot Mummy!" The poor things, you'd think they'd never lived in Hell Houston.

Anyway, the improved weather has inspired me to do two things. One: to finish the knitting part of my Gemini tee...

Still needed: weaving in of many ends (damn stinkin' hemp yarn with lots of knots!) and a good wet blocking. Maybe tonight.

I've also gone on a total run and done a bunch of dyeing.

That's four out of six colorways drying in the glorious sunshine. The other two will be joining them in the next few hours, and I'm hoping to get an update posted on Sunday afternoon. As long as the weather and the photography gods smile on me!

I hope everyone has a glorious, sunshine filled weekend!

New tools, new projects, new stash

Sometime in February, in a fit of online shopping enthusiasm, I found myself at Hulu purchasing some Knit Pro (aka Knitpicks) interchangeable needles. Now, to be fair, I have quite the supply of needles already, and I'm not at all sure why I thought I needed some interchangeables, but there I was. I was in enough control of myself not to blow a ludicrous amount of poundage on the full set - I tend to use the smaller needle sizes (less then a US6 for the most part), so the full set would have included a bunch of needles I wouldn't have used very often. So I got the starter pack. And some smaller tips (US 3, 4 and 5s). And three extra cables. Etc, etc, etc.

I've now used them in 1.25 projects, and I really like them. The wood feels nice, they stay screwed in as long as I make sure to tighten them with the provided cute little wire thingy, and the tips are nice and pointy.

So pointy in fact that I now have a small hole in my left index finger that makes knitting a bit/a lot (!) painful, depending on how much attention I'm paying to my finger/needle tip contact point. I'm pleased with them.

And the 0.25 of a project that I've done on them that you can see there is the first 20-something rows of the Gemini pullover from the Spring/Summer 2012 Knitty. The yarn is some Hemp for Knitting Hempwol in "Ruby". It's mostly red, but in some lights it looks pretty orange. A bit stiff to work with, but I think it will be a good fiber for my current climate.

Now for the stash enhancement: last Friday I had a real treat - I got to go yarn shopping with a good knitting friend formerly from Houston, who now resides in the Land of good chocolate Switzerland. We went to Loop, which continues to be a trial to my bank account. But I was really good - I came away with only two skeins, neither of which was the £40 lump of Wollmeise lace (orange, of course) that was serenading me. She was equally restrained, and we retired to the local pub to drown our regrets in beer.

These are the babies that came home with me: two skeins of purpley DK/sport weight for mitts. I think the Madtosh will become some Fallberry Mitts, but the Canopy is for another (yet another!) design project, also mitts.

In any event, the day and the company inspired me to another new project: last weekend I spun up this,

and yesterday it got thrown on the loom as warp - C, I'm going to need your snail mail address in Switaly, OK?