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!

Back to the spindle

The last few months have been (as you might imagine) a bit of a whirlwind. My stash and I are currently on opposite sides of the world (both the small stash in Maine and the larger stash in the UK), and it’s currently 35 degrees C where I am, so there is a conspicuous lack of holiday crafting going on.

What I have had with me in the last couple of months is my lovely 3D printed Turtlemade spindle (a gift from Alli via Cat & Sparrow) and a bit of Porpoise Fur fibre that had been languishing in the unsold stock pile for quite a while.

The fibre is 70% Bluefaced Leicester/30% trilobial nylon. It spins like straight BFL, but the nylon adds some sparkle in interesting ways - it isn’t a fully mixed blend, so there are streaks of nylon in the top that shine, a bit like a silk blend.

So over the past two months I’ve slowly worked away at this 100 g, and this week I finished the singles and the plying! I managed to fit all the singles onto my not-very-large spindle in a monster cop,

wound off on an improvised niddy noddy,

and ended up with 164 yd/150 m of lovely, perfectly balanced (!), DK to sport weight yarn.

It is very well timed that I’ve finished this yarn now, as I’m about to head off to Cairns which has a dearth of yarn shops. Now I have something to knit with, the question becomes what to make with it? Suggestions welcome!

Edinburgh Yarn Festival, Skyesong and Fibre Club updates

Quantum Dots, which will be available at EYF on some super soft Falkland merino

Well. It seems like the last almost four weeks since Unravel have flown by in a blur of wool and dye and chaos. It seems that way because they have! I've been full on prepping for Edinburgh Yarn Festival, which opens for classes today and for vast and fantastic stash enhancement on Friday. I've sent off five (!) boxes of fluff, have crammed a pile more into my luggage, and will be on a train northward in just a few hours, just in time to set up.

However, a few other things have happened in the last few weeks that I'd like to highlight. First off, slots are now open for Q2 of the 2016 Lab Goddess Fibre Club. The club runs £45 plus actual shipping cost (depending on location), and will include three monthly shipments of an exclusive colourway inspired by a woman scientist, either past or current. Check out the Fibre Club page to see past colourways and to book your space now.

Current fibre club members: parcels will ship out next week, and I hope you like this month's instalment!

Skyesong in Broadbean merino/flax

Secondly - I have a new pattern out! Skyesong is a lace shawl designed for handspun, and I'm super thrilled that it's been published in the new issue of Knitty. The body of the shawl is worked in a garter lace pattern (knit on every row - woot!) until it is the desired size, and then the edge is finished with a border worked sideways and attached to the live stitches.

One important thing to mention: this is proper lace knitting, with things happening on both the right and wrong side rows. However, the body repeat is only four rows long, so it's not too difficult to get into a rhythm. The edging is more complicated and longer (20 rows), but the stitch count changes on every row, so it's pretty straightforward to figure out where you are in the repeat as you go on.

The pattern includes two sizes - the small version was knit up in fingering-weight yarn spun from some gorgeous wool/flax sliver that I got at Spunky Eclectic a couple of summers ago, in the Lobster colourway. The larger version was worked in my own 60% merino/40% flax top, dyed in the Broadbean colourway.

I'll have plenty of the merino/flax top at EYF this weekend, in both semisolid and variegated colourways, so if you're inspired for a little lacey shawl project, please stop by!

Spinworthy

"Knitworthy" is a term that gets discussed a fair bit in the knitting world, particularly in the run up to the winter holiday season. What makes someone knitworthy is an ongoing, and sometimes contentious debate - the recipient's appreciation of and understanding of the value of handknits is dissected within an inch of its life, their ability to care appropriately for said handknitted gift is considered, and the giver's ability to "let it go" (it being the knit item in question) is discussed and pondered. It's a tough thing, putting all the time and energy and work into a handknit present when you're not sure what will happen to it in its new home.

What you don't hear discussed very often is if someone is "spinworthy".  For me, spinning a gift for someone is a different undertaking then knitting something. When I spin, part of the enjoyment is in being early in the creative chain that begins with the sheep growing the wool and ends with the finished object. I take a raw-ish material (the "ish" being reflective of the fact that I'm usually working with already processed but not always dyed fiber) and create something that, while beautiful in and of itself, isn't actually the finished product. There is still potential in that skein of handspun - it might grow up to be a hat, or a cowl, or some warm cozy mittens. It might end up as a square or two in a big blanket, or an edging on a sweater, or just about anything at all. The final fate of that wool is still up in the air.

All of this is a rather long and indirect way of saying I've finished a big spinning project. For Christmas in 2013, I gave Alli a sweater lot of handspun, fiber and colors TBD. After much back and forth and a bit of sample dyeing/spinning, she decided that she wanted yarn to knit the Gradient Pullover by Amy Miller. We went back and forth on colors, but she finally decided to go with the same pale to deep orange as shown on the pattern page. After some disagreement about fiber (I was pulling for BFL, she was enamored of merino-silk), we finally found a solution (that is, she got her way), and the project was underway.

Sadly, this was sometime in late May or early June that all this got settled, and the rest of the summer was pretty much a wash (what with the moving and all). I finally got the fiber out to dye and realised that I was short by about 10 ounces. Thankfully, my parents came to visit in October, and brought some more fiber with them (thanks Mom!). Much singles spinning and plying later, I present this:

Fiber: 80% merino/20% tussah silk, dyed in three different shades of orange

Spun/plied: singles spun at 12:1 on a ST folding Lendrum, plied on a Hansen miniSpinner (hence the ginormous skeins!)

Yardage: 455 yds/6.8 oz of light orange, 645 yds/7.9 oz medium orange, and 660 yds/9.4 oz dark orange. Plus a couple of mini skeins of medium and dark so she can swatch. Total yardage 1760 yds/24.1 oz, approximately 1170 ypp. The medium orange is a bit lighter in grist then the other two (sport vs. DK) but I think they'll be ok all together.

One last beauty shot:

There's a bit of odd plying going on in some places, but that can be fixed if needed down the line. I'm hoping it will be a non-issue when knit up.

So - Happy Late Christmas A! You are definitely spinworthy, but no, I will not knit the sweater for you.