Singles!

My post-Winter Holidays spinning frenzy continues, this time with some Parakeet Corriedale.

This 2 oz took me about an hour to spin on the miniSpinner. I've been letting it rest since then so that it's not too energized when I take it off the bobbin and finish it, but I'm not sure how much longer I can wait! I'm hoping to have enough yardage to do a retake on my top-down hat that I made over New Year's, and then I'll be able to get the pattern out to some test knitters and get it released.

Monday random bits

1. I have knitting that I can not share. Knitting in custom-dyed indie yarn even. The trick of alternating between two balls of yarn is working out really well in taking care of dye lot variations (which are quite dramatic). But that's all I can tell you at the moment...

2. I have another secret project, only this one is crochet. And it's a baby present. So no pictures at all, for the time being. Suffice to say that a) I had to buy yarn for this one and b) it's cotton yarn (I may now be convinced that cotton yarn is only good for crochet, by the by...) Both of my daughters have asked for the same item, only in wool. Hmmm...

3. Last week's freezing temperatures and snow may have led me to the "inescapable" conclusion that I needed to make the girls new hats and mittens. With hedgehogs (their request). Which meant I had to get some yarn on Friday when out doing "market research" with Alli. The fact that it is now 7 degrees C out has sapped my will to knit mittens and hats. Ehem. Move along here, nothing to see.

4. My Dirty Porridge yarn is now happily dry and ready to be measured and assessed. However, I have not yet managed to collect it from the towel rack in the downstairs bathroom and make such measurements, nor have I managed to collect the other 8 skeins of yarn that have been hanging over the shower head since early December. Knitter/spinner fail.

5. I am a bit concerned that I'm going to be stuck in the middle of a big thing at work and be extremely late to meet Devil's bus after school. Oy! FWP for the win on a (finally!) sunny Monday.

Get a miniSpinner, if only for the plying

This week I learned the true value of the Hansen miniSpinner: super amazingly fast plying.

Sometime in November I started spinning 24 oz of fiber (first blogged 23 November) - 16 oz of Portuguese Merino in the "Silt" colorway,


and 8 oz of Parritch Targhee.


Last Friday, I finished the third and final bobbin (the Targhee), making it just about 2 months for spinning the whole 24 oz. Yesterday, I finished plying the last of the combo, making it less then a week for plying 24 oz of fiber (!):

Here it is in all its glory:

And in extensive, close up detail...




Clearly the miniSpinner is da bomb (and speedy!) for plying. Truly!

These big squooshy skeins are still a bit damp, and the small final leftovers/swatching skein still needs a bath. I'll update with yardage/wpi/grist statistics when I've figure it all out. Have a good weekend!

The Ubiquity of Jane (i.e. Selfish Knitting, Part 3)

I think I may have talked once or twice before about my enduring love of Heather Ordover's Craftlit podcast  - it's like going back to school with the coolest English teacher ever, and getting all sorts of cool background and context and detail that is so important to really understanding and appreciating some of the greatest works of literature ever. Over the past three years or so that I've been listening, I've "read" a bunch of books I managed to avoid (or never got exposed to) in school. Books like The Scarlet Letter, Gulliver's Travels, Wuthering Heights, Flatland, Woman in White, A Tale of Two Cities, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Turn of the Screw, Little Women...the list goes on and on. And then there are the books that she's covered that I have read: Pride and Prejudice, Tristan and Isolde, A Christmas Carol and the current book-in-progress: Jane Eyre.

Heather is also the creative power behind a series of books with patterns inspired by characters inspired by classic literature, What Would Madame Defarge Knit? And when she started Jane Eyre on the podcast in November, she also started a KAL for Jane's Ubiquitous Shawl by Erica Hernandez. This shawl is amazing, with a specific reference from the book for each of the four sections.

You may have noticed, if you've been reading here for a while, that I tend to make things more complicated then necessary when it comes to these knitting projects. Not content to search through my stash for approximately 1300 yds of DK yarn, I decided to spin my own.

I choose to spin up some Hello Yarn Fiber Club fiber*, Shetland in the "Minerals" colorway. I only had 8 oz, so I traded for three more bags. I ended up with just over 1300 yds for the 20 oz I spun up. I did a 2-ply, and it ended up being somewhere between DK and worsted weight.

The shawl starts from the center out, and I used a little i-cord trick to do the starting cast on. If you're interested in the details, I talked about it in the KAL thread on Ravelry. I made it through the first 2 sections with my first skein of yarn (~560 yds), then through the trinity stitch section and part of the border with the second skein (488 yds), and I've probably got 50-70 yds left from the last skein.

Details ad nauseum:
Pattern: Jane's Ubiquitous Shawl by Erica Hernandez (Ravelry links)
Yarn: ~1300 yds of handspun Shetland, Hello Yarn Fiber Club, colorway "Minerals", DK- to worsted weight. Final "shawl"** was 54 inches square.
Needles: US 7/4.5 mm needles
Start/finish: 8 Nov 2012 - 19 Jan 2013 (actual blocking day)
Comments/mods: only modification was using handspun rather then commercial yarn. The pattern has a couple of errata that have been posted on the KAL thread, but other then those, it was well written and easy to follow. I loved Erica's exploration of the role that shawls play throughout the book, and how she used inspiration from the different stages of Jane's story for the different sections of the shawl. It doesn't hurt that the finished project is gorgeous...***

So, from here on I have some deadline projects: one secret from everyone, one semi-secret wee person present, and one handspun sweater for barter for a sooper seekrit exciting project that Alli and I are working on. So from here on out, things may be a bit sparse on shareable knitting content. But I do have some more handspun yarn coming up, fresh off the miniSpinner!


* You're shocked, I know...
** It's a shawl, but really it's going to be used as a blanket. So. Big.
*** And many thanks to the weather gods on Friday for providing an appropriately seasonal backdrop for the photo shoot!

Selfish knitting, part 2

Because I am insane, I decided that just before Christmas was a good time to start a KAL project for myself. So I joined Ruth's mystery KAL for a pair of gloves. Now I've made several pairs of mittens in my time, and have enjoyed them, so I thought - how bad can a pair of gloves be?

Answer: pretty freakin' bad. Rather, pretty freakin' fiddly. First there was the yarn: Botany Lace (underlined emphasis mine). Then there was the gauge: 9 sts/inch (I don't even knit socks at that gauge). Then there was the pattern: lots and lots (and lots) of twisted stitches.

I managed to get both gloves done to the end of the hand by Christmas time, but my initial plans of having these be a gift was thwarted by lack of fingers. So after New Year's I started in on the fingers.

Holy Fucking Fiddly Batman. To be absolutely fair, my hatred of glove knitting has nothing to do with Ruth or her fabulous pattern. It can be totally blamed on the fact that I am, in the best of times, only slightly more coordinated then an octopus trying to conduct an orchestra. So I sat on my parents' couch, with wooden dpns sticking every which way at dangerous angles, growling at anyone who asked me how it was going. And that was only the first glove!

Thankfully by the time I got to the second glove, I was on my way home (hello airplane knitting!), and it seemed to go a lot smoother. I triumphantly finished the last thumb before touching down at Heathrow. Hooray!

You may be asking why it's taken me two weeks to show them off? Well, it took me a week and a half to weave in the ends one the first glove, another four days to find the project bag with the second glove, and last night to finish weaving in those ends. See? I told you it was fiddly...thankfully the finished project is gorgeous:

I promise - they look much better on, and will look much better once they've been blocked. I admit I couldn't wait to wear them, so they haven't had their spa treatment yet. And given that it was -5C this morning when I left the house, I was glad to have them - they are toasty warm!

Pattern: Butterfingers by Ruth Garcia-Alcantud
Yarn: Araucania Botany Lace, 450 yds/100 grams, about 75% of 1 skein in gorgeous purples
Needles: US 1/2.25 mm dpns/circulars for magic loop
Gauge: 9 sts/12.5 rows per inch
Start/finish: 26 Nov 2012 - 4 Jan 2013
Comments/mods: this is a lovely pattern for a lovely pair of gloves. I just have to be in the right mood to do fingers I guess. That is all.

Now, I'd like to say I'll never knit another pair of gloves again, but I've got another skein of this yarn lying around (in greens and greys - swoon!), and I am finding myself in need of a pair of gloves for running. Maybe a pair with some conductive thread in them...