robknits

Not quite spring

    Central PA is resisting spring, though at least it hasn't snowed in a few days.  It is a crisp autumn day out there at the moment, on April 15 13.  Some of the daffodils are showing, and I have seen one -- exactly one -- forsythia in bloom.  In Pittsburgh last weekend I saw they are as usual about 3 weeks ahead of us here in the central mountains, with all the daffs up (and a bit frozen from the Easter snow) and some trees in bloom.  The trees here are still stark though the lawns are greening up.
     Here's the progress on Scotch Thistle.  I am through the third segment now.  I had to frog it and start that segment again, so I am being more careful with lifelines.  I got careless and began treating lace knitting as if it were mindless knitting.  It's not.  But I am just using lots of lifelines and paying a bit more attention.  Weirdly enough I was messing up on the purl rows, which is just carelessness.  It will be very interesting to see how this blocks out.  At the moment the end, as you can see, is narrower than later sections and segment two forms bumps.  It will also be interesting to see how this rather hard-twist yarn blocks out. 
    I succumbed to another skein of Schaefer Anne on ebay.  Gorgeous colors, possibly even those in the original Scotch Thistle.  I don't know what shawl or stole this will be yet but the colors are gorgeous. (Oh wait, I said that already.)  This photo doesn't show that on the other side the skein also has some magenta and gold that really sparks it up.
    And, for the first time in a long time, some fleece got washed.  This is some Romney lamb's fleece that I bought almost exactly a year ago.  It took a LOT of work to get it clean.  The tips were brown with lanolin and dirt.  But I reread the chapter on scouring fleece in Lee Raven's Hands on Spinning and decided to trust her when she said that only the cut end will felt.  The cut ends were clean, so I went back, used enormous amounts of Dawn and added teapots of hot water to the sink, along with turning up the temperature on the hot water heater, and WASHED those tips.  As you can see, not all the fleece retained the lock formation, but I don't think I felted it.  I am really looking forward to spinning this.  It is so so soft.  I am not even going to dye it first, as I have always done.  Instead I am going to spin it into yarn and dye the yarn.  I will also have to figure out how to spin the soft little clouds this combs into.  It just takes a swipe with the dog comb, and I have a cloud.  A cloud with a 3-inch length.  That's shorter than anything I have prepared before this, so I need to think about how to set up the wheel.  Faster?  Slower?  Less pull to let it grab the next bit?  Help!  I also realized I have dyed earlier fleeces in rather light colors, so this yarn might end up a more brilliant one.
     And finally, that Pingouin Silk from the past.  Digging around I found 9, count 'em, 9 balls of this stuff.  That is 1260 yards of what turns out to be worsted weight yarn.  I know, the label says DK, but a closer look (glasses off) at the little gauge chart shows they recommend knitting it at 5/in.  And I must have another ball somewhere, attached to the quickly abandoned original project, since these are all virgin balls of yarn.  Hmmmm....  That could be a summer cardigan. 

Creativity surge

    

Robbyn says I sparked her current interest in lace.  In turn, she has sparked a re-interest in dyeing for me.  The funny thing is I have never dyed yarn, just fleece, which I have then spun (or stashed for future spinning). She provided temptation Thursday night during her knit chat when she told me that Knitpicks is now offering a Bare version of their Gloss yarn.  That got me thinking (and drooling).  Then  Chez Casuelle emailed me to say, oops, they don't have the Twisted Sisters Zazu that I ordered in Copper after all.  Which actually is OK, since I want a summer shawl and was beginning to wonder if fingering weight wool might not be a bit warm.  So I began thinking of buying silk, or rayon, or tencel. And then, a minor miracle... an ancient, rusty synapse in my brain fired.  I ran downstairs to a basket that holds yarn so old I don't even have it with the rest of the stash.  Sure enough, there are piles of a natural-colored silk, much of it still in the original ball with labels still attached. I bought it in the 1980s as a newbie knitter, surprised to find silk yarn that wasn't shiny and bothered by its lack of elasticity.  So the sweater never happened, but I had bought enough for a sweater for the 1980s-version of myself.  Probably not enough for a sweater for the somewhat larger 21st century self, but PLENTY for stoles and shawls. 
     Next issue: I want it copper-colored.  And I have the feeling copper is not going to be the easiest color to obtain when dyeing, since I do NOT want orange, rust, sienna, umber, or terra cotta.  I reread my color and dye books.  Orange with some blue?  I really don't want to end up with brown.  Then I found that Jacquard has a liquid dye in a color they call Aztec Gold.  So experimentation may begin.  How nice to have enough to experiment with.  This is DK weight, by the way. 
     Also....
    Ta Daaa! The bias lace scarf is finished, though not yet blocked.  It is off the needles. Whew.  The problem with scarves for me is that the same pattern goes on for goddam ever.  So ... Robbyn is promoting designing my own.  I may work my way through parts of the Margaret Stove book on designing lace and start coming up with my own rectangular stole patterns.  Scotch Thistle, with its various segments, should stay interesting, and the Anne was wound and staring me in the face...  So I cast on and started knitting Scotch Thistle.  I am finding the chart very easy to read (thanks Jackie!) and my system of marking off the segment repeats (in bright pink marker) is working very well.  Here are the few couple of repeats of the first 4-row pattern.  This colorway is mostly teal with some olive and a wee bit of that dusky mauve I mentioned.
    Once that synapse fired a couple of others suddenly farte fired.  I had gone back to drop spinning some painted lace roving I had bought at MDSW last year (might be nice to get it spun in time to buy more this year :>). It suddenly occurred to me that I was having trouble with the roving breaking and dropping the spindle not because I am out of practice (or not only...) but because my one-ounce Jenny spindle, which I like a lot, was too heavy for the thin strands of silk roving!!!  Silly spinner.  Anyway, I immediately though "Gotta buy a lighter weight spindle" but wait...  I have a Spindolyn.  I have 2 Spindolyns, the second one being a light weight.  So hey...  try spinning the silk on the light Spindolyn!!!

     Of course, all this creativity and problem solving burst into being because I am supposed to be doing something else -- laundry and packing for a weekend visit to friends in the 'burgh.  And can I find my iPod, used primarily for long-distance driving?  Of course not.  Gotta run.

Color

     Since graduate school and my former teaching career, I've become very conscious of how  necessary it is to have some kind of cognitive scaffolding on which to hang new information. That is, we can hear all kinds of interesting facts, but what they mean to us, what we learn from them, how we can incorporate that information and make it knowledge really depends on what we already know.  Over the last few days, while traveling, new things I learned to do came together with things I heard or read.
     Driving to Philadelphia I listened -- again -- to the 2nd episode of Weavecast, a podcast about (of course) weaving.   Episode 2 discussed painting warps, and also interviewed a very experienced weaver about her weaving in general.  Now, I had listened to that episode before, but this time I was listening to it as someone who had now warped a loom.  The threads under tension as warp on a loom are beautiful.  I don't think I had ever noticed that before.  So now, remembering what my dark red warp had looked like, the idea of painting that warp struck me brilliant.  Some folks actually paint the warp once it is already on the loom, and while I understand how messy that can be, it is stretched out there waiting to be worked.  The weaver interviewed (I think it was Mollie Freeman) also talked about how she stuck to one particular weave -- out of the seemingly infinite possibilities -- because she could do so much with just that one.  I had recently decided to at least start that way, in an effort to focus in on the enormous world of weaving.  Given my fascination with color, it makes sense to keep to one or two weaves and see how much I can do using color in different ways within those parameters.
     That brings me to the other new body of information.  While away I read (am still reading) Victoria Finlay's book Color: A Natural History of the Palette.  The book is an interesting idea -- she goes looking for the ways people learned to create different colors in paint and in dyes.  Having done just a little bit of dying with synthetic dyes and some thinking about natural dyes shaped how I read this book.  I love most shades of green.  Not the yellow greens or the bright kelly greens, but any version of sea greens, forest greens, gray greens, blue greens, deep greens, sage, Gaywool Bush Blend dyes in Meadow and Ivy....  And it turns out greens are hard.  And mysterious.  Historically green poisoned people in Britain, when arsenic was used to create the popular green wallpaper of the 18th century.  It was also made using copper and malachite.  There are lost greens, greens that have disappeared over the years and searches for lost formulas using saffron and yogurt.  One-pot greens -- as opposed to having to dye fibers yellow first, then overdye them with blue -- had to wait until synthetic dyes appeared in the 1870s and 1880s. The chapters on blue, indigo and violet are just as fascinating -- and in fact so was the chapter on red.  It has changed how I think about dyeing fiber now, and I am more and more interested in natural dyes.  I did appreciate  how her narrative makes clear that there is nothing benign about most natural dyes and how difficult it has been to make color stay.   Color: A Natural History of the Palette is a sort of travelogue as well -- she travels to China to find celadon (a type of green), to Afghanistan to find lapis lazuli and the blue dye produced from it,  to Mexico to explore the rediscovery of natural dyes including indigo.  I am now reading the chapter on violet, and am starting to look for other books on color.  Some that I want to check out: Michel Pastoureau's Blue: The History of a Color and Amy Butler Greenfield's A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire are two possibilities.
    I also just discovered that episode 3 of Weavecast has just been posted.  I am off to download it onto my iPod.  Housekeeping and gardening are much more likely to get done if I am listening to something interesting.

I'm back

     I still don't understand how I lost a computer cable, but being unable to post pictures was so frustrating I bought a new one.  Why are those thingies still so expensive???  Anyway, here are the pictures I promised.
    First up:  a picture of my first weaving project. As was obvious when I posted a picture of the results of my first spinning attempt,  I have no ego about my new skills, such as they are.  But making this was very exciting, so here it is.  Still unfinished.  It is off the loom, and you can see that I used a hem stitch between the header and what was left of the warp.  I still have to make the fringe and wash the piece.  The project was a table runner, and each student chose a stitch pattern (well, as we knitters would say) from a classic source of weavers' patterns (Davison, for the weavers among my readers).  This is a pattern from a whole group known as rosepath.  In cotton, I think 3/2 (or was it 5/2?  Weaver-talk for gauge weight of yarn.) Have to take a look at my notes.  I am going to do the finishing this weekend, and start figuring out how to start the new project.
     Interesting point -- weaving brings a whole new class of dust bunnies to the house.  Now I get colorful dust bunnies.  This is what was under the tabletop loom when I took it back to the shop.  A graphic reminder of the abrasion of warp fibers during weaving.
     I do still knit.  Though lately exclusively on the shetland shawl pattern I am doing in Jaggerspun.  You start by doing 14 and a half repeats of the trim pattern, and the LYSO swears it will go much faster once I get past the trim.  Of course when I finish the trim I will have to pick up something like 472 stitches.  But after that I will be knitting the body of the shawl.  This is what 9 repeats looks like.  Every time I try to speed up my knitting on the trim I make mistakes.  At the moment I am one stitch short, so I keep tinking the row I am on and trying again. 
    I am continuing to spin -- two projects on spindles (the Meadow green Romney and the handpainted merino) and the plying project on the wheel that fell of the niddy noddy into the world's worst snarl.  I am making progress in untangling it, but very very slowly. 
     The other day I was waiting for a friend in the cafe at the local Barnes and Noble and I was knitting the shawl's trim.  I don't usually knit in public, but it was comfortable that day.  I noticed a woman watching me, and sure enough, she came over after a while -- another knitter.  With the lovely Irish name of Niamh, pronounced Nieve.  She is otherwise occupied on guild night, but we both heard for the first time of a new knitting group meeting at a local Starbucks on a different night.  So my knitting community is expanding a bit.  And I am, of course, very eager to get to MDSW. 

WOW!

   First of all.... Ta da! Weaving!!!!! 
Here it is!  Today was my third (of 4) sessions in an Introduction to 4-Harness Weaving class, I finally got all the tangles out of the warp, and started weaving! I am so excited.  This table top loom, an Ashford, in case you are interested, is not mine, but is mine til next week when I finish this piece.  There are, I am pleased to announce, has mistakes.  Of course.  It just recently ocurred to me that while I did permit mistakes in my knitting, I had somehow decided I could not get started doing tapestry weaving until I had designed a great work of art to weave.  OK.  Bizarre, I know.  And so while I have not yet started weaving a beginning tapestry, I am allowed to make mistakes in my first piece of 4-harness weaving.  I love it.  I chose, as I have been choosing all winter, a dark red and gold combination.  Here's a pic -- put on your sunglasses:
    And I am so psyched about this I have already found a pattern and bought yarn for a project on my own floor loom, which is ALMOST all put together downstairs.   So far I have enjoyed the whole project, even the time spent untangling the warp.  Chaining a warp is not a hard concept.  Basically, you have a bunch of threads all lined up, and to keep them untangled you do a sort of crochet or navajo ply motion that should keep things nice and tidy.  I think I need remedial chaining.  But it all worked out, the LYSO turns out to be an excellent teacher and I think she just produced 5 new dedicated weavers.  So I bought this stuff for the next project.  The idea is I am going to finish weaving this thing -- a table runner -- and start right in on warping for the next project, which is also a table runner.  I don't use table runners, but they sure are popular projects in weaving books and magazines.  I figure I will drape them on top of all kinds of things.  The next one might turn into two kitchen towels instead.  I know, I know... as recently as a couple of days ago I could not imagine why someone would weave a kitchen towel.  But you can make them in gorgeous colors of cotton, and they are small projects, so as I experiment -- and work toward becoming adept at warping -- they seem very doable.  They also do NOT require sewing, beyond a hem, which making bags or clothes would do.  I am working my way toward rugs.

     I did spend a lot of time this week dyeing more fleece.  Experimenting with colors.  I had bought a Country Classics dye called Blue Bonnet that I was afraid was way too light.  But on my light gray fleece, the color is gorgeous.  Then I tried some yellow, Country Classics color Maize.  Oops.  Really oops.  The color that resulted was so ugly my digital camera simply refused to record it.  It was sort of an old gold that had a bit of screaming yellow green in it.  It was so unbearable I decided to overdye with the Country Classics red I had, which was Magenta, thinking I would get more of a gold.  Well, then I sat down to reread Deb Menz's Color in Spinning, which of course warned that red dyes are WAY stronger than yellow, so actually that bit of fleece is now a very nice dark red.  Hmm.  So I grabbed some more fleece, and this time used 1.75 tsp of the Maize, and only 1/8 tsp of the Magenta.  Success!  I got gold on most of the fleece, and something indescribable and hideous on the darkest gray sections of the fiber.  Those are being taken out, and if I like the gold when I have combed the fleece, I will do some more of it on the lightest sections of what is left of that fleece.  Colors/photos will be posted when the red, blue and gold are combed and I have roving.  I did not think I would get into dyeing, but I find that I cannot stop.  How many days to Maryland Sheep and Wool?  I need more fleece!  MORE FLEECE!    
     Finally, a question. What the heck is this?  It was in among the sticks, shuttles, bobbins, etc. that I got from the former owner of my floor loom.  My weaving teacher had never seen anything like it.  Anyone know?  Those are tines sticking up there, though they are not very sharp -- not like my wool combs, for example. 
    As for the last entry's question, about how to process the Romney lamb fleece, Amie had the great suggestion of playing with it -- combing an ounce, carding an ounce, etc.  I actually think I will probably just flick it -- I don't think it needs more than that. 

Dyeing voodoo - AMENDED

In response to pushy readers  , I added photos.  I also have to add an apology to members of the Handspinning ring -- during some editing I appear to have lost the ring link.  I will get that back up today.

    I love the dyed Romney (shown in the last entry) so much I decided to dye another batch.  I am using Gaywool Bush Blend, a commercial pre-mixed dye, and I carefully followed my notes from last time, weighing and measuring everything.
     When I lifted the fiber out of the dye pot, large sections were still light gray.  And there was still color in the pot -- it was supposed to have been "exhausted," leaving only clear water in the pot.  Hmm.  Undyed wool, but with dye still in the water.  I have no idea why that would happen, especially since the fleece had been washed thoroughly. 
     I left the fiber in the pot.  And left it.  And left it.  Finally, when I pulled it out, the undyed parts appeared to have dyed.  But there was still dye in the water.  Here is a picture of the now dry Romny, color Gaywool Bush Blend Meadow, Dye Lot #2.
     So what's that weird light stuff next to it?  Well, there was still dyestuff in the water., so I threw a small amount of a lustrous white Border Leicester washed fleece into the pot.  With the much reduced dye, and the white fiber, that one came out sort of cotton-candy green!  (If that is a color.  Very light, and very clear.)  Here it is next to a skein of the Border Leicester that I spun up undyed.  I love the undyed version.  Not a big fan of this über-pastel green.  The picture above is an interesting illustration to beginning dyeing 101: on the left, light gray fleece, full strength dye, and extra time in the pot; on the right, white fleece, much diluted dye.  I like dyeing on light gray.
    Yesterday I said: The Romney is still drying, and I am trying to remember what I have labeled the first rule of dyeing:  don't panic while it's wet.  There are spots on those initially undyed areas that show the (relative) exhaustion of the dye, and are much lighter.  Combed in with the rest, though, it should be fine.  I hope.  Meanwhile spinning the first batch on a spindle is going surprisingly quickly.
    Looking at it dry, now, I see just one scary spot.  There, I have a streak of very intense color and some major variation. See?  But it is just that one spot, and I might just take out that bright streak.  And the very yellow lock you can see in this picture as well.  And we'll see what combing it does to combine the remaining variations.  I LOVE the variations dyeing this fleece resulted in the first time, so we'll see how this second batch comes out. 
    So, Robbyn and Kim, here are your pictures!  Hey Kim, did you take a look at the Rowan Magpie swatch a few entries ago?