robknits

Back to normal, weatherwise, and my loom is for sale

     Back to normal weatherwise means it is cold, very very windy, gray, and giving us a very lovely "wintry mix" of snow, sleet and freezing rain, so it is, of course, slippery.  Welcome to central PA!  But my Yak Trax were where they were supposed to be, I have clean wool handknit socks and mittens, and a good winter coat.

     Speaking of being prepared for the cold weather, I have joined a group called Macuwita sni.  They have a Yahoo!group as well as a group on Ravelry.  They are knitting sweaters, hats, mittens, etc. in the warmest possible wool or wool blend for Cheyenne River Sioux folks.  And, if I remember correctly, you send the items directly to the reservation.  Since I am knitting two large projects at this point, I have decided to pull out stash (I have some Cleckheaton 8 Ply I bought for a sweater and then decided not to use, as well as my palette of Lamb's Pride) and make hats and mittens.  They do need sweaters, though, so I thought I might use the Cleckheaton to make either a sweater or a vest. 

     The two big projects are going well.  The Pearl Buck swing jacket is going very fast.  I had avoided projects with enormous amounts of stockinette, but rows of stockinette with a little fancy charted cable at one end turns out to be fun and fast.  The other side has some shaping to it to, so this is fast without being mindless.  Problem is I decided to make it a couple of inches longer long after I started knitting, so I either have to knit even for a couple of inches before starting the armhole or keep it the length in the pattern.  I am not sure what it will look like if it has two even inches before the body begins to flare out. 

     The Vogue cabled cardigan is also going well and I have now completed several (or at least 3) repeats of the 28-row pattern.  I really like that the cables change as you go.  I switched to the Knitpicks Option needles and am having a little less trouble with splitting the yarn.  Too often though I discover at the end of the row that I dropped a stitch and have to go back and find it.  Must be because of cabling without a needle but I haven't yet identified at what point I drop it. 

     And finally, I have decided to sell my floor loom and buy a table top loom.  No, no, not quitting as a weaver!  So, anyway, if you want a great 45" counterbalance floor loom ... it is a Leclerc Fanny, 4-harness with cloth aprons, with a storage bench, EIGHT reeds, raddle, temple, lease sticks, ties, warp rods, assembly instructions. Also included: a Leclerc Nilus vertical warping reel. New vertical warping reels alone sell for hundreds of dollars. Disassembled, it all fit in the back of my station wagon when I bought it all. Pick up only -- Located in central PA. I will drive two hours in any direction -- if it is not sleeting! --  to meet you. Asking $600.

     Stay warm!

More Knitting at Day's Close

     Reading more in At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, I learned that not only did women congregate at night -- for social contact while knitting and spinning -- but that in France they actually built huts for this purpose in the winters (p. 182-183).  And, of course, in these original Stitch and Bitch sessions (as Robbyn called it the other night during the virtual fiber gathering she holds every Saturday night) the women talked about their daily lives, their villages, their farms, sex, men and their kids.  At times, apparently, the men got worried, accusations of witchcraft and scandalous behavior were thrown around.  The women, apparently, were successful in keeping the men at bay and preserving their space and gatherings.  Spinning and knitting bees were called veillées in France, Spinnstuben, Rockenstuben and Lichstuben in Germany, posidelki in Russia and veglia in Italy, céilidhe or áirneán in Ireland and y noswaith weu or "knitting night" in Welsh.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

     Pretty much la même chose here with my knitting as well.  I have redone everything I frogged for the Vogue cabled cardi.  Managed to unsnarl yet another sock yarn snarl (see the nasty thing?).   Almost done with the Blauband socks.  Yesterday, after the surprise of waking up to a snowfall, I wore the Opal socks finished earlier this fall.  Two points:

     I live in the central Pennsylvania mountains.  Why did it surprise me to see snow?  Somehow we manage to forget every year and are just flabbergasted when, hey!, it snowed!

     The other point is that I am no fan of Opal yarn.  That pair is the scratchiest of all the socks I have made.  The Brown Sheep Wildfoote, which lots of folks dislike, is way nicer to wear than the Opal.  Fortunately, the rest of the sock yarn stash consists of Mega Boots, Blauband, Anne, Jawoll, J Knits, Lisa Knits, and who knows what else, but I don't think there is any more Opal.

And here is a very dark picture of the reknit bit of cabled cardi:

Fiber after dark

     I have been reading At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, and while it is not the "enthralling anthropology of the shadow realms" that the blurb on the cover promises, I do keep reading.  It is the history of how people behaved after dark for centuries, if not millenia.  In the chapter titled "Works of Darkness," the author talks about those areas of work that did not stop when the sun went down.  Included in this were the cloth trades and brewers (when the blacksmiths did it there were complaints about the noise) and, of course, women's work at home.  Here is the point of origin of the phrase "a woman's work is never done."   Turns out laundry was often done at night, and women also often augmented family income by brewing ale and making cheese at night.  And then the author says "Above all, women devoted nights to spinning and knitting, carding wool, and weaving." (p. 164).  Not just a way to clothe your family, it was often a form of piecework, where merchants provided the materials and families paid for what they could spin, weave and knit.  The author mentiones farther down the page that in "the early 1570s, 94 percent of poor women performed textile work of some sort."  It was done in almost no light, since candles were still a luxury and fireplaces emitted very little light.  And all that spinning and carding was done after a full day's labor.  A treat for us, a survival tool then.  No surprise then that working class women were glad to give it up when commercial yarns, cloth and clothes became affordable.

      Since I do not need to do it to support or clothe myself, my evening knitting has been very enjoyable (click on that dark picture to get a good look).  I have made progress on the cabled cardigan from Vogue but ... I am about to frog it.  I want to make the next size up.  I thought of continuing and using Lily Chin's article (it was in either this summer's or this fall's Vogue Knitting) about adding gussets to sweaters and sweater patterns.  But I honestly don't have that much done yet, and might as well start over in a size I have more confidence in.

    The yarn is Froehlich's Sedrun, a DK weight wool and nylon that I guess was marketed as a sock yarn.  It was on sale at my LYS at her annual Memorial Day sales event, and I was able to get enough for a sweater for a remarkable price.  And as Robbyn said, it certainly should be durable.  So if I make this sweater the right size, it should last me a good long time.  And I love the color, which is way out of my usual comfort zone.  I am also cabling without a cable needle, using Carole Wulster's Cable Needle Freedom booklet as my guide.  I took the class of the same name from her at Stitches one year.  The concept of rearranging the stitches on the needle is not a hard one, but the way she explains it in this booklet led to my ability to read cables, cable symbols, and know how to rearrange the stitches.  Waaaay better than using a cable needle.  (The booklet also has some patterns in it, including a hat I think I'll make one of these days.)  So I am cabling right and cabling left, purling at times, and reading the chart very easily.  So I am not upset about frogging the beginning and starting again. The only teeny problem has been that the yarn splits very easily and I am, unfortunately, using an Addi needle rather than an Options needle.  'Cause I can't find a size 3 Options needle.  I know I have a size 3 Options needle.  It is deliberately hiding, and sneering at me too.  Very annoying, because with a yarn that splits that sharper point would be very welcome.

     When I don't want to read a chart or pay that much attention to my knitting, I am working on the blue Blauband socks, which are close enough to the finish line that I keep checking to see how much yarn I have left.  Can't wait to finish and wear them.  I also find myself justifying beginning another sweater that would involve lots of stockinette, on the principle that having one close-attention sweater and one real-quick-just-knit-around sweater would work out well.  Obviously this is just a desperate attempt at justifying startitis but I might let myself give in.  Sounds like fun, doesn't it?