robknits

Next! (edited, with new pics)

 

       Knitting: Scotch Thistle is done.  I enjoyed knitting it, l ike the yarn (Schaefer Anne), but found it hard to block -- not used to pinning out those points at the end.  Though as I wrote that I thought of a possibly better way of doing it.   Blocking lace is truly miraculous -- I love the feel of the stole and the size is just perfect.  I am going to remember that when I make other rectangular stoles. As usual, lots more detail if you click on the pictures.
     Other great news, in weaving:  I have a new warp on the loom and am working my way through variations on plain weave.  My problem at the moment -- the author of Plain Weave is Anything But Plain suggests you try for a balanced weave using 10/2 and 3/2 alternately in both the warp and the weft.  With a sett of 10.  If I did the weft at 10 picks per inch, the results would look like a net, it's that loose.  Hmmm.  Oh wait.  A light is struggling to turn itself on in my brain.  Does "10 picks per inch" actually mean 20 throws of the shuttle?  That is, is a pick in plain weave 1) throw the shuttle through shed 1, PLUS 2) throw the shuttle through shed 2?  I am off to find my copy of Deborah Chandler's Learning to Weave.

    Another bit of good weaving news.  My loom is a style of loom called a counterbalance.  For the nonweavers out there, that means the shafts work in pairs -- when shaft 1 goes down, 2 goes up.  When 3 goes down, 4 goes up.  They are great looms, you get a huge shed -- the space between the threads in which you throw the shuttle.  See?
     The good news?  This is not the usual huge shed.  This is the shed with only one shaft down.  What does that mean?  Jack looms, unlike counterbalance looms, have shafts that move independently of each other.  So you can do gorgeous twills that have 3 shafts up and 1 down.  Usually on counterbalanced looms you have to do "balanced" twills, because the shafts work in pairs.  I of course have been falling in love with 3:1 twills.  But Chandler suggests tying each shaft to its own treadle and seeing what you get, because, as she put it, counterbalance looms have "much treadling personality."  Looks like I should be able to try some 3:1 twills.  I will have to experiment.
     Other good weaving news: I will be taking a 3-day workshop at MAFA's annual conference.  MAFA is the Mid Atlantic Fiber Association, and it is an association of guilds.  This year they decided their annual conference should take the form of workshops, here in Pennsylvania.  So while folks here scratched their heads in confusion when I said, with excitement, that I was going to Scranton PA for part of my vacation (not a typical vacation destination), I am thrilled.  I am taking Peg McDade's class, which is called "Don't Just Throw the Shuttle," and it is all about understanding weave structures to best design your fabric.  Here is the brochure for the event.
     On the down side -- I took off my Regia wool socks day before yesterday (yes it has been that cold around here) and discovered a hole on the sole on the ball of the foot.  Rats.  This pair is only a year old. I wear out commercial socks on the toe, but I wear out my handmade socks on the ball of the foot.  I did some darning last night, but I am trying to figure out some preventative measures.  Here's what I have come up with so far:

• Go back to working socks on two circular needles, and do the soles on a smaller size -- which means 0s.  I already work the yarn at a tight gauge.
• Someone on Knitters Review suggested duplicate stitching across the ball of the foot with reinforcing thread.  That actually is a pretty good idea, though slow.  And I don't know what it would feel like to walk on the reinforcing thread.
• Go back to Dez Crawford's pattern for "re-footable" socks, which lets you take off worn out soles and knit new ones!  Though that would mean keeping a considerable amount of yarn for later.
• And of course, I am trying to figure out why I wear out handmade socks there.  I do walk around the house in socks with no shoes, but have never figured out why folks think that is harder on socks that walking in shoes.
• Additional solution: making lots more pairs of handmade socks, so I don't wash and wear the same few over and over again.

So I have to do sock #2 from that light Regia shown in the last entry.  And lots more.  And I have to decide what is next in other knitting, if anything.  If I dare say it aloud... besides concentrating on socks for a while, I am seriously thinking about finishing a few of those almost-FOs staring at me from the stereo cabinet.

On beyond MDSW

     For more on the sheep on the bus, here's the story from one of the passengers -- with a picture of the unusual passenger. 
     For a while I suffered from my usual post-MDSW feeling of overwhelm.  So many ideas, so much material and equipment and the need for some focus and some production.  The results are better (in my own humble opinion about myself) than usual:  I did not immediately jump into 4 new projects.  Instead :       -- I actually managed to get the second half of the Scotch Thistle started.  I must have messed up the first two rows 5 times, no idea why, but finally got going and am through the first section (first 28 rows) of the pattern.
       -- On the bus to MDSW I decided to try a garter rib on the sock-in-progress.  You know, the one that appeared to be doomed to be only a toe forever.  On the way back from MDSW I decided the garter rib looked boring.  So I frogged back to the ankle and started the leg pattern from Kim Salazar's Pine Tree sock pattern.  This may not be the best combination of yarn and stitch pattern ever done, but it is good enough and I am making progress. As usual when I am working from a large skein of yarn I miss doing both socks at once but haven't bothered winding off another ball of yarn.  This is going quickly now, so this pair will be done sequentially.
       -- The Spindlitis Yahoo! group's May challenge is to organize your spinning.  Since I went through lots of my spinning fiber before heading to MDSW, I decided that was a great idea, especially since I couldn't remember what fiber that dark green roving was made of.  So I found a little notebook, and went back through the blog, which is of course my journal of fiber arts stuff, and now have an inventory of fleece and roving.  It also reminded me that the light green roving I had been spinning on the Columbine was only part of the Bridget fleece I bought last year at MDSW at the Hatchtown booth.  So I went downstairs and found the rest of it -- some more fleece dyed that light green using Cushings dye, and some, a yellower color, that I did not dye.  So I did some more hand carding yesterday, creating more green rolags for spinning.
       --  Copper yarn.  I want copper-colored yarn, and mentioned a while ago that I bought a Jacquard dye that might get me close.  I was thinking of using it to dye either the Pingouin Silk I recovered from the stash, or some Knitpicks Bare lace I bought.  But doing the fleece inventory made me realize I had other options.  First, I have some fleece I tried dyeing with a yellow dye. Came out hideous. And I have some orange top (what was I thinking?  Oh yeah, of my mom, who loves orange.)  And some burnt orange top.   After studying Color in Spinning I confirmed what I remembered from my first reading of the book.  I am going to overdye those with violet.  The yuck almost-but-not-quite-gold fleece is going to be overdyed with a bit of red and violet.  The two orange batches of top will get overdyed with violet.  I think I can get copper(s).  It will be a fun project and I will keep notes in my new spinning notebook and experiment till I get the colors I want. 
     Cats. Finally, a portrait.  Cat on an extension cord.  This is Frannie, usually camera shy.  As you can see, she is quite a bit bigger than my calico Maggie.  When she jumps off a window sill you can hear the thud across the house.  She gets exactly the same "healthy weight" food as my little Maggie.  Who was caught in the act, on the dining table wondering who knocked over one of my displays of sun images.

Sigh.

     It is finally spring here in the central mountain area of Pennsylvania.  Beautiful sunny day, a long walk, lots of hours of light after getting home from work.  I am a bit discombobulated nonetheless.  I spent a week with my mother.  When was the last time I lived with my mom for an entire week?  I can't remember.  It was nice, and it was productive, due to two visits to continuing care communities, where my mother might join the independent living community, and due to the work my sister did to get lots of unused or worn out items out of my mother's house and to the Vietnam Vets or the dump.  But it was harder than usual to leave and come back to my own home.
     I came back to some gorgeous silk laceweight yarn I bought from Mystical Creations the day before they shut down their Etsy store.  They still have an online store, and still sell on Ebay, but I swear I was their last Etsy customer.  I fell in love with this yarn, which had the evocative springtime name of French Lilac.  You can see on the right what it looked like on my computer screen.
     I was so excited to see it waiting for me, ignored the other mail, opened the package.... Hmmm.  Take a look at the second picture.  On the top, my supposed French Lilac silk.  On the bottom, the skein of Schaefer Anne I bought on Ebay a week or so ago.  Notice anything?  Enlarge the picture for the best view.
     Yup.  Separated at birth.  Ab-so-lute-ly identical.  Auauauauaughghghghgh! 
      Sigh.  I can't imagine the point of keeping them both.  But aren't they gorgeous?  I think, I think, that I will probably sell the Schaefer Anne for what I bought it for on eBay.  I kinda hate to, because it is truly gorgeous, but really....  Since next week in Maryland Sheep and Wool, I will sell the Anne and look for other lace weight yarn at MDSW.  Though, on the other hand, maybe I want to see what I think of knitting with silk laceweight before I say goodbye to the Anne. 
      Knitting was in fact accomplished during the visit to my mother.  I finished the first half of the Scotch Thistle stole, reminding myself continually that you can't tell what lace looks like til it is blocked.  And I have knit a sock foot. All in stockinette.  I will decide after doing the heel what I will put on the leg.

     Finally, the cats.  I have a new cat sitter, who appears to be excellent.  Maggie (the little calico) met me at the door and demanded lots and lots of petting, immediately, until of course she decided that was enough petting and made that "I could bite you if I wanted" gesture that means "enough."  I called and called for Frannie, my shy tabby, who decided to stay in the basement for a while longer.  The cat sitter didn't see anything of her but a tail as she hurled herself into the basement every time the sitter came into the house.  Fran came up a couple hours later, and deigned to approach me.  When they slept on either side of my feet last night I figured all was forgiven.  Until I came home from work today to find a Frannie-sized cat turd carefully placed right in front of my favorite reading-knitting-tv watching seat in the living room.  That's when I realized: my cat is a bitch.

A lamb in a box

    

Well, kinda.  See?  Lamb in a box.  Lamb locks after just one swipe of a dog comb.  I did wash it a bit too vigorously, so I am collecting a smaller amount that has some tangles and knots.  But I am going to keep that too, maybe run it through the drum carder, maybe experiment with painting it, and spinning a nubbier yarn.  The stuff in the box, well, I can't wait to start spinning it.  It is so soft and so white, I am going to spin it like this and dye the yarn later.  I have a lot more to run that dog comb through first though.
    In addition to lamb, we have toes.  Yes, toes.  Toes in a box.  I keep starting socks from the toe up and then getting stuck, unable to decide what I want the sock to be when it grows up.  Here is the current toe, on the left, from Regia's Line Step, or Step Line -- I never did understand the name of that yarn.  Dawn Adcock did a very nice version of her Shapely Sock in this yarn, it turns out.   (Scroll down her page a bit to see it.)  And look at the pic below of what mine did, all by itself...  I couldn't have made that happen deliberately.  Cool, huh?  And we all know the second one is not going to match.
     The Shapely sock has,

in fact, very nice shaping, but I was in the mood for some fancy stitch work.  But after looking at pretty much every sock pattern and stitch dictionary I could get my hands on... it was still just a toe.  Finally I decided to just proceed, and chose the Sock Bug's Follow the Trail stitch.   It was kind of interesting to figure out and looks ok, but I really don't feel like doing two socks'  worth of this stitch.
So my sock block continues.  I may try the Lacy Mock Cable stitch.  According to my blog I really liked knitting that one (good thing I keep a blog), but a different idea is percolating at the back of my brain.  I kinda know what I want but can't figure out where I know it from, and the closest approximation I have found is worked over 15 stitches, which is either too wide or too narrow for my foot, depending on how you look at it.  So I am going to continue to look at stitches and see what I come up with.

Progress is being made on the Scotch Thistle wrap, though in a truly heartstopping moment this evening I held it up to admire it and found a large hole -- with dropped stitches -- way back at the end of the first segment/beginning of the second segment. (I have just finished segment five.) I swear it was not there yesterday.  I managed to get my heart beating again and -- after considering running screaming through the house pulling my hair -- used a crochet hook to pick up those nasty dropped stitches.  It looks fine now, but I have to figure out how to permanently fix that final recaptured stitch, currently on a safety pin.  Would I do that before blocking?  After blocking?  No way am I frogging the 3 segments after that spot.  No way.  (OK.  No shrieking.)  So maybe, a bit of sewing thread to fix that stitch.  Any advice?  Besides never knitting lace again?  'Cause that is not an option.  Except for moments like that, I actually enjoy it.

     I am going to meet Kim tomorrow to compare additions to knitting libraries and yarn stashes, and make starry-eyed plans for Maryland Sheep and Wool.  Since she is, in fact, sock-crazy (or rather, she is Sock-Crazy) maybe she will have a good idea on what to do with the Regia Line Steps.

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.