A bit of a spree

As those of you on Ravelry know, a number of designers chose/are choosing to donate some of their proceeds from pattern sales to various organizations offering aid to Haiti. Using their nifty "Help for Haiti" tag, you can browse the patterns, or filter the results to patterns that you've already favorited or queued.

The ease with which I was able to find patterns that I had already noted down meant that I dropped quite a bit of imaginary PayPal money on patterns. Including:

Snow White
Gosport
Honeybee Cardigan
The Manzanita Collection
Francie
Northman Mittens
Triskele Mittens

And I don't think I'm done yet. A number of designers (including me) are extending the donating period well into February and even later. So get out there and start buying people!

The next question, of course, is what do I cast on first with my four sweaters worth of stash (at least). Any suggestions?

How did this happen?

I realized the other day that, according to Ravelry, I've only got two active knitting projects on the needles at the moment. It took me about four hours and much mental anguish to acknowledge that this is, in fact, true. There's the double knitting socks I'm working on for Devil, which are mere rows away from being separated so I can do the toes (I'm definitely not brave enough to try and do those both at the same time). The only other thing actively being worked on is the Sock Yarn Blanket (the crowd goes wild).

To say that it's been a while since this baby got any play is a major understatement. The last blog post about it was here, but no pictures have been posted since almost a year ago. A few nights ago, as I waited for the most recent sampling to dry, I picked it up and got back to work.

A bit of garter stitch was just what I needed after all the math involved in spinning to match a commercial yarn*. The only strenuous bit has been trying to pick out colors, and I'm getting to the point where I'm just going to grab things at random and throw them in. Anything to get this puppy done by the end of February.

The status of the SYB has now gone from this

to this.

There's a chance I might be done by 28 February, but I still haven't figured out how I'm going to fill in those funky little triangles around the edge. Or what to use for the edging. Or the backing, because Boo will be forty two before I finish weaving in all those ends. But the light at the end of the tunnel, if not getting closer, is at least visible from here. And that's progress.

Now I just have to gear up to finish up my Hurricane Vest before spring hits and I'll really feel virtuous.

* If I had had even an inkling of the number of times I would need a calculator for this project, I never would have started spinning, much less spinning for this damn sweater. Never.

Slogging along

I started some socks for a friend's Christmas present a few weeks ago, and they've been a tough row to hoe in several different ways.

The pattern is lovely, with lots of twisted stitches,

and the yarn is also lovely (and sparkly!), if a bit splitty at times.

But the absolute killer was the heel flap, with multiple rows of k1, ptbl...

Oh my aching wrist! I have a bone deposit on the back of my right hand that, 99% of the time, I don't even notice. (The 1% of the time I notice it is when I hit it against something and jump around turning the air blue for a few minutes because O The Pain.) However, every so often it becomes an issue. Like, oh lets say hypothetically speaking: when I get all fired up to finish a heel flap and end up totally wracking my hands doing ptbl on size 1 needles. Ooof.

Since my reckless foray into heel flapitude this weekend, my right hand/wrist have been less then happy with me, to the extent that large doses of NSAIDS seem to be in order. So in order to give it a bit of a break*, last night I cast on for the first of three parts of a present for Boo.

To say that my younger child has something of an obsession with animals would be a laughable understatement. Nemo is one of her all time faves. So I was hunting around Ravelry, and came across a free (hooray!) pattern for Nemo mittens. Originally using sport weight yarn, and sized for 4-6 years old, I'm using some left over Knit Picks Essential that I dyed (another post there), and size 1 needles. I think they'll fit. And they're using so little yarn, that I think I'll be able to bust her out a Nemo hat as well. Yee haw!

*To any normal person, a break would mean "Stop knitting you idiot!" However, the holidays are right around the corner and I Have Gifts To Make.

It must be autumn

Because people are wearing sweaters now, and it's not doing good things for my startitis.

Devil and I went to the story hour at our local library today, and I don't remember what we heard because I was so taken with two sweaters there. The first was a heathery pink number on an adorable little girl who was probably 20 months old. It was a standard yoked cardigan, with one button at the very top, seed stitch hems/neck/front bands, and a bunch of eyelet rows in the yoke to give it a bit of interest. I scrounged in my bag for a pen and a receipt and made a quick sketch, probably scaring the crap out of my neighboring caretaker. Turns out that this looks like the exact pattern*, so I won't have to reinvent the wheel. Score!

The other sweater was a grown up one - another cardigan with seed stitch accents, but this one had two buttons, patch pockets on the front, a shirt collar and was knit up in a drapey chocolate brown yarn that looked incredible. I immediately thought of this yarn,

which my mother found somewhere in Maine and sent me several years ago. I've got a whole bunch of it, so when I start swatching this evening, I might whip up some of that and see how it goes. It feels pretty crunchy in the skein, but I'll do up a couple of swatches and abuse them in inventive ways.

Maybe when I go back to work I'll stop with the crazy designing inspiration. I can only hope, because otherwise it's going to put a huge dent on my ability to concentrate on other things!

* I don't think I've mentioned recently that Ravelry kicks arse. Took a millisecond to find this pattern.

FF: Inspiration

The May-June project for the Ply by Night Ravelry group was to spin something from stash and knit either the Lace Ribbon scarf or the Rivulet scarf. What with moving and parenting and all, I wasn't feeling terribly inspired to do either of these projects.

However, a couple weeks ago I remembered a phenomenal project from the first round of Ply by Night, where the spinner separated out the component colors from the top, spun them in order and created an ombre yarn that went from yellow to orange to purple. It was stunning. And I thought that I might try something similar with a recent Fiber Club shipement.

"Air", Hello Yarn Fiber Club April 2009, 50/50 superfine merino and tencel

I split the fiber into four main colors: dark purple/wine, grey, green, and a bunch of sections that went from dark blue to teal. I started with the purple sections, split each one in half and spun each half on to separate bobbins. I switched from bobbin to bobbin with each color to try and keep the singles the same thickness/twist.

I've been catching up on episodes of Yarnspinners Tales and was entertained to find that one of the recent ones was about spinning bamboo and tencel. I experienced many of the things they talked about - tencel wants to be spun fine, and it tends to clump on itself, requiring that you stop, untwist and declump before going on. It also needs quite a bit of twist, but I think that since I've been spinning merino in one form or another for the last two months, that didn't stand out as much for me as it might have otherwise.

The yarn ended up absolutely gorgeous - soft, shiny, drapey. The colors worked out really well - purple to dark blue to turquoise to teal to grey to green. I spun the singles at 15:1 and plied at 12:1. 4.1 oz/117 gr, 28-18 wpi (mostly 20-22 wpi). Finished with a cool soak, thwack against the side of the house and spinning overhead in the back garden before hanging to dry.

I ended up with 406 yds, so plenty for Rivulet. The pattern calls for sport weight, so I'll go down a couple of needle sizes and see how it looks. I'm planning to start at the purple end and see how far I get through the color progression before I get tired of the pattern.

FF: BSJ production, Part 1

Note: apparently Fiber Friday is not limited to spinning, since today's post is about dyeing. Consider yourselves warned.

Last weekend we had a lovely visit from the siblings-in-law* who came down to make off with some of our baby stuff in anticipation of their firstborn's arrival in July. And while Mom-to-be is a knitter, she hasn't been feeling the motivation to do much baby knitting these days. So I, as Auntie-to-be, have taken up the gauntlet. I had some undyed Swish superwash leftover from my Fabulous Intarsia Experiment, so I handed SIL my Acid Dye Quick Reference and told her to pick some colors.

This is an example of how it's a good idea to get input from the intended recipients of a knitted item, because I would never have put these colors together.

The yarn soaked overnight, and I squeezed it out and laid it on some plastic wrap while I go the dyes ready. It was a bit windy, so quite a bit of VM ended up in the dye package, but it did no harm to the yarn, so far as I can tell. I used highly technological means to apply the dye (plastic water bottles with holes punched in the lids so I could squeeze the dye out). The parents picked Sun Yellow, Golden Yellow and Emerald, but I used artistic license to add just a squirt of Fuschia to the mix.

I wrapped up the yarn, put it in the roaster, and then took it back out again to spray it with citric acid (oops!). Then back in the roaster on a rack above about 1.5 inches of water at 225 degrees for about 2 hours. I rinsed out the yarn and hung it to dry.

Reskeined,

And balled up ready to go.

This will become a Baby Surprise Jacket (BSJ) - I'm just hoping I have enough yarn for it! According to Ravelry's fabulous BSJ Wiki, it will be a near thing, but I've got some other colors in the stash that can be used or overdyed to be more appropriate. So I'm off on another Zimmerman adventure.

* What do you call your sibling-in-law's spouse anyway? Sibling-in-law once removed? These are the things that keep me up at night.

Nana is crafty

While Ironman and I went gallivanting off to London a few weeks ago, my wonderful parents flew down from Boston and babysat the girls. Nana, not willing to be left without something to do (recent rotator cuff surgery not withstanding) asked me for a project. And so I put her to work.

A few months back, I found a great thread in the Cult of Lendrum group on Ravelry about wheel carry bags. There are quite a few out there, some good, some not so good, but one enterprising spinner posted some pictures of a bag she made herself out of a coverlet set she got at the store. Seeing as how Nana just finished a beautiful quilt for us, we had an old grungy coverlet sitting around.

So I favorited the post, gave my Mom my login info, and left, secure in the knowledge that she would sally forth and create something fabulous.

And she did. Behold, my new Lendrum bag:

She also made individual bags for the Kate, flyers, plying head, fast flyer and extra bobbins.

And there's enough extra space in there for a cubic buttload of fiber. Which is good, cause that's what I've got lying around these days.

The only thing I think I might add is a little pocket on the inside for extra brake pegs and drive bands (and maybe a slot for the seldom-used oil bottle). It's fabulous!

I left the wheel resting in it's folded up, newly-bagged glory for a few days and then got back to work, this time on some gorgeous BFL from Nikol. This is the third batch of fiber from Yarn School, and I'm remembering why I like BFL so much - the buttah of the fiber world.

I will be feeding my BFL fix alot in the next few weeks. The next round of the Ply by Night group is some BFL from Briar Rose Fibers. I'm anxiously awaiting it's arrival, but then I'll have to decide how to spin it. The group choose two patterns this time - Primavera Socks for thinner yarn, and the Chickadee Cowl for thicker yarn. Since my default spin is usually pretty thin, I'm kind of leaning towards a thicker yarn, maybe even a single ply for the cowl. Plus, I'm going to need lots of those next winter, right?

I want those four hours of my life back

If you're considering faking your death on the internet, please us this video as a primer so I can get some more sleep.

I will also add a postscript: going back to the community where you "died" as a sockpuppet but using identifiable aliases/similar email to register your new blog will probably not work out too well for you. Just sayin'...

What, knitting? OK, if you insist. Boo decided (after Devil wore her new socks for 36 hrs straight before I could pry them off her feet and throw them into the machine) that she needed new socks too. So she started pulling yarn out of the cupboard and holding it on her feet. And standing on it. I broke down and started a pair for her out of some Kool-Aid dyed Knitpicks Bare, red and pink, using Grumperina's model for helical stripe socks. They will not be done for the January progress report, but I have a whack-load of spinning to share for that.

Wee teaser: My WHMU(WHSKAL) buddies might want to take note of the spinning posts for the next few months. That is all.

FF: Sunshiney

There's a great Ravelry thread I've been following for a while now, where people post pictures of their handspun projects start to finish: fiber, spun yarn and FO. A brief discussion there generated a new group that I've joined - Ply by Night. This is a spin/knitalong, where everybody buys the same fiber and colorway, and then knits it up. For the first venture (January/February) we're knitting the Morning Surf Scarf.

Since I'm fascinated by the change from fiber to yarn to knit, this was the group for me. We picked superwash merino from Crown Mountain Farms in the "Sunshine of your love" colorway. My fiber arrived right before we left for vacation,

and the day we got back from Boston I started spinning the singles. Let's hear it for spinning as recovery from 17 days with two small children!

The top was very interesting - one side was really saturated, the other side had splotches of white. I decided to try and blend those as much as possible, so I split the top into quarters, and then spun from two pieces of top held together to blend the saturated and white stretches. I ended up with two bobbins like this.

I knew I wanted to chain ply, since I really like the way a 3-ply looks in dropped stitches (as seen in my mini-Clap, also with handspun), so while I was home sick the other day, I plied everything up, soaked it for a bit in warm water and Eucalan, and hung it out to dry. I didn't really do any rough finishing since this is superwash, and the overplying evened out well after finishing.

Before finishing

Having finished a Tomten, and reinvigorated my mojo for another long-slumber WIP, I was going to hold out this stuff as a carrot to get some other things done. But...I couldn't do it. I now have about 8 inches of scarf already hanging off the needles. It's amazing. Should be done by Monday.

Final yarn stats: 126 yds of chain-plied superwash merino (8 oz!), 11-13 wpi before finishing, about 10 wpi after finishing.

Sticking the dismount

Or, in my case, not sticking the dismount. As in, taking a huge giant sideways step on the dismount, then falling on my ass and rolling off the podium onto the ground in a giant heap.

Can you tell I've been watching too much gymnastics? Or as Devil calls it, the monkey bars.

My grand, ambitious, long-anticipated Ravelympics project is probably not going to make it across the finish line. I'm loving the pattern, the yarn is gorgeously soft (mmmmm, baby alpaca!), and it's moving along. It's just that, well, it is kind of overwhelming. I'm maybe a third of the way in, and the rows are 400+ stitches and take about 12 minutes each. I'm finding that I want to savor this project, not rush through it. Plus black yarn plus black beads divided by spending much of my day in front of the computer makes for sore eyes. I worked on it on the bus yesterday, and by the time I got home all I wanted to do was knit stockinette sleeve caps. No more yarn overs, no more tiny beads on tinier crochet hook.

It is going to be absolutely phenomenally gorgeous when it's done. I just don't think it's going to be done by Sunday at noon. Oh well (Porpoise untangles herself from hurdle and stumbles across finish line).

Waiting...

Thanks to this and this, I now know that I will be able to get in on the party that is Ravelry on July 30, 2007.

Not like I don't already have enough ways to waste time...