I haven't updated my blog in awhile, so here's a sock.

I was beginning to think I'd never post on my blog again, but then a flurry of productivity hit me and I finished four knitting projects in a week. Newly inspired, my dormant need to show off rose up once again and screamed LOOK AT ME.

Here are some socks I started knitting for Doug over a year ago, which I finally buckled down and completed:

This pattern was cobbled together from Charlene Schurch's "More Sensational Knitted Socks", using Patons Kroy sock yarn. I enjoyed knitting them, so I'm not sure why I procrastinated finishing them for so long.

Probably because in the earlier part of this year I became obsessed with spinning and knitting sweaters for ME. We all know how much I like ME.

The first is the Diminishing Rib Cardigan, pattern by Andrea Pomerantz featured in IK Spring 2009:

This is that merino-and-silk fiber I spun this spring and fought with a bit to get it the right weight. Now that I know better how to handle this stuff, I kind of want more to experiment with.

The second is the Shalom Cardigan (Windy calls it my "shawlter" because it is both shawl and sweater) by Meghan McFarlane. I dyed and spun this stuff intending to make something for Doug, but oh, look, ME. I think this is my favorite thing I've ever knitted. And it was FUN to knit; I did the whole thing in two weeks.

For the record, Doug likes it, too, and has entirely forgotten about his sweater.

Awake and Spinning

I know, I know. Everyone who reads my blog (or USED to read it before I slacked off) is fed up with me for not posting pictures of my remodeled kitchen. And I was going to put the pictures up today. I really was.

But then I realized, if I WAIT, I'll continue to have a captive audience for my riveting, adventurous tales of YARN.

Somehow, with everything going on - all the death and destruction and remodeling and packing and moving and cleaning - I have managed to spin 700,000 skeins of yarn and knit two mostly finished sweaters. I think it's because of the new wheel. I am pretty sure it is a time machine.

Speaking of time machines, at some point I'm going to have to give up my car because it is 10 years old and sounds like an airplane taking off and I don't think Dug is ever going to fix the ceiling fabric that is now drooping down so low it will soon cover my eyes when I'm driving. (Yes, I KNOW I could figure out how to fix it myself - that's not the point. I'm lazy, people.) Anyway, my car had this really nice feature of going back in time during transit, so that if a party started at 7:00, I could leave my house at 8:00 and get there at 6:30, making everyone feel super awkward and concerned for my social skills. When I first got the car, I named it Penelope (not sure why), but now with all the noises and the time travel and it being blue, I've rechristened it the ReTardis.

Eh? Eh? Get it? Sigh.

Oh yeah, yarn. I've spun and knitted so much crap, I didn't know where to start with the show-and-tell, so I've begun with the first stuff I spun on the Majacraft when I got it. This is the extremely soft and snuggly chocolate alpaca I bought on the trip to Illinois last year, when we stopped at Apples and Alpacas in Mexico, MO. That was such a fun visit. I can't believe almost a year has passed since then.

I love how this yarn turned out. I managed, miraculously, to learn how to do the long draw spinning technique (drawing back with the drafting hand and not smoothing down the fibers as you go - allows for a softer texture) and didn't overtwist it, so it turned out very silky with a nice fuzzy halo.

I DON'T love how I had to take 3000 pictures of it to get only ONE which is remotely the correct color - it's the right color on the bobbin shots above, but somehow it defies photographing once plied. Also, it is not blindingly reflective in real life - indeed, it is not shiny at all. Not sure where that's coming from. Cousin Mark? I'm going to need you to drive to Kansas to photograph my yarn properly. 'Kay? Thanks.

I also don't know what to do with it. I got 2.5 skeins of it...maybe 400 yards or so? Any ideas?

Remodelling & Whining Update

All of you - fine, both of you - who read my blog might well assume that, after two months with no posts, I'd decided to abandon the whole thing. No, no, I've just been so very busy. (Which is a nice way of saying I've been wallowing in despair and ignoring my own very wise advice to myself which was something along the lines of, "NO wallowing. Particularly in despair.")

I thought I'd more or less avoided the obnoxious grief thing, but turns out I only postponed it. Then it hunted me down and beat the holy living crap out of me. It didn't get me right away because I was cleaning out my mom's house and I had the hard work/focus on mom's stuff to exorcise my grief with. When the contractors started, however, I had to wait until they were done to resume my work over there...then two months went by and I can't remember a damn thing about those two months. It's like I was sleepwalking. Anyway, I snapped out of it, cried for two weeks, and now I'm okay and my (current) house is REALLY dirty because nobody cleaned it while I was sleepwalking.

I feel like...er, that character in that series of books everyone is reading that I will not admit to having read (twice), when, in the second book she is so upset that she just goes numb for a long time. Then, of course, when she snaps out of it the ouchiness is much worse than if she'd just faced it and run off with Jacob in the first place. I mean, uh...nevermind. Let's move along.

OH LOOK, my bathroom is done. Let us review the before pictures:

As you can see, the old bathroom was MARVELOUS, but there were a few things wrong with it. Some of those things you can't see in the photos, but I will not describe them here, in case any of you might be eating.

Here's a few snapshots of what it looks like now:

In my opinion, the new bathroom is a bit of an improvement. In my next post, whenever I get around to that, I will show the new kitchen. And also maybe some yarn. (Apparently, while wallowing in despair, I went a little sweater crazy.)

RePly

In the comments of my last post, Jennifer asked if, since we both intend to knit the "Diminishing Rib Cardigan," we're both going to spin the yarn for it, too. Well, sure!

As soon as I rescue the first two skeins of yarn I made.

I thought I was pretty slick, spinning my yarn and measuring it with my WPI tool. I was downright smug about it. Y'all know where this is going...

Naturally, after I plied and washed my yarn, it...bloomed. It fluffed up. Expanded. What was supposed to be an 8-wraps-per-inch yarn became a 4-wpi-yarn. Which mean not only was the yarn totally wrong for its intended purpose, but I wouldn't have enough yardage anyway. Plus, I just didn't like it at that thickness, so plying it all and use it for a different project wasn't appealing, either.

I went ahead and made a skein from the same singles, except this time a 2-ply. OF COURSE it was perfect. Just what I wanted. The thickness, the color, the character. Arrrrgggh. I consulted the website to see if I could buy more fiber and dye and perhaps recreate my results. They were out of stock on the lovely silk merino blend. More arrrrrrrgggh. Then I looked at my two hideous 3-ply skeins and lamented wasting such gorgeous fiber. Arrrrggggh, again.

Then I realized...why don't I just unply it? Oh. Yeah.

So, last night I unspun the one 3ply skein back onto a bobbin, I put one of the three plies on my ball winder and the other two on my skeiner and made Dug help me manage it as I took the yarn apart. It was a time-consuming pain in the booty because we had to stop and untwist the bobbin and undo snarls...but it worked!

I just have to cross my fingers that it still looks right once I re-ply and wash it. I want my green sweater, people.

Babble

With the Other House being worked on by contractors, we're taking a little break from all the sorting and cleaning, which is finally giving me some time for Fiber Therapy. I don't have any pictures to show you, because if I stopped to take pictures of stuff, I wouldn't be spinning.

I freaking LOVE my new wheel.

One thing it affords me is more efficiency. I'm a much faster drafter now than when I first started, and I'm discovering that, with the Rose, I don't have to slow down to match the pace of my wheel. Over the weekend I finished spinning and then plied 3 monster skeins of chocolate brown alpaca AND spun a full (giant, Majacraft-sized) bobbin-and-half of merino-silk for my next sweater. Days of work now takes hours.

OH YEAH, I've started spinning for the next sweater. I decided Malicious Salad would best be used for other projects, which left me still without a green sweater. The Diminishing Rib Cardigan by Andrea Pomerantz, featured on the cover of this spring's Interweave Knits, seemed like a good project for Spring knitting:
I'm doing something new and courageous with this project: I am attempting, with my spinning, to replicate the gauge of the yarn used by the designer. I ended up falling for this pattern because it happens that the yarn used (Savoy, by Stacy Charles) is a wool-silk blend, and I, coincidentally, had 2 lbs of wool-silk blend fiber waiting for my next project. I have dyed it green, but not solidly - I want the yarn to have a bit of a tweedy look when I'm done. (I also am spinning this yarn with a bit of "character" - not going for the ultimately smooth, milled look of the Savoy stuff - and I think this sweater design will really suit that look.)

The internet tells me that this yarn is an "Aran weight" and measures about 8 wraps-per-inch - that is, if I wrap this yarn around a ruler without pulling or squishing it too tightly, it's going to loop around the ruler approximately 8 times per inch. I started spinning the singles and then just 3-plied it back on itself, measured it, then adjusted the thickness of my singles until it worked out to 8 wpi. (Okay, fine, I didn't adjust and remeasure; I just eyeballed it and announced, "That looks about right!" and knocked on wood.) There is a wee bit of variation in my my singles, but that's alright; I'm just going for an approximation, not an exact science.

Maybe tonight I'll take pictures and then tomorrow I will go on and on about how much I like spinning this particular fiber. I could definitely see myself making more than one sweater with this stuff.

I got a(nother) spinning wheel!

So, after months of research, I finally settled on the Majacraft Rose. I ordered it from a local shop, and they told me that Majacraft would ship the wheel directly to me from New Zealand. (I'm going to have to curb my sudden love of all things New Zealand; I fear that if I force Dug to watch one more Flight of the Conchords video, he's going to inflict bodily harm upon himself and others.) Anyway, so, shipping from New Zealand takes awhile, and I hadn't received any shipping notices, so I just figured I'd see my wheel in a month or so.

Somehow, though, I wasn't surprised when the mailman brought me a little package yesterday afternoon!
(I think you can click on this photo and it will open in a bigger screen, so that you don't have to squint so much to look at all these fascinating spinning wheel parts.)

I spent the evening assembling and then briefly getting to know my wheel. It's so different and slightly more complex than my Kiwi, so the learning curve is more than I expected. There was a little troubleshooting as I had a few no-that-part-goes-HERE moments and discovered that I needed to break in the bobbins a little because they're very tight on the flyer at first and don't want to spin freely. I also discovered that you want to adjust the whorl position so the groove on the whorl and the groove on the wheel you are using are directly lined up with one another. Somehow all of that figuring-it-out stuff was really fun.

I only did a wee bit of spinning, just using leftover scraps of wool as I tested everything out. This wheel has Scotch tension, but it's quite different from my Kiwi. It's actually easier to use because it's quite precise and you can see exactly where it needs to be before you start spinning - a little too loose, the bobbin doesn't brake; a little too tight, the drive wheel doesn't turn. Not much guesswork there!

The treadling on the Rose is so smooth. Dug noticed that it's a little harder to get started than the Kiwi. I did, too, but then the inertia makes it easy to keep on treadling, and there's no position where it wants to "stick"; it's very easy to control the wheel with the treadles alone, versus needing to sometimes...wait...

Dug, what do you mean "it's a little harder to get started than the Kiwi?" HOW WOULD YOU KNOW? You have been treadling my Kiwi! HAAAAA! Busted!!!

I knew Dug would succumb to the spinning wheel someday. I mean, I don't think he's going to take it up, but I can't deny that I am delighted at the evidence that he thinks it's just a little bit cool.

Anyway, I imagine Dug will be taking more photos of the wheel-in-use tonight so that I can blather on about it some more. One thing I do need assistance with is a NAME. I don't want to call my wheel "The Rose" all the time; it needs a proper name. What should I call it?

Bathroom: Before

Joy! I have found some poor suckers to gut and replace everything in my bathroom, and they are starting tomorrow. I thought I'd celebrate by throwing up a little photo mosaic of "before" pictures. ("Throwing up" is definitely the right phrase, here.)
They are ripping the whole thing out, drywall included, replacing all the plumbing and wiring, and rebuilding the room from scratch. I hope to get some in-progress snapshots as they go!

I don't have any humor-laden commentary about this yet (I mean, really, the photos speak for themselves), but let us all hope that the contractors performing my bathroom transformation don't give me any REASON for humor laden-commentary. Okay, count of three: 1...2...3...begin hoping NOW. [unnnngggggghghhhhh]

Hoping feels a lot like constipation sometimes.