Not much knitting

    Two weeks ago today I packed up the cats and a few needed items and moved from the apartment to the house.  Life has been chaotic ever since and my head followed suit.
     There are so many things we need to do, so many things I want to do, that I find myself frozen, going into auto-mode, doing only the necessary to live (cooking, cleaning, doing laundry - exciting, ain't it?).

     My knitting took a back seat as I sat around, looking at the trims we need to paint, the floor that needs to be cleared of paint and dry wall stains, the garden that needs tending to.  It was a big surprise for me to go to bed last night and be assaulted by a new idea.  I have a commission to finish, some yarn I spun which I want to make socks from, the cotton Dorothy to knit and two designs to write down, yet, the new idea haunted, nah, nursed me to sleep last night.
     It was really odd, since usually new ideas pester me, keep me up.  I guess I longed for something new so bad, that a new idea was comforting to me.  I slept very well.

     I was without an internet connection (and TV) for a week, so, to keep me busy, I spun - a lot.  I spun a blue lace weight yarn that was sitting in the bin for almost 6 months, spun a purple roving that was in the same bin for more than a year (also lace weight) and almost a pound of brown fiber from The Sheep Shed, bought maybe two years ago.  The latter became a bunch of sock yarn.
     Isn't it funny how some fibers want to become this or the other?  The purple fiber, for example: when I picked it up last week, I was wondering why I hadn't spun it before.  As I put it through the wheel, the answer became clear - it wanted to become lace yarn, but I didn't have the skills before to spin as fine as the fiber wanted...
     The brown fiber?  It was meant to be sock yarn.  After I spun the fiber, I remembered that I had done it before and all the yarn produced with this fiber was sock yarn :P

     No pics today, sorry.  I want to finish this commission already so I can focus on other projects ( I see a lot of woodwork in my future).

Random news

     Blogger had a major hiccup on Friday the 13th.  Many people (temporarily) lost posts.  I don't think I've lost any, but did lose comments.  If you don't see your comment here, it's because it got lost during whatever happened to blogger - I didn't delete it.

     I've started spinning again :D.  I had some red/black singles on my wheel for so long it was getting dusty.  The other day I was directed to a spinning discussion and the need to spin hit me.  I went back to the wheel (poor thing has been giving me sad looks for so long...feeling abandoned), finished spinning the fiber, plied it and started to spin the batt of fibery goodness I had in a bag since last year.
     There is someone who is very dear to me who is going to get the yarn I'm spinning right now.  I put together all kinds of soft, shiny, beautiful fibers I had into a gorgeous blue batt: mohair,silk,merino and some angelina for bling.  It's a pleasure to spin.

     It's been a cold, wet week around here.  I need to go grocery shopping, but don't want to leave the house.  I want to sit by the wheel and spin some more.  I also want to knit on the shawl I found the other day on Ravelry:  My heaven.  Am I crazy to also want to spin some yarn for a new Dorothy I'll be knitting on the KAL?  Oh, yeah!  I also want to paint at least the front porch floor this weekend.

Fibers and me

ETA:  What?  Two entries in one day?  Not really.  The other day I was setting permissions to my projects on Ravelry and began scratching my head, as I was sure I'd written a post about the Clematis Stole.  I checked all the posts on this here blog and couldn't find it...Odd.
Today, while trying to figure out how the jump break feature works, I had to edit a post and found the post.  For some reason (oh! shiny object!)  I got distracted and the entry that should be posted back in 6/01 was kept as a draft...

I'm back on the internet horse

So the cup is over and I'm back to show you what I was up to during the time I'm calling my Internet vacation.
First, I'll state the obvious and say it's amazing how much more time I had when I wasn't glued to a computer screen.
I had planned on spinning the whole time the cup was on, but there were some boring games and my fingers got sore, so I also did some knitting and sewing (something I haven't done in maybe a decade).
Here is the evidence:

Yet another pair of Harald socks (from the book Viking Patterns for knitting).  I hope these will be my last.  Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely design, but I'm tired of doing them.  I used two different handspuns of my own, since one strand only wouldn't work for Joel's feet.  One is a green superwash I've spun a long time ago and the other is a punta/mohair mix.  They are both n-ply.

With any luck, he won't felt these (after he felted his silk/merino socks he begins asking about fiber content before anything I do for him is finished).

I had a little accident during the knitting and am glad I have more than one pair of needles in this size. 
The broken needle you see below is entirely my fault.  Tight cable knitting shouldn't be done with acrylic needles.  They (the needles) are great and I'll continue to buy them.  Of course, I'll be more careful about what kind of knitting I decide to do with them.


Around the same time I spun the yarn I got from Gnomespun (the one I wrote about on my last post).  At first I thought about doing a two ply, but my division of the roving wasn't very accurate and in the end, I decided to chain ply it:
A few days before doing this one I found some brown roving I had for more than a year and decided to spin it too.  It's also navajo ply.  Both yarns are somewhere between heavy laceweight and light fingering:


By the time I finished the second yarn my fingers were too sore to keep on spinning so I turned back to knitting.  There are (as always) a few ideas brewing up in my head and for the Nth time, I started again a stole design - maybe this time I'll get it done:
When I got to the end of the central element I made a mistake I had done before and got upset with it, so I put it aside and went in a hunt for some other project.  Sometimes, when I'm doing mistakes over and over again, I stop and begin to organize things around me - it helps me to focus again.  This time, I decided to organize my stash and found two attempts that got me going again.
The first one was a star alignment kind of thing.  I had just bought the Module Magic book and one day was watching a quilting show and saw an amazing quilt that I thought I could translate into knitting.  I was knitting the Curve of Pursuit at the time and began putting techniques together to see what I could come up with.  I knit a few modules, put it aside for some reason (like another shinier thing) and never thought about it again - until I found it while "organizing" my yarns.  I picked it up, frogged what I had, started over again and have a fair sized swatch right now:
I'm knitting (in my head) a different triangle - if it does work in real life, I'll release the pattern.
The second treasure I found tossed in one of my bins was a swatch of a stitch I'm pretty sure is in one of the Barbara Walker books.  It's a pretty cool looking net and when I first saw it I wanted to knit it, just because.  I knit a good size swatch, realized I'd made a mistake and put it away.
When I found it, I knew I wanted to use that stitch again, but for the life of me, couldn't find the pattern for it anywhere, so I carefully tinked my swatch and managed to figure the stitch out (me thinks).  Now, the question was what to do with it.  I had an initial idea for a stole (that might eventually be created), but didn't want to commit to something like that at the time, so I settled for a purse:

Let's see...what else?  Oh yeah!  Sewing.  I learnt to sew when I was ten or eleven - just after I learnt to crochet.  I eventually graduated to a sewing machine and during my adolescence I sew a lot of my own clothes.  I hadn't sewn in probably 10 years and when I convinced Joel to throw away his old (very heavy and very ugly) pillow, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to make him a new one.
I had forgot how fast (and pleasant) sewing can be.  I managed to do the pillow in one afternoon.  It's quite simple and no, I didn't do the quilting:

The other day I got another custom order for the yarn I used for Dianna.  As I was dyeing the roving for it, I decided to dye another one in a different color to see how one of my dyes would break down:

The first one is already being spun and will become an Arco Iris yarn.  As for the second one (merino), I'm not sure what to do with it...

I've also dyed and am (was) spinning some silk in different shades of green.  I need to find a better technique for dyeing silk, though.  The way I'm doing it now leaves some undyed spaces which dilute the color on the finished yarn.  When I started spinning this roving I was going with "let's see how thin I can make it" approach. After a few hours and cramps on my fingers, it hit me: what will I do with this sewing thread...so I began spinning a thicker singles.

Finally, 4 days ago I decided to try my hands at Skew.  The construction for these socks is simply amazing.  I did the first sock in two days, just because I wanted to see it done.  Since I was using different needles and yarn from the ones recommended in the pattern, I wasn't sure it was going to fit, but it turned out OK.  I'm almost done with the second sock and might re-do the first one - because I went down one needle size for the second. 

Give them a try, trust the pattern and just knit.  They are a very fast and pleasant knit.

Once every 4 years I take a break from life.  I stop everything I'm doing and watch the games.  I grew up watching it because that was what we're supposed to do, but as I grew older I realized I like the game - I like the strategy, the skills involved and if everything else is sub-par, there are always the legs ;).

In case anyone is wondering if my silence is due to a new design, sickness or accident, it's not.  I'm just watching the cup.  I can't knit while watching the various games, so I spin.  Hopefully the matches will be good enough I'll have to learn how to spin not looking at my hands.

I've "taught" myself to listen to matches, but I'm having a hard time with the British narrators.  The accent isn't such a big deal, but the way they narrate the game is - way too much commentary, way too little narration.  For some reason I'm not able to listen to internet radio here, so I have to spin without looking at it.  Luckily some gorgeous roving from the gnomespun arrived last weekend and I'm having a great time spinning it.

Sorry for the pic, but I couldn't wait to start spinning this, so I didn't take a photo of the lovely braid...This is Dorset top in a color scheme called pheasant.  It's my first time spinning this type of fiber and I really like it.  I'm getting very fine singles and am hoping I can come up with a new design to make the colors justice.

For now, I'm just enjoying seeing the colors of the different teams twist past my fingers.

Dyeing and spinning

Now that the weather is warm enough that I can put yarn and rovings outside with no risk of them freezing, I'm back to my wheel and crock pot.

I had to dye and spin one skein to replace another one that got lost in the mail :(. The first roving I dyed didn't come out quite the way I wanted, so I dyed a second.
Since I'm a very thrifty frugal cheap person, I decided to spin both rovings using different plying techniques. Turns out, I liked both yarns.

The first one is a two ply, lace weight yarn. The second is a n-ply, heavier lace weight (me thinks):
Right now they are both reserved for the person who bought the missing skein.
As soon as she picks one of them, I'll make the other one available to the general public.


Although the spinning is coming along just fine, I'm having an awful time with my knitting.
I'm working on a new design, knit a sample, didn't like how it came out and decided to chart it first.
For this new design to work as a pattern so people (other than me) can actually knit it, I'll have to do some serious mods to the stitches I choose. Problem is, I'm tired of starting this over and over again...sigh.
There is another design idea that has been haunting my nights and I know there is no way I can knit this one without charting it out first. Oddly enough, the knitting itself will be less complicated than the one I'm working on now.
I also have an almost finished (as in knit by me and another person) triangular shawl design that only needs an edging and the (dreaded) writing. I might release this one before the other two I talked about above.

On other news, we bought a new toy and had to take some money out of our down payment account to get it. Also, today I had to turn a comission down. I really don't like doing that, but the job was awfully labor intensive and would take time away from my test knit and the designs I'm working on. Oh, well...