So many hobbies!

Dyeing with Ellen

Oh, people!  I'm pretty sure I'll be adding handpainted yarn to my store in the near future.  Handpainting yarn was FUN!  Ellen Minard (from Half-Pint Farms in Vermont) was a wonderful teacher and I learned so much from her and my fellow students.  I just wish I'd brought my camera to class.  I'm kicking myself now that I didn't.  The best part of being in a class with others is seeing what colors they choose.  I find myself picking mostly the same colors and when I started using colors I saw others using, I made yarn I loved. 

From Sybil, I borrowed her colors of rust, pumpkin and charcoal and added pine green to liven things up and make the colorway my own.  I love, love, love this yarn and I can't wait to make myself a pair of socks.

These skeins used cherry, toffee and mountain aqua.  Where they combined, I got purple and a lovely green.  I haven't decided how much I like this one for myself.  I was trying to move away from my usual colors.  It's hard to get an idea of how something skeined will look once it's knitted up.  It's a keeper for potential sale yarns, though.  I have more yarn that I dyed today but it's drying.  I'll try and post more pictures tomorrow.

I highly recommend taking a class, or classes, in your chosen interest.  You learn so much not only from the instructor, but from your fellow students.  This weekend's class was hosted by Artisan Knitworks in Grosse Pointe Park, MI.  It was an hour's drive for me (gas prices - Yikes!) but the store is beautiful, the owners extremely nice and helpful and they fed us, which really raises the bar in my opinion.  They brought in bagels from my favorite bakery (Brueggers) for breakfast and had lunch catered.  There were a certain number of skeins that were included in the materials fee and they had lots of extra yarn of different kinds that they sold to us for wholesale.  I, of course, ended up spending more than I'd planned but I'm so happy with how my yarn turned out.  I will definitely take classes from Artisan Knitworks again.

New toys are good!

 

They're especially nice if they arrive in the mail when it's snowing... AGAIN!  Geez!  Anyway, I ordered this beauty from Butterfly Girl Designs, who makes lovely spindles.  The whorl is polymer clay and the entire spindle weighs .8 ounce.  I've been spinning up a sample of Merino/pygora.  I think I may be in love with pygora.  When I get my little place in the country...

Unfortunately, it was a small sample and what you see is the entire sample.  Still, it was enough to tell me the spindle spins beautifully, although due to the small diameter of the whorl, not for very long. 

I may have to start a spindle collection. 

Finding the right cable

Finding the right cable pattern has been tougher than I'd expected.  It's the major focal point of the shawl  so I have to decide what "feeling" I want it to have, if that makes sense.  Since the edging yarn is green, or mostly green, I'm leaning toward a Celtic knotwork pattern.  Well, that and I've loved Celtic knotwork for a long time.  Once I decide on the "feel" of the shawl, I also have to pick a pattern that I can end in a point, since I really want to keep the point at the bottom of the cable panel.  Oh, and speaking of yarn, I'd completely forgotten about the 3-ply Cormo yarn I made quite a few months ago.  It's perfect for the cable panel, which is fantastic because I really wanted the shawl to be knit from 100% handspun.

This is a picture from a book called Knitted Gardens by Jan Messent.  This little garden would make a great play set for a little girl.  Do you see the lily pond with lily pads and flowers?  Oh, my!  Or, if you're feeling particularly adventuresome, how about Knit a Fantasy Story, which comes complete with directions for a castle, unicorn, damsel, chickens, etc.  I just added that one to my wish list.

Yarn experiment

This was the Tutti Frutti roving that expired on my Etsy store today.  It obviously wasn't a big hit in its roving incarnation so I decided to spin it as a singles, over-dye it in red and try felting it.  If it works and looks good, I'll put it back up for sale.  I saw some felted yarn someone else had made and I liked the look of it.

I decided to visit my local used bookstore after work today and look for knitting books.  There was one.  Yes, only one.  I had lovely dreams of finding a treasure like one of the out-of-print Alice Starmore books or the Harmony books that have since been reprinted in a new guise but apparently are crap.  No such luck.  I should have known that the local knitters would have cleaned out anything good.  Bummer.

Tonight was Spin Night.  Tomorrow is Bagel Day... and Sushi Night.  The Helmones are coming to visit and I'm hoping to feed them into somnolence.  There might be chocolate.

One mitt down

This one took me forever to knit and finish.  People actually knit socks out of this weight?!  Pairs of socks?  In a matter of days?!  Do these people work?  Do they sleep?  I can't fathom it.  I must just be a very slow knitter.  Yikes!

I've been pondering my shawl pattern... okay, hold on sec, I'll take a photo of the sketch... my scanner isn't hooked up...

This is my original rough sketch so I don't have any measurements and some changes will likely happen.  Sorry it's taken me so long to show this.  Now you can see just what I've been talking about.  Okay, so the center panel will have the cable - pattern to be determined.  The green Merino/mohair I spun will be the dark edging  and possibly a couple of rows along the center panel.  I wanted the entire shawl to be out of my handspun but since it doesn't look like I'll have enough of the Polwarth/kid mohair (that I'm still in love with), I'm now thinking I'll do the center panel out of millspun yarn.  The center panel may or may not come to a point.  It depends on the cable pattern I use.  I like how the point looks, at least in the sketch, so I want to keep it if it works.  I'll knit the center panel first, then pick up stitches along each side and knit out to each point. 

I'd like to say I did a lot of knitting this weekend, but what I really did was a lot of sleeping and reading.  I hung out at Barnes & Noble a bit and checked out some knitting books, none of which came home with me.  Next weekend is my dyeing class so there won't be much napping then.  Woot! 

You have got to try cables!

Is that gorgeous or what?!  And that's my practice swatch!  I'm telling you, you have to try cables.  They are so easy, and you don't need no stinkin' cable needle.  :-)  I used a dpn.  I think you know by now that the fanciest thing I've tried has been socks... this was easier.  Much easier.  It's so much fun to watch the cables take shape as you keep knitting.  The center cable is a 6-stitch cable and the ones on each side are 4-stitch cables.  Something that surprised me (although it shouldn't have) was how tight the knitting got when I crossed the stitches.  It makes perfect sense now, though.  Because the stitches are being crossed, they're being stretched which tightens things. 

All my spinning last weekend has left me a tad burned out on turning fiber into yarn.  Since I have three knitting projects I'm in the middle of, and of course I'm now obsessed with cables, knitting will pretty much be it for the weekend.  Who knows, I might even complete something.  Shocker! 

It's Spring!

Last night was Spin Night and I worked on this.  It's Corriedale pencil roving from Crown Mountain in the Silk Road colorway.  I wasn't really thrilled with it while I was spinning but once I plied it (tonight's fun), I really started loving it.  It's nice and soft.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it.  It will felt beautifully so it may have a future in some felted project.

I've been thinking about chickens a lot lately.  Normally that might be pretty weird but I still plan on buying some land in the country in the next couple of years.  Free-range eggs taste amazing and free-range chicken tastes just as good.  Sunday I checked out the McMurray hatchery website to see what kind of chickens they sell.  They have a huge variety from the common to the exotic.  Since I want to keep the egg layers and eat the meat chickens, I've decided to do what my parents did:  the meat chickens will be white and the egg layers will be colored.  It'll make it much easier to distinguish between the ones for the coop and the ones for the freezer.  Of course, this is all assuming I can get someone to butcher and prepare the freezer chickens.  I'm far too tender-hearted to do it myself.  I remember coming home once when I was a teenager and seeing a headless chicken in the kitchen sink.  My parents and brother were in the back yard doing the deed and since they hadn't seen me come in, I snuck up to my room to hide until they were done.  I like to eat them but I'm perfectly happy to pay someone to do them in for me.  The way I look at it, I can buy chickens and eggs at the grocery store that lived horrible lives in tiny cages or I can grow happy chickens that spent their lives wandering around my little farm eating bugs and green things and seeds.  Besides, the older I get, the more I realize we need to take care of this planet.  My way of doing that is to do what I can to decrease my ecological footprint by growing some of my own food, animal and vegetable.  Part of my family believes that global warming is complete nonsense preached by paranoid people.  Personally, I don't know if global warming is real or not, but shouldn't we err on the side of caution and act as though it IS real?  Shouldn't we do something now just in case?  If it turns out global warming isn't actually happening, won't it be a good thing that our actions now, though they should prove unnecessary, mean the air is cleaner in the future?  The way I see it, it's a win-win.  But humans are a short-sighted species and we're more interested in doing what's the easiest and cheapest now without regard for the price that will be paid by future generations.  I find that very sad. 

Almost enough

This is a great deal of what I did over the weekend.  I was fully planning on practicing cabling this weekend but I got distracted by spinning.  The brown roving is from a fleece I bought last year and I'd really like to finish up.  Spinning it up is on my Mission Possible 2008 list.  I've almost finished spinning for a third skein which will bring the total weight of yarn spun up to two pounds.  Enough for a sweater.  This is super bulky weight so the future sweater will knit up fast.  I still need to spin up some contrast yarn for the yoke(?) and the cuffs.  I want to knit the collar and the shoulders top down in the contrast yarn and then switch to the brown.  I don't know what that kind of sweater is called off the top of my head.

Friday I signed up for a yarn dyeing class on the 29th and 30th with Ellen Minand.  It's my first dyeing class and I'm pretty excited.  So far I've gotten all my information from books and email friends.  Learning dyeing from someone who dyes so beautifully will be wonderful.  I'm thinking of adding hand-dyed commercial yarn to my Etsy store in the future.

I still have one more day off tomorrow.  I think I'll see a movie.

Last of the Merino/mohair

About 120 yards of the Merino/mohair for my shawl.  I'm in a bit of a dilema with this stuff.  The first skein is pretty good and I'm thinking of entering it in the skein contest at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in May.  The problem is, I'd like to have my shawl done by then so I can wear it around and show it off.  Hey, you've got to have goals, right?  I love how this stuff spins, and I love the shine, so I guess I'm going to have to order more and dye it up in another colorway.  More dyeing and more spinning.  What could be better?  I just hope future skeins are as good at the first one.

Nights out

I love that I have Monday Spin Night and Wednesday Knit Night.  I live alone, except for Seli, and it's good for me to get out and have actual, fun conversation.  Unfortunately, my Nights don't give me much blog fodder.  Tonight was a bit more memorable because we had a guy show up wanting to learn to crochet.  Yes, a guy.  Trevor was sweet and rather attractive... and far too young for me.  Darn!  We also learned a bit about commercial travel since one of the ladies there is a commercial pilot.  She had some fun stories, and if I could remember her name, I'd tell you. 

I had some questions and comments about my new cabling book so I thought I'd give an overview.  The book is broken into three basic sections:  Cabling Basics (which has lots of helpful illustrations), Projects (from scarves to pillows to sweaters to afghans) and a Stitch Dictionary.  The basics section has good written and illustrated instructions.  Honestly, cabling is very simple.  In its simplest form, you just cross stitches.  Of course, you can move from that to very complicated patterns but basic cables are just two or more stitches that you've crossed and knitted.  Heck, for simple cables, you don't even need a cabling needle (which can just be a single dpn).  If you're interested in cabling, this book will show you how.