So many hobbies!

Getting closer to a sweater

This is a lousy picture of about 100 yards of bulky-weight yarn from my Cormo/Border Leicester roving.  This definitely won't make a sleek, out-on-the-town sweater but more of a hang-out-on-the-weekend kind of sweater. 

This morning I was pleased to find I'd received my Ravelry invitation.  So far I've added my books and needles but not much else.  My stash of sock yarn will take me quite a while to enter and then there's all of my handspun.  To be honest, I'm not really getting what the big Ravelry hubub is all about.  Sure it will be nice to get all of my stuff, patterns and projects neatly organized but, really, I can do that on my computer at home.  Maybe my problem is I don't have any knitting friends.  At least none that I actually sit and knit with.  If there's a Stitch&Bitch in town, I don't know about it and everyone else I know who knits lives a minimum of 45 minutes away.  Sorry, folks, I just don't get it.  Can someone explain it to me?  Am I just not enough of a techno-geek?

Harry Potter? I'm satisfied.

I read from 10am to 10pm yesterday.  I knew once I started reading I wouldn't be able to stop until I was done.  Don't worry, I won't give away any spoilers.  All I'll say, which is what I've heard from everyone, is that I'm satisfied.  I had made three predictions on what would happen and I was right on one, wrong on one and half right on another.  Now, onto the fiber...

Saturday was the third and final session of the Sheep Breeds Study class on fine wool breeds.  This time we learned about the Merino, Rambouillet and Romeldale breeds.  The above samples, from left to right, are Merino, Rambouillet, Romeldale and Rambouillet blended with silk.  Of the four, I think the Rambouillet was my favorite.  It has wonderful loft and makes for a very bouncy, warm yarn.  I also learned Andean plying which is how the above samples were plyed.  Once you know how to wind the singles onto your hand, Andean plying is very easy.  It works well for making sample yarns or for plying off of a drop spindle.

Beth gave me a thumbs up on the Cormo/Border Leicester roving that I had had processed.  She said it was fine and liked the yarn she was spinning.  I will admit I'm starting to like the yarn I've made from it.  It's a bulky-weight, squishy yarn that will make a very warm sweater.  I spun up another bobbin tonight.  I love the tactile experience of processing a fleece myself, but it's a lot of work from dirty fleece to triple-ply yarn.  I'm rather liking the ability to just pull roving out of a box, pre-draft it a bit and then spin.

The new flyer for my Ashford Traditional.  My wheel is 30 years old and the flyer that it came with only has one ratio.  This one has three ratios and the smaller two will make it much easier to spin lace-weight yarn or very fine wools that need more twist.  I need to take some fine sandpaper to it to smooth the rough spots then I can start spinning the extra-fine batts I made a couple of weeks ago.  Mmmm, a Merino, cashmere and angora blend.  Oh, my!

I read all day

Sorry.  Can't talk.  I'm on page 655.  Fiber things tomorrow.

No comments to email

I discovered this morning that Typepad hasn't been delivering comments to my email.  I don't visit my blog that often so I didn't realize I'd been getting comments.  I try and reply to the comments you leave me so my apologies for the silence.  I'll figure out what's happening and fix it.  Have a great weekend everyone!

Note:  Yahoo mail was putting them in my bulk email mailbox, which I never look at, only delete.  I guess I'd better be checking it from now on.  I've added Typepad's email to my address book so comments should come to my inbox from now on. 

Marigolds 2-ply

Despite the fact that I was constantly picking out VM while I was spinning, I'm fairly pleased with how this yarn came out.  It's softer than I was expecting and once plyed, became very squooshy.  Yellow is NOT my color though, so this will probably end up in a felting project.  I bought it because it was cheerful and I was in need of cheerful.  I have a lot of trouble spinning this kind of wool evenly.  Merino and Superwash Merino I seem to have little trouble spinning evenly, but the rougher the wool, the less even my spinning is.  It doesn't help that I'm not nearly as anal as I used to be and I don't fix the thick and thin spots like I should.  I guess I'll have to work on that.

I'll be starting (and most likely finishing) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this weekend.  I may have little blog fodder come Sunday night.

Marigolds singles

I thought this roving looked cheerful so I bought it off of ebay.  I won't say from whom because I'm not terribly happy with it.  There was too much VM that I was constantly picking out and it was fairly annoying.  You can see some that I missed at the bottom left of the bobbin.  Anyway, this was my spinning tonight.  I'm almost done with the 4 oz. I bought and tomorrow I'll ply it.  I have no idea what I'll do with the yarn because I can't wear yellow or orange.  I just liked it.  Maybe I'll felt something with it.

So before I sign off and go to bed, I have a question:  when you've run out of clean glasses and you need one, do you make the effort to wash one, or do you just grab a measuring cup out of the cupboard and use that instead?   I think it's time to run the dishwasher...

My first fingering-weight sock yarn!

I'm so pleased!  For me, spinning a singles fine enough to ply into fingering weight is like slalom skiing:  when you're doing it right, you're leaning far forward over your tips and it feels like at any moment you're going to loose control and ski into a tree.  But I persevered!  Spinning fingering weight yarn was my challenge for the Tour de Fleece and I'm very pleased I accomplished my challenge for the year.  The yarn ended up being around 300 yards (probably a bit less) and a lot pinker than I thought it would be looking at the roving.  It's very soft and will make very nice socks.  How decadent to wear silk socks!  Of course, I still have to knit them.

I got my renewed passport today.  It cost me a small fortune to get it expedited but I got it in about 3 weeks.  I'm going to Italy at the end of September and I'm starting to get excited.  As I'm doing the final pre-departure preparation, I'll be picking out a good traveling knitting project.  Knitting and crocheting are the perfect travel projects:  they can be taken out and put away with very little fuss and are great for passing time while you sit in airports waiting for flights.  We have layovers going and coming of at least 2 hours each time.  Do I take socks or lace?  Or both?

No spinning, no knitting

The only thing fiber related I did tonight was wind the Merino/silk singles into a center-pull ball.  Yes, that's a test tube in the center.  The test tube keeps the center from from collapsing until I can ply tomorrow.  To properly ply from a center-pull ball, you need to stick your thumb in the center to keep it from collapsing and to keep the center from coming out and making a knot.  It took me about an hour to wind this ball.  There were alot of singles!

After work was filled with grocery shopping, buying a new deadbolt and waiting for it to be re-keyed then coming home and trying to install the new one.  It took a while.  Oh, and I made cookies for work.  I'll use the excuse of celebrating a co-worker being with the University for 10 years but I really just wanted them and if I bring them to work, I won't eat all of them myself. 

Back on the bike

I'm finally chugging along for the Tour de Fleece.  This represents my spinning for Saturday and Sunday.  It's a 50/50 Merino/silk blend I bought at the Great Lakes Fiber Show Memorial weekend.  You can see a picture of the roving here.  I had to work at it, but I think I may have licked my aversion to spinning very thin.  I should end up with a fingering weight sock yarn after it's plied.  I've learned that when you're spinning for 2-ply fingering weight, it takes FOREVER to spin 4 oz. of fiber.  I've got probably 10 hours of spinning in this one bobbin.  Dang!

Friday night I dyed about 5 oz. of Superwash Merino using the new dyes I got this week:  Spiced Pumpkin, Boysenberry, Key Lime and Dark Meadow.   I must confess that it is a butt-ugly piece of dyed wool.  It would have been fine if I'd left out the Spiced Pumpkin but with it...  it's not pretty.  That said, I'm going to take a picture then spin it and ply it.  I'm still working on the theory that even the most attrocious roving can look amazing once it's spun.  I've seen a few terrible-looking home-dyed rovings on my Flickr groups that were so incredible once it they were spun up, I couldn't believe they'd come from the same roving.  When I'm done, I'll present the before and after and you can give me your opinions.

I picked up my copy of the new Harry Potter book this weekend.  I haven't started it yet because I know that once I do, I won't be able to put it down and I'll get nothing else done.  I'm warning you now that once I start it, there will be nothing blog-worthy until I finish it.

And then there were two...

Bobbin #2 spun up pretty quicky once I figured out Beth's modified long draw.  All of the second bobbin, which you can see it over full, was spun in two hours.  This fiber has a staple length of about 8 inches so I tried to put less twist in it in the hopes that the resulting yarn will be softer and not picky.  I have probably 5 lbs. of roving, which means lots of yarn.  I already have some ideas of some sweaters I want to make.

I have been having a rather off week.  I know to blame it on hormones and I've learned over time to cut myself a lot of slack when I feel like this, knowing that "this too shall pass."   If I just don't feel like knitting or spinning, I no longer stress about it and I sit and watch a movie.  Tonight I treated myself to a book and dinner at Panera.  I picked up The Celtic Collection by Alice Starmore.  To my knowledge, this is the only Starmore book still in print.  The others you can pick up used for up to five hundred dollars.  I thought I'd get the current one while I could still afford it.  The sweaters in this book are way beyond me at this point but they are so beautiful.  I hope some day to be up to the challenge of knitting one.  I want to start with "Rosemarkie" on page 23.  It looks like it's supposed to be the easiest one in the book.  "Easy" being a relative term, of course.  So far the only yarn I have in my stash, besides my own handspun, is sock yarn.  And I think we all know by now that sock yarn doesn't count as stash.  I'm contemplating buying the yarn for "Rosemarkie" and starting my own Stash.  You know, so I'll have it when I need it.  It's good to be prepared.  Isn't "Be prepared" the Boy Scout motto?  We should all be good little boy scouts and have plenty of yarn in our stashes.  Just in case.