16 skeins

Sixteen was a lot to tackle in a weekend, especially since finishing them means counting out large skeins into smaller sizes to sell. I'm very tired of counting to 90 and 100, which I did multiple times as I skeined my yarns to size. Oy. But! They're pretty. And I'm hoping to actually sell some in real life tomorrow, to a knitting group at the Somerville library. And if I don't, then to the website they'll go. I'm reasonably happy with the colors, and even managed to custom-dye some for a friend from work. The little guys in the picture are leftovers from the fingering weight skeins. The pic is bad, since it was taken in the dark with flash, instead of in real light, but I think they're cute anyway.

almost there...

After much frogging and gnashing of teeth, here is my sweater, lounging on the carpet, after an initial blocking. As feared, it's a little small around, so it'll have an extra-wide button band, and we'll call it an artistic element. I ripped down to the armpits after almost finishing the decreases the first time, and knitted back up a la: slip two stitches, knit 1, pass the two slipped stitches over. I like the pretty line that this creates.

Since I added 16 stitches to each sleeve to make up for my poor gauging, I also had to figure out how to account for that as I decreased down. I ended up decreasing two sleeve stitches on each sleeve twice, both toward the top of the sweater, which seems to have taken care of enough of the extra fabric around the top to make it fit me reasonably well. I'll take in a little extra at the armpits as well. Now it's just the bands, and it'll be done!

But, knitting will be set aside briefly, as I've gotten an invitation to bring some of my sale yarns to a knitting group event next Monday, and I have so much white yarn still here, I figure I should dye at least some of it before then... time to clear the kitchen counters!

sweater again

Okay, maybe this pic shows it off better. Tim has agreed that it will probably make me crazy, so I was be frogging tomorrow, in the car, on the way to visit Brown. Or maybe during my lunch break. Either way, I guess it's better to get it right than to never wear the thing.

gored decreases

I have been speeding along like a good little knitter on my raglan sweater (designed from Ann Budd's sweater pattern book). By the time I reached the sleeves, I was half a stitch off of gauge (oops), which I didn't notice when I swatched (and I swear, I swear I swatched). In any case, it didn't affect the body too much, I don't think -- I was knitting it to be larger and roomier, and now, well, it isn't. It should still fit. The sleeves, however, needed to be made larger, so I added 8 stitches to each. I still don't know how it has affected the outcome of the sweater, but I've put it on, more or less, a couple of times, and it seems to be fine and good.

Except! Except I have been doing my decreases backwards from how I meant to do them. They should have slanted toward the seam, and they are slanting the opposite way, thus creating a fairly pronounced gore between sleeve and not-sleeve. So now I'm left trying to decide whether this will become a decorative element, or whether I have to rip all the way back to the armpits (about 7" at this point) and redo the decreases so that they slant towards the seam instead of away. Sigh. My sweater knitting is cursed. Thoughts, comments?

a few pictures...

I used way too much soap this time around... much rinsing ensued. These are a couple of the six skeins. I'll post pics of all of them once they're reskeined. They're much more attractive after they're reskeined, in my opinion. I also learned my lesson and dyed only one weight of yarn for a change. I won't have to stare at them and try to determine which are sock weight and which are light worsted. I do have two purple/blue/yellow/green skeins, though, so I'll have to devise a system to keep track of which smaller skeins I make from each big one.

paint & dye (but no pictures)

This weekend was a good one for home improvements, especially if you count changing white yarn into prettily colored yarn a home improvement, which I do. Tim finished painting the downstairs bathroom to a lovely blue with grey undertones, and I took down most of the hideous accoutrements (shiny gold accessories just aren't us). Now it just needs a new light fixture and towel bar and it'll be done!

I spent a few hours this morning becoming reacquainted with my dye equipment. I'm now up to an even dozen powder dyes, which means I may have to get some more squeeze bottles soon, since handpainting is a much more exact process with the squeeze bottles than it is trying to dribble dye out of spaghetti sauce jars. I seem to have managed nonetheless, and have six skeins drying above a heating vent. I'll try to have some pictures soon -- most are deep/dark colors, with a couple of rainbowy skeins, and one orange/yellow/red thrown in. I really should work up a pattern to use with these things. I don't really know what 560 yds of worsted would be best used for.

I'm plugging along on my sweater, but my gauge is 1/2 a stitch off, which I think will be okay in the body, because I'd planned a bigger size than I needed to anyway, but I think the sleeves are going to come out too tight. So, I'm planning on knitting 66 stitches instead of 60 around, but then will it get all wonky when I join the sleeves to the body and do the raglan decreases? I've tried to dissect the pattern, but haven't gotten too far.

I know that I knit half the front of the body (it's a cardigan), then knit all but 8 of one sleeve, then the back, then all but 8 of the other, then the other half of the front... so, when I join everything together, I'll have 12 more stitches than my pattern calls for... so I guess I haven't figured out how to adjust my decreases to make it make sense because I've never knitted a raglan before. Hopefully someone at knitting group tomorrow may be able to parse this out with/for me.

closet solutions

The new closet where I plan to keep my yarn is in an ideal location. It's embedded in a little nook between my living room and the guest room/tv/spinning/music room. Across from the closet are built-ins that include bookshelves that hold all of my fiber-related books, a drawer for loose patterns and extra-large needles, and a cabinet for various projects, my ball winder, and other paraphernalia.

Unfortunately, my giant Tupperwares of doom yarn don't fit in this closet, so I'm trying to update my storage solutions, and these ornament boxes are coming to the rescue. They're collapsible, you can compartmentalize them with the inserts if you want, and they're two-layered. This is one of the ones that I've filled, and I have another that holds the yarn for my ab-fabbish afghan in the bottom compartment, and my afghan itself (in all of its long-unfinished glory) in the top half. As an added bonus, the organizers were on sale at Home Depot for $2.50, so I was feeling economical enough to buy some more undyed yarn for an upcoming dyefest, whenever I get around to that. Today, I spent a couple of hours organizing the basement, and will probably spend another hour on the bookshelves, now that I've dug my book boxes out of the basement. Mmmm alliteration.

Also, I have other things to say, but I think I'm going to try to post here more often, which means I'll save them so that I can use them in new entries, sooner rather than later. The topics include: paradise fibers rhapsodies demystified; newly-spun yarns; my sweater.

new "storefront"

Attention shoppers! Woolarina.com is beta-testing its new osCommerce storefront. It should be fully functional, but please let us know if it isn't!

The Full Catalog
The Sale Page

Much applause to Paula for getting this up and running!

(if you do decide to order something, and don't get a confirmation from us, please email us and let us know -- the website doesn't like to tell us when we get orders, and we're trying to work that out...)

sweater, take 4

I've embarked on yet another sweater project. This will be the fourth sweater that I'm knitting for myself, and perhaps I'll wear this one, although I'm not banking on it.

Sweater #1 I knit two winters ago. I bought the yarn in Chicago in December 2003, I think, and finished the sweater while it was still vaguely chilly out, maybe. It's a great tweed yarn, bulky (the sweater's knit on 11s) with dropped shoulders. I think I was kinda sorta using a pattern in Hip to Knit. My seams are awful and I never wear the sweater. If I fixed the seams, I might wear it. And maybe took an inch or two out of the width, which is a little more problematic.

Sweater #2 is an acrylic blend, bulky yarn with one black ply and one brown. My shaping was off, the seams, again, less than stellar, and the bottom rolls. I don't wear it. I plan to frog it one of these days.

Sweater #3 is Berella Polar, and I've written about it here. The raglan shaping at the top makes it look wonky, and I think I should've gone up a needle size and regauged, because the fabric just doesn't feel right, plus . Or perhaps I should stop trying to use acrylic blends. This one, too, will likely be ripped up and recycled into hats or some such.

So, this new sweater has some lessons learned behind it:

1. I'm using a worsted weight, 100% wool yarn (Cherry Tree Hill potluck yarn in blues, greens, and purples, kinda like this.
2. I made a real, live, 4" gauge swatch. In fact, I made 1 1/2, 'cause I started on 8s and bumped down to 7s.
3. I'm creating a pattern from the Ann Budd Book of Sweater Patterns, but I'm doing all of the measurements extra-carefully, and basing them off of pre-existing sweaters that I like and wear.
4. I'm knitting a cardigan, because I'm more likely to wear it, especially since it's a variegated yarn and I think it needs something solid to offset it.

I'm doing seed stitch bands on the edges, 1 1/2" on the bottom and it had better not roll; crew neck; raglan shaping, although I might change my mind by the time I get to the top part; simple sleeves without bells or any other madness; no body shaping. We'll see what happens.

miles and miles of fiber

So, 2006, eh? I guess it's time to clear the sidebar and start anew!

I added up the yardage I've documented in spun yarn for 2005 -- 5,862 yards. That's 3.3 miles of yarn. Neat. That also means 6.6 miles of singles, give or take, since all I've spun is two- and three-ply.

For this year, I have many fibery goals for myself:
1. learn how to spin reasonably balanced singles
2. use all three of the flyers for my wheel
3. take a spinning class, maybe, to work on these sorts of things
4. finish at least one lace shawl project
5. dye less felty merino (i.e., learn to exercise patience in dye process)
6. learn to dye blues more consistently (my colorways always eat blue)
7. keep track of mixed dye formulas for colors so that they can be replicated

Please excuse my lack of grammatical sense this morning. Not enough coffee yet, I guess, but I wanted to get these down.

And, if I can behave myself and budget it out, I hope to purchase a drum carder. I don't know if I can wait til post craft fair season. I will wait at least until Sheep and Wool, which I'm hoping that some local folks will want to trek down to (Anne? Jess? We can use my car, as long as someone else drives).

So, that's the beginning. The end of 2005 was a bit of gift knitting -- a couple of handspun hats, the completion of the Clapotis IV, and now I'm working on a scarf from my Brooks Farm yarn purchase (see picture above), all for me. I'm also spinning merino, and looking forward to creating a home for my yarn, which it'll have as soon as the new house is more put together.

a bazaar bizarre success

We had a great time at Boston's Bazaar Bizarre on Sunday. The crowd was amazing - the line was around the block, so it's a good thing that it wasn't as ridiculously cold or snowy as it could have been. It was, however, cold enough to sell a plethora of hats. There are many days of hat knitting and dyeing ahead before Crafty Bastards next October. Not sure if we'll do summer fairs, unless we think of useful things to sell there.

My favorite new addition to our inventory is odds and ends skeins. These are small bits of yarn from that last bit of roving that we spun, or leftover dyed yarn after reskeining a batch to a useful length. It's a great way for folks to try out a new yarn without the full-skein commitment, or to have just a bit of trim for a project. And, it's a great way for us to use our little oddball bits.

If I drove and didn't mind not having a steady income, I would craft fair across the country.

the reveal

Okay, so back in October, a month ago in fact, I went to Rhinebeck. I posted about Rhinebeck. I put up some pictures. But, the most exciting purchase that I made had to stay off the Internet until today.

Today is my little sister's 21st birthday. She has been knitting for longer than I have, and took up spinning quickly and intuitively. She spent many hours spinning on my Ashford Traveller when she visited, and she drop spindles on the train in Chicago (so if you see a small Asian with cute hair and a drop spindle, feel free to say hello).

Anyway, today, the wheel is being gifted to her (well, a picture of it is, and she'll be here for Thanksgiving when she can claim it in person). That means that I can show off its replacement, which came home with me from Rhinebeck.

She's a Lendrum, Double Treadle, scotch tension, plus I have the lace and bulky flyers to go with her, although I haven't tried them yet. I had to watch Chelsea talk about her wheel (which happens to be the same make/model as my wheel), and convince myself to wait until now to talk about mine. My last three yarns have been spun on the Lendrum, and we're learning to get along. The action is much smoother, and I love that the design means that I can see the yarn as it builds up on the bobbin so easily.

Of course, I will miss my Traveller, which has taught me so well the basics of spinning. But, I know that it will have a good home, and be a good gift for the sister.

lazy dyeday

The dyebath is percolating, and Tim is off to purchase some vinegar so that I can do some steam dyeing with the rovings. The colors come out nicely, but they do need the acid wash to set. The yarns are cycling through the pan on the stove. I'm even wearing gloves to prevent my looking like a dye artist at work on Monday.

My Clapotis yarn is being ornery. I wound it into a center pull ball, and somehow it ravelled itself around itself so that when I pulled, two extra strands of yarn came along with the one I needed. Ended up rebaling the whole thing. Better work this time. Grr. I am five repeats into the body of the pattern, and have found many instances to pull it out and work a few rows (before meetings at work, while signing home insurance paperwork, etc).

We close on a new house in a week. I've been working at the new job for 3 months. It's no wonder that I'm not writing here as much as I'd like.

Getting things done

I've joined a local group of creative type journallers in a challenge to do some creating every day in November, as a kind of answer to the National Novel Writing Month phenomenon. Apparently, this has helped to motivate me even more than reading other knitblogs. I've actually finished projects that are months old, and have done some work toward the craft fair; namely, I have re-entered the mouse knitting season:



That little stack is the beginning of a larger menagerie that will be stuffed with catnip and on sale. If only they reproduced like their real-life counterparts.

I've also completed the arm warmers based on the Mikado fingerless glove pattern, except mine are fuzzy Suri Merino:



and I've embarked upon my fourth (they're addictive! they're good for xmas gifts!) Clapotis:



That one's hand-dyed superwash yarn, just like this stuff.

Progress! Woo!

craft fair strategizing

by this time next week, i hope to have completed:
-1 set handspun armwarmers with reasonable pattern that can be given away with handspun
-10 felted mice, ready for stuffing
-organization of the inventory spreadsheet

Bazaar Bizarre Boston - Sunday December 11, 1-9pm!

Come see Paula and I be excited for the reasonable hours! We shouldn't have to get up at 5:45am for this one!

less than two months?!

Holiday knitting is upon me, and caught me completely by surprise. I have at least four projects that I'd like to complete before xmas, plus I'm desperately in need of a pair of pop-top mittens for myself, and I'm 3 inches from finishing my Plymouth Odyssey hat and currently out of yarn (grr to my big head). The four projects? A scarf, long opera gloves, a lace shawl, and a multi-yarn garter shawl. Also possibly a leaf lace scarf, but that one's on hold in an attempt to remain realistic. Plus, spinning up 4 more ounces of silk/merino that I'm spinning on consignment, of sorts, plus another craft fair. *whimper* Time for a game plan.

sp6

Yay! My pal received her first package. It was yarn that I dyed, but I was all paranoid about telling her that, in case she could track me down online via woolarina or some such. I have been a slacker with the mail since moving here, so I'll have to motivate myself to get the next batch of stuff out soon.

As for my secret pal -- are you still out there? I got one email, but I haven't heard from you in a bit, and your email address was undeliverable...

Fiber in the Mountains

Much fun was had with bloggers, livestock, and friends this weekend, but I gotta say that the fiber took center stage for much of the time. Rhinebeck felt more fiber-centric than Maryland Sheep and Wool did -- I'm not sure if it was the location, all pretty in the fall and far from home, or if it was my particular focus on looking at fibers rather than yarns, but it seemed like there was less commercial yarn and knitting ephemera, and more spinning and weaving and handspun or otherwise artisanal yarn (i.e., from smaller dyers/spinners rather than the big companies).

I got to the fest on Saturday at opening, and braved the gloomy, misty/rainy weather to wander through the first few barns. I serendipitously ran into these lovely ladies of the Maryland blogger/Mayorga meetup contingent, and was able to connect them to their roommates for the night. Paula and I wandered around for most of the day, and I filled my big bag with 6oz fiber balls. By the end of Sunday, I was getting pretty good at holding balls of roving in my hands and approximating their weights. Another nifty party trick for me, I suppose! Paula picked up a drum carder, which means new ways for us to blend rovings! I got lots of fabulous merino and merino/silk and other fibers, and some other goodies that will remain a mystery until my sister's 21st birthday, if I can wait that long. I am pleased that the only yarn that I purchased was from Brooks Farm (2 skeins of Four Play, to make a nice, soft scarf). It was hard to pass everything else up, but I stayed within my budget (I had all of 78 cents left when all was said and done), and I will be set for spinning for quite some time.

Other highlights: enabling a new fiber geek; fried dough and irish creme coffee; a clear sky even for a brief period; a free pound of fiber; lots of beautiful shawls; apple wine that tastes even better warmed up. and the goat? He's made of cashmere. Mmmm...

Rhinebeck Bound

Today was my last day in the office (we get Jewish holidays off sometimes, and then I'm going to a workshop thingie on Friday), so my mind is already on the weekend. I'm headed to Rhinebeck for the Sheep and Wool goodness. This will be my first visit, but since it's closer than Maryland Sheep and Wool from where I now live, it'll probably be the fest of choice.

I'm throwing around ideas of what it is I want to buy. I don't think I'll be able to pass up Brooks Farms' yarns again. They're just so amazing, and the colors really drew me in at MDS&W. Pictures don't really do them justice. Tomorrow I plan to do to reality check on how much yarn I actually have, so that I remember how much I don't need a lot more...

Crafty Success!

A fine time was had at Crafty Bastards '05, and now much restocking must be done, which means more fun with dye in the near future - hoorah!

Here's a pic of the booth with two of our intrepid crafty vendors:



Blogger can apparently do something with images that I haven't tried before, so let's hope this works.

In other news, thanks to the new job, travel, and possibly dim sum on Sunday, I have spent the last four days horizontal and fighting a virus. All is not lost, though -- I finished knitting three hats, and got some work done on the boy's scarf. Knitting was about as much focus as I had, but it was enough! Kids' hats = instant gratification.