Home is where the yarn is.

Remember how I said that in February I would start finishing up some WIPs? Well, apparently I'm not over the handspun obsession, because for some reason all I've wanted to knit is a baby sweater out of this girly Falkland wool that I spun up (Pipsqueak from FatCatKnits), even though there are no little girls expected among friends and family.

So the other day I pulled out the swift and ball-winder and, luxury of luxuries, found a place to set them up. In our old house, there was nowhere to clamp them both, so I clamped the ball winder to a desk and would hold the swift in my left hand while I cranked the ball-winder in my right and if the slightest thing went wrong I'd have a big mess on my hands. I marveled a little bit at the beauty of the whole set-up while getting ready to knit.

I cast on for a modified EZ February baby sweater. It became clear early on that I wouldn't have enough yarn to finish, but I figured I could use that little skein of leftover singles that I had plied to crochet on a lacy little cap sleeve if I needed to, so I persisted. Unfortunately I ran out of yarn while casting off, and the little yellow yarn is a little thinner than the rest, so I decided that maybe the yarn just wanted to be something else after all.

Back to the ball-winder I went, and ripped the whole thing out. And as I was walking out of the kitchen, I saw something on the floor under the swift. Another skein of yarn. Half again the yardage of the first one. Apparently, I had more than a bobbin full of the plied yarn, and I had twisted the two skeins together into one hank, and then dropped one when putting it on the swift. (So that's what my "150 yds +80" notation on the tag meant!)

So I cast on for the little sweater again. Luckily, it goes pretty fast. This time, I went for a cardigan instead of a pullover, and did YOs for the increases to make cute little eyelet rows. Aww. And I think I even have enough yarn for sleeves!

On Spindling

I haven't had a lot of time for knitting or spinning this last week, but we did get moved and the house is listed and has already been shown twice, so we're very excited. Unfortunately, the handyman that we had called to do the last needed repair just got the flu, so I guess we're going to be doing that ourselves tomorrow. :-P

I did finish knitting the handspun socks and spinning the Flawful Fibers January shipment, so if you're interested, check out the sidebar.

I don't have much time, so I'm going to cop out a little bit and paste in a post that I wrote over the holidays when I didn't have internet and then never posted. I always feel kind of weird putting up how-to-type posts because I haven't been doing this very long and I feel like it's a little pretentious of me. On the other hand, if I have information that might help someone, I don't want to withhold it. I have learned a lot from reading blogs and seeing how other people do things. So here goes.

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On Spindling

There are apparently people who can pick up a spindle and fiber and, without much trouble, create fine, even singles. Either that or a lot of people are lying on the internet (and that’s always a possibility).

Either way, I am not one of those people. When I took spindle to fiber, the result was something only vaguely resembling yarn, and I will not pretend otherwise. Just about everything I have learned so far about spinning, I have learned the hard way.

Not that I’m complaining. Spinning isn’t as forgiving as knitting – you can’t unspin the fiber and start over – but it is rewarding to stick with something and see progress over time. If I could spin commercial-quality yarn right off the batt (ha), it would just be a chore. It is it’s own craft, and learning it is half the fun.

In the interest of helping, or at least encouraging, others who are interested in spinning but off to a bumpy start, I will share what I have learned so far. Experts, feel free to chime in with additional hints, or to tell me what I’ve still got wrong.

Lesson 1: Maybe your first spindle should be a first couple of spindles, at different weights and from different makers and manufacturers. Play with them, and with different fibers. Experiment and see what you like and what works for you. Your first yarn doesn’t have to be yarn at all; it’s a learning experience. I bought some merino yarn and one spindle, and figured I wouldn’t invest any more until I could make good yarn with what I had, but making the yarn I wanted (sock yarn, natch) with the materials I had would be pretty difficult. If I had branched out earlier, I would have been less frustrated.

Lesson 2: Spindles are not one size fits all. Don’t feel like you’re doing something wrong if there’s a limit to how fine you can spin with a heavy spindle and a fine fiber. I was eventually able to spin a fine yarn on my 1.8 oz Cascade Pilchuk spindle, but I had to put so much twist in for the single to be able to support the spindle that the yarn itself was hard and wiry.

Lesson 3: Don’t think your yarn has to be thin to be good. Let the fiber tell you what kind of yarn it wants to be. That merino made a really nice, soft bulky weight on the Cascade spindle once I stopped being such a control freak.

Lesson 4: Spindles are not perpetual motion machines. Yes, it will spin longer if you can feed it a steady stream of drafted fiber, but eventually it will stop. A well-balanced spindle can spin all the way to the floor, but don’t be surprised if it stops and reverses (a lot) while you’re just figuring out drafting.

Lesson 5: It really does get easier with practice. The faster you draft, the longer the spindle spins without attention. And you’ll start to be able to tell when it’s slowing down or reversing and fix it before it takes all the twist back out of your fiber and drops.

Lesson 6: The spindle will still drop sometimes. I find that mine start to drop when I’ve got them pretty full of fiber. It makes sense; if you’re spinning on, say, a 1 oz. spindle, and you spin an ounce of fiber onto it, now you’re trying to spin the same kind of yarn on a 2 oz spindle. At some point, you reach critical mass.

Lesson 7: When drafting, hold the fiber gently in one hand, and pinch and pull with the other hand. I had a death grip on the fiber in my left hand for the longest time, and it slowed down my drafting and gave me snarls of fiber when I got to the end. Easing up was the single thing I learned to do that made the most difference.

Here’s what I can do on a spindle now, after a few months of inconsistent practice. The skein was spun on the larger spindle, which is, I believe a 1.3 oz. Golding. It’s a bit underspun and basically unusable – it drifted apart a couple of times when I was skeining it, and I just finger spun it a little and tied it back together – but I’m proud of it nonetheless. The smaller spindle is also a Golding (.6 oz?), with the same Shetland top.

An Open Window to a New Opportunity

Just when I had all but given up, we found a house to rent! So I'm busy packing and cleaning and getting ready to move ASAP. Finally it feels like we're moving forward.

I finished and blocked the Chevron Scarf from Last Minute Knitted Gifts, and I *love* it!

I had about 550 yards of singles, which I was afraid wouldn't be enough, but I couldn't find anything to pair it with in my stash, so I just knit it with straight handspun, and I'm glad I did. The scarf is about 8 feet long, and I still have a little handspun left over.

Have you noticed this spin-knit project monogamy that I've been practicing this month? I've been having so much fun knitting with my handspun. In February, I plan to go back and start finishing the carry-over projects from last year. So it's a good thing I finished spinning this in time to cast on before February:

The fiber is from FreckleFaceFibers on Etsy. I bought a few tops from her with some birthday money because I loved her rich, saturated colors, and I wasn't disappointed. The fiber is a little coarser and crimpier than I'm used to in a merino, but it made a nice yarn.

I was lamenting the fact that my handpainted roving stash was dwindling when I got it, so I decided to spin a finer yarn so that it would last longer. I split the top six ways lengthwise and spun two segments onto each of three bobbins, varying the order as I went to avoid stripes. I just wanted a rich, semisolid purple, and I think I got pretty close.

Of course, as soon as I got myself started on a long, involved spinning project that uses all of my bobbins, I got packages from Spunky Eclectic and Flawful Fibers. The Flawful Fibers one especially made me want to hurry up and get the sock yarn spun, already!

The colors are based off of a little painting called An Open Window to a New Opportunity, and thats just so fitting right now that I can hardly wait to make it up into something that I can see and use every day.

So yesterday I spun and spun and spun and spun and plied and plied and plied and plied until my bobbin was too full to take any more, and I still have singles left on all three bobbins. I have about 290 yards of the 3-ply, so I'm thinking out of curiosity and to avoid leftover singles, I'll Navajo-ply the rest and maybe I can make socks and fingerless gloves.

Also, it's my 1-year knit-iversary! It was the last weekend in January last year that I decided to learn to knit. I did some research online, and contacted one of my LYS because they said they taught classes at X time, but if they didn't have enough students the class wouldn't make. So I emailed to see if they had enough students and they never emailed me back. Undeterred, I went to the big Jo-Ann on Friday after work and got myself some dishcloth cotton and a set of needles and sat down with the KnittingHelp.com videos and knit my first swatch.

Which led to my first UFO.

I think maybe every stitch in that blanket is twisted.

My first finished objects were all felted, which, in retrospect, was pretty smart, because I was able to learn a lot of techniques without my mistakes showing. Last night, Bruneaux decided to eat one of them, so here I am, almost exactly a year later, knitting another pair of felted clogs for my husband. It is interesting to be following the pattern again with some experience under my belt, remembering how challenging it was for me then. For one thing, the first time around, all of my M1s left holes, but I didn't know how to fix it, so I told my husband it was supposed to be like that. After a trip through the washer, no more holes!

Lastly, since I spent all morning packing it up, I might as well flash the stash.

That's everything in the plastic bins, including sock yarn and fiber stash, dresser stash and living room basket stash and ottoman stash. I might have one more bin for equipment and works in progress, or I might just transport that stuff in knitting bags; I haven't decided. And there will be a box or two of books and magazines.

Not too bad, right? I'm glad for it, though, because my fiber budget is about zero until the house sells, and maybe for a while after!

Award!

Lise has very sweetly given me a blog award!

The rules are as follows: “Give the award to 10 people whose blogs bring you happiness and inspiration and make you feel happy about blogland. Let them know by posting a comment on their blog so they can pass it on. Beware you may get the award several times.”

So here are my nominees:

Bea at Baa Baa Blacksheep is so crafty with her sewing and knitting.
Rebekkah at Bowerbirdknits is very serious about knitting and spinning, in a good way.
Peggy at Chasing Bunny has been churning out the beautiful designs.
Janine at Feral Knitter inspires me with her colorwork projects.
Loribird at From the Wool Room cranks out the projects, and they're all beautiful.
Adrian at Hello Yarn makes me want to cast on whatever she's knitting.
Meghan has a new podcast, Stitch It, that is delightful.
Ami at Sour Cherries knits, spins, and takes pretty pictures of it all.
Sula at Sulala is always doing something innovative.
Whitney at WhitKnits makes such pretty sweaters.

Thanks, Lise, you made my day :)

EDIT: I totally feel like a spammer, leaving all these comments to come see my blog!

Lazy

So how many days, exactly, is it appropriate to go around without getting dressed? I think I'm probably over that number. The thing is, we're really hoping to find a place to rent or whatever before we list the house so we can take our clutter and a little extraneous furniture and, more importantly, the dogs, and leave the house in show-condition. It's hard to make a house look like there aren't any inside pets with this going on:

So I've basically got the house base level clean so I can just pick up little messes and dust and vacuum here and there and keep it nice. Next step is packing up anything that we'd be able to take with us, but it's looking like it's going to be a week or 10 days before we're able to get into anything. And, I keep telling myself, we may just have to list it and I'll be driving around with three dogs and their food and other paraphernalia whenever it shows, so maybe I shouldn't start boxing things up just yet. Either way, I'm in no real hurry to get started on that. And my husband has run off with my Mini because it gets better gas mileage than his truck, so if I want to go anywhere, I have to drive something that's about 4 times the size of what I'm used to, and that makes me nervous.

So, instead, I wound up my Helleborus BFL singles and have sat on my tushie knitting a scarf all day.

I've never really thought of myself as a scarf-knitter, but I just can't put this down. I don't know what the deal is. I keep thinking, what will my husband say when he comes home and I'm still in my pajamas and this thing is about three miles long?* And then I think, ok, after this repeat, I'll get up and take a shower and run some errands. But I'm still here in my PJ's.

I have some squishee things to show you, though, and after I post this I can run one of them to the post office, so blogging is sort of like being productive.

Ta-daa!! Here's the Baby Surprise, with buttons and everything! The baby this is intended for was, last we heard, measuring in the 95th percentile for size, and his head was measuring in the 100th percentile. The daddy, a college friend of my husband's, is a big guy, so I didn't piddle around with any newborn sizes. The kid might never wear it. Instead, I went straight for the 1 year size.

As I've said before, the multicolor is my handspun (Summer Cabin BFL from FatCatKnits) and the brown is your standard Plymouth Galway Highland Heather. I followed the pattern and then, once done, picked up and knit an extra 5 ridges in brown on each cuff to match the solid button band, seamed it up, and then knit an applied i-cord on for the neckline. The neck looks to me like it might be a bit small, but since it's a jacket, they can always leave the top button undone, so I'm not terribly worried. What do I know about the size of baby necks, anyway?

The buttons are little leaves carved from coconut, and I think they're perfect. They're the same color as the brown yarn, so they're a nice detail without stealing the show.

When I was ordering fiber for this jacket, I got a few colorways that I thought might work because I didn't trust myself not to screw it up a couple of times. One was called "Sweet Promise" by FatCatKnits, and it was a superwash merino orange and brown and yellow, but when I got it I thought the oranges and browns were a little rosy for a boy's jacket. So, in the interest of learning to spin thicker, I pulled it out and practiced, and, voila, squishy, bulky 2-ply, about 80 yards.

I have no idea what I'm going to knit with it. Maybe a hat?

I don't know what happened when I was plying it, but I swear, I got stuck at a point where the bobbin was winding in a different direction from the twist. I could get it to wind on, but only if I spun clockwise, and then it would take the twist out, or I could get it to put more twist in, but it wouldn't wind. I had to break it off and start a new bobbin. Anyone have any clue how I managed that??

* Not that I need to feel guilty. Before last week, he was the one who was home all day, and he was not always productive with his time. And he's not really the type to berate me for my laziness (though he would tease me for it). Still, it's almost embarrassing. Almost.