It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

Thanks, everyone, for all the complements on my sewing. I'll show you the rest of it when the nursery is finished, which should be next month sometime!

I went out in the 80 degree weather this weekend and strung lights on the house, and we picked out a fresh tree and brought it home and I decorated it, and whaddyaknow, it's been cold and wintery all week. I've even been listening to a little Christmas music.

I've even done a little Christmas knitting and spinning. First, an ornament for a gift exchange.

It's the Cabled Globe Ornament from Knitting Daily, knit out of some handspun BFL and improvised with some Rauma Finullgarn holly leaves and berries. To make the leaves, follow the instructions for the Christmas tree in the August chapter of Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac, but three-needle bind off down the center instead of knitting the trunk. The berries are just tapered I-cord that's folded over and sewn on.

And you may remember that last year I knit stockings for all of the dogs based on mitten patterns. And then we traded Bruneaux to my MIL for Smiley? Well, sure enough, we were one stocking short. No longer!

Since she's a blue and white Aussie, it made sense to knit her a grey and white stocking, and I even found a chart in Selbuvotter that kind of looks like her. This was my first time using Dale Baby Ull (ack! superwash!) for colorwork, and at first I thought it was way too soft (give me my sticky Finullgarn!), but it all turned out ok in the end. Like the other dogs, her name and the year are knit into the cuff of her stocking.

Now, time to get back to that Christmas spinning!

Have a safe and happy holiday, everyone. I'll see you on the other side.

Bad Blogger.

OK, I'm awful. I took a little blog vacay, and I'll admit that this post doesn't mean that it's over. It's more like a quick catch-up. I'm just not feeling it so much lately.

First, I can't not mention that I got to teach someone to spin over the 4th of July holiday. We had so much fun, and I left her with a lot of information and plans to buy a wheel right away. She's actually a mohair rancher back home, so she's interested in taking her fiber to a mill and spinning it. I haven't heard from her since; I hope that means things are going well.

Second, on the Barn Raising front, I have 12.5 more squares, for a total of 27.5 out of 42. One, obviously is incomplete (more on that later) and four haven't been blocked yet, but here are the ones from the potluck yarn I posted about last time.

I'm stalled out on the last half that I started. I spun another scrappy on a spindle, and I way overtwisted it, so my square looks a little like a pinwheel. I think that may be ok, but I need to figure out what yarn to finish knitting it with, and somewhere along the line I lost interest a little bit. But since I'm 2/3 gone, I should be able to finish it with some degree of rapidity when I take interest again (and have more scraps or spin more yarn for it.

Lastly, I finally finished up my yarn for the HHHH swap. If memory serves, this may be my first true fingering weight 2-ply yarn.

I dyed the roving myself, and I've kind of always thought of the colorway as "Arsenic and Old Lace," a la the old Cary Grant movie. Let's hope she gets the reference and doesn't think I'm trying to poison her through the mail.

More Barn Raising

Seven more squares:

I might've hit the halfway mark this week if it hadn't been for spinning this:

510 yards of Funky Carolina's "scrappies", spun one after another and Navajo plied. This way I can knit lots of squares from one yarn ball that are all different from one another.

In other news, the tree guys showed up again this morning. I told them they were finished and sent them away. Let's hope they don't come back.

Save the trees!

Anyone have any experience trying to keep the electric company from doing this to your trees?

I took this picture just a few blocks away. I don't know if you can tell at this size, but it's a gaping hole out of what was a beautiful magnolia tree.

They're chopping up trees all over town and I just can't stand the thought of them doing that to my magnolia. Thankfully, the power lines don't run right through the middle of ours like that, but still, I'm not impressed with their pruning job.

They've already spent 8 hours in our yard hacking up trees I didn't much care about, relatively small growth that probably needed to go anyway, but I'm drawing the line at the magnolia. A little internet research shows that they're threatening homeowners who try to stop them ("we'll destroy your tree"), so I'm meeting with a rep tomorrow at lunch when my husband can be with me. I'm possibly a little hot under the collar to handle this rationally myself. But I'll be doing more research tonight so I'll be ready. Hopefully an offer to have the tree trimmed away from the lines at our own expense will do the trick. Wish me luck. In the meantime, my new parking place is right in front of the magnolia.

In other news, finished spinning.

580 yards of 2-ply Wensleydale, light fingering/heavy laceweight
Spunky Eclectic Club, April, "Perfect Storm"

Handspun for Bea!

Bea finally has her yarn (and likes it -- yay!), so I can show it off, now, too.

Spinning for a non-spinner is a little daunting. Especially when that non-spinner is also a dyer. I felt compelled to do something with color that can't be done once a yarn is finished. Hence the 3-ply. I can't wait to see what it will look like all knit up!

OK, so maybe I have a little idea. The middle bobbin was spun a little thicker and ran out well before the other two. And then I had about half again as much blue/green as remaining purple, so I didn't want to ply them together. Instead, I wound them into center pull balls and plied up two little yarn balls of very fine 2-ply, and then I had this idea to make Bea some perfectly useless little socks out of it. 16 stitches on size 00s. Fun!

I'm tempted to knit tiny socks for all my yarn now :)

The yarn came out at about 500 yards of sportweight, but it's so fluffy and squish I'm sure that it could be knit to sock gauge. Bea wouldn't tell me what she wanted except that she likes knitting socks, so I was really hoping against hope that it would come out in that range, and I think it all worked out all right. Since the yarn is a soft fiber and softly spun, the fabric would probably benefit from being knit a tight-ish gauge.

Sneak Peek

OK, I said I wasn't going to blog about my swap project for Bea until she received it, but I am going to give a little teaser. My part of the trade was to spin up some merino roving she purchased from AllSpunUp. And the thing about spinning handpainted roving is, you never know what you're gonna get. It looks different as singles than as roving, and it looks different plied than it does as singles. So I think I can show you a little without giving it all away.

First off, I split the roving differently from what I've been doing. Instead of tearing it into strips of various sizes and spinning from the end, I laid out the roving and tore it into thirds. Because of the way it was dyed, this gave me two lengths of roving that were mostly purple and one that was mostly blue/green. I then split each of these three sections into fourths and spun them up successively on three separate bobbins, one bobbin for each third.

Almost looks like different colorways, no?

What does the resulting yarn look like? I can't tell you! It went to the post office today. What I can tell you is that this merino is like buttah. How long has it been since I spun merino that wasn't superwash?

Stay tuned.

All knitting has stopped.

But spinning continues for the time being. More on that later.

The house is coming along all right. The kitchen and bathrooms are painted, even the kitchen cabinets, and I've got the paint fume hangover to prove it today. We spent all last week prepping the rest of the house for paint and were going to spray it with my parents' paint sprayer on Friday but, even after messing with it all day, we never got it to work. So we rented a paint sprayer and my husband and I sprayed the rest of the walls on Saturday.

If anyone ever tells you that a paint sprayer is faster and easier than rolling paint, don't believe them. It takes way more prep, makes a huge mess, and, in our inexperienced hands, didn't give great coverage. What's worse, the beige I picked that looked beige in the store and beige in the sunlight looks positively pink on the walls. It's horrible. So, after all that, we have to buy 10 more gallons of paint and start over.

We debated whether to go ahead and hire someone to finish painting or whether I should do it. The cost of hiring it done would be offset by the fact that we could move in earlier and stop paying rent. However, reports are that the local painters kind of do a sloppy job, so my agony will not be ending any time soon. I'm taking a break today, but tomorrow I'll be painting ceilings.

When I get at home at the end of the day, I'm way too exhausted to knit lace without making a royal mess of it. I guess I could work on the easy scarf project, but it's still in the car from the San Antonio trip, and I'm just not that into it right now.

But spinning is still soothing.

440 yds/ 5 1/8 oz, I'm guessing DK weight.
BFL
Hello Yarn Fiber Club, January 2008 "Insect Wings"

I spun it for short color repeats, so whatever I knit with it should be really stripy. I don't have the imagination right now to try to figure out what that will be, though.

I also got this great swap package from Bea this week that just made my day. She really went above and beyond.

I got a knitting bag, a sock bag, a notions bag, and some pretty blue stitch markers that are the perfect size for lace. If you like it, also check out her Etsy shop. Warning: she also dyes some gorgeous sock yarns.

Now it's my turn to do a little something for her. Thankfully I get the last word, as it were, so I can make sure my part measures up. I've already gotten started, but I'm going to wait to blog it until she receives it so she'll be surprised.

More laceweight; somebody stop me!

So I finally got around to finishing that laceweight tussah silk I showed you a while ago. I ended up scrapping what I had done so far, because after fondling the silk laceweight I bought at DFW Fiber Fest, there was just no denying it was overspun. So I sat down at the Matchless with the rest of the fiber and tried to walk the line for soft singles that have enough twist not to fall apart. I spun from the end of the strips I had pulled from the top and didn't have as much waste as I did when spinning from the fold. Once my left hand gets a layer of silk filaments on it, no more seem to stick, so it was the cleaning off that was my main problem before.

You know you're addicted when you come home from sanding ceilings, take a shower, and continue plying lace. I did wait until this morning to skein it up, though.

810 yards / 3 3/8 oz
~34 wpi
2-ply

I think I'll lay off the laceweight spinning for a little while now. If I can.

Panda food makes pretty yarn.

Don'tcha think? I petted this bamboo roving almost daily since I received it as my March shipment of the Zen String fiber club. I knew what I wanted to do with it as soon as I first saw it, both how I wanted to spin it and what I wanted to knit with it. This is about 800 yards of laceweight singles, with long color shifts. What nice drape it has. Now I'm petting the skein every day. I need to finish another project or two before I get started.

More spinning!

Are y'all getting tired of this yet? Because I'm not. And I haven't much else to show you. I've started a new lace project, and it's coming along, but it doesn't look like much and I've got it all bunched up on a 24" needle, so I can't really spread it out and show you. No nupps on this one, but it is Estonian lace and uses a lot of the same k1, yo, k1, yo, k1, yo, k1, yo, k1 in the same stitch maneuvers. And, I gotta tell ya, I don't know if it's that or the crocheting of dishcloths or both, but my right shoulder is really taking a beating. So every day I tell myself no crochet or lace, and every day I sit down and think, "well, just a little," and then the next morning I wake up and can't turn my head to the right and swear I'll take the day off. But spinning still doesn't hurt, so that's a good thing.

Here's the first fiber to come off the new wheel. It's the llama that I purchased at the fiber fest. In retrospect, I should have started with a more familiar fiber on the new wheel, but what's done is done. I'm not entirely happy with it, and I don't know whether it's the fiber or my growing pains. All I know is it's not an airy woolen-spun and it's not a smooth worsted-spun and it just feels kind of heavy and lifeless. DH still likes it, though, and still wants a hat. I suspect it will look a lot better when it's knit up.

It's a three-ply and I should have just about enough for a hat. I got myself in one of those awkward positions when I was plying where the wheel just wouldn't take up, so I'd pull out more singles and let the twist flow up, adjust the tension and try again, and still, no take up. I was completely tangled up in yarn before I realized that the drive band wasn't over the bobbin. (Doh!) I don't know how it happened, but I think it means that spinning four ounces of fiber and trying to ply it is perhaps a little more than I can handle in one day.

For my second try, I chose some BFL I had purchased from AllSpunUp on Etsy (I like how she doesn't name her colorways). I think this was still the day of the wheel's arrival and my husband and I had gone out for dinner and margaritas and we came home and I was all, "My spinning wheel! Let me show you it!" So I pulled out the fiber and split it in half and spun a little bit for him. I chose the high speed whorl to see what it would do. Then later I was kind of stuck with that decision.

I decided to do the fractal thing and spun the one bobbin I had started from the end and split the other half several ways and spun them on the other bobbin. Because of the way the yarn was dyed, though, I didn't end up with a whole lot of solid-color portions. You can't tell in the skein, but the beginning is mostly green and the end is mostly the red/rose colors. I could use it for socks, but they'd be fraternal in the extreme.

I have about 520 yards of 22-wpi 2-ply. I'd call that a light fingering weight. I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with it just yet. I'm tempted to make an EZ garter stitch moebius, but I kind of also want to branch out from scarves, hats, and socks for my handspun. Any other ideas? There's not much on Ravelry for 500 yards of light fingering that isn't socks.

The ply twist might be a little funky on this as well, because about the time I was halfway through plying, I found (gasp! horror!) dirty footprints on my treadles. The Schacht is oil finished, not varnished, and my bare feet were leaving some grime behind. I cleaned it off and switched to a socks-for-spinning policy, but the ones I chose were slippery on the treadles and it was a completely different feel.

On the wheel is some bamboo from my Zen String fiber club. I'm spinning laceweight singles straight from the roving for really long color shifts, and I think I'll make a Montego Bay Scarf with it.

Fiber Fest Spoils

DFW Fiber Fest 2008 was the first weekend in April. I went last year and browsed the vendors and thereafter planned to take a class or two this year, but with the move going on I wasn’t certain I’d have the time. Turns out I was right about that, but we did have time to swing by as we were in town to finish packing on Saturday. I snagged some divine handdyed silk laceweight from Madeline Tosh, fondled some kid mohair yarn from Brooks Farm for a long time before talking myself out of it, and picked up 4 oz. of llama fiber that will become a hat for my husband.

But the best part? Walking around, my husband noticed all the little travel wheels that some of the vendors were spinning on and said, ‘we need to get you one like that, that you can take with you.’ And if just planting that bug in his ear wasn’t enough, he was serious about doing it right away. (Stay back, ladies, he’s mine!)

I didn’t expect to get another wheel for years. I was thinking maybe, if I was very good, Santa might bring me a Woolee Winder for the Symphony this Christmas. Of course I had thought about it, and hinted about it, but I just thought it would be a while. And I probably should have told him that it should wait, but, people, I am weak.

At first I was thinking I’d get a Little Gem – you can’t really beat that for portability. But the more I got to thinking about it, it seemed silly to spend so much for a wheel that I’d mainly use when I traveled. (And plying -- apparently they have huge capacity bobbins.) For the money, though, why not get something that I’d be happy to use every day, that was also portable? Why not examine my current situation and see if I can fill in any other gaps besides portability?

When I researched wheels the first time, it was really important to me to get a Saxony style wheel. In fact, the Lendrum Saxony was my first choice, and the Symphony was my second. Both met all of my criteria, I just thought the Lendrum was a little prettier. I still love the way the Saxony looks, but now that I know what I’m doing behind a wheel, I’m better able to appreciate the beauty of all styles of wheels. It’s more about the ingenuity and engineering of the design than the turning of the wood that gets me going these days.

The Symphony can be configured with the flyer either on the right or the left. At the time, I had never spun on a wheel and so didn’t know which way I would like better. I opted for the ‘normal’ setup with the flyer on the left, thinking that I would learn to spin to fit my wheel. Turns out, I spin with my right hand in front and I can only spin with my left hand in front about as well as I can write with my left hand or knit English. I can do it, but it’s not pretty. So I spend a lot of time twisted around in odd positions while spinning on the Symphony. I don’t even realize I’m doing it. If I had gotten the wheel set up the other way, I could pull the yarn across my body as I draft. As is, I pull it straight out and sort of behind me.

A castle-style wheel, besides being inherently more portable than a Saxony, also solves the problem of handedness. The flyer is in the middle; you can spin however you want. I flirted with the Lendrum DT and the Rose, but in the end I decided on the Schacht Matchless. I ordered it last Tuesday and it showed up today!

Ain't she a beaut?! I am like a little kid with a new bike.