Making Stuff, Weeks 14, 15, and 16: Whew.

So I swore I’d never skip a week of making stuff this year, but I’ve got a good excuse. In fact, the excuse is that I have been making something, it just doesn’t have anything to do with yarn, alpacas, or fiber. As I’ve mentioned the last couple of posts, we’ve been busy at Uber Entertainment finishing up Monday Night Combat, which means we’re all putting in some crazy long hours, which doesn’t leave me much time for spinning right now but that’s a temporary thing. The time spent on the game has been more than worth it as we’ve seen it go from a-really-good game to whoa-this-is-a-really-awesome game. I’m not out of the crunch-time woods yet but I did manage to sneak in about one accumulated hour of fiber time this week to do some fibery things.

But first! I finished Duet!

The Finished Duet, a combo hat or scarf, your choice.

I’m very pleased with it. To recap, the yarn is my own handspun that’s comprised of about fifty percent alpaca from my boy Silverton, and then blended with Merino wool that I dyed myself in two shades of green and some 80/20 Merino/silk blend in white. I was going for a sage green when blending and boy, did I hit the color I wanted. I’m amazed at how lovely this color is. I took notes and fiber samples so I can reproduce it later, and I ended up spinning about twice as much as I needed for the Duet. I’m trying to decide if I want to keep the yarn and knit another one (or something like it) or sell the yarn.

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Two and a Half Years of Belly Dance (So Far)

Nearly every girl my age growing up was into some kind of graceful display of athleticism. For some — and it seemed most — it was gymnastics. I think I might have been the only girl in my little world who had no interest in gymnastics whatsoever, no matter how much my friends gushed about how awesome it was or how great they were at it. For other girls it was ballet, and those girls seemed born to wear a cute little pink leotard. I had two things going against me when it came to this stuff — the first was that I was ungraceful, ungainly, and clumsy. Looking back at pictures of me as a kid I wasn’t particularly big, but I was always taller than other girls my age and always felt like a giant compared to them. I was forever tripping over my own two feet.

The second was that I was a raging tomboy. My grandmother tried in vain to get me to wear dresses as a kid but I’d have nothing to do with them. I have a distinct memory of telling my dad once, when I was around five years old, that I wished I was a boy because boys got to do way more fun things and had cooler toys. Looking back, I remember the pained expression on his face as I think he wondered exactly what kind of daughter he was going to be dealing with as she grew up.

So it’s a little weird that decades later in my late thirties I’d have any interest at all in dance, something that not only didn’t interest me for most of my life but actually bored me. But when I moved out here in 2007 I needed something physical to do and literally on a whim I thought, “belly dance. Sure, that sounds fun.” I figured I’d take the eleven-week class I saw advertised at the local fitness place, probably hate it, and never go back again. I’d never been exposed to belly dance. I’d never seen a belly dance show. I had no cultural or ethnic ties to any regions in which belly dance is prevalent. My knowledge of it was limited to exotic costumes and crazy shimmy moves, but I figured that if there was one thing I had in abundance it was hips and that I may as well put them to some good use.
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Making Stuff, Week 13: A Spinning Break

Another Friday, and another entry for WonderWhyGal’s Fiber Arts Friday! We’re coming in for the landing at work on our project (Monday Night Combat – don’t forget to check it out!) so my time is limited for a little while. And when I don’t have much time to spin or knit I pick my projects carefully to maximize my sense of accomplishment in a short amount of time. So instead of doing any spinning this week I took a little break and decided I needed to do some knitting with my own handspun, a nice, small project that I could take to work and get done quickly. And since I had spun my Silverton Sage yarn for just such a project, I went ahead and cast it on.

Silverton Sage being knit into the Duet hat/scarf from Knitty.com.

So far I’m pretty happy with it. I do have a couple of criticisms of my work, however — first, I overspun the yarn just every so slightly. I got a little overzealous, I think, in wanting a bouncy 3-ply yarn, and I probably should have run it back through the wheel to unwind it a little bit, but honestly it’s not that bad. Second, I’m wondering if a 2-ply yarn would have worked better for this stitch pattern. The general rule of thumb is that if you’re knitting with cables or any other textured stitch that needs to pop, you use a 3-ply, and for any lace pattern you use a 2-ply. This pattern has no cables but it struck me as not quite lacy enough to qualify as lace, so I chose a 3-ply. And it does look nice, I think, but part of me wants to make the same yarn in a 2-ply, knit the same pattern, and then compare. That’s not likely to happen but who knows? I just have a few more rows to do and it’s done, so I just need to pick up a couple of buttons and a ribbon to finish the whole deal.

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Making Stuff, Week 12: Silverton Sage

It’s one thing to be sick at home and at least be able to do some knitting or spinning. But you know you’re really sick when you’re an avid spinner or knitter and just the thought of picking up the needles or sitting at the wheel is enough to send your stomach into flips. That’s exactly where I found myself this week: Monday night I went to bed a perfectly healthy human, two hours later I woke up feeling like I was hit with the worst case of food poisoning I’d ever had. And that’s what I thought it was until twelve hours later when I was still, um, refreshing the contents of my digestive system, shall we say. Several times later.

Turns out I’d gotten a stomach virus, probably picked up while I was at the Cues & Tattoos festival in Seattle this weekend, surrounded by lots of people, many of whom had traveled. That’s knocked me out of commission pretty well this week, so much so that it felt like the last three days just kind of fell into a time chasm: one minute I’m perfectly fine and the next minute it’s April, I’ve got forty-nine unread emails, and I’ve done nothing but watch Animal Planet. Thanks, stomach virus. Food and I are only just getting back on speaking terms today, three days later, and even that’s still a rocky relationship.

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Making Stuff, Week 11: In Search of Sage Green

The dye experiments continued this week as I search for that ever-elusive sage green. I think at this point I’ve tried every rational combination of Jacquard Acid Dyes that I think might produce it, including a couple of new ones this week: Emerald with Gun Metal, and Emerald with Silver Grey.

More dye experiments. On the left is Emerald/Silver Gray, on the right is Emerald/Gun Metal.

I did a 2:1 ratio on the Emerald and Gun Metal combo, which is on the left. It came out slightly bluer, but not that much different than if I’d just used straight Emerald. For the one on the left I decided to invert the ratio: I did a 2:1 ration of Silver Gray with Emerald. Surely this would do the trick, I thought. Nope — looks like a pale version of Emerald.

But all is not lost as I decided that if I can’t dye my way to sage green then I can blend my way to sage green. I already knew that ultimately, for the yarn I’m seeking to make, I wanted an alpaca/Merino/silk blend, with the majority being alpaca. I had undyed white Merino/silk, my green Merino from the above dye experiments, and some of Silverton’s fiber already carded into batts. Time to blend.

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iPod, meet coffee. Coffee, iPod.

On the weekends where we don’t have an agenda Matt and I have nice, relaxing morning routine: we get up and make coffee and/or tea and we sit on the couch upstairs looking at the latest headlines and such on my iPod. It’s kind of our modern morning newspaper. I took the day off today after a couple of weeks of crunch time at work, so today was kind of like one of those weekends.

Matt bought me that iPod for my birthday in June and had even had it engraved with my long-time gaming industry nickname: Hellchick. I knew I was going to love it — I had really wanted one — but I didn’t realize just how awesome it was until I had it. I use it for everything. We have a wireless network set up at home and so I’d much rather curl up on the cozy couch to check up on email, Twitter, Facebook, and the news rather than use my PC, and in my fiber room I have an iPod dock to listen to music or my podcasts.

This morning I had put my rather large mug of coffee in my lap for a second while I went to navigate to something on my iPod. It slipped right out of my hands and down into my coffee mug. Ports down. Like it was docking with the coffee. It couldn’t have slipped the other way where the case probably would have saved it. Oh, no.

I squealed and leaped up off the couch, ran to the kitchen, and grabbed paper towels. I dried it off as best I could and immediately started trying to dry the ports. But the iPod was already dying in my hands: the screen was flickering and it was getting dimmer…and dimmer…and dimmer. And soon all I could see was a barely visible Apple logo on the screen. The fact that I take coffee with cream and sugar — nay, take some coffee with my cream and sugar — was probably only making it worse.

Eventually, when I figured I couldn’t get any more liquid out on my own, I set it down on the counter and vowed not to touch it until it dried out. Of course I couldn’t help but finger the power switch helplessly hoping for a miracle. I felt awful, not just because I love my iPod but because it was a gift from Matt. For his part, though, Matt started making jokes immediately. “I’d post on Twitter, ‘R.I.P. iPod 2010′ but…well, I don’t have an iPod to pull it up on now.”

“Too soon!” I cried.

I hoped against hope the warranty would cover it, but this must be the world’s most common iPod issue because it specifically mentions coffee on their warranty information as being something they will not repair damage from. Well, crap.

I went back to the couch and after heaving a heavy sigh, picked up my coffee and took a sip. “Tastes like technology,” Matt said.

Making Stuff, Week 10: No Time!

We’re working hard at Uber Entertainment on Monday Night Combat this week so I’ve had very little time to spin, so this update really will be short this week — in fact, I started this a couple of nights ago and have only had enough time to add to it here and there. I didn’t even really get any actual pictures of any finished projects, so I took a couple of pictures of works-in-progress just to have some this week.

I did a few more green dye experiments last weekend, still trying to attain that elusive sage green. As you can see I still haven’t quite gotten it.

Yarn on the fiber rack.

Today I made a quick stop at the supply store and I picked up some Silver Gray and Gun Metal dyes. I’m hoping that by adding these to my emerald I might get closer to the color I want. I may have an hour tomorrow to throw some wool into the dye pot before I go into the office, so we’ll see.

As for spinning, I started the roving I’m calling “Silverton Silk” (80% Silverton’s alpaca, and 20% white silk) on the Golding spindle this week.

Silverton Silk on the drop spindle.

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Making Stuff, Week 9: More Blending

I was about to write that I didn’t feel nearly as productive this week and thus wasn’t going to have much to talk about, but then I gathered up the pictures for this week’s entry. I guess when you have six different pictures you must have accomplished something, right?

This week was mostly about blending. A few weeks ago you’ll recall that I blended up and dyed a roughly 60/20/20 blend of Falkland wool, alpaca from Benz, and nylon for socks. (You know, I actually suspect it’s closer to a 50/25/25 blend…I lost a lot of shorter Falkland fibers on the first pass and that probably changed the ratio.) As a refresher, here are those socks in progress — I’ve only got the rest of the leg to knit on the second sock and then they’re done.

The Falkland/alpaca socks, mostly finished.

I absolutely love how these socks feel and knit so far. The gauge is a little big but it’s live-with-able, and they’ll make perfectly fine socks regardless. But I wanted to make a similar blend for socks and spin and knit a pair for comparison, one made with Blue-Faced Leicester instead of Falkland since BFL is so popular for socks. So that’s what I did this past weekend.

BFL, alpaca, and nylon ready for the dye pot.

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Making Stuff, Week 8: Crazy Dye

It’s a shorter entry this week (and given my propensity toward huge, tome-like posts, I’m sure you’re glad for that) as I only have a little to show off. I finished the sock yarn that I began from last week’s dyed roving, and that was really an enjoyable spin.

Burgundy Gold sock yarn, 100% BFL.

It’s just 100% superwash Blue-Faced Leicester, no fancy blends this time. I should have taken the picture with a coin for scale because finally I spun a true sock-weight gauge — it’s nice and small, perfect for about a size 2 or 3 needle. It’s 3-ply but I chose not to chain ply it; I really wanted to just see the colors interplay the way they did for a change of pace, and I really like the result. I still have a few ounces left, and now that I’ve gotten my hands used to spinning such a fine gauge singles for this weight of 3-ply yarn I’m going to blend the remaining BFL with alpaca from Benz and some nylon, just like I did with my Falkland sock blend, and then knit that into socks to compare with the Falkland ones, which I’m almost finished knitting. I’ll be able to compare wear and feel then and see what I prefer as the end result more. I love experimentation!

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Making Stuff, Week 7: My New Drum Carder

So many things to write about this week! And the first one isn’t something I’ve made but something Matt’s dad made…my new custom-made drum carder! I’m so excited! But before I get too ahead of myself, let me just remind you that I’m posting this for WonderWhyGal’s Fiber Arts Friday extravaganza, so don’t forget to check out what other cool stuff people are doing.

I’ve said before that Matt’s dad loves making things. He’s seventy-five and retired, and he’s been machining and making things pretty much his whole life, and the stuff he makes is very good. He loves new projects and if he’s not already working on something for himself he’s looking around Matt’s house for things to make or improve. And a few months ago when he came to visit I was in the middle of drum carding some of my alpaca’s fleece into batts on my Louet Junior drum carder.

I bought the carder used at a pretty good price. I had saved up my pennies to get a drum carder but after researching I knew there was just no way I was going to get one of the really nice full-sized popular models for any price I could afford right now, and hand-carding all of my alpaca just simply wasn’t going to cut it. Even used, nice carders like Strauch or Pat Green go for several hundred dollars, and motorized carders can sell for, at minimum, $1000. After researching and then looking in my wallet and then researching and looking one more time in my wallet hoping that the bills had just magically multiplied like bunnies while I wasn’t looking — only to realize in dismay that they hadn’t — I settled on the Louet Junior, a half-sized model that seemed to get a fairly equal smattering of great reviews and “meh” reviews. Given that, like most spinning equipment, drum carders always seem to have good resale value and tend to go fast as soon as they’re put up for sale, I figured that at worst I could resell it if I wasn’t happy with it and save up for a different model.

When I showed Matt what I wanted to get he said, “you know, my dad could probably make one of those.” I admit that I wasn’t really sure — it seemed like drum carders had specific, precise measurements. And then I realized that we were talking about a man who can machine things within 1/1000 of an inch.

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