Making Stuff, Week 33: And Still More Batts.

It’s another Fiber Friday, and here I’m with two weeks in a row for posts. Awesomesauce.

I kind of went batt crazy (har har) this week and did some more batts, even though I have some still waiting to spin. But when the urge strikes you gotta go with it. This time, though, I thought I’d detail the process a bit more. Maybe it’s just for my own benefit when I look back and want to see how I did these, or maybe someone reading this is interested in seeing this process detailed.

The plan. I had a plan for these batts, which I’m calling “Gun Metal Benz.” You’ll see the finished product in a bit. The plan was that I wanted to blend Benz’s black fleece with merino/silk that I’d dyed Gun Metal Blue, thinking that the black of Benz’s natural color would make the dye really pop as it has in past blends I’ve done with his fleece. So I started with some washed locks and carded them up into batts.

Benz's soft fleece, carded into two batts.

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Making Stuff, Weeks 29 & 30: Something Blue

A short update for this week’s Fiber Friday entry which, by the way, you can get more of over at Wonder Why Gal’s blog.

We’ve been busily planning the wedding, and it’s surprising just how much time that can take up. In the meantime, though, I began the Luna Moth shawl and I’m really enjoying how it’s working up so far. This is my Something Blue and my Something New for the wedding. The yarn is gorgeous and so delicately soft that I’m almost afraid of it — it’s a singles and I rarely knit with singles to begin with, and it’s 100% silk to boot. But hey, it’s gorgeous so far, don’t you think? I can’t wait to finish it. The only negative with this yarn is that the dye isn’t fully set and leaves some blue on my hands, which means I’ve got some soaking to do when this is done lest it leave that blue on my dress.

Luna Moth shawl, in progress.

And that’s it for this week. I ain’t got time to write, I’ve got a shawl to knit!

Making Stuff, Weeks 18, 19, & 20: It’s Color, Not Quantity.

I found about an hour these last two or three weeks to get a little bit of spinning in. You know, underneath the couch cushions and stuff alongside some loose change and a crusty Cheeto. It’s not much but I’ll take what I can get this month. But hey! There’s a light at the end of the tunnel and sometime soon I will have free time again.

I began work on the “Cozy Toes” blue-green blend that I carded up a few weeks ago. I’m absolutely loving these colors so far. The picture does some justice but honestly, you really just have to see it in person to feel that color pop.

Blue-faced Leicester/alpaca/nylon Cozy Toes single. One bobbin down, two more to go.

I’m anxious to move on to the other two bobbins, but I just love walking by my wheel and seeing that color spring out like that. I’m three-plying it traditionally, no chain-plying. While chain-plying would retain the color bands that’s actually not really what I’m after — I’m looking forward to a more impressionist-painting look (I hope) to the resulting strands all intertwining.

Most of the time these days I spin intentionally; I set out to create a very specific yarn for very specific projects and it’s actually pretty unusual for me to find myself wanting to spin something just to see what I get. But that’s exactly what I did with the green meriboo/Benz alpaca/white merino/silk blend I carded up and spun as a two-ply fingering weight. I just wanted to see what I’d get and wow, I’m really happy with the results.

A meriboo/Benz alpaca/white merino/silk 2-ply fingering weight yarn. Just my color!

On the surface it probably doesn’t seem much different from the Silverton Sage yarn I spun up a few weeks ago, but it’s actually quite different. It’s softer (incredibly soft, in fact) as it’s a flatter 2-ply yarn and not the slightly-overspun, round 3-ply yarn that Silverton Sage is. It’s also a fingering weight yarn so it’s a much lighter gauge. And the color is a bit darker and more gray, which I really like. I’m finding the blends I’m creating with Benz’s black fleece to almost be the most interesting blends because the addition of some of his black fleece in the right quantity does things I don’t really expect. As a UI designer my color work has always been on a monitor; I have virtually no experience with painting. But paints are what fiber and dye combinations mimic and it’s been fun to see how the addition of some black can take a color and really pop it rather than mute or darken it a whole lot.

As you can see, I was so anxious to knit with this that I didn’t even take a proper picture of the loose, tasty hank before I wound it up for knitting. I’ve decided to knit the Marmalade Shawl with it as I ended up with a scrumptious 300 yards (practically on the nose). I’m planning on it being a bit smaller, more of a loose-mess triangular scarf around the neck. That’s if I can get past the cast on, which I fussed with late last night and had to rip out as I found it a touch confusing.

So, not much in the way of quantity this week but I think I’ve more than made up for it in color, don’t you think? I’m anticipating having a little bit more time soon to finish this yarn and I’m really motivated now to do that. But in the meantime, why not go check out the other Fiber Friday posts at Wonder Why Gal’s blog?

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 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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Spinning Project Catch-Up

Having mentioned the various spinning projects I’ve worked on over the past year I thought it would be good to show a few of them off in more detail, including some I didn’t mention recently. And as I said before this has been a banner year for me in terms of spinning — I’ve got my own fiber supply now, I’m spinning more intentionally, and I’ve jumped into dyeing, combing, and drumcarding.

One of my Christmas gifts this year was a beautiful Golding drop spindle, given to me by Matt’s mom. I always like to have a spindle project going even though I do the bulk of my spinning at the wheel because spindle projects are so portable. I still had some of Cinnamon’s undyed combed top that I’d carded with soy silk in a roughly 50/50 blend; I figured this was the perfect spindle project. I didn’t have a ton of it and figured if I could spin it laceweight then maybe I could make a small project with it.

The finished alpaca/soy silk blend, with the Golding spindle used to spin it.

I’ve got quite a few spindles and I won’t hesitate to say that this is by far the best one I have and have used so far. It spins for what seems like forever and it’s incredibly light. It doesn’t store much because it’s so small, but on a spindle this light I’d primarily be doing laceweight projects anyway.

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yes, they are alpacas

Two Saturdays ago I finally realized my long-time goal of becoming some kind of crazy fiber baron, someone who controlled the entire means of fiber production from the top down in my clenched, capitalist fist: I got my own alpacas.

There are three of them — Cinnamon, Benz, and Silverton — and they are completely adorable as alpacas are wont to be. Those of you who’ve been following our progress on Facebook already know their origin story, so you can feel free to skip a bit. But for those that don’t, we got them from Don and Jody Stanwyck of Jo’s Fleece Fields, who’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty in helping us prepare to be first-time alpaca owners. I’d read and researched for years but the time had finally come to actually get alpacas, because the only way I was going to learn any more was by actually owning them.

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buy my stuff!

It’s just like me to go and create this brand new design and then let the site sit un-updated for weeks while people wonder where I’ve gone. So I thought this would be the perfect time for an important update: plugging my stuff. Buy! Buy it now! Have you bought anything yet?
What have I got for sale? Well, in addition to the handknit items I’ve been putting in my Etsy shop, I’ve been going through my handspun yarn stash and I thought I’d see if people were interested in buying it. If you’re a knitter who’s unfamiliar with handspun yarn, you might wonder to yourself, “why would I buy handspun yarn when I can get cheaper yarn from the knit shop?”

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charity knitting update

I’ve put up a bunch of new items on the Knitting for Charity site. Ellen’s been busy and she contributed a hat and a couple of scarves. I’ve also included my first felted project, a small bag made from purple and black wool and mohair. The money from Ellen’s projects will be given to the American Red Cross, and the money from my projects will go this round to the I Have A Dream Foundation.
Check out the items and remember, when you buy you contribute to a great charity.