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 31 & 32: More Batts.

The crafting is going slowly this week as we spend most of our free time prepping for our wedding, which is — GASP — in less than a month. I’m slowly working on the shawl, but I also managed to get at least one spinning-related project done this week: a couple of new batts.

Cinnamon Chocolate Mint batts.

I hadn’t intended to make these, but while doing some cleaning this weekend while I had some spare time I put away a bag of Cinnamon’s fleece in the fiber studio. When I opened the plastic box I use to store his fiber, I saw that I had a big paper bag filled with some of the combing waste I had saved from blending his fleece with some Merino wool. I looked up at my peg board and saw the green and chocolate Merino roving I had dyed that had been sitting there a while. I didn’t have a specific project in mind for these rovings; they were the leftovers of a previous project. I looked at the bag, and then I looked at the rovings. And then I took a few minutes to sit down with my drum carder. What came out were these batts, and I’m loving the color. I’m calling it Cinnamon Chocolate Mint and I can’t wait to spin them up.

I only got a total of 3.2 ounces so I need to decide exactly how I want to spin this to maximize the yarn I get. Any thoughts on that, spinners? For now they’re just sitting there looking pretty while I decide. Usually I know exactly how I want to spin the fibers I prepare but I guess because this was so spur of the moment I’m kind of blanking on the next step.

That’s it for this week, so it’s another short Fiber Friday post. But don’t let that stop you from getting even more Friday Fiber fill over at Wonder Why Gal’s Fiber Friday.

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 24 – 28: It Can’t Have Been THIS Long…

Oh. Oh, my. I went and counted the weeks since my last Making Stuff update and was shocked — nay, appalled — at myself for having let a whopping five weeks pass without an update. I had intended to use this series as impetus to create something every week and be held accountable for it with actual photo documentation. And I sort of failed there. But that sometimes happens and you just have to pick it up again and keep going.

Wedding planning is my go-to excuse these days — I’ve spent most of my free time researching and researching and researching some more, and for some reason I felt like I just really needed a short spinning and knitting break, you know? And it doesn’t help that I’ve stalled on that lovely shawl I’m making with my Bamboo Benz handspun; I was sure I had enough yardage but ended up coming up very short, and with it being a lacy triangular shawl pattern (Marmalade on Ravelry) I now have to figure out the right place to rip back to if I want to finish it correctly. I don’t care about it being small — I actually kind of want it small so that it’s more of a neck shawl — but I do care about finishing it right. But now that I’m actually looking at the pattern after pulling it up to link here, I think I’m feeling a little more stress than I need to about it. It looks like I really can just rip back to the end of the last repeat and do the finishing chart. I’ve been knitting for twenty years now so this really shouldn’t be that scary. And it’s not, it’s just that it’s disheartening to know that after twenty years of knitting you can still make egregious errors like severely underestimating your yardage or not planning your chart repeats correctly. Or not putting a lifeline in to easily rip back to. You know, like you said you were going to do when you started this project knowing that you would likely run out of yarn. That sound you hear is that of my palm meeting my forehead.

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Making Stuff, Weeks 22 & 23: Cozy Toes!

It’s been slow-going because of crunch time at work, but I finally have a skein of Cozy Toes 2.0 sock yarn.

Cozy Toes 2.0 yarn in the Old Benz in the Sea colorway.

This is 2.0 because if you’ll remember I did a first run with some Falkland, but since it wasn’t superwash I knew I wouldn’t want to use that regularly for sock yarn. So I went with a superwash Blue-Faced Leicester combined with some alpaca from my boy Benz and some nylon. I dyed this batch with turquoise and chartreuse and, voila…the Old Benz and the Sea colorway. I struggled to find a name for this colorway until Matt suggested it, saying that it reminded him of the sea and it fit with my naming convention of including the alpaca who contributed his fiber.

It’s plied in a standard 3-ply. I know that most people do chain ply when spinning multicolored rovings for sock yarn, and I do sometimes do that if I really want to preserve a color scheme. I find that not only is a standard 3-ply easier to do and is a true 3-ply, which makes it sturdier (a chain ply isn’t a true multi-stranded yarn since it’s one single plied back on itself), but I enjoy the way colors interact in a standard 3-ply, frequently doing so in unexpected ways. For instance, there was quite a bit of blue in the roving but it doesn’t stand out as much as the green, something I can keep in mind for the next batch. I’m enjoying comparing all the chain-plied yarns I did in the past to my recent batches of standard 3-plies and learning from that experience.

I’m off to Oregon next week and I’m planning on taking the skein with me to begin a set of test-run Cozy Toes socks. After all, I have to try a finished product before I can begin selling the yarn to knitters! Once I knit the socks my plan is to throw them in the wash several times and see how they react — I’m curious how the amount of alpaca in it will affect the socks in the wash.

Want to see what other cool things people are doing with fiber? Check out WonderWhyGal’s Fiber Friday, a monument to all things fibery!

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 17: When You Can’t Spin, Dye.

I want to preface this week’s “Making Stuff” with a pointer to a wonderful article I read on the increasingly interesting Make And Meaning blog collection. Paul Overton, author behind the quality Dudecraft site, wrote an inspiring article about the relevance and importance of handcraft and hands-on work. My favorite quote from the article is this:

The problem is that, over the last thirty years, we’ve devalued handwork to such an extent that we’ve begun to equate dirty hands with weak minds. We’ve put so much emphasis on knowledge work and made labor such a dirty word that now we don’t even have enough mechanics to fix our cars. Instead of acknowledging the fact that every kid is not going to fit into the advanced placement→college degree→knowledge work equation, we’ve pushed and cajoled and squeezed them into what we think are socially acceptable, middle class professions because, you know, god forbid they turn out to be happy, blue collar workers.

This is a sentiment that I, and I think every handcrafter, can really identify with, even if we aren’t making a living with our handcrafting skills or even want to. It’s the idea that this is work to be valued, that it’s not something done because someone failed out of prep school or was never considered smart enough to get in in the first place. It’s a great article and I won’t rehash it here, I’ll only suggest that you read it right away as he has some great ideas for remedying the current perception of work and physical labor.

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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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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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