d’oh!

i just realised what happened with the mittens: i had 177 feet, not yards. i forgot to do that final calculation step where i divide by three *hangs head in shame*. so i actually had 59 yards - had there been 80 i would have been spot on. lol, i was utterly baffled by why anyone would give a yardage for one mitten.

got me silk found a long sumptuous silk brocade dress in a charity shop today.

the silk is in really good nick, barely a snag or anything, although the dress seems well used and is starting to come apart at the seams. i’m hoping this means it should withstand being a lining okay. there’s also an equal amount of a lighter weight plain black lining that i can use to line the strap and stop it stretching. the whole vibe of the bag is turning out much more delicate than i envisaged, i hope it’ll be fit for more than just an evening bag.

and i just couldn’t pass up this fabulous turquoise wrap at £1.50.

i gimped the colour so it’s a very close match for the real thing. it’s very loosely woven and slightly felted (by the manufacturer, doesn’t seem accidental). i was planning to felt and chop up into a bag or something, but me and madam have been fighting over who gets to snuggle up in it on the sofa and i think it might have already become a fixture au naturel.

i’m very behind the times in my current turquoise phase, isn’t it all a bit passe now?

i found this response to a question on holes in yer ankles on knitters review. i’m going to paste the answer as chances are by the time i get round to my next pair the thread will have been archived or deleted.

This problem is basically very localized laddering, caused by stress on the corner when you’re working the heel and the instep stitches are resting.

For covering up the ones you’ve already done, take a little scrap of yarn and duplicate stitch over the holes to pull them together, then weave in both ends of your yarn scrap.

For preventing them in the future, either lift the stitch from the row below on the instep side and knit it together with the first stitch on the heel side, or vice versa, or pick up the bar between the stitches, twist it, and knit it together with the next stitch. If you can still see a small gap, a little judicious work with a crochet hook, easing the slack into the surrounding stitches, will take care of it.

i’ve been dithering for months over an Important Purchase, and have at last bitten the bullet and made up my mind. it’s yarn for a baby blanket which will be crochet blocks from this book. wanted something easy care, preferably cottony, subtle rich colours, less than £2/50g.

no chance.

have been debating the toss between subjecting myself to weeks of work with eyeball-searing luminous plastic (let alone subjecting poor mother and babe to same) vs second mortage for something rowany or blissish.

my decision was to compromise on the colour front. it’s the modern use of colour that appeals to me most about the book, and i loved the idea of using non-babyish colours for a blanket that would hopefully last through to childhood. but the colours i like simply aren’t available in my price bracket for the project. so i’ve had to go slightly softer, more pastelly, more conventional/traditional, which isn’t the end of the world given that i at least got a composition i’m happy with: 50%cotton 50%acrylic, machine wash, see here. they say it’s lighter than 100% cotton which is true judging by the yardage per 50g, perfect for a summer baby. even better i got it for 99p a ball + cheap postage from dianne’s yarns.

next comes the fun bit, choosing the squares…

ooooh new blog. i’m really looking forward to seeing how whip up shapes up.

i’m not a huge reader of blogs, i track a few in bloglines, but in general i don’t do the whole blog thing. this site was conceived as a stand-alone craft journal before i really knew what blogs were, and i just don’t have the time or inclination to follow the whole social side of blogging.

but as a fan of everything on topic i have to say whip up looks unmissable. i’ve had a very pleasant afternoon meandering between the contributors’ various sites and i’ve taken some form of inspiration from every one. i particularly love the fact that it’s international, hopefully that should give an interesting interaction of perspectives.

so far the pick of the bunch for me is yarnstorm: great pictures (and easily navigated galleries), relevant chat, uk based and - something i see on so few blogs - she has categories. i can’t emphasise enough how important that is to me, it makes the site a permanent resource rather than something ephemeral. i challenge anyone to explore a blog just by trolling through the archives month by month - it’s tedious and you give up after a page or two of tatting or whatever else it is that blogger does that goes straight over your head. give me some categories and i can happily scamper back and forth for hours, and then come back and look again when suddenly i see the light and realise that tatting is what i’ve been waiting for all along.

and on that subject we now have a blogs category. i’m hoping that when i eventually go back and recategorise all the past posts it doesn’t haul them all back to the top in bloglines.

not enough yarn to make it a partner

the yardage on the pattern said 80, but i guess that must be per mitten. there was 177 yards of this bfl when it came off the wheel (before washing and dyeing) but the one mitt took 5-and-a-little-bit colour repeats and i only have 3 left. i didn’t swatch since it was easy enough to try as i went along and it’s bang on size-wise.

i’m in a quandry what to do next: spin some extra and try to approximate one of the colours then use that for the cuffs? spin some extra and dye to a co-ordinating colour then intersperse that as another stripe? spin some extra don’t even bother to frog the first and just have them unmatch? just do something different with the yarn? i do love the mitten though, fits perfectly (apart from over-tight cast-off, obviously) and is super cosy and soft.

the pattern was great, really easy to follow, and i learned how to make 2 stitches together. wasn’t sure what “reverse loop” was so did “knit left loop then knit right loop” as per knitting help. also learned how to pick up stitches around the thumb which worked out really well with no gaps (once again yay for kh).

the yarn is the very first thing i spun on the wheel and i’m super pleased with how it turned out. i had to keep hauling it off the bobbin and running it through again to add extra twist when i was plying, i much prefer a nice tight ply, and it came out absolutely totally balanced

the self striping was a cinch too. i just wrapped the yarn around 2 chair backs the length of our front room apart to make a really long skein. then i marked it into 3 with yarn and each third went into it’s own bowl of dye in the massive pot. the only tricky thing was handling a skein that length, especially for rinsing, but in the end i just hauled it of all the bowls and dumped into the sink (handily enough our front room isn’t exactly huge, so the skein was just about manageable).

the colours were supposed to be greyish-purple, greyish-green and grey, but came out damson pink, khaki and greyish-pink respectively. i lost my nerve with the purple and addded extra red after the skein went in, hence the pinkness. i wanted to add a little warmth to the grey so mixed in a spoon or 2 of the “purple” bath, but that red sure is insistent, a little goes a long way. again to help the colours blend i added a little “purple” to the green and again the red has dragged it too far towards brown. all that said i love the accidental result (accurate colours here).

the thing i liked best about all this is that it didn’t take much longer to do than it did to write up. it was fluff at lunchtime and knitted before bed.

i have a hank of handspun and a hankering for fingerless mittens. this pattern looks like it fits the bill. i even have 5mm dpns *happy dance*.

do i bother to stripe-dye the yarn first or dive in with it hot off the wheel?

decisions decisions…

no, not about futurama coming back, while that is indeed good news, slightly better than this in fact. but i digress…

my temperamental gallery plugin has been upgraded and i’ve gone back through and updated the old pics. all thumbnails in posts should now link through to larger images in the gallery. the not so good news is for anyone who subscribes on bloglines (both of you ;)) who will see all the edited posts coming up as new. sorry guys.

i have a very special bag to make (luckily for someone who doesn’t read here) and have been mulling over the possibilities for a while. it’s gradually coming together and seeing this bag over at fivegallonbucket has pushed me a little further in the right direction i think.

the base will be black alpaca a) because i have some and b) because the recipient is allergic to wool. she reckons a wool bag should be okay since she wouldn’t be touching it all the time, but i’ve heard alpaca can be better for some allergies so i thought that would be on the safer side. i’ll line with some yet-to-be-acquired fabulous fabric, hopefully silk. i’ll spin some silk for the strap (have just ordered from fyberspates) and probably blend the silk and alpaca for some accent yarn.

now i’m having happy thoughts about felting some round beads or, if the alpaca’s not keen to felt, making pompoms (though making sure they don’t fall to bits is the challenge there i reckon). a handful of co-ordinating glass beads and we should be there i reckon.

i finished the socks i started on boxing day on sunday, so just under a month, even with a fair bit of dedicated knitting time. i used wendy’s toe up sock pattern which was (on the whole) a breeze. once i got my head around the short rows it was really straightforward - enough to manage the second one with barely a glance at the pattern.

the biggest problem i had was knitting the double wraps at the ends of the rows in properly to make the right side neat. trouble is i don’t remember how i managed to do it right in the end, or even where i found the tip that set me on the right path. i know that knittinghelp didn’t help me this time. next time i do some i’ll have to update this entry, when it all comes back to me or i have to go hunting for help again.

since it’s my first try at socks they don’t fit brilliantly and don’t match. the first one (on the right in the pic) turned out so much too small around the leg that i cast the second on with extra stitches (64 vs 60) and accidentally started the ribbing much lower on the leg. so i decided to frog the first back to the ankle so that i could increase the number of stitches in the cuff. so i actually had 2 nearly completed socks about 2 weeks ago, but it took me a while to get back to finishing sock no.1.

the final verdict is that sock no.1 istoo small - it’s a little short in the foot and it could be a little wider. sock 2 was too long in the foot before a wash but perhaps fits about right now. i actually decreased the sitches by 2 once i’d past the ball of my foot as it was feeling a little loose (it turned out that my tension relaxed loads after i’d firmly got the hang of the dpns - the first sock bore very little resemblance to my guage swatch, much tighter) then i increased up to 66 for the cuff.

on the first sock i changed from 2.5 to 2mm dpns for the 3×3 ribbing but had to change back since one of my birch needles snapped (i didn’t put any additional pressure on it). i limped along with 4 until i lost another irretrievably down the back of the in-laws sofa, and then reverted to the 2.5s. i have to say i much preferred working with the metal needles, but will have to remember to test the replacement guarantee on the brittany ones.

i think next time i would do the rib in a smaller size needle, but increase the stitches to compensate - i think i’d prefer a tighter looking rib. while i love the striped yarn (regia canadian colors, toronto) in the stockinette stretches i’m not mad on it in the rib, the purl stitches are too bittily stripey. i guess i’d be better off with a wider stripe.

i had problems when it came to binding off, too tight, but solved that with a crochet cast off that i’ll link to here cos i’m sure i’ll come looking for it again soon.

but i’d say on the whole i loved knitting these, the changing colours in the yarn kept me interested and the whole thing was much easier than i was expecting (given that i’ve only knitted rib scarves and half a hat on dpns before). the only thing i really need to address is quite noticeable holes at the ankles where it joins back into the round after the short rows. i did have a very slight widening at the corner of the needles but a trip through the wash evened them out a treat.

# 1 - adult alpaca, spindle spun, plied.

i spun this from a few handfuls or raw fibre at the spinning day on saturday, the first alpaca i’ve tried. it’s fluffy but quite hard (overtwisted). i found i had to put a lot of twist in to get it to hold together at first but once i’d settled into it i should have reduced the twist.

# 2 - baby alpaca, fluffed, not combed or carded, wheel spun, singles. 4mm needles.

i was amazed by this - it seemed really marginal whether it would hold together at all, and turned out a wonderful soft, fuzzy fabric. this was the second yarn i spun on the kiwi after a little bfl top. i kept it as a singles as there clearly wasn’t enough twist to ply. i picked out the largest lumps of vm but hoped the other bits would kind of work their own way out during spinning and washing (some did, some didn’t). i also thought i’d done for it when i washed it rather roughly and it seemed to have felted into one big mass. it withstood being pulled back into strands while wet and skeined off pretty well once it was dry. (i have to add that i LOVE the skeiner - the fuzzy, loosely spun, tangled skein would never have made it into balls without it). there’s a lot of thick-thin variation (very rough average 15 wpi) and i think the needle choice was about right, the fabric’s quite open, but the fuzz fills any gaps nicely.

i love this so much i’m seriously thinking about spinning enough for my first jumper - will subject the swatch to a little abuse. i’m sure i’ve heard that alpaca doesn’t pill but that it can shed a lot. the pattern at the top is (a very rough attempt at) the crocus bud pattern from belle epoque (knitty). it’s the closest i’ve found to what i’m looking for but not quite there i think, i’d rather someththing with a higher, maybe square neckline, and a little more fitted. i’m also having serious doubts about spinning 500g of the stuff anyway near consistently.

# 3 - baby alpaca, combed, fluffed, wheel spun.

i lost a fair percentage of the fibre in processing. not having proper equipment i busked it with an old comb (plastic, teeth too close together) and a dog/cat paddle brush (like a mini carder, teeth also probably too close together). i can see why joanna recommended combing, that seems to be the most efficient way to get the bits out - might see if i can make a trip to the pet shop and see what they have in the way of combs.

while the fibre prep was better i think it’s way overspun for a singles. now i realise it needs a lot less than i always thought to hold together, especially on the wheel where there’s less tension on the fibres so it’s not going to drift apart as you spin. the finished skein has a deal of residual twist (compared to no.2 which hung pretty much straight) and is kinked up in places. i wouldn’t want to weight it while it dries since there’s little enough elasticity in the yarn already, don’t want to kill it altogether. i’ll still knit it up and see how it compares to no. 2 through a few wash/wear cycles, so i can fine tune.

oh wow oh wow oh wow.

i cannot believe that it took approximately 28 hours from order to delivery - my kiwi’s here!

and i cannot believe how much faster a wheel is than a spindle. i have 2 mini skeins of alpaca hanging to dry already (one completely raw, just fluffed a bit, the other with all the crap combed out and then fluffed) plus half a bobbin of white bfl. i’ll spin up another half then ply the two.

and that’s with assembling the wheel and the skeiner and giving the wheel a couple of coats of wax (the skeiner only got one but it got sanded first - i discovered the sandpaper they send you too late for the wheel). the skeiner totally rocks, although it’s almost as big as the wheel istself.

and i have nothing but praise for the wheel. i got this impression that somehow it would be shoddy or second rate as it seems to be generally dismissed as a beginner’s wheel. maybe i’ll find that i outgrow the high speed kit, or that it goes rickety with age, but right now i think it’s fantastic. the wheel runs on ballbearings so it’s smooth as anything. the double treadles are great, i can get it to start in either direction without having to push the wheel itself which i had to do on the traditional i tried out on saturday. it has an intermittent mystery squeak that’s so far proved immune to copious oiling but i’ll track it down.

i really cannot get over how fast this thing is munching through my fibre stash, i’m onto the higher of the 2 standard ratios already and the bfl’s looking like it’ll turn out a decent, usable yarn. although i don’t have much choice how thick it’s soming out, it’s still perfectly passable. the alpaca’s going to take practice but i think the second (singles, the first time i haven’t plied, cos was too loosely spun) might actually be usble for something delicate.

oh and the wheel and front room in general now smell heavenly as they recommend you rub the screws in candlewax to get them to go in smooth. the only one i had about is an ancient scented one from habitat that i’ve kept forever as it is the most wonderful scent i’ve ever smelled and i never wanted to use it up. it’s called euphoric (petigrain, geranium and orange) and i keep grinning as i get little whiffs of it, and having brief flashbacks to the time i bought it, about 5 years ago.

now all i have to do is work out how to get my cunning decoration plan to work…

i’ve ordered my wheel - a kiwi with all the bits (although the jumbo flyer is out of stock and should follow within the month).

i really really wanted a lendrum but when i contacted the only uk supplier i was informed there’s a 3 month waiting list. that kind of pissed me off as i specifically asked him not much more than a month ago if there was likely to be a wait and he didn’t mention one. tbh i’ve been utterly underwhelmed by their service on every occasion i’ve contacted them, so i’m very happy that my custom has gone elsewhere.

i dithered a bit on the kiwi as i suddenly realised that although it’s pretty compact it doesn’t fold, which was high on my priority list. but we’ve decided that if we can’t find a corner to squeeze it into (and it would be a squeeze) it can always sit up in our bedroom during the day and just come down in the evenings.

i’m also not over keen on having to finish it myself, but i guess that’s how they keep it affordable. was pondering whether to do somthing fancy, but read a good point that dings and chips would blend in much better with a natural/oiled finish. but will scout around and see whether inspiration strikes.

i ordered from www.twistfibrecraft.co.uk who couldn’t have been more friendly and helpful over the phone. they seem to be cheapest in the uk by a reasonable margin. the whole kit & caboodle, including high speed kit, jumbo flyer and skeiner (which should come in very handy, i get horribly frustrated dealing with skeins and i keep wrapping my pvc niddy too tight and snapping the joints) came in at less than the lendrum (wheel only) and shipped free. the order should dispatch today from the distributors, so with luck might be with me by the weekend

i will be able to afford to buy art. real art, other people’s art. rather than just gazing at it adoringly or pondering how easy it would be to rip off (while never actually getting round to it). yep inspiration rocks but acquisition rocks too.

in particular i will buy several of angela lewin’s botanical prints and hang them in my conservatory. when i’m rich i will have a conservatory too

sorry, o/t. via nebo peklo.

urgh why does any vestige of rationality disappear whenever shopping is involved?

a) i haven’t finished my first pair of socks, they’re taking much longer than i expected, i’m getting quite bored and have a whole heap of non-knitting projects i want to finish, plus i want my next (eventual) knitting project to be non-socky, probably using my sari silk. so WHY am i lusting after sock yarn?

b) i am not and will never be predominantly a knitter, i have knitted a grand total of 2 and 9/10 items, none of which was complicated enough to require markers, i think it will be a long time before i tackle any pattern which needs them. moreover, i make stitchmarkers. i make crochet ones (which i will use) and knitting ones (which i probably won’t), i have a whole stash of supplies including some very cute beads just waiting to be turned into markers. damnit i even have little tins to keep them in. so WHY am i lusting after stitch markers? (specifically the little blue and white ceramic animals).

must resist…

Alpaca Fiber - Selling Fleece - Preparing Fleece -Mount Airy Alpaca Company, Maryland
joyofhandspinning: alpaca

despite appearances to the contrary i haven’t dropped off the face of the earth, or stopped stitching, but i have been rather sidetracked by various things, mostly watching movies.

but all should be back on track soon, i went to a spinning workshop today, had my first ever try on a wheel and also came back with some mmmmm alpaca, hence the links.