I win! October 27, 2009

As much as I appreciate Kif’s guest post the other day while I was… indisposed, it was very hard wrestling the laptop back from him.

 

 

Now that I have it back (I think I will pay for this ousting with a midnight hair-ball) I would like to share this with you:

 

   

That’s right, an entire completed Central Park Hoodie back!  With short-row shoulder shaping, every cable turned the right way, the right size and everything. I win! (…but I really shouldn’t say that in print until I’ve finished it, lest I anger the knitting gods again.)  I’m on to the left front now, just finished the ribbing for it.

 

In other news, I haven’t told you about my fun trip to Weaving Works.  I went there with my mom while she was visiting.  I hadn’t been there before, even though I’ve lived in the Seattle area for 6 years!  I don’t have any pictures of the inside, sadly, but I can describe it for you!

 

When you come inside, there’s a massive wall and shelves full of yarn like Noro, Lana Grossa, and Sirdar.  There’s a great selection.  And then there’s the back third of the store.  Fiber and thread, in bulk.  Undyed cotton, nylon, wool, bamboo, rayon and more in all different weights and then there’s the dyed selection of those threads!  And the fiber!  Silk, wool of different breeds, yak, mohair, hemp, even milk and Firestar; it’s enough to drive a spinner mad.  There’s pre-dyed wool for felting and spinning and tons of undyed/natural fiber for dying yourself.  Silk in hankies and in cocoons if you want to do the reeling.  And some blends of fibers that are just great.  Sadly, not even the prices helped me decide- all the fiber is really well priced!  After a lot of indecision and burying my hands in bins of fiber, I decided on a few things.

	About an ounce of 80% merino, 20% bamboo blend, undyed.  This one’s just for experimenting.  I love knitting with wool/bamboo blends so I’d like to see how it spins.
	2.5 ounces of pure, undyed Blue-Faced Leicester top.  It’s soooo soft.  I thought I’d dye it myself, something fun.  Of course now I can’t think of a good color combination; blue or purple or brown?  And I can’t decide if I want there to be subtle gradations, stripes, or just a gentle switching of shades as I spin.  Any ideas?
	About 2 ounces of a pre-dyed 70% merino/30% silk blend.  I can’t stop petting it, it’s so luscious!  I even braided the hank so that it looks all pretty in the photo (notice I didn’t do that for the others!)  They had a small sample spun up at the store and it was beautiful.  This is what I’m going to spin as soon as I finish the CPH.  And what am I going to spin it on, you ask?
	My brand new, top-whorl spindle from Cascade Spindle Co.  I love their spindles and they’re all inspired by mountains in the Cascades!  This one is Mt. Baker, which is north of me, and we went skiing there a few years back.

 

The spindles are in the last part of the shop, with the spinning wheels, extra bobbins, niddy-noddys, and knitting needles.  Oh, and the books!!  So many shelves of books about anything to do with fiber.  This is my new favorite store.  It’s a good thing it’s not too close, otherwise I’d be overrun with fiber in no time!

I made yarn! September 22, 2009

I’ve now spun on a wheel and on a spindle.  While I was very frustrated at the beginning of the spindle class, it eventually made much more sense to me than spinning on a wheel.  There are so many parts to the wheel, so much happening at once, that I couldn’t really conceptualize what was going on.  It was easier on the spindle, once I got past the silently screaming phase anyway.

 

The kit that I bought for my spindle class came with a few ounces of fiber.  I used up most of the roving in class, but had a surprising amount of combed top left.  I like the top better anyway.  So, I spun that up over a week or so, getting better all the time.  Then came time to ply.  I completely forgot about making a plying ball, and put each ball of singles into a mug to keep them from rolling around and started plying.  It was very frustrating and I don’t think I’ll ever forget to make a plying ball again.

 

This is my two-ply, mostly worsted-spun yarn!

 

I think it came out pretty well!  There’s hardly enough to do anything with, so I think I’ll tuck it away as my first real finished yarn.

 

After that, I found some of the white top that had been separated from its brethren for no apparent reason.  So I spun that and tried my hand at chain-plying.  That was really hard.  The single I spun was very “energetic” (the polite term for “way too overspun”) and that makes chain-plying much, much harder since the single keeps trying to strangle itself.  It’s kind of like wrestling with cling wrap.  When it worked, I loved the technique.  When it didn’t work, I wanted to burn the whole darn mess, except that it’s wool and wool doesn’t burn well.

 

Worsted-spun chain-plied skeinlette.

 

For comparison, here’s all three of my yarns together.  Wheel-spun single, spindle-spun two-ply, and spindle-spun chain-ply.

 

I do believe my drafting has gotten much better!

SS09 Debriefing, Part 2 August 18, 2009

I went all out and took a class in every slot available.  I thought about not taking a class on Saturday morning, the logic being that by then I would be pretty tired and want to sleep in and there wasn’t a class that I was utterly dying to take then.  But then I thought, this might be the only opportunity to take these classes at all!  So I registered for a Saturday morning class.  Turned out that all my previous thoughts had been true, I was tired and I didn’t really get much out of the class.  But I met some fun people and the teacher, Charlene Schurch, was very nice.

 

 

My favorite classes were the ones I took on publishing designs, which I don’t have pictures of since they were just lectures.  I got lots of good information, including tips on how to get a book published.  A book is my long term goal but it won’t be happening anytime soon.  First, I have to build a “platform.”  Basically, this blog needs to get big enough that a publisher sees my audience as worth the publishing cost, or I have to become wealthy enough to independently publish it.  Both of which will take some time, I think!

 

  

I enjoyed my class with Janel Laidman, the author of The Eclectic Sole and has beautiful color work socks.  She was very friendly and complimented my Arthurian Anklets!  I love knitting color work but I’ve never gotten a good fit on color work socks.  I now have some good tips to help with that, so expect to see some more stranded socks coming this winter!

 

     

I loved the spindle spinning class that I took Saturday afternoon.  Abby and Denny were great teachers.  Well, I didn’t think they were so great for about the first hour of class.  I kept breaking my “yarn” and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.  I was frustrated and feeling kind of mentally fuzzy; you know that feeling you get when you’re trying really hard to understand something but it’s just not working?  Yeah.  When things finally clicked, though, oh man!  I was totally hooked.  I ran right over to the marketplace after class and grabbed some fiber!  By the end of class, my yarn was even and thin if a bit fuzzy and all I wanted to do was to keep spinning.  I’m almost done spinning the fiber that came with the class kit then I will try plying it and then… I will start spinning my new fiber!! (I’m trying hard not to get too obsessed with spinning.  But it’s really fun.  I don’t even know why.)

 

Next post I’ll show you all the tasty things I bought at the marketplace!

Spin Spin Spin December 8, 2008

While I was in Virginia, I mentioned to my mother that I was interested in learning how to spin.  Now, I’ve been putting off learning to spin for a few reasons.  One, I’m afraid I’ll love it.  Two, I’m afraid I won’t.  If I love it, well, I feel like I don’t have enough time as it is to do everything that I want to do.  Add spinning to the long list of crafts I already do and… But I really want to like spinning. Actually making yarn seems so fascinating to me.  I’m worried that I won’t enjoy it, that it’ll be a big hassle or I’ll be just plain bad at it.  So, I haven’t really applied myself towards finding a class and learning to spin.

 

As a nice surprise for me, my mother arranged for me to have a private spinning lesson at an LYS, Nature’s Yarns, Inc.  The shop and the people there were lovely.  When I went for my lesson, their knitting group was meeting, so the place was filled with people knitting, chatting, and even spinning.  I watched in awe as one woman smoothly, hardly even paying attention, churned out yard and yards of something that looked like it was going to be a fabulous yarn.  I was very jealous. 

 

After the requisite explanation of the parts of the wheel, which I only somewhat remember, we got down to business.  My instructor had me learning on a Louet wheel, which I think was the S10 (I think she called it something else. but I can’t quite remember.)  She had prepared three types of wool for me to try, a carded white wool, a rougher wool, and some blue top/roving.  She showed me how to draft the fiber to make it the right thickness before I started to spin.  Experienced spinners can draft as they spin, but there was no way that I was going to be able to do that. 

The wheel that I was using only had one treadle, which meant that to go clockwise you put your toe down first and to go counter-clockwise you put your heel down first. (I think.)  This quickly became a problem.  I have trouble with clockwise/counter-clockwise on my best days.  Add in fibers, spinning machinery, and having to keep track of what I was doing?  Yeah, I think I unspun the yarn as much as I spun it.  I was supposed to turn the wheel counter-clockwise to spin the yarn.

   

I knew that I was going to be bad at spinning the first time I tried it.  I seriously doubt that anyone has ever sat down at a wheel and spun a decent yarn their first time.  So I didn’t feel bad that my yarn was perhaps the ugliest thing this side of the Mississippi.  My instructor told me that I spun very well and maybe better than other beginners, but I bet she says that to all the beginners.  I mean, seriously, what else do you tell someone? 

(This is the first time I’ve tried putting a video on the blog.  Hopefully all will go well.  The audio really isn’t worthwhile, just some background chatter.  At :10 I add more fiber, badly.  At :30, I try to draft the fiber a little better to prevent a slub, but it didn’t really help.)

 

By the end of the lesson, I kind of had something resembling the hang of it.  Ok, I was nowhere near proficient and I think my yarn actually got worse towards the end.  But it was fun.  Learning to spin was kind of like learning to drive a car.  You sort of know where everything is and what everything does.  But you have no idea exactly how press to hit the pedals for a nice smooth ride.  That’s something that comes with practice.  It’s that infamous “feel” that makes things work.  At the end, I certainly didn’t have a “feel” for anything except when the fibers were going to fall apart.  My yarn is by turns horrifically over twisted or terribly under twisted.  It goes from bulky weight to finer than laceweight in the space of an inch.  I had no feel for how often to press down on the treadle (I’m pretty sure that my method of “find a rhythm and don’t ever stop” was dead wrong) and did you know that the bobbin doesn’t really pull the yarn?  You have to decide when the yarn has enough twist and then feed it into the bobbin.  You pinch the fiber in one hand until you get the right twist, then move the pinch up to twist the next section.  But I kept just over-twisting the first section because I would forget to put it on the bobbin.  And I’m pretty sure that I held my pinch too close and I should have sat back a little more.

I’m not really sure if I enjoyed spinning or not.  It didn’t seize me immediately like knitting and crochet.  But one hour really isn’t enough to get the whole experience since it’s so complicated.  Maybe I’d like spinning more if I had actual yarn at the end of it instead of 4 yards of slubby junk?  In any case, I predict that by the end of next year, I’ll have a spinning wheel and hopefully something that looks like yarn.  The potential for learning there is just too much for me to resist.  Look at that yarn, though. So twisted that it can’t even straighten out.  At least I kind of like the colors.