Awhile back, last month, there was a sneak peek of what's on the wheel. Well, guess what? It's off the wheel, plied, washed, and done!
I'm really pleased. It's 430 yards of 2-ply that ranges from sport to worsted - 10 to 18 wraps per inch, depending on the stretch of yarn. I use Eucalan no-rinse wool wash in a hot bath and let it dry. It came out soft and wound up two large cake balls.
Reds, purples, oranges, yellows. It's in a box and shipping to my dragon now, who will knit it into a slouchy hat for the cat!mom. I can't wait to see what it looks like!
Back in last christmas I bought myself my very first spinning wheel - an Ashford Kiwi 2, unfinished (no stain, no polish). I've been happily spinning on this wheel half a year now, with vague plans to put some stain and polish on it at some point to protect it.
This is my wheel as of Sunday morning. I realized it was getting a bit grubby - those are foot prints from treadling with bare feet on the pedals, and the bobbin brake knob is turning greyish from hand oils where I'm always turning it. Poor wheel is only half a year old! Time to do something about coating it, but I really really don't have the space or patience to disassemble the entire thing, stain it, and leave it somewhere to dry - not to mention it's now stupidly humid out and putting it outside isn't going to actually make it dry.
Two hours later, here's the first in-progress wheel photo. I'm using outdoor furniture acrylic paint - goes on like melted butter with a little water mixed in, very opaque, dries in a flash. The brake knob, center strut, and pedal concords are done in fire engine red; the pedals are done in red with diluted streaks of metallic gold over the top. The idea for the scheme is going to be red/gold/black.
And no, I'm not taking it apart. =P I probably won't paint ALL of it, just the parts I come in contact with the most often (and the wheel itself, because it'll be pretty). And because acrylic dries so fast, I can go back to spinning within an hour or two of putting a coat of paint on. Yay! \o/
I am a hobby knitter. I'm not great, but I'd say I'm comfortably intermediate level - I can do most lace and cable stitches (though I tend to get bored) and I've successfully completed at least ONE sock. I've knitted hats, and doll sweaters, and I'm in the middle of my first real-person sized sweater. I've knitted enough to have opinions about brands of needles and types of yarn, so yeah - "intermediate".
Back when I was a smallish kitten - say, late middle school, early high school, so maybe fourteen-ish? - I first picked up knitting. I taught myself out of those "how to" basic instruction pamphlet books that you find in craft stores, along with a set of Susan Bates needles and some Red Heart yarn. I had recently, back then, been exposed to Doctor Who - specifically Tom Baker's fourth Doctor, and the infamous Scarf Of Doom. So I sat down over summer break with my cheap craft store supplies and taught myself to knit the basic garter stitch and proceeded, very quickly, to knit myself a striped reddish Doctor Who scarf that was twice as tall as I was. Satisfied with my contribution to my early cosplay efforts, I promptly retired the needles and stopped knitting.
Not as nice as this, but I tried!
(For the record, I'm pretty sure Susan Bates needles and the old school scratchy Red Heart yarn were a large portion of WHY there wasn't nearly as much of a boom in the hobby/cottage knitting industry back in the '80's and '90's. Those were pretty much all you could find and they're enough to make anyone give up knitting.)
Fast forward to somewhere around 2010, when more and more people I knew on the journal blog-sphere were knitters and talking about (and showing off) pictures of their fabulous hand dyed yarns and pretty bamboo and wood needles. So, I figured why not - I picked up knitting again. I'd forgotten everything so I had to start over from scratch. I went back to starting with a scarf, this time knitted on wooden needles that slid like butter compared to the craft store kind, with Paton's Bohemian yarn which feels like fluffy soft fuzzy caterpillars and makes you just want to roll around in it. And this time I taught myself - courtesy of the wonder that is instructional videos online - how to purl as well as knit, and viola, a hobby knitter was born.
So, what's the point of this long-winded reminiscence?
I am, right now, an English knitter - I tension the yarn in my right hand and "throw" it over the needle (actually, more like "flicking" - it's all in the index finger). However, particularly when knitting with lace yarn on needles under US #3 sizes, this tends to aggravate my carpal tunnel. I can knit for half an hour or so before my right thumb starts going numb, and if I ignore it and keep going then it goes completely numb, along with the index and middle fingers, and stays that way for an hour or more. Annoying, and also very distressing, and more than a bit painful when the feeling is coming back. Slows down my knitting substantially since I can't do it for very long.
So I've been trying to pick up Continental knitting - tension the yarn with my left hand and "pick" the stitch. I can, so far, manage a knit stitch in this style. Purling is right out, but it's useful for looooooong stretches of stockinette in the round, knit knit knit forever. And it's kinder on my hands - I can do it for half an hour on the morning commute and only have some tingling and stiffness in my thumb and fingers, easily shaken out.
But you know what it's not? It is NOT faster than how fast I knit that silly Doctor Who scarf back in the day. Neither of these knitting styles are. Even with needles that scraped and stuck and yarn that was like twine, I knit that thing blazingly fast. And today, while looking for tutorials about continental knitting, I came across something I'd never heard of before - Lever knitting, where the right hand needle is either braced in your armpit (long needles) or held in the junction of your thumb like a pencil (short needles).
'Lo and behold, that is exactly how I first taught myself to knit - I thought it wasn't "right", it wasn't how the pictures looked in the tutorial I was learning from, but it was fast and efficient so that was what I did. Then, when I picked knitting back up, now with video tutorials, I studiously taught myself how to do it the "right" way and I've had numb thumbs ever since.
GO FIGURE.
Lever knitting is apparently one of the older (pre-industrial) styles of knitting quickly and on-the-go - something people could do while walking or other chores, with the aid of a knitting sheath or knitting beltto stabilize the right hand needle while they're moving. This sounds so much better and easier to me, and omg I want a knitting belt. Really. Do Want. I may have to figure out how to make some sort of facsimile of one, because it would be so much easier on my hands.
Welcome to what my desk looks like right now! Mess, mess, and more mess, but productive mess. I'm on a beading binge, making things that will hopefully be for the etsy/artfire shop.
I was going to have a prospective June 1st opening, but let's be realistic - mid June sounds a little less rushed and crazy. The only rush to open the shops is to actually have them open; basically, it's solidified as "nothing is going to spontaneously do it for you, you need to just get your ducks in a row and keep pushing forward". So that's what we're doing.
Beaded things, art things, knitted things, doll things... whee! Here's just a little sneak peek:
I was exempt from posting yesterday because of Root Canal. =P Root canal dental work trumps everything, and I spent most of the day on the couch, eating applesauce and taking ibuprofen. Not as bad as it's made out to be, but it leaves you sore afterwards.
Fortunately, today I woke up free of pain, mouth feels normal, and it's a long holiday weekend! I wonder what the cat is doing on a long weekend....
Things that make you go hhmmMMmmmm! More on this next week!
Haven't been spinning much lately, too many other things to do. However, I banged up my right shoulder, which put a stop to things like knitting and beading. Spinning, however, doesn't take much shoulder motion, and my chair is nice and high backed so I could brace myself. Back to spinning it is!
This is what's on the wheel right now. I wish I could tell you what it is, but honestly, I have no clue. The Cat Mom, on hearing her kitten had taken up spinning, sent me a Box 'o Roving - no labels, no clue what fibers they are, just random colors Mom liked. Some of them were rough, at least two were completely unspinnable (I suspect they were for felting) and some of them were soft and fluffy and wonderful.
So I arranged them in orders where the colors looked nice together, and started spinning!
It's - mostly - a nice thin single. And I've spun enough of it that at this point the bobbin is so heavy that my little Ashford Kiwi doesn't really want to take up the yarn right any more. The plan is that my Dragon will knit the Cat Mom a hat out of it, and for a hat you need yardage, so the colorful mix needs to be plied with something else and not to itself.
It's all so colorful and bright I decided it needed something darker and sort of neutral to offset it. Digging in the roving stash, I came up with BlueMoonFiberArts Blackbird colorway, in superwash merino.
Which looks much lighter than you'd expect as roving, but spins up beautifully dark with just some subdued hints of color. I'm hoping it'll ply with the colorful scraps and make them pop.
Now to spin a comparable amount of the Blackbird to go with the Random Roving! I have no real way to judge this except by guesstimating. I'm excited to see what it plies like, and how much yarn I end up with by the end of it.
Ever wished you could have a custom made yarn without having to spin it yourself? Pick your colors and fibers and just have yarn magically appear, no effort involved? Wouldn't that be awesome?
Yarnia, a little yarn shop in Portland, OR, has set out to do just that. This is the most innovative way of selling yarn I've seen, and my hat's off to them - both for the idea, and for a great product.
Internet advertising at work, and I found them utterly by chance while browsing Ravelry - they popped up in the little add window to the side and I said huh, wonder what that is, and clicked. What Yarnia does is provide completely customized yarns; at their online shop you can select your yarns by fiber content or color, up to six at a time blended into one custom yarn. The yarns you select are singles, and are combined together and wound onto a cone. You specify how much you want, and a little gauge tells you, with each single added to your cart, how bulky your yarn is going to be.
I wanted more lace to sock weight yarn, so I kept it to three singles per cone. This also influenced my fiber choices, as some of their singles are bulkier than others. Keeping to alpaca, silk, mohair, and the glittery shiny lurex, I whipped together a mardi gras purple-green-gold and a subdued but sparkly blue toned. Submit the order - under $10 for 400 yards each - and bam, done.
Less then a week later the cones arrived. Poof! Magic, and custom made yarn.
Aren't they pretty? The lurex is pure synthetic sparkle magic, and it's understated - it pops out in glittery bits when you knit it up with the rest. There's a thread of gold in the first one and a thread of aqua blue in the second.
Now, the only trick is that Yarnia's technique is to wind at an even tension onto a cone - it's just the singles laid out together. They aren't plied with each other, so there's no overall twist. You just pick it all up together and knit with it as one. Might seem a little awkward at first, but it's not bad, and I like the way the colors seem to wrap around each other and alternate with your stitches, so you get a variegated effect.
Now the eternal question... what should I knit with the new yarn? Hmmm.....
(Just a note of reminder - CatDragon doesn't get any kickback or kudos for product reviews, I'm just passing along fun and interesting things as they cross my path!)
I'm a cat of small attention span and even shorter short term memory. This is the inherent problem with multitasking - I'm doing so many things at any given time that I if I put something down to come back to it later I can't remember what I was doing.
Knitting patterns? Stitch patterns that require extended repeats over multiple rows? DOOM.
So for the two sweaters I have on the needles right now (one human sized, one doll sized) I made stitch pattern markers, decorative little things that help me remember where I am in the pattern, which double as the place marker for the start of the round.
Simple, yeah? The larger one just has decorative bead spacers and is meant to count every 10 rows (the number of rows between increases/decreases in the human sized sweater).
On the smaller one I didn't bother with spacers - it's charting a specific stitch pattern for the cable running up the center of the doll sweater. It's the OXO cable, where the plain rings are just knit as normal and the rings with the beads are the cable crossovers. The blue beads mean I should start with the "hold cable needle to the back" and the purple (fuschia) beads mean I should start with the "hold cable needle to the front". Blue = back, fuschia = front, and the little heart dongle at the end reminds me it's the XO hugs and kisses cable. Even on my least caffeinated and most braindead days I can remember that!
On row 2 of the stockinette between increases
The entire things took me an hour to whip up this morning, using jump rings (5mm and 7mm) and eye pins with assorted beads for the connector bits. Quick, simple, and now I know where I am in my patterns even if the knitting sits around for a month or two unworked.
On the first stockinette row after the first cable cross
Let me tell you a tale of happiness and woe. The happiness? Simple! The cat and the dragon, united at last, sitting around playing WoW and knitting during our vacation. LOVE IT. Perfect. (The knitting, the playing, the vacation, and definitely my dragon!)
The woe? Knitpicks is no longer my go to place for online yarn shopping. Why? Because the yarn is gone.
"But WHY," I hear you ask, in your best Jack Sparrow voice, "is all the yarn gone?"
Aren't those gorgeous? [sob] Shadow Shimmer, RIP
Beats me. But Knitpicks, in their recent revamp, has axed almost all of the lace weight yarns I used to buy. Specifically the Shadow line, 100% merino in lovely colors, including some tonals which are hard as heck to find in lace, much less find reasonably priced. I am a sad cat. SAD, I tell you. SO SAD. Fortunately I have a stockpile of the decommissioned yarn lines, but I am still so sad that when I use those up they will be GONE.
This is the Bitlet, my Hujoo Nano Freya. She's itty bitty - fits neatly in the palm of my hand, and therefore took up no room at all slipping her into my carry on luggage to come on vacation with me. As you can see, it's hard to knit anything for her that doesn't look bulky. Fortunately, I also brought a ball of the KP Shadow Shimmer in the orange-brown spice, another in the blue-green bayou, and some US #0 DPNs.
The first attempt involved a simple tube dress - about the size of my thumb - with some eyelet holes that I threaded a sparkly yarn through. The second attempt I got more ambitious - sleeves! and little bits of colorwork, alternating the bayou and spice yarns. Completely knit off the cuff, I just kept holding it up to her and guessing if I needed less or more stitches. It came out pretty cute for an impromptu attempt at knitting in micro size. :)
What do you do with your beginner sample works? You know the things I mean - the lumpy swatches of awkward knitting or the even lumpier over and under twisted chunky bits of homespun yarn, the mangled bits of jewelry wire, and the tensionless bits of weaving. All the things that scream "Hello! I just started this craft and I'm not sure what I'm doing and I'm making a lot of mistakes!" Yeah, those bits.
Trash bin? Usually. But in the case of spinning, well, I'm loathe to discard any actually useable bits of yarn. Even if it's overspun chunky.
Fortunately, there's always uses for scrap yarn. Even better, dolls will never complain that you've dressed them in something that looks like your first knitting project! Particularly not when the doll in question has been sitting around naked for months because nothing I have in doll clothes will fit over her abundance of curves.
Shadow: Finally, clothes!
Shadow again, my Iplehouse EID 1/3 girl, and the scrap yarn sweater dress made entirely of bits and bobs handspun from roving by yours truly. At the top there's what I call "Alliance Boyfriend" (being a handful from my "Heroes of the Alliance" roving bag mixed with a handful from my "Boyfriend Sweater" roving bag). Around her waist is some "Alchemy Flambeau", and the skirt part is "Optimus Prime". Optimus and Alliance Boyfriend were spun around the same time when I first got my spinning wheel, with Flambeau coming several months later when I had learned some better technique.
Lastly, there's "Optimus Prime", which was the first thing I spun on my wheel. It's pure silk mawatas, Knit Picks Hanks in the Hood in "Warm Spring". I peeled each layer apart and spun them together with the colored ends butted up against each other (blue to blue, red to red) so that the color gradations were longer, and then I plied it to itself into a 2ply chunky worsted. Having tried several cheaper silk hankies from other places, I definitely recommend trying Hanks in the Hood - the brilliant color and smoothness is to die for. Excellent quality, and at that chunky weight I got 26 yards from it.
Cast on and free form knit with US8 needles, and viola! Something useful out of My First Spun scrap yarn.
So last time I raved about the itty bitty mini Turkish drop spindle. The real question is, of course, how much yarn can such an itty bitty spindle make? And what do you DO with it?
This is the ball I pulled off of the spindle - I could have kept spinning, but I was curious how much I already had. It was probably roughly the size of a dollar (US) coin. No bigger than a cat toy.
Since it was a center pull ball, done in a few different stretches of roving, I took the center and the end of the yarn and tied them back on the spindle, then plied the single of yarn to itself. This gave me a tiny ball of roughly sock weight yarn and I thought to myself, well, why not knit something for one of the dolls?
This is Shadow. She's an Iplehouse EID 1/3 girl, Asa sculpt, and currently sans faceup/eyes/wig in prep for doing some major mods to her, so please excuse the bare bones look! I cast on enough stitches to go around my smallest circular needle and then just did four rows of random yo/k2tog lace to make a little cowl scarf. I actually could have done another round or two - I had yarn left over.
So, THAT's what you can do with a itty bitty ball of yarn. I'm suitably impressed with the mini spindle, and hey, now Shadow has a totally hand made, handspun and knit, cowl scarf! ^_^
I wasn't going to be one of those people enamored of drop spindles. I like my wheel! It does a lot of yarn quickly and far more consistently than I can do by hand. But... I'm a sucker for tiny things. >_>
How tiny, you ask?
This is a mini Turkish spindle from Snyder Spindes on Etsy. It's a whopping 4.25" long, with 2.5" arms, and like all Turkish spindles it winds a center pull ball around the arms and comes apart in pieces so you can just slide the ball free. I LOVE IT. It's so very tiny! I can put it in my pocket, carry around a sandwich bag of roving, and spin on the bus!
Isn't it ADORABLE?? And it has an excellent spin for making very thin lightweight singles.
The merino-bamboo spins up like a dream, nice and easy to get consistent and thin. The tencel is a lot slipperier and hence harder to get consistent - also, it's fuzzy. VERY fuzzy. I end up with puff clouds of it stuck to my hands, my clothes, and sort of free floating around me if I handle it for too long. I can see why people mix the tencel with other things, but I haven't mastered blended combing yet.
Of all the things I never thought I'd spin, Angora bunny fur has to be on the top of the list. But when my mom found out I had an interest in spinning she sent me a box of Random Rovings - things she'd gotten from a local seller in Pueblo and which came to me completely unlabeled, a sampler box in warm colors. Some of them were only good for felting, some of them I've spun into a multicolored yarn which my mom will get back in the form of a hat, and at the bottom of the little box was... a ziplock bag of pure satin fluff. Angora fluff. Fluffy, slippery, undyed, soft as clouds bunny fur.
There is NO WAY I could spin that on my wheel. I have enough problems with bamboo and silk as it is! But, I have a drop spindle, which I've actually never ever used. And a bag of bunny fur that was staring at me longingly. Well, I thought, why not? What's the worst that could happen?
Color me pleasantly surprised!
Compared to spinning on a wheel I find drop spindles incredibly slow and tedious. But it does give you MUCH better control, and though my spinning is on the thick/thin side with lumps and bobbles, it's still pretty much on the lace side of a single of angora. Success!
Obviously I still have a lot to spin, but it's getting easier (pre-drafting is key!) I have two blue and green silk mawatas to spin as well - maybe I'll do them all on the drop spindle and then ply the silk and angora together for something super soft. No idea what I'd do with it... maybe just wind it up and pet it occasionally. ^_^
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