Yaaaaarn!

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!

Wheel in Color

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/

There's a word for that?

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 belt to 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.

Bead 'Splosion

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:

Do you knit for the Alliance or the Horde?

What's this?

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!

What's on the Wheel

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.

Custom Yarn - Yarnia

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!)