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!)

Pattern Markers

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

Micro Sweaters

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. :)

Scrap Yarn Sweater Dress

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.

Alliance Boyfriend - merino/silk/bamboo

Here's "Alliance Boyfriend". It's made of rovings from Paradise Fibers - Ashland Bay Merino/Silk in "Autumn" and Ashland Bay Bamboo in "Aegean Blue". It's a chunky worsted weight, 2ply, about 16 yards.

Alchemy Flambeau - polworth/BFL

Swatched on US3

This is "Alchemy Flambeau". Still a bit on the thick and thin side, but look at the weight difference! 2ply sock yarn. The roving is a mix from BlueMoon Fiber Arts - a handful of the "Flambeau" in Polworth (the grayish side) and "Tea and Alchemy" in Bluefaced Leicester (the reddish side).

Optimus Prime - silk

OP again

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.