librarysarie

Parade of FOs

I've managed to finish quite a few things lately (by my standards), and I guess it's really about high time I started putting them up here!  So, this post may be overload, but in the interests of getting it all out there...

First up, a non-recent finished object.  My friend Brian requested a hat back earlier this year.  I finished knitting it in late winter/early spring, but then I never got it off in the mail.  It's finally been sent and received, though, so it can be unveiled now.

Pattern: Koolhaas, by Jared Flood (from Interweave Knits, Holiday Knits 2007 issue)
Yarn: Moda Dea Washable Wool in "moss"
Needles: US6/4.0mm and US8/5.0mm
Time: February 10 - March 22, 2009 (according to Ravelry)

This was my second time making Koolhaas, and this time I did the cabling correctly!  I was very happy with how the hat turned out, I really liked the yarn (which I'd never used before) and I hope Brian likes it too!

Next up, a tiny baby sweater, also sent off to Brian, for his new baby daughter:

Pattern: "Heartbreakingly Cute Baby Kimono," from Mason-Dixon Knitting
Yarn: Bernat Cottontots - one full skein of the pink, and a tiny bit of the white/pink/lavender variegated
Needles: US7/4.5mm
Time: November 2009, basically

I think that the finished product here is cute, but I'm not entirely sold on this pattern.  For one thing, it makes a tiny sweater.  Brian reports that baby J will in fact be able to wear it, but if you had a larger infant, unless you had the sweater ready to go right at birth, I don't think it would work.  The pattern says it's easy to size up, and I suppose that's technically true since it's just one big piece of garter stitch with some shaping, but since you can't really tell what it's going to look like till it's done and folded into place, I, for one, would have a hard time resizing it.  Much easier to resize a traditional top-down raglan!  Or, heck, even a standard-construction, set-in-sleeve sweater.

I decided I didn't want a solid pink sweater, so I started and finished with a little bit of the white variegated.  And it's a good thing I did - I had just a couple of yards of the pink left when I was done with that section, so if I'd knitted the entire sweater in one color, I wouldn't have had enough!  The Cottontots isn't bad yarn, but as is often the case with me and cottons, I had to take a lot of breaks -- it's rough on my hands.

Third, something for me:

Pattern: Noro Striped Scarf by Jared Flood
Yarn: 2 skeins of Noro Silk Garden (colorway unknown; sorry), and one skein of Lamb's Pride Worsted in ivory
Needles: US8/5.0mm
Time: Started sometime in late summer; finished on Dec. 7, 2009

This was my off-again, on-again project for a few months -- I've been off socks for a while, but this was perfect for when I wanted some mindless knitting.  I planned to knit until I ran out of yarn, but ultimately, I just kept going till I was sick of it.  It was maybe five and a half feet long when I was done, maybe not quite that.  I washed it (mostly to soften it up, not so much for actual blocking purposes) and hung it to dry over our shower curtain rod, and it stretched out to about 82" long -- a perfect length for me to wrap around my neck a bunch of times and still have nice long tails.  It's been on the warm side since I finished this so I haven't had a chance to wear it yet, but I hear we're having a cold front blow through for the end of this week!

And yes, I just said I'm off socks, but this hardly counts:

Pattern: Wee Tiny Sock Swap Sock by Emily Ivey/Yarn Miracle
Yarn: a scrap of Claudia Handpainted Short Sport in "Peppermint Mocha"
Needles: US2/2.75mm
Time: December 12, 2009 (a very quick knit!)

I decided our tree needed a knitted ornament, and a wee tiny sock seemed like just the thing!  And what better yarn for it than my scraps of "Peppermint Mocha" yarn, left over from these socks?  I knitted it while the Comcast man was here the other night installing our new HD cable.  It's about 3" long, all told, and now that it's done I need more!

Ten on Tuesday on Wednesday

I liked yesterday's Ten on Tuesday topic, but then went to bed without writing up the post.  Whoops.  So, a day late, but here it is: 10 Great Things About The Holidays, in no particular order...

1) The music.  I LOVE Christmas songs.  I'm not one of those people who listens to them in July (and in fact, I don't WANT to hear them in July), but as soon as Thanksgiving is over, I've got the Holiday Music playlist on the iPod going full-time.  I'm told that the Pandora holiday stations are good too - gotta give those a whirl!

2) Buying gifts.  I really, truly enjoy buying gifts for people.  Often we exchange lists among our close family members, but I especially love it when I come up with the perfect gift without having to consult a list. I don't stress out about it - I just have fun.  And I love how the tree looks with all the wrapped stuff under it.

3) Food.  Thanksgiving is actually my very favorite meal, moreso than Christmas, but I love to eat (see my waistline for evidence of that) and any season that revolves so much around food is ok by me.  ;-)

4) The tree.  I love going to a tree farm, picking the perfect tree, and schlepping it back home again.  Once we moved on from apartment living we started cutting our own tree every year, and I don't see us changing that anytime soon. 

5) The smells.  The aforementioned freshly-cut tree.  Cinnamon.  Baking.  My various scented candles that just smell like Christmas to me (Balsam and Cedar from Yankee Candle is my very favorite!).  

6) Decorations. The more glitter and sparkle involved, the better.  I probably like things that verge on tacky, but if Christmas isn't the time of year for such things, I don't know what is.  (I'm pretty low-key the rest of the year in terms of tchotchkes and whatnot, so I think I can go crazy for a month!)  I love making the house all twinkly at Christmas.

(An aside: I don't know if I actually spelled "tchotchkes" right, but I LOVE that the Firefox spellcheck suggests "hotcakes" and "crotchless" as alternate spellings.  HA!)

7) Time with family.  It's the one time of year, generally, that our entire family is together all at once, and we always have so much fun.  We're so lucky to have largely low-maintenance families where everyone gets along and there's very little to be had in the way of Drama.

8) Snow.  OK, we don't always get a white Christmas, even here in the land of allegedly perfect and idyllic winters, but I love it when we do!

9) Christmas cards.  Snailmail seems to be virtually obsolete these days, so I love checking the mail every day and [hopefully] finding something other than bills and junk!

10) Quiet time.  I try to end each day with some quiet time - sitting in the dark in the living room with just the Christmas tree lights on, maybe with some carols playing.  It's so peaceful and rejuvenating for me - almost meditative, really.  Sometimes it makes me a little sad and nostalgic for years gone by and people who are no longer with us; sometimes I think about what future Christmases might be like; sometimes I actually reflect on my life as it is now.  It's like my own internal Dickensian spirits (a la A Christmas Carol), all brought out by some multicolored lights and glittery ornaments.

The briefest of updates

Oh, blog, how I neglect you.

The knitting is moving along - the baby kimono, mentioned in my last post, is finished.  I also finished the striped scarf from my last post - just need to sew in the ends and wash it to soften it up a little.  And, of course, I have to take pictures of both.  I've also got a shawlette that's nearly done - just a chart and a half left to do.  And I've got yarn for the next few projects in my queue, which I will introduce soon.

And there's the Christmas prep - another post to come.

Gratuitous Cat Picture 

As you can see, Gandalf was NOT interested in letting Jim work the other night.  Jim was moving his hands around, typing, using the touchpad...and Gandalf stubbornly kept his head resting on Jim's hands.  It was HILARIOUS.

Plodding

Isn't it funny how sometimes the tiniest projects take us the longest to do?  I'm currently working on a baby kimono for friends with a new baby, and I can't get over how long this tiny little sweater is taking me!  I thought it would be a couple of evenings, maximum, but I was wrong.  Part of it is the yarn -- I'm knitting it in Bernat Cottontots, and cotton yarns tend to hurt my wrists, so I have to take a lot of breaks -- but I'm not sure what other excuses I can use.  Still, though, I'm getting there -- I'm done with the back, have split for the two fronts, and am more than halfway down the first front -- so with any luck I'll get it finished up this week and in the mail to them before the new baby is too big to wear her tiny little sweater.  ;-)

No pictures of that yet, in case my friends read the blog, so here's the other thing I've been plodding through over the last few weeks: a Noro striped scarf.  Like the baby kimono, there is NO reason this should be taking me as long as it is.

Obviously, it's only half-Noro - the colored stripes are Noro Silk Garden, while the off-white is Lamb's Pride.  My initial plan was to knit until I ran out of yarn, but the scarf is nearly five feet long now and I've got quite a bit left.  I do like my scarves on the long side so I can wrap them around my neck a couple of times, but still, I'm only 5'3" so "long" for me is really not very long as far as scarves go.  ;-)  So this is very nearly finished...at this point I'll probably just knit till I'm sick of it.  Needless to say, since I've got this super-warm scarf almost ready to go, we're having temperatures in the 60s lately.  Typical.

Earlier this year, my plan had been to try to knit some garments for myself.  That plan got thrown out out the window for various reasons, so I've got a queue of small projects lined up.  I need to finally settle on fingerless mitts for my mom -- I bought the yarn at NHS&W in May 2008 (!) and have tried three different patterns, but didn't feel the love with any of them.  I need to get that project done, though -- poor Mom has been so patient!  And I have a couple of scarves I'd like to do, and I'm feeling the pull of the neckwarmer/cowl, and there are baby things (it's a baby-splosion 'round these parts lately!), and after my successes with Ishbel and the Vacation Crab, I want to do more small shawls and some toys!  So many projects, so little time.  (And I'm not even planning Christmas knitting.)

Gratuitious Cat Picture

A while back when I pulled out my Rhinebeck purchases to photograph them, I didn't pack them up and put them away immediately.  When I came back into the room a while later, I found this scene.

Maggie LOVES to lay in my fiber when I leave it laying around.  She's so good about it, too -- she doesn't scratch at it or do anything untoward, just lays near/among it, sometimes using something as a pillow.  I can even leave works in progress laying around, and while the cats do lay on them, they have never done anything Bad (except for one time when Gandalf gnawed on the end of a bamboo needle, but that was nothing a little sandpaper couldn't fix).  I have the best kitties.

Blob no more

A few entries back, I introduced you to the purple blob - Ishbel. Well, Ishbel has been past the blob stage for a while now, but she hasn't gotten her day in the spotlight yet thanks to my poor blogging of late. 

I'm actually not sure when I finished knitting, but according to the EXIF data on the pictures, these photos (both pre-and post-blocking) were all taken on September 7.  I'm pretty sure that I finished the knitting and moved immediately into blocking, so we'll call Sept. 7 her end date, which means that this took me just over a month to knit.  Not bad for not having knitted much at all over the summer.  :-)

First, a couple of pre-blocking shots...

...and some post-blocking (well, to be fair, blocking-in-progress):

(As you can see, especially if you click on the picture to see the larger version over at Flickr, for some reason I had a heck of a time getting the points to scallop out evenly -- the left edge was more than happy to ease into nice points, while the right edge really seemed to want to stay flatter.  Can anyone think of a reason why this would be the case?  It's not like my gauge was different on one side of the row than on the other...)

Blocking really is magic.  I think this is the first time I've really blocked lace, and despite my issues with the scalloping, it was fun!   And not only did it open up the lace, it really made the shawl larger: pre-blocking it measured about 17” deep and 50” across the top, unstretched, and post-blocking it's about 24” deep and 60” wide.  It's a perfect size to wrap around my neck like a scarf (plus it stays on better that way than it does if I wear it like a "proper" shawl).  No action shots, though; sorry.  I'll try to work on that (though first I have to get her back from my MIL -- I accidentally left Ishbel at her house a couple of weeks ago!).

I knitted the "large" size shawl.  The skein of yarn I was using was 550 yards, and I had quite a substantial ball left over -- so my initial fears about running out of yarn were unfounded. 

This was possibly one of my favorite projects ever -- fun to knit, and I LOVE the finished product!  I see more small shawls in my future -- they're a great way to use all that sock yarn that I have deemed "too pretty for feet."  ;-)

I'm working on another blob now, but that's a post for another time...

What brings a knitter back from the dead?

Why, Rhinebeck, of course!

The last month of my life (since my last blog post) has moved along just like the month before it, busy, but with nothing bloggable going on. Still no reading to speak of, still no knitting.  But that didn't stop me from going to Rhinebeck, and I'm happy to say that I'm really glad I went.  It was a fun day to be sure, but more than that it was inspirational.  The needles have been clicking more since I got back...it was just the kick in the pants I needed.  I'm still not knitting a lot, but more than none is still an improvement!

I went on Saturday, and despite the horrid forecast, it actually turned out to be not too bad a day.  It was chilly, but I'm a New Englander -- I can deal!  I was perfectly warm in my Tangled Yoke, a turtleneck, and a windbreaker....didn't even need a hat, or to pull out the scarf I brought along.  And the rain held off.  The camera never made it out of my bag, but I ran into some friends (*waves* at Jessalu, Carole, and Zarzuela, among others), had a fun meet up with the other "aunties" from Juniper Moon Farm (formerly Martha's Vineyard FIber Farm), enjoyed some hot cider, and, yes, made some purchases. 

Here's a bad picture (I am still mourning the loss of my beloved camera.  I can't even be bothered to try to improve my dinkycam pictures):

The two spiraled-up rovings in the back are from Into the Whirled (and that was all Jessalu's fault!).  The pink-and-green sock yarn is from Sliver Moon Farm.  The off-white is Sylvan Spirit from Green Mountain Spinnery, and is destined to be a baby sweater of some type.  The dark stuff in the middle that you can't really see well is some amazingly soft alpaca/silk fiber from Gale's Art (it's so soft you can hardly even feel it when you touch it -- it was a total splurge, but I HAD to have it).  The yellow fiber and the brightly-colored fiber next to it are also from Gale's Art, and will be spun and plied together to make yarn for another baby thing.  And the gorgeous pink in front is merino/tencel I won from Zarzuela for correctly answering the question, when did she make her first Etsy shop sale?  (Thank you, Jessica!)

And then there was this, a mug from Jennie the Potter.

Tea just tastes better in a mug like this, somehow.  I love it!

Stitches East is here in Hartford this weekend.  I've got too much going on today to be able to go, but I might try to hit the market for a little while tomorrow...

Blog? What blog?

Ahem.  Well, happy September.  Long time no see.

I guess summer got away from me there at the end.  It's been a crazy few weeks 'round these parts, yet despite that not much has been going on that's really bloggable.  I haven't been reading much, haven't been knitting much, haven't been taking photos (more on that in a bit).  The stuff that's been going on is not anything I really want to write about publicly (don't worry, though - it's nothing bad!).  And not only have I not been writing in my blog, I've barely been reading anyone else's blogs, either.  Nor have I been doing much on Ravelry,  So I could not possibly feel any more out of the loop, as far as the knitting world goes.

The one bad highlight of the month since I last wrote here was that my camera, my beloved Nikon D80, was stolen on a trip to a local children's museum.  :-(  I set it down on the floor while we watched an animal demonstration and forgot to pick it up, and when we went back just a few minutes later, it was gone and was never turned in.  I can't tell you how heartsick I was -- and still am -- over that.  Part of it was the money, certainly -- it wasn't cheap, and won't be cheap to replace -- but more than that, the camera felt like an extension of myself and I feel strangely naked without it.  Now, Jim and I are both amateur photographers and so we each had a D80 (a treat to ourselves a couple of years back when we had an unexpectedly large tax refund), but a couple of weeks before my camera was stolen, I'd broken my favorite/everyday lens, and so I'd been using Jim's everyday lens.  So not only is my camera gone, I can't even really use Jim's because the regular lens is gone and we're left with the 50mm fixed lens (which I love, but which doesn't work well for everything!) and the telephoto lens, which is even more useless in most normal situations.  

I am thinking about a replacement.  Part of me feels like it's really excessive to have two DSLRs in a single household, and that I should get something lower-end (maybe a really good point-and-shoot) as a replacement.  But on the other hand, part of the reason for having two was so that we wouldn't have to "fight" over the "good" camera when we're in a situation where we both want to be shooting (which happens fairly frequently), and besides I've been spoiled now and don't know if I can take that backwards step.

I do still have my old point-and-shoot, but as I said, after having the D80 I was spoiled, and I really hate using it.  That shutter lag...ugh.  And besides, I can't find the battery charger (it's been so long since I used it) and at this point I've used up all our rechargable batteries so I either need to buy regular batteries, or find the charger.  My life, it is difficult. 

Long story short -- I do have a couple of little projects to photograph so I can blog them, but life isn't cooperating at this very moment. 

Anyway.  I'm here, I'm not dead yet, I'm getting back into blog reading, and maybe I'll get back into blogging too.  :-)

Before I was a knitter

It's hard now to think of a time when I wasn't a knitter -- for some reason, even though I've only been knitting for four or five years (oddly, I can't remember exactly when I started -- my first online reference to knitting was in June 2005, so all I know is that it was before then) it feels, in many ways, like I've been doing it forever. 

But while I haven't been a knitter forever, I have always been crafty.  My mom never met a craft she wouldn't try at least once, and I certainly inherited that gene from her!  (I also got my startitis, as well as my ability to get 99% of the way through a project only to never actually finish it, from her!)  But Mom's main craft was cross stitch, and until I started knitting, it was mine, too.  I was never terribly prolific, but it was something I did on and off throughout my life.  I was getting more seriously into it at the time I started knitting -- but I haven't crossed a single stitch since then.  (So while I'm not a very monogamous knitter, I have become a much more monogamous crafter since the knitting bug bit!)

As with knitting, I don't remember exactly when I started to cross stitch, but my mom first taught me when I was five or six years old.  And, good mother that she is, she still has the very first thing I ever made hanging in her kitchen!

It isn't dated, but as best as we can figure, I made this circa 1984 -- which makes this a vintage sampler.  ;-)  That top row of hearts is off-center, as  you can see, but overall it's surprisingly good for a six-year-old -- the stitches are relatively even and mostly all crossed in the proper direction.  I'm sure the back is a mess, though!  (Neatening up my backs was something I was only just beginning to get good at when I stopped stitching.)  I remember entering this in the Harwinton Fair -- the same fair I entered my knitted goods in last year -- and winning a blue ribbon.  That was before I was old enough to realize that all of the kids' entries win a ribbon.  ;-)

And a later example of my work:

This is also not dated, but I made it for my mom probably five or six years ago.  It's mounted in a trinket box top and is about 8" square.  When I made it, Mom had just started to quilt for the first time (something she's since abandoned).

Earlier this week, I pulled out all my cross stitch patterns, looking for a particular one to lend to my cousin.  As many of you know, if there's one thing I'm good at it's stashing, and before it was yarn, it was cross stitch patterns.  ;-)  I'd forgotten how many of them I had!  Many are not really my taste any longer, but I have a lot of really cute ones -- and many that are quite small and that would be quick projects.  And of course, I probably don't need to tell you that I have cross-stitch UFOs too.  It's been so long since I've gone through my stitching basket, I don't even KNOW what might be in there.  I should look.  (And on top of all that, I've also inherited all my mom's stitching stuff too -- including UFOs that she stopped working on probably 20 years ago -- because stitching bothers her eyes too much these days and she doesn't do it any more.)

You see where this is going, right?  I think I need to revisit my old crafty love.  It's been so long!  But I have so many knitting projects in the queue (not to mention on the needles) too -- so many crafts, so little time!  Expect to see some stitching of a different sort going on, though, in the not-too-distant future...

Sock Summit Support Society

A huge segment of the knitting world is in Portland, OR this week, attending the first-ever Sock Summit.  And even though I've been sort of off socks for a few months now (she says, as she guiltily eyes the sock yarn stash looming over her), I'm quite jealous of everyone who gets to attend!  It looks like it is QUITE the event, and it doesn't hurt that Portland is one of my very favorite cities.  So I think we need a support group for all of us poor knitters who have been left behind, unable to attend the Summit.  Who's in?

Even though I'm off socks, I did manage to guilt myself into finishing a pair that had been on the needles for nearly a YEAR.

Pattern: Basic plain-vanilla sock formula -- 56 stitches around, slip-stitch heel flap, 2x2 ribbing on top.
Size: mine
Yarn: Fleece Artist Sea Wool, "Peacock" colorway
Needles: US2 / 2.75mm DPNs
Time:  August 12, 2008 (according to Ravelry) - July 18, 2009

Yep.  Almost a year.  Kind of sad, really.  The worst part?  When I pulled these out of hibernation, I found that I had left of in the middle of the toe decreases on the first sock.  Yes.  The middle of the toe decreases.  Who DOES that?

In any case, though, they're done, and they're pretty colors, and someday it will be sock season again so I can wear them.

The Blob

While I was in Washington, I cast on for Ishbel by Ysolda Teague.  I'd had this skein of gorgeous yarn in my stash for -- well, for a long time.  I bought it on eBay, back before Etsy had been invented (though the seller is now an Etsy shop), when I was a brand-new knitter.  In fact, I think it might have been the first yarn I ever bought online, although I'm not entirely certain.  I never had any real idea what I wanted to do with it -- I bought it just because it was pretty, and at 550 yards it was way more than I needed for a pair of socks, so I was holding out for something different -- but as soon as I saw Ishbel I knew that that was what it needed to be.  The yarn is Fearless Fibers sock yarn in "Midnight Passion" and it's a beautiful semi-solid purple, with lovely shades of indigo and violet.

Right now, of course, the project is still in the "blob" stage.  I'm farther along than I was when I took this picture -- I'm into the lace portion now -- but I suspect an updated photo would not look much different.  It may be a blob, but it's a really pretty blob.

Actually, I ran into a snag today.  I was knitting along -- I had completed chart A and was motoring along on chart B -- when suddenly, at the end of a row, I was off by one stitch.  And, sadly, whatever my mistake was, it was NOT on the row I'd been knitting, so there was no tinking back (I can't tink back multiple rows in lace).  Luckily I had been using a lifeline, but unluckily, the lifeline was five rows back (at the beginning of the chart) so I lost almost an entire chart's worth of knitting.  I ripped back and have gotten everything back on the needle (or so I hope -- need to double-check that) but haven't started reknitting yet.  Sigh.  A minor setback to be sure, but still, no one likes backwards progress!

I'm not certain yet what size I'm making.  The pattern calls for 610 yards of yarn, and I have 550.  I'm not sure how much of an approximation the 610 is -- maybe 550 will be enough, and maybe it won't.  I followed the "large" directions for the stockinette portion, but may opt for the "small" size lace.  The only difference is how many repeats of each chart are knitted.  I am planning on knitting through chart A, B, and then A again before deciding what to do.  (At that point, I move onto chart C if I decide to go small, or repeat A and B again if I choose large.) 

Crabby

I think -- and I know I'm not alone in this -- that the hardest part of packing for a vacation is deciding what books and knitting projects to bring along.  Whatever you bring has to be Goldilocks-perfect: interesting enough to not be boring, but not so complicated that it requires a vacation-inappropriate level of mental effort.  This year, though, for our Martha's Vineyard trip, it was easy to pick a knitting project.  What better thing to knit on a beach vacation than a sea creature?

Pattern: The Deadliest Crab, from Knitty, summer 2009
Yarn: Plymouth Encore, in red and off-white (exact color names/numbers unknown)
Needles: US6/4.0mm
Time: June 30 - July 2, 2009

What a fun, fun knit!  I will definitely make this pattern again.  It was not difficult -- just fiddly, thanks to the bobbles and all the little pieces.  The only problem I had was in picking up the stitches for the bottom -- for some reason, I could NOT get the correct number and so I had to fudge it a little bit, but that's all invisible now.  And I sewed on the eyes (vintage buttons from my grandma's button jar) a little crooked, but I think that that adds to his charm!

If/when I make this again, I'll go down a needle size -- I used the needle size recommended in the pattern and paid absolutely no attention to my gauge, but I'm such a loose knitter that the stuffing shows through in some places.  It could definitely benefit from a tighter fabric.  Also, I feel like his top shell is too flat and his belly is too rounded -- I might try to modify something so that those attributes are reversed.

I finished knitting the crab in time to do a photoshoot on the beach, and my nephew T and I had entirely too much fun with it.  A small sampling of our shots:

Worst Blogger Ever

Well, now I'm TWO trips behind with my trip reports.  Jim just had a conference in Washington, DC, and I tagged along with him.  We were there for five days, and we had a fabulous time.  (Well, *I* had a fabulous time.  I got to spend the whole time playing tourist; Jim had to spend three days conferencing.  But I think he enjoyed his spare time, and he seemed to enjoy the conference itself too, inasmuch as one does.) 

I will catch up later, but for now I will just share an observation that encapsulates everything that I love about Washington, DC:  At every restaurant we went into, the main television at the bar was tuned to CNN.  Not a baseball game, not golf, not ESPN sports highlights.  CNN.  It's a city of nerds.  No wonder I like it there so much.  Washington, how I love thee.

While we wait...

I'm currently attempting to upload a zillion (okay, about 300) vacation pictures (finally) - here's hoping that flickr uploadr works for me this time!  It has a bad habit of crashing or hanging on me mid-upload.  Fingers crossed...

In the meantime, while we're waiting for those pictures, how about I catch up a little bit?  I have a couple of finished things that haven't made it here yet...

Conference Socks

Pattern: Basic stockinette socks, 48 stitches around
Size: Mine!
Yarn: Claudia Handpainted Short Sport, "Blue Fields" colorway
Needles: US3/3.25mm
Time:  April - June 2009

I mentioned these in passing a few entries back.  I called them Conference Socks because, well, that's where they were knitted -- Sock #1 was knitted at the Connecticut Library Association conference in April, and Sock #2 was knitted on the bus to and from Book Expo America in June.  There's not much to say about them -- my basic sock recipe, and the finished socks are nice and soft and squishy.  Oh!  There was one interesting thing about them.  I finished the first sock, but realized as soon as I put it on that I'd made it a tad bit too short for my foot.  So after finishing the second sock, I undid the grafting and ripped back the toe of the first one, and lengthened it so it would fit properly.  This is notable because this is the first time I've unknitted a finished item in order to fix it.  And it worked and everything!

And some spinning:

This first skein is from The Painted Sheep - BFL in the Sweet Caroline colorway.  I posted a picture of the roving I started with here.  I could NOT get a good picture of the resulting yarn.  I tried everything -- natural light, artificial light, flash, no flash, lightbox, window, you name it -- but there was no way I could get the colors to look right.  The colors in the picture of the roving are more true.  You'll just have to believe me when I tell you that the yarn is not as blinding as it is in this picture!  It's two-ply, approximately 160 yards, and about 11wpi - about DK weight.

And this one is 3.8oz of Falkland wool from Freckle Face Fibers.  They called the colorway "Grecian Blue" and I could see that in the roving, but once it was spun all I could think of was faded denim, so I've been calling it "Favorite Jeans" in my head!  It's a single, about 172 yards and 11-12wpi.

That catches me up for now, I think.  Well, almost.  I have a couple of things that I finished back in, oh, April? May?  Both are gifts, but because I am not One With The Post Office, I haven't managed to get them mailed off to their recipients yet, and I don't want to post about them until I do.  One of these days, I'll manage to get them in the mail so they can have their big reveal....

Working on the re-entry

Aaaaand I'm back!  Did you miss me?  We got back yesterday from our annual (does doing something two years in a row make it annual?) trip to Martha's Vineyard.  I intended to blog while I was away, but I am pleased to report that, while I did check in on twitter and read the news every day, I did NOT spend a lot of time online.  It was like a real vacation!  ;-)

We had a marvelous time.  I'll blog about the trip more later when I have pictures ready to go (I've gotten as far as getting them off the camera, but haven't culled/edited/uploaded yet), but suffice to say we actually had some SUN.  Not for the whole week, but enough where we were actually able to go to the beach and do other outdoorsy things, and I actually have a suntan despite the liberal application of SPF 30.  (But it's a tan and not a burn, and that's the important thing.  Right?)  And I have a fun knitting project to share too.

But for now, I have a mountain of laundry to fold and some unpacking still to get through.  Why can't these things do themselves???

Life Cycle

I thought that those of you who are non-spinners might like a little peek at the life cycle of a spinning project.   I missed some steps (since it didn't occur to me to do this post in this format until I was uploading the pics to Flickr), but on some future spinning project I'll do a better job at documenting each step along the way.  For now, though, here are the major bits.

Roving:

(Missing step: Unbraided, split, and pre-drafted roving)

Singles on the bobbin:

Singles wound into a center-pull ball (my preferred method for making two-ply yarn from a smallish amount of singles, because it doesn't waste any):

Plied yarn on the bobbin:

(Missing steps: Yarn on the niddy-noddy; yarn soaking in a bath; yarn hanging to dry)

And the finished product:

The pertinent details: this is 4oz of Romney, purchased from Zarzuela's Fibers, in the "Easter Egg" colorway.  It's a 2-ply yarn, and I spun it at about 9-10wpi (about worsted weight).  It came out to be about 112 yards.

This is, possibly, the first time I've spun a two-ply yarn that really and truly came out just as I was hoping.  I tend to underspin, which makes my plying quite loose, but with this I think I got the twist just right (or pretty close to "just right," anyway!) and I'm thrilled with how it looks.  And while there are a few bits that are slightly thicker, for the most part this is spun quite evenly.  I see a lot of improvement in this skein of yarn over many of my earlier ones, and that makes me very happy!