Sometimes progress is slow

Sometimes I feel like I'm finishing things all over the place and sometimes I feel like projects take FOREVER!! I'm there right now.

I have projects laying all over the place and this weekend I'm hoping to bring a little order to the chaos.  I may not get many projects significantly forwarded but at least things will be a little more clear and I'll have a plan.  I hope.  

A while back I spun a pound of beautiful Blue-faced Leicester (BFL) and silk.  I was trying to go for a DK sort of weight, which I mostly did, although it really wanted to be spun more finely than that and the beginning of all 3 bobbins I filled were significantly finer than the rest of the bobbin.  As a matter of fact, this sort of worked in my favor but more of that in a minute.

Just before spinning the BFL/silk, I'd finished spinning a lace weight plum silk roving that spun up beautifully.  Both yarns needed to be washed and I flaked out and washed them in the same tub.  Fortunately the water wasn't agitated but still some of the purple leeched onto the white yarn.  As soon as I realized what I'd done, I separated them and rinsed the white yarn.  There were only a few very light splotches of purple but it wasn't good.  As usual, I moved into "make it work" mode and decided to tea-dye the white yarn.  I figured that would cover up any remaining purple splotches and give it a nice warm feeling.  And it did.

The other "mistake" I made with the white yarn was that I put entirely too much twist into both the singles and the plying.  Or so I thought.  I was afraid that I'd ruined this beautiful fiber and made it tight and tough and that there would be no softness to it.  The plying helped some of the overtwist of the singles and I think the washing/dying process helped a little bit of the overtwisted ply.  By some happy accident, the yarn turned out perfect for the Elizabeth Zimmerman Pi Shawl I decided to make with it. 

Normally I would use a much lighter weight yarn to make this shawl but I wanted this one to be a cozy up on the couch while it's cold outside (and it does get cold in Texas - for at least 2-3 days of the year). If this yarn had been spun at this same weight but with less twist, it wouldn't have taken much wear and tear.  But with it as it is, it should be much heartier and keep its lacy integrity better.  I started using the heavier end of the skein and the yarn got slightly thinner as I got to the outside edge.  Funnily enough it also helped to transition into the lighter yarn for the border.  The yarn always knows.  

I did have another problem to solve here.  The color of the yarn is pretty but pretty bland, too.  I didn't want to just make the whole thing in this one color.  It probably could have taken it had it been lace weight but I just didn't think the color could carry the chunkier texture alone.  As you can see in one of my catch-up posts, I recently experimented with doing a macramé fringe on a piece of linen fabric, the way they do in Italy.  The linen was a similar color to this yarn and I loved the effect of some black tatted lace to pull that design together (also precipitated by a "mistake"  LOL). So I wondered if I could make a similar design element work on this shawl.

I decided to use a black lace section around each of the increase rounds as a sort of transitional element.  I knew that I couldn't just use a lace-weight yarn because it wouldn't hold up to the weight of the main yarn.   On the first section, I used 2 strands of black lace-weight yarn, both for strength and to make the yarn just a little bit thicker.  But one of the skeins of yarn was extremely weak and kept breaking on me.  Not a good sign.  What to do... Aha!  I said to myself, I said, Self.  Why don't you use the ball of black tatting cotton you made the tatted lace border with?  Yep, that would work great.  Much more strength and the weight fitted in. 

But it didn't go very far.  So for the 3rd black lace section and following, I used 1 strand of lace-weight wool and 1 strand of black bedspread-weight crochet cotton (10/2).  Perfect.  I've progressed to the lace edging, which is knitted 2 rows to each stitch of the shawl.  Since there are about 600 stitches, I will be here for a while.  When you add to that how difficult it is to knit this 2 stranded yarn with the Addi turbos needles I'm using, I think I'm going to be here for a very long time indeed.  But it will all be worth it in the end.

The Puzzle

So what do you do when you have a skein of multicolor chunky single-ply yarn that's pretty but doesn't have enough yardage to really do anything with?  

What if you have another ball that's a lace-weight solid color yarn that you don't yet have a project for?

What if you try to combine them? What size needle would you use?  What would you make with them?

It's kind of a fun project to figure out. 

For me, I decided to do a cowl. The chunky would be nice and warm and the lace-weight would allow me to add some nice details. 

I started off with a sort of in-between needle size but quickly realized that it was going to be way too small for the chunky. Since I was going to be doing a lacy insert into plain stockinette, I realized I could use different size needles for each of the yarns with very little effort and bridge the gap that way. 

So I did stockinette for the chunky using size 8-9 needles and then I transitioned to size 4 needles for the lace. 

For the lace I did a really simple, super lacy old lace pattern called "faggoting" which is simply doing 1 round of yarnover/knit 2 together and 1 round of knit. These 2 rounds are repeated as often as needed to make it the length you want. 

I did a few short sections in the bottom before knitting a long center section, basically to use up the whole skein. 

I was going to do a long lace section before doing the edging but I got bored so it was shorter. This was one occasion I was glad of my sometimes short attention span because it came out much better. 

I used a little 8-stitch VanDyke edging from the 1846 Cornelia Mee book to edge it (which took forever!) so it ended up like this. 

It turned from being a snood to a lacy neck warmer and I love it. 

So go explore your stash and try your hand at combining 2 different yarns that you might not have thought to put together. See what you come up with!

New Classes

I’ve got two new classes in the Spring semester at Lincoln Land Community College. One is a repeat of a class we did in the Fall – Knitting with Jewelry Wire and Beads which will be a Saturday morning class on April 4th. It’s been so much fun seeing the endless variety from the students in this class.

The second class is one I haven’t done at LLCC before – Designing Your Own Purse with Knitting or Crochet. This will be a 3 week class on Thursday evenings starting on March 19th. Some people find weeknights better, others prefer Saturday mornings so we’ll try both this time.

I’m really excited about this class which will cover lots of creativity exercises and lots of different techniques. I think 3 classes will be enough time for people to have fun with it.

If you’re in the area and interested, the catalogue should be out soon. Be on the lookout or contact the Community Learning office.