Knit Your Own

I've been spinning away and I've got a plan just as soon as I get the fiber I ordered from Pacific Wool and Fiber but it's a secret for now. 

I got on a start new projects jag yesterday and started 2 new projects with my handspun.  One is a scarf made from the mohair/merino handspun I spun from fiber I got at Bishop Hill last year.  The mohair top was dyed in a mediteranean sea sort of colorway.  I plied it with a solid color merino and I love the effect it has on this scarf being knit with an "ocean wave" pattern.  Can't wait to get it finished and blocked out.

The second project is very close to my heart because I fell in love with the roving (Frabjous Fiber blue faced leicester), then I went batty over the finished yarn and now I'm head over heels with the way it looks with this Wisteria Shawl pattern from the Homespun Handknit book.  It's a wonderful easy pattern and is moving right alongI'll bet I have a goodly bit of it finished by the end of the weekend.

Pardon me boys, is this the railway stocking?

During our research, we came across this pattern in the February 1861 issue of Godey's Lady's Book.  When I first saw it, I read through it and dismissed it.  Couldn't work.

The idea is that you cast on and knit the ribbing.  You then bind off and immediately go back and pick up all the stitches.  Fiddly, you say?  What's the point, you say?  It's all in what you do with the picked up stitches.  The pattern says to knit a finger and a half of stocking stitch (stockinette stitch - knit all rounds).  Then you knit a stitch and drop a stitch all the way around.  In other words, you drop every other stitch and let them unravel back all the way to picked up stitches (since you bound off and picked up stitches, the unraveling stops at the ribbing.  I was convinced that dropping the stitches would make it wider, not longer. 

We got talking about it at the Retreat and I decided I just have to try this.  I got cast on, bound off and picked up.  Granted I only knit about 3/4 of a finger but it worked.  It worked!  You can see the socks here along with the beginning of a little matching sweater.  On the right side is the piece before the stitches have been dropped.  Really.  That's it.  Give it a try and see if it doesn't work. 

I'm going to use this as a test and work out a real size pattern.  It may take me a little bit but I'll be sure to post it when I get it done.  I love the sweater.  In the stripes like this, it reminds me of the old Knute Rockne/Win One for the Gipper/Ronald Reagan era of football jersey.  Not sure why but it makes me smile everytime I look at it.  A little bit of magic.  Always a little bit of magic.


Three Sisters Folk Art School

If you're in the Central Illinois area, there's an event you want to put on your schedule.  As a fund raiser for the new Three Sisters Folk Art School, we're going to be putting on Folk Art in the Park.  It will be a whole day of demonstrations and hands-on instruction in a wide variety of crafts represented by the school, including fiber arts such as spinning, knitting and weaving, and wood carving and turning, basket making, dulcimers, pin hole photography and more.  Mark your calendar for Saturday, September 11, at Three Sisters Park in Chilicothe (just north of Peoria). 

One of the projects we, as the Guild, are working on is putting together miniature rooms that have samples of the various crafts that we expect will be taught through the School.  One of my projects is to knit some socks.  Here's the first one.  How fun is that!  It was knit with lace weight yarn and my trusty 6-0 needles.  The second sock will be started and then transferred to the miniature needles one of the other ladies is going to make.  I even managed to get the little heel turned and used the Kitchner stitch for the toe stitches!

Land O' Cotton

I mentioned the project my Mom and I have going.  I spun quite a bit of cotton from the seed so I thought my mother might want to try growing it.  I've never met a plant she can't grow and she does come from cotton country in West Texas.  What better way to feed your addiction than by helping someone else feed their addiction in a way that will feed your addiction?!

So under the warm Texas sun, the seeds got planted. 

First report - there were babies.

Second report - there were teenagers.

Third report - yellow flowers.

Fourth report - pink flowers

Evidently the flowers come up yellow to begin with and then change to pink as they mature.  Once they run their course and fall off, the boll will come up and then we'll really be on our way. 

I'll let you know how it goes.

Sampling

In keeping with my goal to sample with fibers and spinning and such, I had a good time this morning.  I plopped in my "Roman Holiday" dvd, got my variety of fibers I'd put by to sample with and my cards and had a good old time.  First of all, how could you not have a wonderful time with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn.  I LOVE that movie.  So sweet and bittersweet.  Always brings a little tear to my eye when they meet in the middle of all those reporters at the end.  Sigh...  Love that movie.

Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn and surrounded by scrumptious fibers.  Nothing better. 

For this morning, I just wanted to see how the fibers acted together.  I had corriedale, generic wool top, merino, silk noils, tussah silk, bamboo and tencel.  I loaded my cards with a little of this and a little of that, mixing them as seemed good, adding colors as it seemed good.  Once I had the fibers carded lightly and rolled them into a rolag, I spun them on my Ashford drop spindle and plied them Andean style to get a good 2-ply sample skein.

These were straight off the spindle and these are after they've been washed.  I don't know if you can see the difference in these pictures but they really "bloom" after they've been washed.  As always, you can click on the pictures to see a larger view.

I enjoyed myself immensely, not only because it was fun to figure out how much of each color and each fiber to load up and, of course, I always love the wow factor of how the yarn looks as it is spun into singles and then plied into a yarn.  It always seems a little magical to me and never quite predictable.  I like that!

My exploration of cotton continues, too, with this little wrap of tri-colored natural cotton that I've had for ages.  You can see the top and then how the color deepens once the yarn has been boiled good and proper.  Our spinning group took to the park the other night and I took my "coyote" cotton (that's the reddish/brown color) top and I spun and I spun.  I told some of the ladies that I never ever thought I would fall in love so deeply with spinning cotton.  I just can't get enough of it.  I realize that much of that has to do with the preparation of that particular top that makes it so easy to spin.  Believe it or not, I love cotton.  Next time I'll let you in on the little experiement in cotton my Mom and I have going.  Actually, she's done all the work to this point!

Silk Vid

Take a look here and see what you think.  Just remember, it's nothing fancy!

Sampling

Hope you had a wonderful holiday weekend.  I spent mine visiting yarn shops in Bloomington, IL, such as MaryLynn's Yarn Garden and Ewe Knits.  Both are wonderful, warm, friendly spots and I thoroughly enjoyed the chats I had in both places.  Don't think I got out without buying stuff, either!  More on that another day.

The rest of the weekend I spent sampling, getting some knitting started and also some dull things like getting the house straightened and washing clothes and dishes.

The fun stuff included...

finishing a project I've had in mind for a long time, which was to spin some black wool roving to match some beautiful jewel tone Nashua Creative Focus worsted yarns I got in South Dakota a couple of years ago.  It's a wonderful singles yarn and, although the actual Nashua yarn is wool and alpaca, I just used wool for my version.

It was mildly successful but I really had a hard time walking the fine line between getting too much twist into the singles or not enough.  I knew, too, that no matter how little twist I was able to get away with, I would still have an unstable yarn.  But, lo and behold, the first time I've gone on Ravelry in about 3 weeks, I stumbled on a discussion string about this very thing and was told that it should go into a really hot bath then into a cold one and it should be "roughed up" (their term, not mine!).  This fulls (slightly felts) the yarn which gives it strength and stability for knitting.  Who knew?

Oh, yeah, the reason I wanted to do this is because I thought this yarn in colors I've got would make a wonderful mondrian sort of something.  I've always liked that look.  I'm thinking I might do some sort of bag.  That could be cool, right?

The other finished project pertains to some silk hankies I finally got spun.  These were a purchase from Stitches a couple of years ago.  I started spinning them by poking my finger through the middle and drafting out but then I thought I'd try spinning from the corner.  It worked a lot better for me so I'll definitely be using that technique in future.  I did a video showing how to do it and will post it when I get it edited.  It's nothing fancy but it does show the process.

I spun the singles medium to very fine and, of course, with the hankies you get a good bit of texture in the yarn.  Then I navajo plied it, mostly because I was too lazy to try to wind half of it off onto another bobbin.  They say that necessity is the mother of invention but I have to say that sometimes it's laziness that's the mother of invention.  I would never have originally thought to finish this as a 3-ply but it looks great and I'm much happier than I would have been otherwise.  And when I got it finished, I suddenly realized that the colors matched exactly some linen in my stash.  I've decided to do a little vest in stripes with the purple and green linen and this beautiful veriagated silk. 

But, is that all?  Nao, there's mooorah!  (Remember that from My Cousin, Vinny?)

Anyway, back to spinning...

I started playing around with some red hankies and red merino/bamboo that I think will go very pretty together.  And I started playing with some tri-colored cotton.  You can see a little of both here.

Way down yonder, in the land of cotton...

COTTON UPDATE

I would like to report that the cotton jag has not lifted, even though it was interrupted for a few days with the retreat.  I'm finally feeling like I'm getting the hang of the spinning of the cotton although I'm still having trouble with the regularity of that spinning, i.e. the unevenness of it all.

However, I got impatient last night.  I had one prety full bobbin (ok, it was half full but with another half full bobbin, it would have been a full bobbin when it was plied) and had started on the second one.  I kept thinking, "I wonder what this is going to look like.  I wonder if this is going to work. Hummmmm...." until I could stand it no more.  I whipped off the partially filled bobbin and whipped on a new bobbin for plying (I really did whip them off and on - I was curious) and got to gettin'.

Here's what I got.  About 248 yards of cotton.  Real. Cotton.  I mean, can you believe it?  There were a couple of places where it came apart so I had to knot it but for my first real go at a skein of spun cotton, I don't think that's too bad.  It came out fairly fine but you can see that it's not very even but it'll do until something better comes along!

I'm now trying to plot what sort of summer top I'm going to make.  This should get me some distance down the line in making something before the end of the summer.

I should mention that it's only 1 1/4 ounces or 36 grams.  Raw cotton is much, much lighter than the commercially spun yarn one finds.  I suspect that's to do with making something that will take a lot of wear (commercial) as opposed to what I've done.  But it's like air.  Most unexpected.

Once I got the hank spun and onto the niddy noddy, I tied 4 ties around it to prepare it for the boiling.  With this kind of cotton, boiling helps set the twist and helps clean off the naturally forming substances that you don't want in your finished yarn.  Some gunk came off but not a whole heck of a lot and the color did deepen a little but not as much as I'd expected.  Not to worry.  I've got me 248 yards of my very own handspun cotton yarn!