Better than expected

Sometimes when you get a bump of roving, you have a very clear picture of what it will look like spun up and sometimes, not so much.  I bought some roving at the Bishophill Spin-in a couple of months ago and really loved the colors.  I spun a little sample and andean plied it to get an idea of what it would look like.  To be honest, it looked like vomit.  The mixture of colors was horrendous up against each other and I was so disappointed because I'd bought 2 bunches of it.  Nevertheless, I spun the first bunch and decided to Navajo ply it to keep the colors together.  Much more better.

I love this pattern for a scarf and I thought it would show up the colors well.  I'm so pleased with how it came out, especially after the first experiment.  Just goes to show, first impressions are necessarily the truth.

By the way, this scarf is easy, peasy and makes a great long scarf.  This yarn is worsted weight, 3 ply, and I'm using size 8 needles.  Cast on 15 stitches and knit a couple of rows in garter stitch to get started.  On the next row, knit 1 and wrap the yarn over the needle 2 times (3 times if you want the inbetween section to be longer - with worsted weight I think 2 is plenty but you can wrap more if you use a smaller yarn).  Repeat these 2 stitches to the last stitch, then knit 1.  On the next row, knit the knit stitch and drop the wraps.  Repeat to the end.  Knit 2 more rows.

Just keep going like this until the scarf is long enough.  I like to add a fringe to finish off the scarf.

Something else I worked on during the long weekend was more of this Blue-faced Leicester.  A while back, I spun 4 oz of this roving on the wheel but I also wanted to spun part of it with the spindle to see how it would compare.  I've been spinning it with an Ashford top-whorl drop spindle and am getting it superfine.  I've done enough for one skein but I've got a ton more on the bobbin ready to ply and I've got a fair bit to spin yet.

I also added 2 more skeins to my white on white project.  Lesson in silliness, really.  I'd spun a bobbin of cashmere (or angora - I'm not sure which but it's one or the other) and had a second bobbin to spin before plying.  It was only 1/2 an ounce (although in this fiber, it's really quite a lot).  Feeling quite pleased with myself, I started plying.  You can't imagine how soft unless you've felt it before.  Anyway, there I was all proud of myself and plying.  Until I realized something was wrong.  Very wrong.  It took me a little while to figure it out but there I was proudly plying a z ply and an s ply.  Wrong. 

That's definitely a lesson in how the proud have fallen.  There was no rectifying that mistake and there was no getting more of the fiber.  Drats.  Drats.  Drats. 

I walked around the apartment kicking myself and while I was walking, I spied with my little eye a bobbin of merino/silk that I'd spun up.  It was some of the KnitPicks fiber that I'd gotten to test out and there it was just waiting.  I wasn't sure which direction it had been spun but I was sure to be able to use it with one of the bobbins!  Ha!!  Sure enough, it worked and I navajo plied the other bobbin, giving me 2 more skeins!

It's adding up but I still have to figure out how I'm going to put them together.  Hmmm....

More lace

I've finished the next lesson in my bobbin lace book.  They call it a gimp worked on a Torchon background.  Next I'm going to try a lace edging witht he same thread as this. 

I haven't been doing much else, or else I've been just doing bits and pieces but nothing very interesting. 

I'm hoping to get stuff done over the long weekend coming up but we'll see how productive I actually get.  I had to come to grips with pushing myself way too hard.  It's just that there are so many things I want to do that I have to get projects finished (or feel that I do).  Anyway, I had a little discussion with myself and told myself to knock it off.  I don't know if I took it very well but I'm going to try to do better!

Bob,bob, bobbin along

I think I mentioned that I bought a beginning bobbin lace kit a few weeks ago.  I've been practicing using a book from the library called, "The Torchon Lace Workbook."  I've just finished lesson 6 and here are the last 3 samples (the ones that actually look like something):

I know the middle one doesn't look like much but trust me, I figured something out with it.  I just made a mistake at the beginning that put the colors out of whack.  It really is something and the others look alright.  Right?

I'm going to try my first lace edging next.

Llama Update

When last we spoke, I almost had my handspun Llama bolero finished.  I was afraid I would run out of yarn and I was out of fiber.  Last night I finished the knitting with the yarn I had left and ended up with a mere 8 inches of yarn left over.  Talk about a nail biter.  The problem is that the last bit of yarn I had to knit with was the first bit of yarn that I spun and it wasn't so good.  Fortunately I'd since gotten more fiber from the lovely folks at K&T Llamas and last nightI got another batch spun up and washed.

This morning I un-knit (de-knit?) the cuff portion, added a few rounds and reknit the cuff.  There is a particular joy when you get an inspiration for something that doesn't exist and you're able to pull off making it exist.  I'm inordinately thrilled with this project.

I've still got more Llama fiber left over so maybe a hat is in my future.  And a scarf?  Maybe even a pair of mitts.  Cool.

Overboard

I've been working on a spinning project over the last months.  Well, since I got my Country Craftsman.  I was reading in one of the CC groups where they made the comment that this spinning wheel loves to spin lace weight.  Lace weight?  I LOVE lace weight.  I had some gray Corriedale fiber I'd bought at Yarn Barn on one of my trips to my Mom's.  I had gotten it for a specific purpose but the shade of gray wasn't quite right so it was waiting in the bull pen.  But I knew it would be perfect for a lace experiment with my new wheel.  I've only worked on it intermittently, a strand of fiber now and again.  But I finally got it finished this weekend.  I'd thought the variations in color would be interesting but once I got it spun up I discovered, not so much.  I also had a skein of Clun Forest hanging around that I'd sort of thought of dying up so now I had 2 skeins.

A word about the Corriedale.  Both the yarn and the wheel proved to be overachievers and I was very happy about the final product.  I'd spun it with a z twist for the singles and then plied it, of course, s twist.  But I did the plying on my Fricke wheel because the bobbins are much larger than the CC.  The CC bobbins only hold about 2 ounces.  Even so, I barely got everything plied to fit my Fricke bobbin.  But with my Fricke I knew, not only that the bobbin would be big enough, but that I could get a sufficiently high ratio to do the plying.  I'm a notorious under-plyer.  Really.  If there were a rogue's gallery at the post office for under-pliers, my photo would be there.  But the higher ratio of the Fricke (I used the highest ratio on the wheel) did the trick. I ended up with just under 4 ounces and about 630 yards.  I think I figured that it works up at about 2,000 yards to the pound.

Back to the dying.  I pulled out my dye pot this morning, chose emerald green and saphire blue Jacquard dyes, got my water cooking and my dyes mixed.  I was going for a ocean-y blue green.  What I got was, I think, the results of my not getting the dyes mixed well enough in the pot.

First batch:

It's a much darker green (a green that I'm so in love with) than just the emerald green dye so it picked up a little of the blue.  The Corriedale is on the left and the Clun Forest on the right.  The Corriedale is just a little bit deeper, just because the yarn I started out with was a light gray.  The CF was a natural cream color.

But my dye had not even begun to be exhausted.  So I had some generic white wool roving.  In it went.

Second batch:

The roving picked up the rest of the green in the pot and turned into a nice pale green.  I was very happy to find that the roving didn't felt at all so this should be fun to spin.

But the dye pot still wasn't exhausted.  So I got 3 skeins of KnitPicks superwash fingering/sock weight wool and stuck them in the pot, hoping they would come out kind of an icy green color.  Ha!  Oddly, this batch turned out a completely different color:

Third batch:

Turquoise.  Pure turquoise.  Two of the skeins didn't get mixed well so they are speckled turquoise and white and the bottom skein came up with the pure color.  Hard to believe that all 3 of these shades came from the very same pot of water and dye.

Be honest, do you think I went a little overboard in the amount of dye I put in the water for my 2 little skeins...?

Somebody Stop Me, Please....

I think I've gone just the smallest bit mad with this whole tatting thing.  Honestly, ya'll, I can't stop.  You want to know how bad it is? (How bad is it??????)

I was going through my pre-1930 craft magazines looking out tatting patterns for a challenge in the latest Piecework Magazine and I came across a 1925 issue of Needlecraft magazine that featured a tatted bedspread using size 8 cotton.  That's thread.  Not teeny tiny but small enough.

The instructions say that "When finished, the spread contains one hundred and twenty squares, each about nine inches."  Did you get that.  120 squares.

I realized how crazy I'd become when I looked up from the pattern with the realization that I had actually been considering making it.

Samples

I found a book at the library called, The Torchon Lace Workbook, by Bridget M Cook, which has a really helpful format with 10 lessons at the beginning and 25 patterns in the second part of the book.  So, here are my first samples.  The first one is something I did from another book and is just a series of stitches.  The second one is practicing the half stitch and a linen stitch and the last one is practicing the half stitch.  The half stitch and whole stitch are ways of making the background of the lace and the linen stitch is one of the stitches used for creating the "picture," such as the diamonds in the middle sample.

Cool, right?  I don't know where this will lead but it's fascinating!