Tag Archives: singles

all before eight.

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I went to bed before eleven last night, which was heavenly. I’m an early to bed, early to rise kind of person, and I function best first thing in the morning. I love to sleep with the windows open, shades up, so that I rise with the sun. The craziness of the end of the semester, paired with the fact that I’m currently dating someone with pretty much the opposite schedule means that I haven’t really been able to do this for several weeks. (Not that I’m staying up til 3 or anything, but I’ve been trying to compromise. Hard to be social and go out for drinks with folks who meet up at 10 or 11, when that is normally about when I’m climbing into my bed.)

Anyway, I went to bed before 11 last night, and woke up feeling rested just before six. I made my cup of coffee, and curled up with my wurm.

Note the brokeknits-esque nature of this photo. I think I’m going to knit a few more sections before beginning the decreases. I am in love with these color transitions.

The parritch targhee 3-ply is still damp, but I’ll have finished pictures of that soon. In the meantime, I decided to put something else on the wheel. This is Hello Yarn Fiber Club corriedale in Seasick, and I’m planning either to leave this as singles OR to navajo ply this, depending on how it goes and what I want to make with this stuff. It has been awhile since I spun any corriedale, and whoa, this stuff is awesome. Just sayin’.

Here’s a glimpse of some of yesterday’s organizational progress.

And an early-morning, rather drowsy, pouting pooch. He has no idea that in about half an hour we’re meeting a friend for a nice long walk. Tough life, big dog.

FO: loch (and more spinning).

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Swoon. 506 yards of laceweight/light fingering in a stunning mohair/nylon/merino blend from the Hello Yarn Fiber Club, colorway Loch. I took A LOT of photos of this stuff, which are all on flickr, if you want more. See, I was feeling so pumped about how these singles turned out that I just had to get something else on my wheel.

I decided that I wanted to try navajo plying a whole skein of something. I mean, I practice navajo plying with my leftovers every so often, but I haven’t put the time in to really get comfortable with the technique. So I dug through my fiber stash, and pulled out Magic Chip, a lovely pastel colorway from the AVFKW Woolly Wonders Fiber Club in superwash bfl.

Here’s the bobbin in the afternoon sunshine.

And here’s Boh, resting in one of his cutest positions: legs out straight in an X.

And here they are together — Boh snored right through all of my navajo plying.

I wound this onto my niddy noddy, and marveled at how different navajo plyed yarns are before finishing — way more balanced, because the twist can’t travel the length of the yarn, only the length of the loops.

I showed it to Boh, and after giving it a good sniff, he decided to snuggle it, eyes closed. That’s my dog. Now it’s hanging to dry.

Next up? Well, tell me if I’m crazy, but I found these two skeins of super happy turquoise Cascade 220 while I was digging through my fiber stash, and I would love to have something like Shalom to wear as spring approaches. Some knitters have managed to eke out a short-sleeved cardigan in 450 yards or so, and I’m tempted to try it. Other thoughts on patterns? I’ve moved these skeins to the kitchen table to keep me company while I grade.

(lots) more of those singles.

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But first I have to share this photo I snapped of my lunch yesterday: leftover dumplings, new music (checking out the Broken Bells album), natural light. Yum! (And necessary sustenance for all of the spinning I have been doing this weekend.)

Finished singles, on the niddy noddy. No breaks in the winding process, which I was super happy about. I was aiming for a low-enough twist for these to be reasonably balanced after finishing. With trepidation, I took them off the niddy noddy.

And snapped another picture. So far so good — the singles are not too twisty! Into the bath they go.

Post bath, admiring the sheen of the mohair.

Boh lays claim to the towel used to squeeze out the excess water. (Can you blame him? It smells like wet woolliness.)

And now the singles are hanging to dry. It feels good to be spending so much time at my wheel!

spring singles.

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Inspired by a whole host of handspun citron shawls, as well as too many stunning skeins of handspun singles on ravelry to mention, I decided to work on some singles of my own. This fiber is a new-to-me blend: 83% mohair, 15% nylon, 2% merino from the Hello Yarn Fiber Club in the Loch colorway. I did a bit of reading in the forums, as well as in a few spinning books, to learn more about spinning mohair, and found that the long staple length makes this a great candidate for thin singles. First, I thought I’d need my very fast flyer. When I went to adjust the mother-of-all to a different height, I found that it was stuck — I think the humidity must have encouraged the finish on the mother-of-all to fuse to the wheel base. I decided that dental floss might help, and with my fingers crossed, I forced the floss between the mother-of-all and the wheel base — victory! Now my wheel is minty fresh. (Turns out, actually, that my regular flyer is what I want in order to have a bit more control and to spin lower twist singles, so I re-swapped my flyers.)

I did a bit more spinning this morning, and snapped some photos of the bobbin in natural light. I am in LOVE. (I realize I say that a lot, but it is true.)

I had a slice (or two) of this pie for breakfast, and Boh continued to lounge.

In order to be comfortable with the windows open this morning, I added a few more layers, including my simple things shawlette. Here is an official knits-in-action shot:

Hello, spring.

reward/recovery.

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amondale batt1

Thank you for all of your happy thoughts about Tuesday’s lecture! I finally was able to do a bit of knitting and spinning last night in order to recover from all of the week’s stress and extra adrenaline, and I decided to reward myself by spinning a special treat: a gorgeous batt from Amondale Farms that Lisa Knithound sent my way as a Rhinebeck souvenir. (I was going to try to crack a Halloween joke or two about batts/bats…but I won’t.)

amondale batt2

I know, Boh does not look pleased. But these are his colors! Lisa said that this batt reminded her of the southwest, and I agree: these colors make me think of the gorgeous sunrises I witnessed almost every morning when I lived there.  I did a little bit of reading about spinning batts, divided the 1.5 oz. batt into two equal chunks by unrolling the rectangle and splitting it down the middle, and sat down at the wheel.

amondale battplied

I mostly used the long draw technique to spin this, but I did a lot of smoothing of the single before I let it wind on to the bobbin, so it certainly wasn’t a “true” long draw. I let the singles rest an hour, and then plied them together!

amondale batt niddynoddy

Here’s the plied batt on my niddy noddy…

amondale batt FO

And here is my finished skein: 51 yards of lofty 2-ply that runs a bit thick and thin, from dk to worsted.

amondale batt FO close

I’m already thinking about turning this into a calorimetry for me!

Spinning and plying this batt last night just made me want to get something else going on the wheel. It was so much fun to try something new — this is my first batt! — that I decided to take my fast flyer out of it’s plastic wrap and put it on my wheel.

winter storage bob1

This is Finn, from the Hello Yarn Fiber Club, in the Winter Storage colorway. I’m aiming for a 2-ply light-fingering/laceweight.

Happy Friday!

 

GYC.

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gyc startofbody

Despite the fact that I haven’t actively listened to any Michael Jackson since the summer, every time I go to abbreviate the garter yoke cardigan as GYC (you know, when I label photos and such), I hear the chorus of PYT in my head.

gyc startofbody2

I’m just over halfway through the raglan increases now, and I’m hoping to separate the sleeves from the body before the end of the weekend.

one oz of cmfbfl

I started spinning my CMF bfl yesterday as well. I’m going to work through this an ounce at a time, with the idea that if I keep 4 bobbins in rotation, I can spin 3 ounces and then ply them together, and then start on the next skein. In a perfect world, I’d spin all the singles first and ply the earlier bobbins with later ones to help increase my chances of uniformity, but since I only have 6 bobbins, and no storage bobbins, I’m thinking that working through this a skein of yarn at a time is the way to go, both for my storage options and my momentum. Speaking of momentum, today I should probably aim for more reading/writing and less knitting and spinning. The pace of the semester is really picking up, which means the book piles are growing.

sauerkraut saute

I’m not even going to try for a smooth transition. I snapped this photograph of my lunch sauteing yesterday: fresh farm onions, bok choy, carrots, and homemade sauerkraut.

Time to hit the books. (Well, after I pour another cup of coffee and knit a row or two.)

singles and shawl progress.

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alpinebob1

Bobbin 1 of the Hello Yarn romney in Alpine.

bob2alpineprog

alpinebob2

Bobbin 2, first in progress, because I thought I was going to stop, and then, in the second picture, finished. This stuff spins itself. I may cheat a little bit and ply later tonight instead of letting the singles rest a full day, We’ll see.

heathershawledge

The wedding is next Saturday, a week from today. I decided on two leaf pattern repeats (I think the last time I blogged about this, I was thinking about doing three), and this morning I began the edging. I’m 8 rows into 34, and I absolutely love how this is turning out. If I work steadily on this over the next few days,  I won’t have to stay up late and risk making stupid, bleary-eyed mistakes. My goal is to block this on Wednesday night, so that it has ample time to dry before I deliver it to the bride on Friday.

While I was working on the romney and the shawl, Boh was standing guard at the window:

longdogwindow

He really is a surprisingly long dog — I marvel at his length whenever I find him at the window like this, paws up on the radiator.

morepouting

Apparently surveying the backyard is pretty exhausting work. (There is loud snoring drifting towards my desk from the bedroom.) May your Saturday be as productive and restful as Boh’s!

lucy in the sky, skeined.

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lucyFO1

lucyFO2

My apologies, up front. I have A LOT of pictures of this skein of handspun.

lucyFO4 macro

lucyFO3

lucyFO5 macro

Just one more. Okay?

lucyFO6 macro

3-ply, 325 yards of almost 4 oz of Crown Mountain Farms Superwash Merino in (wait for it) Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. I didn’t measure wpi, but it is definitely sock yarn, slightly thicker and squooshier than the blue Spunky Club sock yarn I finished a few weeks ago. I say “almost 4 oz” because I stopped plying when I could not fit any more yarn on the bobbin, rather than when one of the bobbins ran out.

nplylucy

I navajo plied one of the leftover bobbins, and here’s how it looks, unwashed. The trick really is to just slow down. I did this while listening to NPR’s coverage (downloadable!) of Billy Bragg at the Newport Folk Festival, and I found myself treadling very slowly along with his guitar.  There’s something really quite graceful about navajo plying, and I’m excited to keep practicing.

I have more spinning to share — my wheel was looking so empty that I just had to start a project. Or two.

singles shetland41

This is the last of my AVFKW shetland in Fruit Loops — 68 yards of singles. While the rest was done on a spindle, I spun this on the wheel. Not sure what the collection of singles skeins will become, but I’m quite happy with the lot of them.

indigowensleydalebob1

And this. I only intended to start this last night, but I ended up spinning a whole bobbin’s worth. This is AVFKW Wensleydale in Intergalactic Space Travel, dyed with indigo, which, as expected, turned my fingers a gorgeous shade of blue. I’m still learning about how dye and fiber react, and with this stuff, I could really see how the saturated spots were different (and more difficult for me to spin) than the lighter sections. I’m aiming for a worsted-ish 2-ply with this, but it might turn out more thick and thin, as the coarser, more saturated parts were making it really tough for me to get into a rhythm and find some level of consistency. I’m really interested to see how this yarn feels once it has had a good soak, as the indigo really changes the feel of the wensleydale.

savoryzucchinibread

(One of these things is not like the others…) A friend from my high desert knitting group emailed me this recipe for a savory zucchini-cheddar bread, and I baked a loaf yesterday afternoon. I used monterey jack instead of cheddar, and upped the dill to make up for my dwindling supply of parsley, and whoa. My go-to zucchini bread is more of a breakfast loaf, but this makes it possible to have zucchini bread at every meal. So delicious.

Three weeks until the semester begins — I can’t believe it. Time to get to work!

spindled shetland singles.

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(And other stuff, too. But first, the shetland.)

bohspindle

I was digging through my fiber bin yesterday, and found some shetland in progress on a spindle, as well as some singles stored on metal knitting needles, patiently waiting to be plyed or finished. I worked on the shetland for a little while, and just had to snap this picture of Boh, laying on my left foot, back arched and ears-a-flapping, directly underneath my spindle.

shetlandsinglered hanger

This is shetland from A Verb For Keeping Warm in the Fruit Loops colorway. I have a little bit left to spin of the brown and red section, but the spindle was getting heavy, so I wound it onto the niddy noddy and set the twist. I did the same with the stored singles from the other half of this bump, which was much bluer/multi-colored.

shetland singles skeins

Picking up my spindle yesterday felt sort of funny after all the wheel spinning I’ve been doing, and it took me a few yards (or 10) to get back into a rhythm. Soon I’d like to work on thicker, even, low-twist singles on the wheel, as I really like the way these smaller skeins of shetland turned out. (The thinner, more uneven yarn on the right is the earliest spindling in this picture, before I was doing things like making plans for the kind of yarn I wanted to spin. Fun to be able to see my progress in these side-by-side singles.)

shetlandsingles2

Yardage: 145 yards of the reddish-brown shetland, 88 yards of the blue-multi shetland, and 96 yards of the thinner blue shetland. (I found a new way of doing math that is a bit easier than the 32 and 36 inch increments: Total number of strands x 5 (my niddy-noddy is 1.5 meters, or 5 feet) and then divided by 3 (3 feet =1 yards) = total # ofyards. Thanks, ravelry!)

Progress report on my Beatles’ song-inspired CMF colorway:

lsdbob2one

lsdbob2two

Bobbin #2 is moving right along. The colors are hard to capture when the light is wierd, but these pictures are pretty accurate — I love that chunk of super-bright turquoise on the right!

zucchinipancakes1

After the dilly beans, I decided to keep on tackling the zucchini that is taking over my fridge. Last night, I made a big batch of summer squash and zucchini pancakes.

zucchinipancakes2

They aren’t super pretty, but they were VERY tasty. It’s a good thing I made a hearty meal, because about an hour after I had settled in with my knitting to watch an episode or two of the second season of Mad Men, a fairly large bat began flying around my apartment. (Story to follow. If you don’t like bat stories, stop reading now.)

It is unclear how he got in, which is a little disturbing because my landlord had called to say that the folks upstairs had seen a bat in the basement. (The house is on a hill, and my apartment has great natural light on three sides, but is technically the finished side of the basement because of the building’s orientation. The idea that there is a way to move between my bright  and cheery apartment and the dark and scary basement is not encouraging.)

It is roughly roosting time, and while I have shared open-air spaces with bat families before (see posts from last summer), I am not that interested in sharing my in-town, rather small apartment with a winged rodent (as my father calls them).  I trapped the bat in my bedroom, shut the door, and packed some fabric at the base of the door so that the bat would not be able to squeeze underneath. I got out my headlamp, grabbed a dinner knife, and went outside to pry the screen off one of the bedroom windows to give the bat a clear escape route. And then I waited.

And waited.

I finally opened up the bedroom and took a look around, and it appeared that the universe had righted itself. So I replaced the screen, and went back to my evening plans. And then Boh started to bark in the direction of the 1960s-style dress I have hanging on my bedroom wall. I went back in the bedroom, only to find my bat peaking out from behind the Jackie O-inspired wide neckline of the dress. I closed the door, repried the screen off the window, and watched through the window as the bat yawned and found a cozy spot to take a nap. This bat was serious about moving in.

I called my dad for advice, and in between comparisons to a situation in which he’d had to deal with a hummingbird trapped in the garage (NOT the same thing as a bat in the bedroom), reminders of  a summer vacation we’d taken when I was a baby that involved bats and netting over my crib at night, and a lot of laughter on his part (“Well, do you think it is a vampire bat? How big are its fangs?”), he recommended broom warfare and gave me a pep talk.

At about 11 o’clock last night, I put on my raincoat, pulled the hood up over my hair (to prevent any sort of accidental touching of the bat or entanglement in my curls), barged into the bedroom, and took a golf-like swing at the wall, sweeping the bat towards the window, and likely disorienting it with the force of the blow.

It landed, stunned,  in a plate full of shiny jewelry on a shelf near the window. I picked up the plate and set it on the ledge, and gently poked the bat with the broom bristles until it flopped out the window.

And, that, my dear friends, is the complete story of Rooster vs. Bat, 2009.

That (hopefully) concludes our bat content for the year. More knitting, spinning, and cooking to come!

sleeves and shetland.

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First of all, THANK YOU for all of your kind comments re: the stress of the end of the semester and my very exciting should-be-here-on-Tuesday purchase. Yay!

I turned in paper #1 on Saturday, and paper #2 Wednesday at noon. Yesterday I spent the afternoon cleaning: kitchen, trash, 4 loads of laundry, vacuuming, etc. and even made a trip to a great farmstand to replenish my dwindling supply of fruits of vegetables. I actually enjoy a lot of the parts of keeping house, but these tasks are extra-enjoyable when you’ve had to neglect balance in favor of meeting a deadline or two. One more project, due at the end of the month, and it will be summer, which to me, means the chance to read more slowly, keep getting to know New Home, and enjoy the company of the dog (and my spinning wheel)!

Enough daydreaming, it will be here soon enough! Last night I finished up the sleeves of my whisper cardigan – time to pick up a zillion stitches! Must fortify myself with coffee first.

whispersleeves1

whispersleeves2

I’m pretty bleary-eyed in these pictures, but you can see how the cardigan fits across the shoulders. Here’s one more:

whsiper sleeves3

I lengthened the sleeves — they are about 9 inches long — a half inch of 1×1 rib at the elbow, and then 8.5 inches of stockinette. I decided to make the 22 inch size across the back, and I’m happy with that choice. I’m still on my first skein of shadow, which is hard to believe. While knitting with laceweight on 7s is still slower than knitting worsted, it isn’t as slow as I thought it would be. I’m hoping to keep making steady progress on this sweater, as it seems like the perfect amount of warmth to keep tucked in a bag for when the sun sets!

Also, in anticipation of my Lendrum, this week I returned to some shetland I had started, but with an actual plan: to try to keep the colors separate and spin fatter singles. While I might not have been able to detect the differences in spinning one wool vs. another a few months ago, I am really understanding what differences in staple length and stickiness mean for spinning. I’m really happy with this so far:

shetland singles fruitloops

The fiber is shetland from the AVFKW fiber club. The colors are so rich — and coming off on my hands a bit, but I don’t mind.

Alright! Boh and I have plans to spend some serious time at the d-o-g-p-a-r-k today. He was very patient during all of the paper-writing, and has earned a lot of playtime. Happy Thursday!