Tag Archives: spinning

[miso] sick.

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Yep, hard to believe, but I get even cornier when I’m sick. I’d be willing to categorize this particular sore throat/headcold combination as “sick-as-a-dog” if I didn’t have a perfectly healthy canine snoring peacefully on the couch behind me. I wish he’d stop rubbing it in.

miso

I’ve consumed a couple of quarts of miso today, and I’ve also worked on ingesting as much superfood as possible — which means I even mashed up a few cloves of garlic and threw them into a homemade lemony salad dressing in order to up my allium intake. Hot showers, lots of herbal tea, a pre-bedtime mug of Therma-Flu (which I’m working my way through as we speak) — and some pouting to the boy round out the day’s medicinal treatments. I WILL be better tomorrow. I have to be. I’m so bad at being sick.

I did a very little bit of knitting today — when the full on head cold developed, it became hard to look down without also encouraging the snot to pour out of my nose. I did, however, discover that head colds go nicely with spinning. Standing makes it easier to breathe, and I felt less silly with something to do while standing in order to inhale less laboriously, which prompted me to start the second half of my January Spunky Club fiber:

twilight-part-2

Apologies for the busy and somewhat blurry photo. I didn’t have the heart to wake and move Boh off of the more plainly colored couch.

Alright. Fingers crossed that I wake rested and find my health returned.

about 5 bank accounts, 3 oz and 2 vehicles*

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twilight-2oz

This is more like 2 oz.

Of fiber from the January Spunky Club.

Not anything illicit. I’m just saying.

I’m realizing that 2 oz is about all I can fit on the spindle at one time. Despite what this picture seems to reveal, I’m really happy with the evenness of this yarn. the last 10 yards or so are more irregular (and what you can see here) and I think it has to do with how heavy the spindle gets. When it is approaching full, my technique seems to emphasis the “drop” in drop spindle!

*This is Dr. Dre’s answer to the previous line, and the name of the song: “What’s the difference between me and you?” Given that the song lyrics and music references I normally post situate me solidly in the land of americana/folk/alt country, I’ll provide a little more context. This album was popular during my freshman year of college, and somehow it became clear that a friend and I knew all the words. (While this isn’t my favorite song, I have a serious memory for useless information like song lyrics.) He is getting married next year, and there have been jokes about demonstrating this particular skill at the wedding. If you know the song, you probably realize that it is pretty intense/violent and, shall we say, representative of the genre. Despite all of this, it makes me think of said friend whenever it comes up on itunes, and I smile. Music is good for that.

Plus, now that I operate in ounces — of a very different kind than Dr. Dre —  it is allowing me to creatively(?) post on my spinning progress this week…

you don’t meet nice girls in coffee shops.

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Last night I heard Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin and Buddy Miller sing Tom Waits, Bessie Smith, Johnny and Jack, Judith Miller, some gospel music and a bunch of their own stuff. It felt like looking down on something special, to see these individually incredible songwriter-musicians make and enjoy their music together. Makes it sort of hard to return to regular life, so instead of jumping right into the reading I should’ve done last night, I’ll show you a little bit of spinning I did yesterday.

spunky-jan-fiber

This is my first batch of fiber from the Spunky Eclectic Fiber Club — 4 oz of organic merino in colorway Twilight.

boh-spindle

Boh’s not so good with the spindle. (Yet.)

spunky-progress

The blues and greens look particularly beautiful against the colors of one of the books I’m reading this week — prompted me to get out the camera this morning.

Time to have some more birthday cake for breakfast and get back to the pile of reading…

birthday weekend.

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I have a whole slew of unrelated (or maybe loosely connected) photos: knits in action, kitchen adventures, knitting mistakes… Hmmm. I promise NOT to name this post something about the letter K.

Friday:

bolero-in-action1

Bolero Jacket in action. I feel like I read a lot from folks about how sometimes knitting is not super wearable, and my blog gets lots of visitors who are looking for advice on wearing things like legwarmers, so I’ve been a bit more mindful of snapping photos when I am actually wearing things I’ve made (not that I consider myself remotely fashionable). This sweater gets a lot of wear around the house, and steps into real life when the weather is variable enough to warrant a heavy sweater but not a winter coat — this works best for me with a big puffy vest. I wear this when I need to bring a bit of comfort with me — in this case, the discussion of a tough book.

fork-for-scale

Friday night, we made pizza and lemon tart (from deb at smitten kitchen, of course). No pictures of the pizza. Note the fork for scale in this picture. I also discovered some serious errors with my increasing on the BSJ I’ve been working on — I literally had 6 ridges left to knit when I realized that my increases (for the fronts of the sweater) were uneven. I don’t even have the heart to photograph the problem, nor could I stomach ripping back. I just put it aside, dug through the stash, and cast on for a baby version of the bolero jacket.

Saturday:

biscuits1

moroccan-stew

Moroccan Stew (from deb) and biscuits (a la Mark Bittman). Also, a new spindle arrived:

newspindle

I LOVE this spindle. I spun the sample fiber it came with immediately, and may need to dig through my fiber stash to start something new so that I can put it to work. The spindle is from Spinsanity, and it spins wonderfully. Hooray for birthday presents to myself.

Sunday (actually anniversary of my birth):

birthday-cake

Homemade birthday cake, not baked by me. Honey-Rosemary Cake with Lemon Frosting, from Apples for Jam. This is incredibly delicious, the kind of cake you can eat several pieces of during the day and not feel like you’re overdosing on sugar. I intend to have some for breakfast after I post this.

replacement-sweater

And since this purports to be a knitting blog, here’s the progress I’ve made on my replacement baby sweater. Just about halfway done already — what a difference worsted weight yarn makes. I’ve had enough distance from my BSJ to take a look, and I imagine I’ll rip back and keep going — it may go to this baby, or to the next. Lots of folks in my life are adding to their families this year!

Hope you all had lovely weekends. Sadly, you don’t get to stop reading when it is your birthday, but I did slow down a bit. Time to have some of that cake and prep for class!

pooch for scale.

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pooch-for-scale

pooch-for-scale-2

Ta-da! My first plied yarn. By my calculations (which are often up for debate), this skein contains about 180 yards of squishy mostly worsted weight yarn, with some light worsted and light bulky here and there. I’m thinking that I *need* a new cowl, and once I finish this BSJ for the now overdue baby, maybe I will allow myself to cast on.

bsj-almost

I’m making progress, to be sure — cast off the 5 st on each side for the neckline yesterday, but there is much to do, leaving me with a dilemma: do I read for my independent study with my advisor tomorrow, or knit for him? I’ll likely do some of each, but what I cannot do — I repeat, CANNOT DO — is work on this:

fruitloops1

How did this happen? Spinning is a slippery slope, my friends. I got a new Butterfly Girl Designs spindle in the mail this month, but did not allow myself to test it out until AFTER I had finished spinning the Finn. So, while my plied skein was drying, I figured I had earned just a few minutes with this spindle and some more AVFKW fiber from the club. It seemed slightly unbalanced — likely due to how soft the gold hook is/perhaps some jostling during the shipping process, so I tried bending it slightly this way and that to make it just right — and suddenly, I had spun almost an ounce of this beautiful shetland in the Fruit Loops colorway. This is wayyy too much fun.

Alright — must stop blogging and get reading! or knitting!

plied.

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full-spindle2

I filled this spindle — which split where the hook screws into the shaft just as I was finishing. (I think I’ll mostly be using this for plying, as I didn’t have much luck with it as a beginning spindle, and it seems fixable.) Plying took much longer than I expected — it takes time for an appropriate amount of twist to travel up the strands of yarn! Next I began wrapping the yarn around my arm to make a big loop — but there was too much yarn:

winding

So I started over, using a chair back, and found a reasonably priced niddy noddy online for next time. Here’s my yarn, pre-warm bath:

before-washing

I LOVE it. LOVE. After soaking in warm water/detergent, and then hot water/vinegar, and then warm water again (according to Maggie Casey’s instructions in Start Spinning), I hung it to dry on a hanger in the kitchen.

closeup-hanger

hanging

I woke up this morning to find my yarn almost dry. A few more hours, and I’ll be able to twist it into a skein (and take more pictures). I’ll also work on estimating wraps/inch and yards!

sleepingboh

Boh is pretty tired from all that plying, and I managed to pour my coffee grounds from the grinder into my glass of water instead of into my press. I might be a little tired from plying too! Today I must make progress on that baby sweater. No more spinning until it is done. (Hear that, self?)

the perils of pooches (and some oh-nine goals).

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dsc05552

One minute, the hat was where it always is when it is not on my head: in the basket by the door. The next, Boh is galloping gleefully through the apartment, a destroyed star-crossed slouchy beret in his mouth. At least he looks sad, right?

A few other things I’ve been working on:

blurry-pizza

Reacquainting myself with my kitchen (yay!) through pizza-making. (If you haven’t checked out Smitten Kitchen, do so now. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, etc. I love Everything I Make from Deb’s blog, and you should see the pile of printed out recipes in the kitchen queue.)

Also, dishcloth knitting — some thank yous for hosting us on our north country adventure:

dishcloths

Apologies for my link-laziness: it is unlikely that I will actually connect these patterns to their internet homes. Quick rav searches should do the trick…

So! I’ve been making lots of lists, clearing space on my bookshelves for a new semester’s pile o’ reading, and thinking big thoughts about what I’d like to accomplish this spring, and this year. I won’t bore you with the Grand Academic Plans And Worries just yet, but I do have lots of exciting knitting ideas. I recognize that purely by virtue of writing all of this down, I will not accomplish all of it, but at least I’ll be able to come back to this post for inspiration, should I need it throughout the year.

First up: sweater knitting, or rather, sweater completion!

Right now I have Brompton and 28thirty on the needles. I’m happy with how they are coming along, and I just need to find some slightly longer chunks of knitting time to feel like these are worth pulling out — a row here and there simply doesn’t work when you are trying to keep track of increases or knitting huge rows. I desperately want to wear these, though, and I really think I can get Brompton finished in time to turn it into the cozy grad school cardigan I have been envisioning forever!

Other sweaters on the list:

Valia (Santa brought me a bag of gorgeous Malabrigo and the pattern, and I’d love to have this ready for next fall’s holiday trips home, if not sooner.)

Drops Jacket (I’ve had yarn for this forever, love all the FOs I’ve seen, and my apartment gets cold in the afternoons. This is obvious, right?!)

Cobblestone (for me), Tangled Yoke, Salina, Francis…I have yarn that would work for all of these, and they all have long stretches of stockinette: exactly what the frazzled grad school mind requires.

Next up: Socks! I’ve been a member of the Yarn Pirate Sock Yarn Club this year, and I have a gorgeous stash of Georgia’s yarns, but I’ve been slow to turn them into socks. I’ve unsubscribed after this 3-month round as a way to motivate myself to knit with what I have. I think socks have finally clicked for me as great mindless knitting — I can now turn a heel on a basic sock without having to dig for the instructions, and socks really are perfect take-to-school for extra free moments waiting to meet with professors or for class to start.  No specific pattern goals here, except to master the art of both toe up socks (I’m working on my first pair now) and the short row heel (mine are always hol-ey. I think Cat Bordhi will rescue me on this one, as a knitting friend pointed out last year).

I’m also working on learning to cable without a cable needle, so this year, I’d like to develop confidence/comfort with this technique.

Spinning goals: I think I’m finally getting the hang of (and the addiction to) spindle-spinning, and to this end, I want to make time each month to work on my spinning and learn how to ply. By the end of 2009. I’d love to spin up a 3-ply sock yarn to knit (toe up?) socks with.

All that should keep me busy, don’t you think?

turn a spindle, turn a square

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vinn-pink

And here’s what I was working on while skein number 1 was hanging to dry. This is the first half of 4 oz of Finn in colorway Equilibrium, the November installment of the AVFKW Woolly Wonders Fiber Club. Here’s the beginning of the second half:

brown-vinn

This is more of a complex chestnut brown than it looks. Silly me for photographing it on a brown chair. I clearly took this picture before my morning coffee. I’m planning to attempt plying on my spindle when I finish spinning this up. I think these colors look lovely together, and “Equilibrium” suits them perfectly.

I’ve also been working on turning another square:

square-in-progress

blurry-square

I had to have one for myself — I’m hoping that the decrease seams will become more slouchy with a good blocking. (Apologies for the blurriness on this shot — all I can say is that my arm is a bit tired from all of the spindling!) Details: Grey Cascade 220 and Araucania Nature Wool Chunky leftovers, size 6 and 7 needles, as directed. Also, even though I’m using the notes to get the stripes to line up, it doesn’t look quite right. I ran the tails of both colors up the seam to fill in a few gaps that formed during color switches. Maybe I need to pull the yarn tighter as I’m carrying the strands along inside.

Totally unrelated, but I found myself wearing my malabrigo cowl on my head. And I like it.

cowl-on-head

Still thinking about my knitting plans for 2009…

yarrrrn.

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spindles

Those of you who’ve been reading for awhile know that I’ve begun practicing with a drop spindle. I posted some practice “yarn” this spring, but honestly, I was having a hard time with drafting and getting an even, longer-than-a-millisecond spin with my spindle. Enter Mel of Pipe Dreams and Purling Plans. In September, Mel held a contest in conjunction with fundraising for the Breast Cancer 3Day Walk in DC, and I won the beautiful spindle in the foreground above. This spindle has made all the difference. It spins forever, which has given me the practice I need to figure out how to draft and spin more consistently. I’m considering this my very first yarn — spun from 2 oz of BFL in colorway Sadia from A Verb For Keeping Warm. It is a beautiful, complex gray. Here’s what it looked like when I took it off the spindles:

prewash

I then soaked it in a warm water bath, and weighted it as it hung to dry to straighten it out.  I waited all day yesterday for it to dry, and last night I wound it into a skein:

tada

And here’s the skein with a dime for scale:

tada-dime

This looks pretty thick-thin, but much of that has to do with switching spindles and making it over the drafting hurdle part of the way through this projct. I’d say most of the yarn is solidly dk weight, and none of it is thicker than a heavy worsted. I’ve begun a new spinning project already, and I can already see my own progress. This is seriously addicting.

Happy New Year! I’ll be back soon with (perhaps) a quick review of my knitting year, and some resolutions for 2009.

FO: star crossed slouchy beret

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Ta-da! This was super quick and quite fun to knit. The cables increase the squish factor of the Malabrigo, and while the variegation is a bit busy, I am quite excited to send this westward to its rightful owner. Here’s another shot of the Star Crossed Slouchy Beret, in which the dog demonstrates his usefulness as a table/backdrop:

Using the eyeballing method, this hat took about half a skein of Malabrigo. I may make one for myself out of my sassymetrical leftovers. This is where a scale would come in handy…I’ll keep you posted. In other news, here are some pictures of yesterday’s victories:

Delicious collards from my local farmers’ market, cooked with garlic, ginger and chile.

My very own yarn! (Dog for scale.) I’m not sure if you can get a sense for the thickness of this yarn, but most of this feels like a light worsted or even a heavy dk. I need to get better at spinning the spindle levelly, and at joining new pieces of fiber without getting an ugly blip in my yarn, but I am feeling really good about this. Dividing my roving into more vertical pieces, and doing more pre-drafting to both lengthen the roving strips and separate the fibers from each other made all the difference. I had a lot of fun with this, and am looking forward to practicing a bit more.

I also have a recent yarn acquisition to share, purchased at my new LYS. This is absolutely gorgeous, local, undyed alpaca. I bought two 8 oz 660 yd skeins, and I’m wondering if I could turn this into a drapey Gathered Pullover. What do you think? Other ideas include a luxurious shawl or lacey shrug.

Thanks also for all of your kind words about graduate school and the transition. It feels truly indulgent to be able to set most of my own schedule and focus on reading and writing and thinking. I’m sure my anxiety will begin decreasing once my seminars get past their introductory meetings and I am able to work through the transitional cobwebs by participating.

Alright — off to do a bit more reading, and then some baking, spinning and frolicking with the dog. Happy weekend!