Solar Flare

Solar Flare

I'm really excited!

I'd like to introduce you all to Solar Flare. I know many of my friends have seen it in person already, but I am extremely happy to have finally finished the pattern. I had some wonderful feedback from my test-knitters and I think together we were able to put together a really nice pattern.

Solar Flare is a semi-circular shawl. It is knit from the center towards the points and has a 3-stitch garter border along the top edge. The increases in the pattern are carefully incorporated into the lace. If you look very hard, you might find them! But otherwise they simply hide in with the rest of the pattern allowing it to grow organically.

I know my friends had great fun watching me puzzle out the math on this one. I didn't make it easy on myself. The pattern repeats seven times. I found out that the shawl needs to grow an average of three stitches each row. These two numbers are distinctly incompatible, but I was finally able to make it work!

Solar Flare is now for sale on Ravelry.

May Recap

vString Swap!!

Here I am, still trying to keep up with my resolutions from the start of the year.

This fiber is around 72g (about 2.5 ounces) of GREAT GOOD HEAVENS!! awesome fiber that I received in a swap. It arrived in perfect time to be matched for the Spindler's Challenge theme of the month, Time Travel! So it was the first thing on the books and I spun it up into about 230 yards of 2-ply yarn using a Bosworth Midi spindle in cherry-wood (my first "real spindle" and still my favorite).

The book is Broken Time. It's what I would call a "fluff" novel. It's fairly solid SciFi (and a bit light on the Sci, really). I'm not sure if it's the author's first novel, or if she writes under other names, but it's the only SciFi novel she has under this particular pen-name. I enjoyed it enough to keep it through several down-sizing efforts on my personal library, and enjoyed re-reading it again while working on this yarn. It touches on space anomalies, pockets in time, and serial killers. An odd mix, but it works.

I knit four ounces of handspun into a shawl called Caliz (Ravelry link). But sadly, this shawlette was not long for this world. It is a lovely pattern and I would recommend it... provided you actually use the yarn for which it was written and the gauge that was intended. I tried to squeeze a slightly smaller version out of slightly more robust yarn and it kept trying to choke me. I did the difficult thing and frogged this poor shawlette and threw the yarn back in my stash for another time. (Yes, that's right, knitters. You can finish something, hate it, and get rid of it. It doesn't have to live out the rest of its life as a forever-not-quite-right-object. Toss it back in the yarn bin. It can live again on another day!)

I have also completed 1000+ yards of singles of alpaca/silk blend. It will probably come out being just under 500 yards of finished 2-ply yarn. I did briefly debate leaving it as a single, but I simply spun it with way too much twist for it to hang around happily in this state, even accounting for the fact that neither silk nor alpaca has a whole lot of memory wanting to SPROING back to its original shape. The twist is simply too active to be happy without the counter-twist of plying. I'm not sure I'll finish this by the end of the day (hahaha. Okay, I'm sure I won't finish it by the end of the day.) but I'll have it done pretty soon and if you add it with the spindled yarn above, I think I can safely say I've managed my four-ounce goal for the month.

I did not weave anything. I have planned on weaving, but the loom simply didn't come out. I did work 4 ounces of millspun, but you're just going to have to take my word on that. It's going to go up in another post!

Radio silence

Sometimes I feel as if I'm quiet on this blog for far too long. Sometimes I actually am. Most of my posting is directly driven by what I have finished lately, or at least something on which I have made significant progress.

What gets me are stealth projects. Half of these stealth projects are the little things (like gifts) planned for people who might actually read my blog. The other half are sooper-top-secret-planz... such as a pattern I have worked on for quite a while that I submitted to a publishing company, or a really lovely piece I have in the works right now that I can't wait to unveil but need to do it at the proper time.

So, I have pictures. I have thoughts I want to share and they're burbling around in my head, trying to make it noisily explode with excitement, but they just have to wait.

Instead, we'll just have to last through a little radio silence together from time to time.

At least I'm not abandoning you here with elevator music, instead!

Fiber to Finished Object

Merino Silk Blend

Here's an overview of a process that started in 2009 when I went to Stitches Midwest with my mother.

The first thing I saw that I liked that day was this fiber. I didn't buy it. Not then. We walked the entire floor and then I went back and decided that I did, indeed, need this fiber. Both of them. I didn't think at the time about how they were so very much "Duck" colors (our college football team). I just liked them, and I thought they were a good price.

The story continues in February of 2010 when they finally came back out of my stash to be spun up on the rented Ladybug wheel I had for the month. It was such a fun spin! I still love that wheel. I managed to spin both skeins to a fairly similar grist--or at least as similar as my skills allowed at that time. The yarn was lovingly tucked back into my stash with vague thoughts of ducky hats and other color-work possibilities. But I never fell in love with any of those ideas.

Then came weaving.. and the iPad. These pretty skeins of yarn were just enough to make an awesome sleeve for my new toy (or so I believed).

And I set about calculating warp and weft and planning how the colors would go together. Houndstooth. I had plans for another houndstooth out of handspun, and I thought these would make an awesome first attempt.

Boy, howdy! They sure did!

A scrap of flannel from JoAnn's remnant bin in an appropriately coordinating green was just enough to finish the project. I applied some of my bag making skills to this idea, incorporating a fold-over flap at the top. I love it! I just need to figure out some way to fasten it down. I wanted a magnetic strip, but didn't have anything strong enough (and I'm afraid of interfering with the electronics it will hold). But the bag is great!

I did have to give the flap a second round of sewing. My first attempt (still visible above) was a bit wobbly. Sadly even on a machine my sewing skills are lacking. I managed to very slowly and very painstakingly hand-seam the liner to the flap so that it came up to my standards of precision. I may attempt to go back over that carefully stitched line with my machine, or I may just trust that my own skills are good enough to hold until I wear out this fun bag.


Basic Stats:
Warp Length: 40" (this needed to be at least 12" longer, but came out okay anyway)
Loom Waste: 6" on each end (thus why I need a longer warp!)
Warp ends: 122 ends (122 for 10 inches + 2 ends to start/end on green)
Dent: 12
Woven Length: 24" (after washing)
Woven Width: 9" (after washing)

April Stashdown

Gothic Rose

I walked into April a tad burned out from my frantic pace of knitting the Echo Flower Shawl (which has flown off to its new home). I haven't really wanted to look at complicated knitting and certainly nothing lighter than a middling finger-weight yarn.

So when I started spinning my Gothic Rose batts, I aimed for something a bit more substantial. And I achieved that in a lovely 3-ply yarn.

This yarn is about 8 ounces and approximately 300 yards of Worsted gorgeousness. Black and fuschia blend into a deeply gothic purple that is shot through with bronze angelina. It is sproingy and squishy and soft just like you'd like out of a yarn.

In addition, I pulled out a small skein of yarn I spun up last year. This is about two ounces of a fun blend of naturally colored wool. Cormo and Romeldale make up the bulk of it, but there is also a lovely and perceptible dusting of the elusive quiviut in there, as well. This spindle-spun yarn came out a wonderful slightly-uneven yarn with a lot of character. I'd been saving it for the right pattern, which presented itself in the form of the Yarn Harlot's "Pretty Thing". I thought this would be the perfect cowl, and it almost was.

Pretty Thing, for me, has one small flaw. The lovely flare derived from the way the pattern causes the fabric to bias flips out around my face like some sort of clown-ruff. Not attractive. I tried many ways of tugging it this way and that to no avail. So then I ripped back the final section of the pattern to try and alleviate the floppiness. Only, it followed the knitting down into the previously-firm-seeming knitting below and when bound off the cowl once again proceeded to look very ruff-like on me. As a final attempt to make the cowl more wearable, I tucked the final repeat of the lace pattern inside the rest of the cowl. Viola! Now it looks like an elegant collar when worn, and it is just snug enough to keep out even the stubborn gusts of wind. I still call this pattern a "win".

There is one more knitting project for the month, which was the reason for my "radio silence" earlier. But I am saving it for the "perfect" moment! You'll hear more about it, soon.

Weaving for this month is a handmade iPad case! I'd like to go into this project in a lot more detail. So that will come up in another post!

Weaving -- why it rocks

Not-quite-intentional pooling scarf

With two skeins of fingering weight yarn, you can take a couple of weeks and knit a pair of socks. You can take approximately the same amount of time and knit a scarf. You might be able to eke out a shrug. But again, all of these things will take several days, if not weeks, of careful work.

In two days (one day to warp, one day to weave), I made an entire scarf. And it's gorgeous and intricate and lovely and squishy and everything you'd want out of a scarf!

Shown above is the first few rows of weaving. You may notice that some of the lines of weaving "pop" out over the others. These are called "floats". You can have warp floats (the ones that go up and down through the weaving), or weft floats (the ones that go back and forth across the weaving). And in fact, when you make a warp float on the front, you automatically make a weft float on the back of the cloth. Pretty cool.

These floats make for some texture in the cloth. In addition, you can play with color.

I played with color inadvertently. I'd planned a 3-yard warp and began to string my yarn out when I immediately noticed that it was "pooling". That is, color repeats were stacking up so that each color lined up next to itself in successive strands of yarn. Once I saw this happening by accident, I took steps to make sure that it continued to occur. There were several "breaks" in this yarn that I probably wouldn't have noticed when knitting. But they changed the color sequence, so it showed up immediately against the rest of the warp. I broke the yarn on purpose and realigned things to match.

One of the other amazing things that happens to weaving is how much it changes once washed. You can see on the first picture a very taught, even bit of fabric. But it is being held under significant tension. When you wash this weaving, the yarn relaxes and bends, snugging everything into place. At that point, you have a completely different (and still beautiful) beast.

For the nitty-gritty details of epi, draft, length, width, yardage used, yarn stats and some other pictures, please feel free to drop by my Ravelry Project Page for the Texture Scarf.

Echo Flower Shawl

Echo Flower Shawl

This has dominated my last month of knitting. This shawl is slated to be sent to a friend (the owner of Three Fates Yarns on Etsy) to be a sample to hang in her booth. It is laceweight Merino/silk, called "Lachesis" and it is hand dyed by Stephania.

And it is wonderful.

This is a really lovely yarn base, with just the right balance of spring, softness and sheen. It is strong enough to handle some very serious lace knitting (3-into-9 and 9-stitch nupps, for those in the know) and come out looking wonderful.

I'm very pleased with the project and very glad to have it done.

I'll leave you with a little gallery of just how pretty this shawl can be.

A little cream on top

Miss Babs camel/silk

Just because it never hurts to go overboard with monthly goals, I have an additional two ounces to add to March's tally. This is just over two ounces of camel/silk blend which I have been spinning for almost a whole year. (I checked--I bought this fiber last May and it was to add to a small sample that was already in progress at the time.)

I started spinning very carefully and mindfully with an eye out for consistency of single. As time went by, my skills improved so things went faster, but I also finally let slip that need to scrutinize every last inch--mostly because I didn't really want to look at it any longer.

This is another project I pulled off the spindle onto my niddy-noddy and then portioned back out for a 3-ply yarn. I believe I originally intended 2-ply, but all that mindful and thin spinning would have yielded a true laceweight yarn, and I just finished knitting 800 yards of laceweight in a very complicated pattern and I don't want any more of it. So 3-ply yummy light-fingering weight yarn it is.

There are about 190 yards here in 60 grams. I think it will be a cowl, eventually. It's just the right amount and should be positively gorgeous.

March Stashdown!

Galia's Spindle Designs fiber

Here's the next project in my efforts to convert my stash from stash to finished object! This is four ounces of wool combed top dyed by Galia's Spindle Designs. This, surprisingly, is not wool I paid for, but rather a prize I won entering into the Phat Fiber Blog giveaways! I was so thrilled, because this wool is gorgeous. It also had a fascinating scent from whatever wash Galia uses.

I love gradient dyed fiber and I really wanted to preserve the gradient. But with as long as the color shift was, I didn't really want to Navajo-ply the entire thing just for those three changes in color. I also noticed that there wasn't a long gradual change between each color and since I had an awful time trying to split the braid lengthwise I decided to try a different tactic. I broke the braid at each color change and started to spin. I ended up with three bobbins of three different colors of single.

Then the "hard" work began. I wound each of the three bobbins of single onto my niddy-noddy, keeping track of how much I wound. This gave me the full yardage of each single. Then I planned to make a slow-change yarn. The trick is to let each single run out over the length of the yarn.

Here's an example. I have 60 "yards" of my first color (=), 75 "yards" of my second color (-) and 60 yards of my third color (+). I know I'd like some solid color of each, and a length where the colors blend from one to the next, so I decide I'd like 5 yards of color-change. Since I want a three-ply yarn, I can divide my first color by 3 and then take 5 yards away from one strand, and add 5 yards to the last. The middle color just gets divided by three since it will already be offset by the first color, and then the last needs to bring everything back to the same length. So that's divided by three and has 5 yards difference in the first and last strand.

Here's a graphic to show it, below:


===============-----------------------+++++++++++++++++++++++++
====================-----------------------++++++++++++++++++++
=========================-----------------------+++++++++++++++


As you can see, one color runs out in each strand and then it all matches up again at the end.

Now, if this wasn't complicated enough, I figured I should make two matching skeins to use to make mittens. So, divide everything by two, first, and then do all the dividing-by-three and swapping extra yardage around and.. well. It worked. After winding and breaking and dividing and measuring and getting everything in the correct order on six different TP tubes and then back into plying balls, I was ready.

The yarn spun up very nicely. There is a lovely, slow change between each color as one ply runs out into the next color just as I planned. And the yardage between the two skeins is almost exactly matched. I did get off just a little bit and I'm still not sure how that happened, but it isn't going to stress me out at this point! And of course, part of the fun is figuring out how to photograph everything to show off how it all works!

And in the end, we have two really pretty skeins of yarn, ready to be mittens. And four less ounces of unspun fiber in my stash!

As for the rest of this month's stashdown...

 

I'd tell you all about these two projects, but they really deserve their own posts. Keep watching for more!

Quick spun scraps

This past year I bought a 1 pound bag of scraps of fiber. I never really intended to spin any of it in a serious manner. I bought it, instead, for when I go into our Preschool (and hopefully the Kindergarten this year) and talk about Wool. I spin a little and let the kids paw through it all and talk about sheep and all the cool things you can do with Wool. I capitalize "wool" because I did this for the past two years on the week they are studying the letter "W". (We also sing "Ba-Ba-Black-Sheep" and watch the Pixar short "Boundin'", which you should immediately go out and watch if you've never seen it!)

This year, we also made "felt balls" in the pre-K class. You take a puff of fiber and fluff it up with your fingers. Then get it wet with lightly soapy water and roll it in your hands like a ball of Play-Doh. In about a minute, you'll have something mostly ball-shaped. If you do it like making a Doh-snake, you'll get a little felted worm. The kids really enjoyed it.

But before that day, I was having a "blah" day, and I figured with an entire pound, it was unlikely that an ounce would be missed. So I grabbed out a random number of scraps from the brown and blue/green family and just spun them. This is the result. It is entirely random, woolen-spun, and very soft. For the most part I think the fibers are Merino, but there could be some BFL in there since I had to change my drafting a bit between scraps. I'm positive there's even a pinch of cashmere (the staple was extremely short and it was really wonderfully soft).

I think I'll knit it up into a little animal and felt it. But for what I wanted, just getting to sit down and spin something, fast, was perfect and I felt much better after simply for having completed a small project.

Waterfall Mitts

Waterfall Mitts
by Project Pictures on Flickr.

With the increasing availability of free patterns and the ease of finding them on Ravelry, it's easy to sidestep paying designers, or to think that they charge too much for their work. But when you sit down to do it yourself, it becomes very clear that what designers do is not simple, easy or fast.

Take these mitts. I loved making these mitts.. once I got things to work. But that wasn't easy. I started knitting them in the round. I tried magic loop. I tried DPNs. I had problems with the yarn slipping and sliding, making "ladders" in the knitting, and with needles completely falling out of the stitches. I also started with a completely different lace pattern, the Tilting Squares pattern to match the cowl. Unfortunately, Tilting Squares don't resize well. They don't easily come out to match the circumference of a hand with the stitch counts you can manage with them, and they loose their charm when knit as a panel that is anchored on either side because they no longer have the freedom to tilt.

I found all this out by knitting the first of this pair of mitts over eight times, and ripping out my knitting each time.

I will say one thing. All that abuse gave the yarn (Textiles A Mano "Lucerne", 65% cashmere/35% silk) a chance to shine--and I'm not just talking the silk content. This yarn is strong and durable on top of being beautiful and luxurious. When it could have turned into a partly-felted mess, it still frogged easily after multiple times being knit. It continued to knit up beautifully even after all that working, and once both mitts were completed I couldn't even tell which one had been worked more!



These mitts are knit flat, so that there won't be any odd stretching of the fabric. Trust me, they are much more fun to knit flat than to struggle with any of the various methods of knitting in the round. In addition, you must knit the section of the thumb-hole flat, anyway.

After being knit flat, the sides are seamed using the tails of yarn from the cast-on and cast-off edges. Working from the edge to the middle lets you control exactly where the thumb-hole falls, and how big it will be.

Once seamed up, the lace-in-ribbing expands and contracts to cling to your hands in a sheathe of warmth. And, what can I say? It's cashmere/silk. They are wonderful, if I must say it myself.

But knitting is only half the work. Then you must write it down, make sure you wrote it down correctly, be certain that other people will be able to understand what you wrote when you're not there to explain it, and then make it look lovely. And then it helps to have someone else double check, test knit, and re-read to make sure you didn't slip up on something simple and obvious (or even on something incredibly obscure).

I have to admit, I look at the pattern-costs on Ravelry differently now. I see the hours of work that went into the project on top of the creativity in the design.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that these mitts are also for sale on Ravelry, now.

February Overview

It's amazing how fast February goes by. It's a short month, and we have several birthdays in it which eat up a lot of free time. So I would write up a "recap", except that I forgot to post my progress for the month in the first place!

Since I still need to keep up with my spinning/knitting goals, here's the overview of my February projects.

I spun four ounces of A Verb for Keeping Warm fiber (80/20 Merino/silk, dyed in "Pilgrim" for the Pro-Verbial club). It became about 320 yards of 3-ply yarn. This is in keeping with my Stashdown and "Spin 12 in 12 months" goals for 2011

  

I knit four ounces of handspun, making another 198 Yards of Heaven shawl (Ravelry link). This was out of my own handspun yarn and I used just short of 350 yards by knitting an additional two lace repeats before starting the edging chart.

  

I knit four ounces of mill-spun yarn, although technically this was not from my stash. I was given the yarn in order to design a cowl and matching mitts (a blog post on the mitts is up next!).

  

I started to weave four matching place-mats. I managed to warp the loom on the last day of February, so I suppose this could technically count as a February project. Since it is using several balls of cotton, I think I will just count it as a February/March overlap project, unless I get really ambitious in the next few weeks.

For works in progress, I am still making progress on my WiseSweater. I finished my pattern-band swatches with an option I liked and cast on for the first front panel. It is easy, but mindful knitting and not the sort I can easily tote about town, so it is taking a little more time than usual. I am also working on a shawl for a friend to display in her shop. Hopefully that will come out well (and be done by the end of March!).

Tilting Squares Cowl

Tilting Squares Cowl
by Project Pictures on Flickr.

I have the wonderful good fortune to live in a town with several fantastic fiber-arts shops (three yarn stores, one fiber, and one weaving, not counting the craft-chains that also carry yarn). One of these is Textiles A Mano, run by Laura Macango-Shang.

Laura's shop is just wonderful. Nearly all of the yarn in Laura's shop is a product of her own hard work. She creates fantastic and beautiful hand-dyed yarns. There are shelves upon shelves of skeins of all sorts of fibers and colors. It's impossible to walk through and not pet something.

Laura is fantastic as well. She hosts a knitting group on Wednesday night (which I am sadly unable to attend), and a spinning group on Saturdays. Saturday spinning is something I look forward to attending each week. Lots of great women come together for a couple hours of spinning and talking.

After one of our Saturday meetings, Laura approached me about working with her yarn. She had a new yarn base (65% cashmere / 35% silk) and needed a pattern to sell with it. I was thrilled and flattered to say the least. We both thought a cowl would be a great use for this yarn, and she even had a suggestion of a lace pattern, the Tilting Squares stitch.

I had a great time putting this cowl together. The yarn is wonderful and a real pleasure to knit. I worked with an older Addi 16" circular, and wished I had a Knit Picks fixed circular instead--I've become addicted to their sharp points and the blunter Addi needles just aren't fast enough for my tastes. They are still nice needles and the project fairly flew off of them.

Patterns are really interesting to write. It is quite the intellectual exercise to take instructions that are perfectly clear to you, personally, and turn them into instructions that other people can easily read and understand. Subtle details like how information flows on the page and where charts and explanations should go are also tricky. And, of course, you need a couple of good pictures to illustrate how your knitted object is going to look.

I'm really glad I have a good camera, and a willing-to-help daughter. At not-quite-six, she did a fantastic job of trying to take pictures with mommy's huge camera. Unfortunately, its computer brain was in direct competition with young fingers and getting correct focus was a trial. We got a couple of usable shots out of that effort, but in the end I was forced to the old trick of "hold your camera at arms' length and hope for the best". I can't say how much I love digital cameras. Film is an interesting media, but the fact I can take 20 pictures, know immediately if any of them are any good whatsoever, and trash the bad ones right off my camera is invaluable.

After jumping through all the hoops with noting, knitting, frogging, re-knitting, writing, photographing, formatting, proofing and printing, the Tilting Squares Cowl is now up for sale on Ravelry, or available with the Lucerne cashmere/silk yarn from Textiles A Mano.

The Strange Joy of Frogging

Frogged Yarn
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

What is this, you ask? An ephemeral, deep-sea coral? Some strange spaghetti monster? A steaming pile of yarn vomit? No. This is, or rather this was, my Diamond Fantasy Shawl, now gone to the happy frog pond in the sky. This was my first shawl, back before I really even understood what a lovely thing a shawl could be. But it never really worked.

First off, it was too small. A single skein of sock yarn can yield a respectable kerchief, but really two are necessary for a good wrap. Second, it was rough. I don't know if it was my washing, or my finishing, but soft Merino yarn that was usually a joy to touch became harsh and twine-like in this piece. And lastly, the colors of the yarn warred with the lovely diamond-pattern of the lace. When worn, all the detail simply disappeared.

Now that I've been knitting for a bit, I've come to recognize that not every project works. Sometimes it's obvious when you finish--it's too big, or too small, or your skeins didn't match and it has a horrible stripe right at the wrong place. It could be more subtle with a fit that doesn't quite flatter no matter how you gently block or tug it into place. I started to notice that once I had more than one of a couple of types of knitting, certain projects ended up in the back of the shelf or the bottom of the pile, never to see the light of day.

I decided to frog the Diamond Fantasy Shawl. It was a hard decision. It was my first. It was pretty. But it wasn't getting worn when all of my other shawls and scarves were seeing frequent use. It's time was done. And the yarn is just too pretty to languish in a project that didn't make me happy.

Here that mess is, again. It is amazing what a nice, hot, soapy bath can do for unruly yarn. Gone are those crazy kinks from blocking. Gone is the sproingy mass of curls. Instead, I once again have a smooth skein. And even better, it's softer! And even with a few yards of scrappy bits to deal with, I'm really looking forward to seeing this yarn become socks or some other project where the unique handpainted nature can shine, rather than compete with the stitch-pattern.

But, it is not the only thing that has visited the frog pond this week. Oh, no. I also had the almost-lovely Versatility. Versatility wanted to be a great project, it just never was. I'm almost afraid to share a picture of it because, well, Ugh.

Versatility wanted to be versatile! It was a scarf. It was a shrug. It was a vest. It was a hood. It was cables and lace and bobbles. It was lovely.. and terrible. No matter how I arranged it on me, I looked smooshed into it like a sausage. The beads I used to replace the bobbles tarnished quickly, and they were cold against my skin when I tried to use it as a scarf. It had a huge stripe in the middle where my third skein of yarn didn't match the original two I purchased. It just didn't work.

This one was actually even more fun to rip out than the shawl. I had a deep sense of satisfaction knowing I wouldn't have the project looking at me reproachfully from its shelf in the closet for never bringing it out to wear. Every line that I pulled out of its knitting made me a little bit happier. By the end, I had three orderly balls of yarn that should probably still be skeined and washed, but will do so on my time schedule, whenever the whim may take me.

Until then, happy knitting everyone. Or happy frogging!