May 23, 2011

And lo, there was much finishing, and it was good

Who, me? Absent?

Okay, you win. I've been quiet here for a while, but look! I've been doing things, and I have photographic proof!

I finished that gigantic pink scarf:

Gigantic pink scarf — finished!

And I finished knitting my TwitKAL/Wanderheart shawl, which looked like this before blocking:

Finally finished TwitKAL shawl

...and is currently stretched out on the rack floor, drying into its newer prettier shape:

TwitKAL shawl, blocking

And I finally Navajo-plied the second bobbin of Rubies and Sapphires Merino that I spun during last year's Tour de Fleece:

Second skein of Rubies and Sapphires Merino

Hmm. That doesn't seem like much, does it?

I've also been baking and going to the beach, though not at the same time (yet — someday I'll have a solar oven, mark my words!).

Muffins of some kind
Random baking pic

A tiny crab
Random beach picture. Tiny crab waves hi!

And I've been working on my Big Black Socks and on a secret knitting project for my Santosha Swap partner (which I could probably actually post about, since only the organizer knows which partner is assigned to who ;)), but those aren't ready for photography yet. ;D

So ... see. I've been doing stuff. And there is more stuff yet to come. Think productive thoughts at me, 'cause I'm still going strong now ... but I can use all the encouragement I can get!

May 6, 2011

From fleece to fiber art: alpaca like the ocean

A few weeks ago a friend of mine called me up. "Will you spin me some yarn for a Mother's Day gift? Any kind of yarn you want," she said (though, I admit, not in these precise words ;)). "I've never seen you make yarn I haven't liked!"

Once the temporary ego-swelling had subsided, of course, I had to make some decisions. My friend (hello, Ms. Friend! ;D) and her mother are both allergic to wool, so anything but wool would work. Well, I have plenty of alpaca fleeces, so off I went to the stash.

I wanted to pick a fiber good for dyeing, since alpaca doesn't naturally come in blue, green, or purple, the colors I hear Ms. Friend's mom uses the most. ;) This, a fleece from Calypso Farm, from a Suri alpaca named Glass Slipper, seemed perfect:

Undyed alpaca fleece

Suri, by the way, is a rare breed of alpaca known for having silky, warm, lustrous, drapey fiber. Only one percent of the alpacas on the planet are of the Suri breed, so "rare" isn't just hype! ;) (Check out Suri Network for more information on Suri alpacas and Suri fiber specifically.)

So the fleece visited the wash tub and the dye pot, and voila! Oceany alpaca!

Alpaca fiber


Anyway, originally I thought I'd do a lightweight yarn that might work for knitting a shawl, as Ms. Friend mentioned something about a lace book for her mom. Now, maybe you know this already because you have lots of friends who are fibers, but fibers have preferences about what makes them look good and behave well. Some look good in little black dresses, some look good in jeans and a t-shirt — well, okay, I'm really talking about fiber preparation here, like combing vs. carding, but I am so not in a jargony technical mood today, so we'll pretend it's kind of like clothing style. ;)

Point is, since I hadn't worked with this particular fleece before and didn't know its preferences, I experimented with different fiber preparations. I tried preparing it on my hand cards, on my drum carder, and with my hand combs, and I tried spinning yarn from all these preparations as well as spinning the fiber straight from the cloud (meaning without doing more than picking it apart with my fingers a bit).

Some of the results I won't share with you *cough*, but I found that while the different preparations weren't radically different in results, the different processes were different amounts of pain in the butt. ;) (Suri alpaca doesn't look fluffy until you try to run it through a Louet Junior Roving Carder, let me tell you ... and then it flies everywhere. I guess I need a drum carder with finer teeth? Or maybe I need to buckle down and get those cotton hand cards I've been drooling over for years.) Anyway, in the end I end I went with the hand combs — even though I think of them as fairly slow, they seem suited to the Suri's straight, silky fibers ... and they don't make the fiber fly everywhere and stick to everything. ;)

Hand combs
Scary fiber equipment, yay!


I even knit up some of the sample yarn to see how it behaved.

Sampling the alpaca fiber & yarn


That looks pretty decent, huh? But like I said, different fibers have different preferences, and there was just something about this preparation that didn't seem ideal. Sure, it was functional, but the Suri seemed like it wanted to show off a little more, and not be so traditional. Lots of fibers do traditional perfectly well, and the Suri does have an interesting halo to it when spun like this, but ... well, at the rate I was spinning, it also would have taken me forever and ever to finish the whole batch of fiber at that weight. And I had this possibly odd idea that a Mother's Day gift should probably be ready before Mother's Day, plus, I didn't want to think about pricing a yarn that takes 9 whole hours to spin, not even counting the combing and the dyeing and the washing and, and...

So I decided I'd spin it fatter, since the fatter yarn sample I did seemed to show off the Suri's qualities better. Then I thought again: If I spun it fat, because alpaca tends to be fairly heavy and dense compared to wool, I'd end up with a fat, short skein of yarn, an amount that would make it more of an accent yarn than something Ms. Friend's mom would be able to knit a whole item out of. And that'd be silly, wouldn't it? But the singles alone, with its decent yardage, didn't seem appealing enough — again, it was functional, but I wanted to do something special, not just a plain ol' singles.

Then I remembered thread-plying! And so I went into the part of the stash with the cones of vintage weaving yarn, and I pulled out some white thread, and went to town. Ply, ply you fools! The result:

Alpaca yarn

Ta-da! A little over 100 yards of thread-plied art yarn. (Okay, it's a slightly sedate art yarn, but I didn't want to force anything too wacky on someone I can't remember meeting in person, meaning where she would be in range of my ability to sense wackiness tolerance. ;))

Yeah, I may have fallen victim to making things more complicated than they needed to be, by following my own preferences and treating this project like I would have had it been a present for my mom, but that's not such a horrible thing to do when you're given free rein to make whatever yarn you like, right?

Alpaca yarn

And hey, if the recipient hates it, or if she happens to see this blog post and decides she likes it the traditional, takes-two-gazillion-years-to-spin yarn better than the arty yarn, I do have more of this fiber, and more dye. I can always call a redo! It may even take me slightly less than a gazillion years to spin it next time, since then I'll have had the practice of spinning it this time around. ;)

Of course, I do hope she ends up liking it, maybe even making something out of it that eventually shows up in my inbox in photographic form. That's one of the coolest things that can happen to your handmade stuff — seeing it in happy use, in action.

So here's hoping it's well-received. :D Meantime, I'm off again. There's still more of that gigantic scarf to knit...

May 3, 2011

In favor of hugemongous yarn, and Epic Socks pics

I hardly ever knit with chunky weight yarn — it's not generally useful in Florida weather, and I tend to prefer a slim look to a "fluffy" look, if I can help it, and the patterns that are awesome enough to make me want to use the chunky yarn anyway tend to require massive amounts of it, which is, y'know, usually more expensive than things requiring nonmassive quantities of yarn. ;)

The pound of pink yarn in the last post, though, is for a custom scarf, and chunky weight was an absolute must. (There's no way I'm knitting a scarf of these epic proportions in a lighter weight of yarn — I'd be middle-aged before it was done.)

And this scarf? If anyone needs convincing that knitting with chunky weight yarn has merit — well, lights, please! I present to you my evidence:

This is the scarf partway through day one of knitting it.

BFL scarf, beginning

And this is the scarf on day two.

Giganto pink scarf, Day 2

That's 26 inches, people. 26 inches of 12-inch-wide scarf in two days. I've never knit that amount of fabric in such a short amount of time in my life, methinks. ;) Well, at least not before this week.

So there it is: The perfect argument in favor of gigantic yarn.

And on the far-from-gigantic yarn front, here are some of those photos of the Epic Socks, my first beaded lace socks, that I mentioned I'd take:

Bling socks

Bling socks
Lace close-up! ;D

Giant yarn, nongiant yarn ... We gots it all around here.

(We've even got yarn that isn't yarn yet, she said as she glared at the four ounces of freshly-dyed turquoise-ish alpaca fiber that needs to finish drying RIGHT NOW DANGIT. Pics of that coming once it looks less like pieces of a wet rat with a strange fashion sense.)

May 1, 2011

Coming up for air, plus a pound of wool yarn & a handspun shawl in progress

So tired today, but I finally have the Epic Socks done. (Light shines down from the heavens! Golden trumpets sound! Birds fly picturesquely across the scene!) They're on the drying rack at the moment, so no photos yet, but I'll take some before I send them off to their deserving and angelically patient owner.

And hey, now I know that I can knit a pair of women's lace, beaded socks in 31 hours of knitting time. (I'd have said "women's size X" socks, with X being the US shoe size, except that I can't remember it exactly. Size 9? Off the top of my head I only remember the recipient wears a larger shoe than I do...)

Another thing that looks like it might get done in the next few weeks is that old TwitKAL shawl I started last year. I'm almost out of the blue portion of the yarn, and then there will only be purple left. Yayyyy!

The ol' TwitKAL shawl
Pattern is Liz Abinante's Traveling Woman shawl.

And oh, yeah. I finished spinning a pound and an ounce of big fat fluffy pink hand-dyed Blue-Faced Leicester yarn for a custom order. Behold! A pound of handspun yarn in all its glory!

A pound and a bit of BFL

As I told the person who will be receiving this yarn after its transformation into a scarf, the funny thing about this project is that I'll probably have taken longer to spin the yarn than it will take me to finish knitting the scarf, comparatively huge though it will be. (For reference? I've knit myself a sweater using less wool than is going into this scarf. Which is a reflection that a) I'm small and b) the recipient is somewhat other than small. ;))

I'm going to continue to be a slacker as far as Craft or Bust updates, by the way, since I haven't made any progress on that since my last update — but ever since the first mate and I fixed the washer/dryer, I've been on a cleaning spree, and there's nary a scrap of unwashed laundry left in the house, and I'm coming up fast on the dubious achievement of having no dirty laundry except what we're wearing at the time. Wouldn't that be a trick?

For some reason, since the washer/dryer's been fixed — and it doesn't leak, which hasn't been true for maybe a year — I've been hugely determined to finish off some of the big projects that have been on hold and taking up space not just physically, but emotionally and mentally. So even though I haven't been meeting my weekly CoB goals, well, I think liberating physical space and emotional and mental energy is a worthy trade-off for a few weeks of slackerdom. No?
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