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!


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!


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?

New jewelry for my knitting

Tonight I made stitch markers.



They're meant for lace knitting. I'll test them with my TwitKAL shawl (which, by the way, I cast on yesterday — finally...), and if they don't snag or catch or attack my knitting in some other way while I'm knitting it, then there should be some appearing in the shop shortly ... or maybe I'll be giving some away ... OooOOOooo...

The Tale of the Monster TwitKAL Yarn: How to Spin a Shawl

O. M. G.

That's what I would name this yarn if I were lazy. (...or feeling particularly bizarre. ;))

I have finally finished spinning the TwitKAL yarn, and it turned out to be a monster. This is the biggest skein of yarn I have ever spun. At a guess, I don't need to worry about running out of yardage for the Traveling Woman shawl.

You want to see photos? Yeah? Yeah? Well, I sat there through what, twelve hours of spinning and plying, not even counting the dyeing? You can put up with a few more in-progress photos before you get to see the finished product, too, dangit. ;)

So we left off after the fiber was dyed and dry. The next thing I did was split each color in half (without worrying too hard about making them exactly equal halves) and make mini-sets of three colors — each set of three colors would go on one bobbin, then the two bobbins would get plied together. I actually wanted a bit of overlap between the color changes, to hopefully make for smoother transitions — which is why I didn't bother trying to split each color exactly in half.



Close enough to equal weight for me. Next up: Spinning. Actually, pre-drafting before spinning, to take out any fiber stuck-togetherness (a.k.a. the bit of felting that I probably did when I wasn't paying attention to whether the dyepots were boiling ... ::whistles innocently::).



For those who wonder this kind of thing (I do), the above photos only show half the fiber of a given color. I have waaaayyy too many photos of predrafted fiber now, though, if anyone likes to look at that sort of thing. ;)

And then it was time for lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of spinning. Mini bobbin montage! (Yeah, this doesn't even begin to convey the hours and hours of tiny-yarn spinnage involved.)


At last there were two bobbins, no unspun fiber, and a ghetto lazy kate. The Magical Jumbo Flyer and Bobbin were just over the horizon...


Finally, after more long hours of plying (with occasional cursing when one of the plies broke — not a problem the intrepid wheel+spinner normally have...), one unassuming but gigantic bobbin remained.



Then, this dark and unpromising yarny caterpillar (if you will) split its chrysalis and unfolded its brightly-colored wings. (Ready for it? Ready? Ready??)



TA-DA! And the close-ups!



There it is. Finished. Done. Finito. NO MORE. And it's, like, way, way, WAY more yardage than I need for this shawl. Ha, ha, ha. 4.9 ounces (weirdly, I didn't "lose" any weight, although I normally do with smaller skeins of fatter yarn). 686 yards. Around 18 WPI, a.k.a. sport weight to fingering weight, which is pretty much what I was going for (did I neglect to mention my trusty spinner's comparison card? Maybe it'll show up in a future photo...). Purple, blue, and greeny-blacky.

You may now applaud. Thank you, thank you. Bows all around. Flowers on the stage. The roar of the audience's sincere and deep appreciation. Ahhh.

(And whew. Wait — you mean I have to knit the shawl now? Groooaaan...)

Dyeing the TwitKAL fiber, part two

State of the TwitKAL fiber: dyed and dry, but as yet unspun. I'm hoping I'll get up the gumption to try spinning it tonight, but in case I fail miserably at the spinny idea, I now have backup yarn.


It's Jojoland Melody Superwash, which I bought when I stopped in at Needles and Knobs yesterday — finally. They opened, like, a month after I moved out of St. Petersburg, which is where I'd lived for, ohhh, 20something years at that point. And of course they opened like four blocks from where I lived right before I moved. Of course. Ahem. Anyway.

It's such a pretty yarn that I kind of want to sell out and cast on for the TwitKAL with it, but then there's my pretty fiber. Let's check out how that came along, shall we? Here it is in the dyepots (where, in fact, I did not dye one batch of black and two batches of almost the same bluey purpley color, no matter what my camera or my screen say — you can see the difference, right?):





The blacky color is really a dark dark green. It's rather an "oops" color, since I didn't mean to dye it that dark, but I didn't realize the dye was in chunks instead of well-behaved powder form until I tapped the jar of dye over the pot (I know — I was being very precise and scientific). Let's just say that my amazingly controlled methodology resulted in a rather larger chunk of dye falling into the pot than I intended. You can even see the bit of the pot that was in the splash zone. Doh.

I'm not sure what the darkdark green will come out like when I spin it, but here's what the roving all looked like once it finished drying.




Since I have a couple of votes for spinning rather than selling out, I'll definitely at least give it a shot. More on that in a future post, with shiny new pictures, too.

For me, TwitKAL means Adventurous KAL

So a few days ago, Amber (a.k.a. Spazzy Amber) announced the winning pattern for our Twitter knitalong — the Traveling Woman shawl. Which is the pattern I was hoping would win, since I a) like it, b) like the story behind it, and c) need to finish a friggin' lace shawl sometime in my life.

Then there's the fact that I have to pick a yarn. Not a bad thing — it's just that I don't have a ton of sock yarn sitting around (even if sock yarn doesn't count as stash, it counts as Taking Up Space), and of the sock yarn I have, not much of it matches up with what I want in the Traveling Woman shawl.

But, you know. I have undyed fiber. I have dye. I have dyepots. And I have a spinning wheel. All of which led me to think, Oh, why the heck not? I'll dye and spin my own yarn for the shawl.

In, like, two days. Ha, ha, ha. ;D And one of those days is my birthday, so I'm not sure how much I'll be working on TwitKAL prep that day. And then there's the fact that I haven't dyed anything in, er, quite a while. Years, maybe.

So, surprisingly enough, today I got a bug up my butt to pick the dyepots and dye powder off the floor and mix them up with some nice what-I-think-is-Columbia wool roving. Ensue photo montage:










That's fiber + dye, dyepots, dyepots + water and vinegar, and dyepots + water and vinegar and wool.

Right now I'm waiting for the last batch to finish dyeing, and for the first two batches to cool. Would have done all three at once on the stove, but the boy person appears to have poured some form of congealing-prone food substance into one of the burner drip trays. Nice. Always fun when your dyepots start smoking.