Bank account, forgive me, for I have ordered from Dizzy Sheep two days in a row...

Yesterday's order was, seriously, unashamed, unabashed, stashing. They had Dream In Color Starry. They don't have Starry that often - nobody has Starry that often - and, surprisingly, by the time I got in to work, there was more left than the picked-over carcass. Dizzy must have started out with an awful lot of Starry...the color I got was Lunar Zazzle, a colorway with a lot of blues and greens in it.

Today, though - I had a flash of inspiration for something my sister doesn't know she wants for Christmas. I refuse to feel guilty about buying yarn to make a Christmas present for someone else.

This means, though, that I'd better finish the Doom Scarf. 15 rows of chart to go.

I tried a couple more of Jamie Oliver's recipes last week - the "peppers stuffed with peppers" from Jamie At Home (still can't find this recipe anywhere on the 'net...) and "Tender and crisp chicken legs with sweet tomatoes", which came up a couple weeks ago on his "Recipe of the Day" RSS feed.

Both were awesomely good - although I appreciated the filling of the stuffed peppers more than the pepper shell - and the recipes really encourage you to play with color in your food (peppers and tomatoes both come in a wide variety). The chicken legs were beyond easy - put big chunks of tomato and potato in a baking dish, put chicken leg quarters on top, scatter whole cloves of garlic and shreds of basil around the dish, and bake for an hour and a half. Total cleanup, 1 knife, 1 cutting board, 1 baking dish...unless blood is spilled in a fistfight over the garlic cloves. I'm really looking forward to making either or both of these next summer when I have fresh tomatoes and basil from the garden - and both are a good answer to the dilemma I had about what to do with the bounty from my over-enthusiastic cherry tomato plant.

I've kind of let my goals for the year go by the wayside - one thing it didn't account for enough was that "life happens", and projects came up that I wanted to do but couldn't possibly have planned ahead for. One I intended to hold myself to, though, was "Take a class on something!" - a good goal for every year, isn't it? And, much like the class on natural dyeing that I took last year, this one really brought home the idea that there's no substitute for learning from a human teacher.

Backing up a year: the first issue of Piecework that came in my subscription was the Historical Knitting issue for the year. At about that time I'd been looking for a way to make purling - or, more precisely, switching from knits to purls within a row - more efficient, and I thought I'd found it in the Portuguese knitting technique most associated with Andrea Wong, which was featured in an instructional article in the magazine - this is the method I'd heard about, also used in Peru and some parts of the Mediterranean coast, where yarn is tensioned around a hook-shaped pin or your neck. I gave it a try - and I failed, and kept right on with my old style of knitting.

I was delighted to hear a little while later that my LYS was trying to bring Andrea in to teach a class; I really was interested in the technique, and figured I could learn it from a human much more easily than even a DVD*. I was right. Purling isn't that much different from the way I do it now - but the way the yarn is tensioned makes it that much easier. Knitting with the yarn in front is a little different (and that's where I had trouble trying to learn from the pictures - the article didn't make clear that you really, really should start with purling) - but switching between knit and purl, once you've got the hang of the technique, is a quick, painless matter of flicking the yarn over or under the right needle with your thumb. We tried a little colorwork, too - you add a second pin on the other shoulder, and then just...use whichever yarn you need for your pattern. This could make some of those crazy designs where you use four or five colors in a single row of knitting much more manageable, because while you only have two hands, you could put an arbitrary number of pins on your left shoulder...

I remembered that in a class Yarn Harlot teaches about "Knitting for Speed and Efficiency", she advises students to practice the new style of knitting 15 minutes a day, and that's what I've been doing - right now I'm still kind of slow at this, but I think I'm getting better. I was right to say that this would be the perfect technique for the shadow-knit scarf (now about six inches longer than Hubby is tall, and likely to get another foot or so longer...I worked out that it's about equivalent to five socks' worth of knitting), but Andrea was also absolutely right to say that your gauge will change dramatically and you shouldn't switch mid-project. So, in light of a thought I had while sewing up the tail of my fish hat...I'm making a bunch of 20 stitch x 20 row swatches to practice proper seaming techniques on. Whip stitch is fine for fish hat tails, not so great for sweaters.

*If you want to learn this style of knitting and are not fortunate enough to have Andrea Wong come to your LYS, she does have a DVD out, another one being released in about a week, and a book-in-progress, probably released in the spring of 2010, that will cover a lot more than the DVDs.

TechKnitter, both on her blog and on Ravelry, is an amazing source for tips, tricks, techniques, fixes, solutions, and Things To Generally Help You Knit Better. If you don't read her blog and you knit, you really should; posts are kind of sporadic but always worth reading, and well-indexed so that if you need to know how to do Japanese short rows next month instead of five minutes from now, you can find it again.

Today's post was a little different: adding some nuance to the "process knitter" versus "product knitter" divide by examining what she calls the "ephemeral joy of the knitting itself". The post really resonated with me, and I thought I should share.

The people who bring us the Online Needlework Show (in which I won a doorprize again this year! Haven't received it yet, though...) are opening the doors to the unwashed masses. From November 5-8, they're having he Online Retail Needlework Show...

I'm so far behind on my photography...but here's a couple projects I've taken pics of.



Abby cowl, by Amy Singer
Yarn: My own handspun silk
Needles: #6 16" circ.
Learned: I don't spin as well as Abby. (That's so obvious it almost doesn't count as learning.)



Princess Mitts, by Jennifer Hagan (pattern in The Knitter's Book Of Yarn)
Yarn: Jo Sharp Silkroad DK Tweed
Needles: 2 #6 circs
Learned: When you're knitting with 2 circs, you always have a cable needle handy.

I'm in the middle of a WIP Finishing Binge right now...I'm down to two, one of which just needs to be blocked and sewn up. Wish me luck...

I dunno, but I'm blogging about it anyways. :)

I started following Jennifer L. Aikman-Smith's (yes, the Dragon Dreams cross stitch designer) blog Inhaling Creativity, in which she is exploring and stimulating her creative process and recording the results, with exercises for those of us following along at home. A few of the "homework assignments" have involved playing with your food a bit, going out of your culinary comfort zone.

One weekend, it was suggested that you work with food that stimulated the senses - she mentioned going through your spice rack and smelling things...and the best-smelling things in my spice rack, all taken together, suggested an Indian dish. I stumbled upon Nigella Lawson's recipe for Mughlai Chicken, a dish from central India that aimed more for complexity of flavor than heat (actually there's no heat at all...), and while I'm normally a little skeptical of Indian food as presented by a Brit, the reviewers raved about it, including one person who claimed Indian descent, so I went for it. The recipe was time-consuming but easy, and came out absolutely delicious - Nigella says it's one of those dishes that tastes better the next day, but there weren't any leftovers. (The one complaint: Daughter didn't like the raisins. I ate them for her. :) )

For another cooking "assignment" - she'd mentioned a few dishes she'd cooked from Jamie Oliver's cookbooks, and I remembered a dish from his Food Network show that amounted to "peppers stuffed with peppers with more peppers on the side". Hubby had started drooling over that, but the recipe wasn't on Food Network's website, so I got the "Jamie At Home" cookbook from the library. I didn't end up making the stuffed peppers (yet!), but I did find a recipe that seems to hit all four of Hubby's food groups: Steak, Guinness, and Cheese in Puff Pastry. How can you go wrong with a meal that combines meat, beer, cheese, and pie? I managed, kind of: since the stew is braised in the oven (or a slow-cooker would probably do it, but I would use less water), it has to cook an awfully long time, so I had to cook the stew one day and make the pie the next. The other issue I had was the puff pastry - I probably didn't let it thaw enough, so I had some trouble rolling it out, and the top sheet only just barely fit onto the pie. It wasn't the prettiest pie ever - but at some point it stops mattering what it looks like. :)

...and then on an entirely unrelated note, I cooked to help Daughter with real homework: part of her Social Studies grade is based on outside activities in which you learn something about another culture. I guided her through the process of making onigiri, Japanese rice balls wrapped in nori. For our first try, they didn't come out too bad - if we do it again, I think our hands will need to be a little wetter while we mold the rice. After that, I raided Personal Trainer Cooking for a Japanese dish to serve with them for dinner, and came up with a yummy gingered pork chop - and I was struck by the principle behind the recipe. The dish was actually very simple - I don't think there's much simpler than a marinated, grilled chop, unless it's a grilled chop that you didn't bother to marinate - but the presentation, specified by the instructions given, was unique and interesting. Isn't that the basic gist of all Japanese cooking? If I'm going to be exploring the creative potential in cooking, that probably wouldn't be a bad place to start.

I got my mitts done in time - barely! I bound off the last stitch just before midnight the day before I needed them - and with a scarily small amount of yarn left. They worked out pretty well - they didn't keep my fingers any warmer than usual (duh), but the parts of my hands actually covered by the mitts were toasty.

Instead of knitting a sock (I'd found out that it's a little difficult to knit while wearing the mitts) while I was there, I brought my spindle, and learned quite a bit.

1) Most of the folks there - men, even! - recognized what I was doing. This kind of threw me for a loop, especially when the trend continued to the auto repair shop later in the afternoon.

2) I really can spindle while walking!

3) If you don't worry about how much you're making, the bump of fiber will disappear that much faster.

I was working on the second batch of singles for a lightweight two-ply - I think it came out a little lighter than fingering, but I'll have to check WPI after I wash it - to use up the last of the undyed Romney I bought a couple years ago. I ended up with 80 grams, ~215 yards, spun with a short-draw technique but the fiber was closer to a roving than a top so the yarn is kind of fuzzy. I'm going to dye it with sumac...gotta use up that bag, and I did like the color I got. It'll probably be a lace scarf, given the yardage.

After finishing that, I went back to WIP's - I've almost got my last fish hat done, and then I'll pick up Hubby's scarf again.

Sometimes it just hits, and you find yourself making a project you never thought you'd want, out of a yarn you had no idea how to use.

Background point 1: "Smoke School" is coming up in about two weeks - which will involve me going out into the field for, at a minimum, two mornings to sit in the (usually) cold and dreary weather and estimate the opacity of a plume of smoke coming out of a stack, for a grade. (This happens twice a year, in April and October; any attempt to get good odds of better weather for one session would result in worse weather for the other, so we live with it.) Since this involves filling out a test form, I need enough dexterity in my right hand to manage a pen, which means no mitten or glove on that hand, which sucks.

Background point 2: During the Dizzy Sheep Memorial Day Spin-Off, I got some grab bags, one of which contained precisely one skein of Jo Sharp Silkroad DK Tweed Ravelry link - why is Jo Sharp not in Yarndex?) in a lovely green color. It's a soft, soft yarn, a blend of wool, silk, and cashmere, and I was itching to do something next-to-skin with it - but there's not much to do with one skein of DK weight yarn; most of the patterns that came up were hats.

Background point 3: My niece HB has taken to wearing a pair of commercially-made elbow-length fingerless mitts, as a fashion accessory. I had never considered fingerless mitts a particularly useful thing, and never understood why Fetching was the most-knit pattern on Ravelry - but watching HB put them on, something struck me, and I suggested to her: "You might want a pair of those in your school colors to wear when your school's band marches in parades. They'll keep your hands warm, but leave your fingers free."

So. Over the weekend I was moaning to myself about how the crappy Smoke School weather was coming (and, seriously, it's almost like a curse - last spring it was beautiful the day before, beautiful the day after, and miserable the two days we were in the field), and how even if I stuck my hand in my pocket whenever I could my hand never really got warm...and it suddenly hit me that, just as fingerless mitts are a useful thing for a saxophone player, they are also useful for someone who needs to write outdoors on a blustery day.

To Ravelry I went, looking through the Mittens/Gloves section, applying my usual filters: first "Free", and then "In my library". And even before I filtered for the kinds of yarn I might want to use, it was staring me in the face: a lovely pair of cabled and ribbed fingerless mitts (Ravelry link) that called for one 50-gram ball of DK-weight luxury yarn...which I'd had marinating in the stash because I didn't want to make a hat out of it.

And now it's a race: can I get them done in two weeks? I think I can. Hubby's scarf will have to wait a little longer.

Having picked a sweater to knit - Wendy Bernard's Opulent Raglan, which, no, wasn't on my short list... - the next step is to go bra-shopping. (One of my bras is in the process of joining the Lingerie Drawer Eternal, and the other one might have made it already. Sigh.) In the meantime - time to get a feel for the yarn and the budget.

The suggested yarn is GGH Cumba. I figured, given that a) this is an Interweave publication, b) the yarn is imported from Germany, and c) I need twice as much yarn to cover myself as a skinny girl, it would be unaffordable. But the price is reasonable for a high-end yarn - and it's very high-yardage for its weight - and the whole sweater came out to about $110 once I'd factored in a couple extra balls for swatching, bust darts, and insurance. (Note the caveat "for a high-end yarn" appended to "reasonable".)

I still figured I could do better than that - but that's where I ran into trouble. The yardage is so good for its weight - looking at a close-up of Cumba on Yarndex.com, it's obviously loosely spun, maybe woolen-spun - that I'm looking at buying half again as much yarn by weight to make up for the yardage. Because of this, most of the other yarns people on Ravelry have used for this sweater actually turn out more expensive than the suggested yarn. That's so weird.

The one exception is Berroco Ultra Alpaca, which people were gushing over in the Dizzy Sheep spin-off this weekend. (I apparently missed it very early in the process. Didn't know I wanted it at the time.) At MSRP, enough yarn for the sweater + boobs + insurance works out to about $88. A couple pros and cons:

1) The Berroco is possibly available at my LYS (Knit-A-Round carries some Berroco products). I'd rather buy in person than on the Internet.
2) The Berroco comes in more colors, but I like several of the colors of Cumba; this is probably a wash.
3) The Berroco yarn would weigh, as noted, half again as much; the sweater would weigh 900 grams as opposed to 600 grams.

So now I need to ask myself: is a sweater that weighs two-thirds as much worth about $20 plus shipping? Is it worthwhile to buy one ball of each to swatch with?

I've got a couple finished projects that still need photographing - the silk cowl (dang, did mine end up smaller than the model, but it'll still work) and the yarn that resulted from the Purple Dye Fail wool.

I've switched over to cross stitch for a bit - working on Little House Needlework's Curly-Q Ewe. I also took the Kitty Cottage Sampler to get framed. I should really pick up Tradewinds at some point, shouldn't I? Heh.

I've completely redone the "socks" section of my Ravelry queue - I'd assigned all my yarn to projects, but people keep putting out such awesome sock patterns that it almost seems silly to do that. On the other hand I do have my next sock project set up, both yarn and pattern - I saw I'd added a project inspired by red licorice vines to my Rav library, and I happen to have some licorice-red sock yarn on hand. Yeah.

And, last but not least - I think I've finally talked myself into making a sweater for myself. I just need to decide which one, and I'm interested in feedback to help me narrow the list down...

I'm tossing around:
Rib Waist Cardigan (the grey one in the top picture) (Ravelry link)
Amimono Kimono (Ravelry link)
Curvy Knits Flare Top (umm, I guess Classic Elite is big-girl friendly? :) ) (Ravelry link)
Susie Hoodie (click "More Images", it's the red cabled sweater in the upper left) (Ravelry link)
Bombshell (Ravelry link)
Decimal (Ravelry link)

I'm leaning towards the Flare Top or Bombshell because they're the lowest commitment in time and yarn - and I actually just bought something fairly similar to Bombshell, so that might be a minus. But there's room for any of these in my wardrobe. Thoughts? Input?

Monday as I was getting ready for Knit Night, I realized a few things.

1) Although the baggie of hankies was handy and already in my tote bag, I did not want to spin, and I was no longer under a deadline to do so.
2) I did not want to work on either my hat or Hubby's scarf, the two projects I set aside to go on a sock frenzy in April.
3) I am kind of socked out at the moment.
4) I was hot and sweaty and did not want to handle wool, or anything remotely like it.

What I was actually feeling the impulse to do was cross-stitch - but that would have been weird at Knit Night. (Although when I mentioned that, someone said "Ehh, it's all fiber.")

So, I wound up my Hunter Safety Orange silk laceweight, and cast on for Abby, a lovely cowl. I don't think I have the yardage to make mine as tall as the pictures at the link, but it will be a nice neckwarmer. Also, my yarn is made from the same fiber, dyed by the same dyer, as the yarn in the photos at the link, but it didn't come out nearly as well. Abby Franquemont is a way better spinner than I ever hope to be.)





Yes, that last picture is awfully flashalicious. Silk is, umm, shiny. And knitting it feels sooooooooo good. I'm going slowly, semi-intentionally - at least for the first few rows, it was hard for me to "read" the knitting. But it's on a 16" circ, so it's a good car project, and I've got a road trip coming up.

The full output for the Tour de Fleece - not too bad considering I basically sat the first week and a half out. Sum total is: 200 grams of Romney, singles, total about 420 yards (half of it is skeined on the photo, the other half is on the niddy-noddy), plus some quantity of silk hankies still on the spindle.

I keep deciding I hate the Romney yarn, and then changing my mind when I look at it from another angle. I'm considering striping it with some other yarn in my scarf - maybe something that goes through a greyscale on a fairly short repeat. I know how to dye such a thing myself (and also one that would go through a gradient from light to dark over the whole skein), but I also wonder if my color sense is bad enough that I should be restricted to semi-solids if I do my own dyeing in the future.

Speaking of silk...
( More photos inside... )
Folded up in the bag, the hankies looked a bit more "fire engine" than the picture shows (the picture has very accurate color), but I really like this. The one act of utter folly involved in the spinning was to do it on a spindle with a carved shaft. Bad idea. High potential for crazy-making. If I do silk hankies again I'll borrow Daughter's small spindle, which is largely equivalent but has a smooth shaft.

FWIW, if I had to sum up the trade-offs between silk hankies and top, it would be this: it's easier to handle the top, but it's easier for a beginner to get fairly precise, if not necessarily absolutely smooth, yarn with the hankies.

...that I sadly haven't photographed yet. Tonight, perhaps.

Last year, I picked up a bag of red silk hankies, about 25 grams; on Wednesday, I finally cracked into it. The things have a bit of a reputation, and I found parts of what I'd heard held up, and parts of it didn't.

1) The damn things will cling to anything - True! To prepare for spinning, I filed my nails, lotioned my hands, and used the nail file on a patch of rough skin from a scab that just fell off - yes, that translates to "I sanded my hand"! It didn't help. There were apparently still microscopic rough patches that stray fibers wanted to grab. They snagged on my hands. They clung to each other. They snagged on the carved part of my spindle shaft. They snagged on the plastic baggie. They snagged on my clothes. They snagged on, as far as I could tell, the air. For the love of Pete don't let the cat near the pile of undrafted hankies.

2) Drafting them will cut up your hands - True! I used the "Poke a hole, pull into a loop, break when it's thin enough" method. My index fingers and thumbs felt slightly abraded the next day, as though there were a bajillion microscopic lacerations on them. That's because there were - a single strand of silk is insanely thin and insanely strong and when you draft, you have to essentially pull the world's teeniest cable saw across your fingers. You also have to pull pretty hard; if you're used to drafting smooth wool top this will feel like a workout. (Someone on Ravelry reported good results with both snag prevention and abrasion resistance wearing thin latex gloves while she spun. I didn't have any to try this with.)

3) The yield is not very good - not so true! I think I'm getting 4-5 yards out of a hankie that comes off the stack mostly intact, and I think there's 40-50 hankies in my stack. (For some reason I'd figured there'd be 7 or 8. I have no idea what I was thinking.) This is similar yardage to what I got from silk top, although I might have been spinning that a little thicker. We'll have to see what I end up with when I'm all done. (Spinning combed top was much faster - it took me about 15 minutes to draft and spin each hankie, and probably only about 4 or 5 to make an equivalent amount of yarn from top. But then again I'm new at this.)

4) You can't draft it further once you've started to spin - not so true! The deal is, you just have to remember the staple length is something like a foot; hold your hands really far apart, and pull hard. Also, catch problems before they happen. Thinning out a thick spot that didn't have any twist in it yet was no harder than drafting the hankie in the first place, but I think that would have changed with even a teeny bit of twist.

5) You will get a noily, slubby yarn - True! The edges of the hankies are a bit lumpy, and as someone else pointed out, if the cocoons your hankies were made from were perfect, they would have been reeled instead. Plus, while you can draft it on the spindle, you really can't use the method I was taught for correcting a thick spot (untwist it, draft it, let the twist back in - in theory you could still do this, but you'd have to untwist a foot of yarn that you put a lot of twist into), which makes slubs. So the yarn will be kind of rustic - but OMG is it soft and lustrous.

6) Once you've got the hankies drafted, you can't screw up the spinning - pretty much true! I think even an absolute newbie would be hard-pressed to put too much twist in, and joins are easy as pie. Highly recommended for a beginner who wants to spin silk but is afraid of slippery fibers.

Halfway through the second hankie, I was about ready to give up because of all the snagging - I have a pusher spinning supply shop nearby, and she'll sell me all the spinning crack silk top I want. Unsurprisingly, the more I did it, the better I got at it, and the more I liked it. We'll have to see how it's going at the end of the process - I've barely made a dent in the hankie pile.

I got the Ron socks done (yay! In time for the recipient to wear them to the movie, even!) - and they had the same "kind of baggy at the ankles" vibe that my Dumbledore socks do. I think I might need to customize the sock recipe a little more than the patterns call for. Or else consider the possibility that I seriously mismeasured my row gauge.

This means I get to focus on spinning, guilt-free (except about the pile of dishes in the sink), for the next couple days.

( Yellow yarn is yellow. )
The yarn is coming out a little thinner than I'd intended but it's consistent and it's for a "gauge doesn't matter" project. Worst case I make my scarf a couple stitches wider.

I'm still trying to finish the Ron socks before we go to see Half-Blood Prince, so I haven't been spinning much.

But, as I pointed out to someone the other day - Ravelry members will find some serious "yarn porn" on the Tour de Fleece Group's daily voting thread. Makes me feel inadequate when I can stop drooling long enough. And I'm not sure my votes are meaningful because I "love" about 90% of the yarns...

Day 1


I spun about 10 minutes on Saturday just to get "in the game". I did not finish last in the prize voting with this picture!

Day 5


I managed to spin about 45 minutes today, at least partially while actually watching the Tour de France! I finished off the first blue section and started the pink, so there's a tad over half an ounce on there. Not even going to guess at yardage. The grist is reasonably consistent - I'm going for worsted weight, with a sample of Noro Kureyon for reference.

I started with this....



(8 ounces of Romney top - it started as one long strip, and I halved it, and halved the halves, and halved the half-halves...)

Combining them with some off-brand egg dye kits, I ended up with...
( ooh, pretty colors... )



All kinds of pretty dyed fiber.

But wait, you might ask - doesn't the standard egg dye kit include a purple tablet? Yes, yes it does....and that was the one that failed spectacularly but not unexpectedly, because purple eggs tend to fail in the same way.

( The saga of Purple Fail )

Socks, done, and in progress:



( +2 )

I set up the remainder of the dye-"pots" last night (five baking dishes with fleece and off-brand egg dye, four of which worked nicely, one of which may have failed spectacularly but not unexpectedly and if you think about it you can guess which color it was from that...), and tried the same thing as the night before - in the oven at 200 for a couple hours, then shut it off and let it cool slowly overnight.

Something in the process seems to have said "umm, no". When I turned it off, I noticed that the liquid wasn't even at a simmer, so I stuck a thermometer in one of them - it was only up to 150, which struck me as a bad sign - but I didn't think the green had gotten much hotter than that, so I let it go. There was still free dye in all the dishes this morning, especially in the blue (which had twice as much fleece, and so two dye tablets) - so I've asked Hubby, unexpectedly home from work, to turn the oven back on for a couple more hours. Hopefully it'll take up...or if it doesn't, maybe it's done. If there's leftover dye, I've got more undyed wool around...