It's Done, It's Given!

And it fits!

Yes, at last, my trim- athletic- dad's Cabled Jacket is done and in the hands of its rightful owner. And gratifyingly appreciative hands they are, too.

Why did I never think, all these years, to make my dad a sweater? (Other than because of the obvious hole in my head, that is?) I guess it just never crossed my mind that he would like to have a handknit sweater. Thank goodness he eventually dropped a mild hint or two, and the light dawned.

I'm so glad that it came out all right and that Dad is pleased with his custom- made sweater. It really is all his own. I used the Cable Jacket pattern in Rowan's Knitting for Him book as a jumping off point, but changed a *lot.* The original pattern is a blazer with notched lapels, set-in sleeves, and an asymmetric cable design in wildly different scales on the left and right sides. I did use the same aran-weight Rowan Scottish Tweed yarn and basic rope-and-moss-filled-diamond cable motif. But my version is a button-up jacket with dropped shoulders, fold-over collar, and a tidily symmetric cable design. So it's one of a kind, just for my dad. Being able to do that really is one of the beauties of our craft, isn't it?

I used US size 9 (5.5 mm) needles, going up a notch as usual to get gauge. I think I used about 10 skeins of the Scottish Tweed, as I have a little more than 2 skeins left over. The yarn in the aran weight has recently been discontinued, I believe. It's a shame, because it makes a nice rustic, masculine sweater without being too heavy (not that I expect to see my dad wearing it in the hot July weather around here, still).

I also used the commod- ious inset pockets from the original pattern. I like those a lot, though I agonized over the placement, given all the changes I was making in style, length, and sizing.

In fact, when I make major changes from a pattern, I pretty much agonize over every decision. I don't know why the stakes seem so much higher then. After all, even if I follow a designer's pattern faithfully, it could easily go wrong in some way and not fit or not look right. Ah, but then it wouldn't be entirely my own fault, would it?

But when I muck up a pattern or dream one up on my own and it goes right, there's nothing to beat it. And this one? It's done! It worked! It fits!

And don't I feel clever. And relieved. :)

Tour de Fleece Time

It's July, and that can only mean one thing. It's one of the highlights of my TV-viewing year. The spectacular Tour de France bicycle race. Three solid weeks on the edge of my seat, especially now that Lance Armstrong is back in the saddle -- hooray!

Last year, I discovered the spinners' companion event, the Tour de Fleece, and that just added to the fun. So Rastro and I are off again and running. Now that we have another year of experience under our belts, the spinning doesn't take as much concentration, so I think it's going to be an easier three weeks this year. And no tendinitis this time, I hope! Once again, my spinning challenge goals are a little loose and slapdash, but who cares, as long as I'm spinning every day and enjoying it?

For the first few Tour de France stages (days of racing), I'm spinning this lovely stuff. It's merino and alpaca that I brought back from New Zealand. Can you tell how soft and lovely it is?

It's actually the first spinning fiber I bought, other than a little Brillo pad of coarse fiber for learning with my spindle. A little later on, there was the practice Coopworth wool (that eventually became the Cannonball sweater) and a sweater's quantity of Finn wool (still waiting for me to feel I'm ready) that I bought right along with my spinning wheel. And later still came the excitement of all the amazing fibers to be found at the festivals. But when I wandered into this shop, I was still just getting the hang of the spindle and only beginning to dream of having a wheel. It was very novel then, when I came across a bin of spinning fiber in a yarn shop, to think, "Wait a minute; this is not something only for other people. It's something I can buy, because I'm learning how to spin!"

Feeling ready to actually spin it was another matter. I didn't feel worthy of such nice fiber for a long time. Now that I'm confident that I can do a decent job with a soft, pretty fiber and not risk botching it, it's a real pleasure to dive in and play with it.

I've also started a sock. Because I've gotten over a recent spell of being kind of tired of sock-knitting. And because a sock on the needles is just generally a good thing to have. This is Socks That Rock lightweight, in the Scottish Highlands colorway. In the skein, it's really beautiful. But in the wound-up ball, it got a little circus-clown looking, I thought. I wasn't at all sure what to expect when the knitting started. It's working out to be a hearty, regular stripe, with no pooling. Not a subtle look, but pleasant, and entertaining to knit.

The pattern is Dublin Bay (available free on-line from Mossy Cottage Knits, here.) It's a nice pattern, mostly plain, but with a simple lace pattern down the sides to give me something to do every couple of rows. The lace doesn't really show up as openwork against the bold stripes, but it does create a visual break. So, full speed ahead.

Yes, I am also still working toward starting on the Chanel-ish jacket with my 3-ply handspun. I haven't abandoned it; I'm not that fickle! Besides, it's the Tour de Fleece yarn I spun last year, so it seems entirely appropriate to get it started now. I'm hard at work with sharp pencil and graph paper, mapping out the pattern stitchcount by rowcount, plotting increases and bind-offs, so that I can recalculate all those little counts for much bulkier yarn. This is not a particularly photogenic process, though. And somehow, it always seems to go so much faster when they do it on TV.

Good thing I have the Tour de Fleece spinning and the new sock, for when I need a break. :)

Flashy Feast

Sometimes my enthusiasms crowd each other out for a while. Something has set me off lately, and I've been having tremendous fun taking an interest in a bunch of silly, frivolous things -- more than I have in a long time. Hair! make-up! music! shopping! All things I've loved and devoted plenty of time to at other times, but that seem to have been pushed to the back for a while. (Wait, could the non-stop knitting and spinning have had anything to do with that? No.... :)

Anyway, let it be said that I am not an entirely serious person. And I love girlie things. I have been leafing through the mags, checking out clothes and looks, wearing mascara, and not forgetting to accessorize. People who see me in person probably wouldn't notice all that great a difference, but secretly it makes me extremely jolly. All this research and craftsmanship, though, do consume a certain amount of time, time when I could have been making diligent knitting progress. A wet manicure and a knitting project, for instance, do not mix well at all.

Maybe it's just a summer fling. But, for now, all too often, knitting must wait. Of course, all this is by way of explaining why things are creeping along at a snail's pace.

I can at least tell you about a decision made. I've decided the next project will be from the turquoise/purple/gray handspun. It seems to be calling to me now. After all, I've always pictured this yarn in a Chanel jacket, so there's a fashion connection. :) And it's suitably bright to accord with my current urge for self-decoration.

I've gone ahead and done some swatching. The handspun turns out to be a bulky yarn, best knit with US size 11 (8 mm) needles. It's interesting how a fairly organized looking yarn, with the three colors spiraling in a barber-pole effect, becomes a crazy every-which-way mix when knit. It's hard even to tell where the stitches begin and end.

Can you tell the swatch is three different stitch patterns? The bottom third is in moss stitch, the middle bit is in double moss stitch, and the top part is in a sort of improvised diagonal twill. In the picture, it all looks like a fine old mess, but in person, I think maybe the double moss stitch has the right balance of nubbiness and chaos.

For a Chanel jacket, luckily, texture is good. This yarn all by itself is a wild party of texture. (Note for later: with this yarn, a row counter might be a very, very good idea.)

What I'd really like to knit with it is Mary Heather Cogar's Chanel-ish Cardigan Jacket (there's a pretty one, slightly modified, on Koolsheep's Knit Blog, here). The pattern is in Greetings from Knit Cafe, by Suzan Mischer. Of course, it will have to be a loose adaptation of Mary Heather's pattern. Hers is in two colors of worsted weight yarn in a stitch pattern reminiscent of a houndstooth check. With this yarn, I somehow don't think it's going to need a colorwork stitch pattern, and I'll have to adapt the gauge to bulky. But I think there's a good chance it will work out.

I'm going to give it a good try, anyway. With enthusiasm. And the right accessories. :)

Who's Next?

The knitting has been slow lately. I do have a little something finished that I'm looking forward to showing you. But it will have to wait just a bit, as I don't have a photo to use yet. Until it was done, to break through procrastination on doing the scary finishing work, I had to ban myself from casting on any new projects.

Of course, somehow I did still manage to sneak in spinning and dyeing the Black Cherry sock yarn. After all, I have to get tuned up for the Tour de Fleece, don't I? (Don't answer that.) But no knitting.

So here I am with nothing at all on the needles. Well, virtually nothing, anyway. (There is one unfinished object that's been pushed deep into the back of my consciousness, but that one will keep.)

I'm in that delightful state of uncertainty and anticipation, daydreaming over the possibilities. I think this time it must be a sweater for me. I'm feeling greedy. :) And I'm longing for color.

Here are the leading contenders. All are in the worsted to chunky weight range, and I have a sweater's quantity of each.

On the left is some Debbie Bliss Soho yarn, in reds, pinks, and purples. I found it in a sale bin at Stitches East, marked down to half price. It's a loosely spun singles yarn, slightly thick and thin, nice to the touch. And the colors really reached out and grabbed me. I've done some desultory swatching with it, from time to time, and most of the fancy stuff is swallowed up and overcome by the colors and texture of the yarn. It is no respecter of stitchwork. It will probably need to be treated fairly simply, in a design that won't compete with the yarn's surface interest. I don't know what that is yet. The Debbie Bliss patterns I've seen for this yarn tend to be turtlenecks, some of them accented with cables that seem honestly, even in the professional photos, to disappear right into the maelstrom of the yarn. So something fairly plain, perhaps with an interesting shape.

In the middle is the candy-striped yarn in turquoise, lavender-purple, and charcoal gray. This is my handspun 3-ply yarn, the progeny of last summer's Tour de Fleece spinning marathon. It's reasonably nice-looking, which is amazing, because I spun it from some pretty ratty fiber. (A poorly chosen impulse buy of a "bargain" at last spring's Maryland Sheep and Wool festival. Don't get me started. :) It's a rather hard and nubby-feeling yarn, but it's undeniably colorful. I actually think, though, that those attributes would work really well in a Chanel-style jacket. In something like a moss stitch, I think it might create much the same effect as the nubby, highly textural, raucously colored tweeds often used in Chanel jackets. And the yarn's hard firmness might be an asset, as a jacket like that needs some body. I thought it might look good with a solid charcoal edging. I'd be delighted to triumph over a bad purchase by producing a good sweater.

Last up, the yarn on the right is Noro Silk Garden, a lambswool, silk, and mohair mix, with a slightly crunchy feel. This too could be a vindication of sorts, over a past experience with Noro. On that occasion, I was surprised by some jarringly contrasting colors showing up unexpectedly in the signature long repeats of the yarn. (This was not a happy discovery. Again, don't get me started. :) This time, though, I'm wise to Noro, and the skeins have been thoroughly probed and investigated. These colors truly are the ones I wanted. Because of the fascinating long color changes, this too will probably do best in a simple design. I'm picturing it as a longish but sleek cardigan, perhaps with inset pockets.

So, I wonder... who's next?

Black Cherry

When last heard from, my first handspun sock yarn looked like this. It was a pretty color, but just a bit sober and practical. It looked nice with jeans. I think our Puritan forefathers would have approved.

I, on the other hand, wasn't so sure. I was pleased with how well the spinning had come out, and I liked the fiber, a blend of Blue-Faced Leicester and mohair. Somehow, though, I couldn't get excited about knitting it into a pair of socks. Maybe a pair of denim-colored socks just seemed too much like something I'd go to the store to buy because I needed them. Ho-hum. Oh, excuse me, I nearly dropped off to sleep there for a second. :)

I thought a first pair of handspun socks ought to be more fun than that. I started toying with the idea of overdyeing the yarn. Overdyeing can produce nice results, depending on how the old and new colors work out together. Of course, there's a risk of coming up with something muddy-looking instead. But I happened to have several packets of Kool-Aid drink mix on hand in Black Cherry, a flavor I hadn't tried dyeing anything with before. (Let's be honest; I certainly didn't buy it with any real intention of drinking pitcher after pitcher of Black Cherry Kool-Aid this summer.) I was feeling adventurous, and I decided to give it a go. I resolved to love the result no matter what it looked like.

I consulted my latest favorite book on the subject, Teach Yourself Visually: Hand-Dyeing, by Barbara Parry, the colorist behind Foxfire Fiber. (Wonderful book.) I made a simmering potion with four packets of Kool-Aid and the nice blue yarn and hoped for the best.

And it worked like a charm. It came out like this, not muddy at all, but a deep purplish cranberry color.

In fact, everything went much better than in my earlier experiment a while back dyeing unspun fiber with Kool-Aid. That first time, the loose locks of wool didn't want to take up the dye and were still shedding color in the rinse-water afterward. I concluded eventually that the mostly-unprocessed wool still had a lot of lanolin in it that interfered with the bonding of the dye. This time, by contrast, the wool seemed to vacuum up intense color as soon as the water hit the right temperature. It made me feel like a pro.

The new color has agreeable variations that you can sort of see here. In the original blue color, I had noticed that it looked like only the wool had been dyed, while the blended-in mohair fibers had been left a natural off-white. I think that's what gives the new color its depth. It's a truer dark cherry red where the Kool-Aid dyed the natural-colored fiber and a purply cranberry where it struck the blue.

I find it ravishing. All of a sudden, the thought of knitting this yarn into socks seems a lot more interesting to me.

I'm just not so sure how well it's going to go with jeans. :)

Almost Like the Real Thing

All that outdoor spinning (but no sunburn, please) has done its magic. I've managed to produce something very like a skein of three-ply sock yarn. It's far from perfect, but for the first time spinning sock yarn, I have to admit it's not bad.

It looks like I will actually be able to make a pair of socks from it. I counted 338 yards, though I haven't finished the yarn yet by washing it. When it goes in the hot water bath, that yardage may well shrink down to 300 or so.

But if I knit the legs on the shorter side, it should be enough. And I do still have a little fiber left over. I do my best to divide the spinning evenly among the bobbins. But somehow when I ply, one always runs out first, leaving some extra singles left on the other bobbins. So in a pinch, I could get a few yards more out of what's left.

I'm also happy with the weight of the yarn. Once I got used to spinning those skinny little singles, and they weren't falling apart, I managed to spin the yarn a little finer than my initial samples. So it may even work for inside-the-shoes socks rather than scuff-cozily-around-the-house socks. I can't say what the wraps-per-inch are, since I haven't measured them. (When I try to, I'm never confident about whether I'm squeezing the yarn together too tightly or letting it spread out too much. So I confess, that tends to sap my enthusiasm for collecting that particular bit of data. Wondering if the number I'm getting is complete nonsense just seems to have that effect on me. For some reason.) But just by holding my newborn yarn up to some commercial skeins of sock yarn, I can tell it's in the right sock-weight ballpark. When I get around to knitting it, the gauge will tell me for sure.

Here you can see that it's not actually as highly twisted as one might like for a strong, durable sock yarn. With this spinning project, I definitely learned more about assessing how the twist is going to come out. I was testing it by letting a little strand double back on itself once in a while during the spinning, but it turns out I have to be a little more careful about how I hold it to get an accurate reading.

It should be okay anyway, though. This fiber (it's called Sockables II, from Little Barn) won't be like 100% merino wool that has to be very tightly spun for socks to stand up to moderate wear. It's is a blend containing 25% mohair (the yarn has a touch of fuzziness if you look closely) and 75% Blue-Faced Leicester wool. Mohair is supposed to provide a lot of strength in a sock yarn. It should go a long way toward compensating for imperfect twist.

So I'm proud to have done reasonably well in my first attempt at spinning sock yarn, but there's one thing that still does bother me a little. It's the color. It's not that it's a bad color. It's a nice denim-y blue, and my friends have been telling me how well it will go with jeans. To me, though, it just seems a little blah. It seems like after all this, these socks ought to look a little more special than "goes with jeans." Especially my first-ever handspun pair.

Never mind. I've got some ideas. :)

A Golden Day

Yesterday was one of those gorgeous days that come along in the spring when the flowers are in bloom, the grass and trees are a fresh moist green, the sky is clear and blue, and it isn't yet hot. It was just about perfect.

Work still loomed, but deadlines and problems seemed less consequential, and I got home while it was still bright. Rastro and I were lured outdoors to bask in the soft air and slanting sunlight.

This was a first. Portable or not, Rastro hasn't wandered much and had never been outside before. We may have to make a habit of this. Spinning in the outdoors was lovely, in the strong light and the gentle breeze. The birds chirped, and the world went entertainingly about its business. And on the practical side, I didn't have to worry about catching the little flecks of debris that fall from the fiber as it's drawn out to be twisted. I just let 'em fall overboard. If I had a dog again to lie alongside me, it would be just about perfect.

There was only one cloud to mar my day. What could it be?

American Idol.

Oh, I know I haven't mentioned it, and I usually just talk about the knitting and the spinning. But now and again I quite like a good swig of singing talent and merciless judging. We all have our quirks.

This season, I came late to American Idol and only watched for the last few rounds. But from the moment I woke up and started paying attention, one singer had me riveted. Adam Lambert. The assured, powerful voice that swelled and rose and never faltered. The fiery laser-blue gaze from eyes fringed in black. The one-man glam-rock revival. He survived all the way into the finals as one fell after another. The foreordained winner. Or so I thought.

And the winner is... yes, yes, YES? Kris Allen. ... Kris Allen? Nooooo!

OK, I realize that Kris is talented and likable and his singing style is very popular. Lots of people love him. It's a nice thing that he won.

But, as for me, it's just one of those things. I'll be waiting for Adam's album.

It will be just about perfect.

Take Me To The Fair

Yesterday, world's-most-patient-husband and I took a jaunt to a historical site called the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, in McLean, Virginia. The park shows life on a tenant farm in 1771. Among Virginia's many historical sites, this one provides a different view of colonial times than Williamsburg's townspeople or Mount Vernon's rather well known wealthy landowner.

This was the weekend of a Colonial Market Fair, when people would have gathered from across the countryside to buy and sell their wares, take a break from their labors, and socialize a bit. What an unexpected pleasure it turned out to be. I might just have to add it to my annual calendar, in the long dry spell between Maryland Sheep and Wool and the Fall Fiber Festival.

There was a pub.

There were market stalls with all kinds of handmade items, like furniture, and jewelry, and toys, and clothing, and soaps, and mobcaps and sewing trinkets. There were well- costumed and engaging interpreters everywhere, mingling with the modern-day visitors.





There was lunch rotating on the spit. And there were no outside vendors, with sodas and fast food. The lunch offered to visitors really was what was being cooked here, offered along-side sausages, and butter-cake, and all manner of authentic fare being prepared on the spot.


There were turkeys roaming around, calmly picking their way hither and yon at a stately pace, minded by a patient turkey-herder.










And, what do you know, there were spinners. And very chatty spinners they were, too. From them I learned that wool from Hog Island sheep is a favorite of re- enactors, since, rare though it is now, it's an authentic breed raised commonly at the time. That's what they were spinning here, and the roving had a nice bouncy feel.

(World's-most-patient-husband's comment on seeing the spinners? "Now I know why we had to come." But I didn't know they would be there, honestly! It may have crossed my mind that it might be a possibility, its having been a necessity of colonial times and all. But it wasn't a plot! Not really. :)

I found a couple of irresistible things for myself at the stall with the sewing supplies: a sheep molded of beeswax from right on the farm, and a needlecase simply wrought from warmly rich-looking wood. And from the full-time giftshop out front, a jar of local honey.

I'm not sure what to do with a beeswax sheep, but I loved him, so home he came. He looks alarmingly like something edible, though, so I think I'd better keep him out of the kitchen and out of danger.

I thought I'd use the needlecase to hold the tapestry needles I use for knitting projects, to seam up and sew in ends. It would be a nice change from the plastic tube that the Chibi needles came in. Unfortunately, I hadn't reckoned well; the needles were a half-inch too long to fit. My cross-stitch and needlepoint needles, on the other hand, fit quite nicely. So I'll still use and cherish my little holder.

Just not as often.