More Ketchup, Please

Er, Catch-up, that is!

One of the things I've been meaning to do is show you some of the goodies I got way back at the Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival last October.

First up is this delicious ice-cream sundae. No, wait, that's not it at all, though I think it may be just as delicious.

It's actually three of my festival finds. The bowl is a ceramic yarn bowl, by Elisa Dasher of Honeysuckle Pottery in Keymar, Maryland. I've been curious about these yarn bowls for a while, with the notch to feed the yarn through while the ball rests in the bowl. After trying it out, I can attest the the fact that they do work. The ball of yarn stays clean and in one place, instead of rolling off the couch and all over the floor. And the bowl is a beautiful piece of handmade stoneware, enjoyable in itself. Elisa won't be at the Shenandoah Festival next year, but it appears she's planning to be at the marvelous Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in the spring.

That fluffy confection in the bowl is not ice cream but a one-ounce ball of pygora spinning fiber. It came from one of the farms participating in a Loudoun Valley Pygora, it seems, is a type of goat, a pygmy version of the angora goats who give us mohair. I believe it's a fairly rare breed, at least so far. My reading tells me that these little guys produce different types of fiber. Depending on the individual, it can be mohair-like, cashmere-like, or a combination of the two. And just look at this stuff! I'm looking forward to spinning a sample to see what it's like.

The "spoon" is actually a hand-made miniature nostepinne, carved of mulberry wood, from Terry Selser in DeRidder, Louisiana, via the Lagniappe Fiber booth. It's just a wee little thing for winding small balls of fine yarn. While this isn't a challenge that I've had very often, how could I resist it? The carving at the top kind of reminds me of an old-fashioned clothespin.

Also at the Lagniappe Fiber booth, my fiber-sampling curiosity led me to buy some Cheviot fleece from Nightsong Farms, in Dry Creek, Louisiana. This is a strong, springy type of wool. I'm not sure what I will do with it, other than get acquainted, but it may be a good wool to blend with other types to give them that springy, lofty quality. And I did love these rich colors. The one on the left is natural, and the one on the right is dyed.

One thing I do know exactly what to do with is this sweater quantity of roving from the lovely and accommodating Dalis Davidson at Dancing Leaf Farm in Barnesville, Maryland. This is the Briar Patch colorway, which I'd been looking for and hoping to find at her booth for the last couple of festival seasons. I'd once seen a sample of it spun up at a shop and loved the colors. I finally got smart and contacted her ahead of time, whereupon she dyed a batch just for me and brought it along to the Shenandoah Festival.

And last, but not least, while our friend Puff the Magic Rabbit was not at Shenandoah, some of her fiber most certainly was. Look at this gorgeous stuff. It's a merino/kid mohair blend called Electra Blue. (I wonder if Electra is one of the goats?) I came home with six ounces. This will have to be spun and knitted into something delicate and beautiful, worthy of such fiber.

And people wonder why I love these festivals. :)

A Real MacGyver of Fiber

I have to say, I was very entertained by the idea of myself as some knitting MacGyver, on the strength of my high-tech nail-file and wax-paper solution to a broken bamboo needle.

For anyone who somehow missed it, MacGyver was an American TV series in the late 1980s. I only remember seeing it a couple of times myself, but even so I quickly grasped the essential premise. Here was a guy who, when he found himself in a tight spot, through resourcefulness and wits, would build just the clever contraption needed to get out of a sticky situation and save the day. Out of something like toothpaste and pocket lint. I may be exaggerating, but according to this list of MacGyverisms, not by much!

All right, I may have some mild MacGyver-like tendencies. I may do some improvising once in a while to save the day when the chips are down.

Or maybe just to save the chips when the day is done. Here's an example of my amazing resourcefulness. I was finishing up a meal at a sandwich place and realized I wasn't hungry enough to eat my whole bag of delicious kettle chips. But how could I take them home when the bag was already open? I had no bag clip or rubber band! I'd have chips strewn all over the car or the inside of my handbag. The soundtrack started to swell and I looked around in desperation, starting to sweat. Would the bad guys really win?

Then, with no suitable tools at hand, inspiration struck! My brilliant solution?

I tied up the bag with the empty wrapper from my drink straw. My afternoon snack was saved. My car and handbag were safe. MacGyver would be so proud.



Still not convinced? OK, then, how about this?

Improvised ruler on the back of my knitting pattern when stuck on an airplane flight without a measuring tape?




Or this?

Eyeing the bamboo kitchen skewers covetously because they sure look like you could knit a big pile of socks on them if you sharpened the other end?


OK, I admit it. These are MacGyver-like tendencies only in a small way. A very small way. As a MacGyver, I've got a long way to go. I'm not really cut out for it. I actually like to have a nice array of proper knitting tools.

But if you want to see a real MacGyver of fiber, have a look at Rosemary Knits. Check out the spinning wheel made of a bicycle wheel, pieces of soda-bottle-plastic, and scraps of 2x4 lumber. Watch as the woman spins cotton from a cotton ball. Nothing is as humbling as the real thing.

I bow before her.

Accentuate the Positive

Eliminate the negative. After a wretched week with that stomach bug, I'm already back to feeling positively chirpy!

So let me tell you what I've been doing with the pennywise roving. This is the generic bargain roving that I bought on a whim, without looking too closely, only to find when I got it home that it's filled with lumps. But beauty is only skin-deep, as they say. I went looking for its inner beauty.

I bought six colors, with blending in mind. Three of them I put aside, thinking they looked particularly nice together. That left me, hoping for the best, with these three. I have a half-pound of each, about the right amount, in all, for a sweater. The colors looked, if not exciting, at least possibly compatible. And, to be honest, I really didn't feel like I had a lot to lose.

So off I went with it to the Frumious Bandersnatch, my drum carder, to see what we could make of it. I took a hunk of each color and pulled the compressed sausages apart, opening them up into filmy layers. They sighed with relief to get some air. Having a heathery effect in mind, I stacked the layers on the intake tray.

After it was all cranked through onto the drum, the wool looked like this. It was better than I expected. Rather a nice streaky effect, I thought. And, though muted in color, not a bit dull.

This, incidentally, is what the Frumious Bandersnatch lives for! The main reason I wanted a drum carder in the first place was to be able to play with blending colors and fibers. The yearning for raw fleece came later, once the idea of a drum carder had sunk in for a while and made itself right at home.

Anyway, rather than running the wool through again to mix the colors more thoroughly, I decided to stop right there. I peeled the batt off the drum, rolled it up, and stretched it out into a pleasantly streaky ball of roving. Then I made another, and another. I rather grew to like it.

Oh, I haven't lost sight of the fact that it's full of mess. You can see that just by looking. It's just that I've gotten over the initial shock. I can look past the homely exterior and see the character within. I can contemplate long sessions of lumpy-oatmeal spinning with equanimity and envision a comfortable, nubby sweater as the eventual result.

Driving home one evening a week or two back, I noticed a really dramatic-looking sky. It was freshening for a storm. Deep, thunderous blues were slashed across with clouds in frowning, dirty beige, and ethereal silver-gray. It was utterly beautiful. And in fact, it was almost exactly the colors now streaking through the blended pennywise roving. So I now have a name for the roving, the yarn, and whatever sweater is made from it: Stormwatch.

See? Inner beauty.

Funny You Should Ask...

Did I get a chance, at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, to fill that great big shoulder bag? Why yes, Beate, as a matter of fact, indeed I did. :) Thank you for asking!

In anticipation, since the New Year, I've been tamping down my acquisitive urges, keeping yarn and fiber buying to a minimum, looking forward to shopping joyously at the Shangri-La that is Maryland Sheep and Wool. I decided to concentrate on spinning supplies, though the offerings and selection of finished yarn are inarguably superb. For now, I am infatuated with handspinning, and spinning fiber and tools are much harder to come by than beautiful yarn at the local yarn stores within easy reach.

At the same time, I didn't want to go overboard buying at the festival. I've already built a respectable stockpile of fiber, and I'd rather not inflate my backlog to hopeless proportions. My goal was to find fiber for one sweater, a wraps-per-inch tool, perhaps another spindle, and maybe a few other odds and ends. A secondary theme was to continue sampling types of wool that I haven't tried yet.

So there was a sweater's- worth of this Rambouillet wool, from Mangham Manor in Charlottes- ville, Virginia, the owner of the colorful stall pictured in Sunday's post. Their rack looked even more bounteous before I relieved them of the batts you see here. Rambouillet sheep are a French strain of Merino, so this wool should make a very soft sweater. These lovely colors are destined for blending using the Frumious Bandersnatch (my drum carder), to make a subtle heathered yarn.

There was also this hand-dyed roving of wool and silk from Cloverleaf Farms in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Their address there is on Huff N Puff Lane -- isn't that wonderful? The roving is in a colorway called Oz, quite a bit greener and more brilliant than it looks in the picture. (One of these days, I really must learn more about how to adjust my camera to balance the colors.) I've never tried spinning anything with silk in it yet, so this should be fun. It ought to have a bit of drape from the silk, so I'm thinking it may need to be spun at a fingering weight to make a scarf or shawl.

I found the wraps-per- inch tool I was looking for at Woodchuck Products, a crowded booth where I had to stand in line for an hour! I've seen a couple of very utilitarian models that are readily available, but I was hoping for a pretty one. This one, made of cocobolo wood, fits the bill nicely.

For any non-spinners out there, this tool is used to measure the thickness of the yarn you've spun. You wrap the yarn around and around in one of the notched areas near the top and the number of wraps that will fit in the measured notch helps tell you the weight, whether it be sport-weight or bulky or anything in between.

In keeping with my theme of trying new fibers, I bought this little taste of Icelandic wool, from the Three Farms Icelandics booth. Because of the severe climate where they live, Icelandic sheep have a thick double coat, with long outer hairs and a soft undercoat. In processing an Icelandic fleece, spinners may choose to separate the two types of wool or mix them together. This particular package comes from Aboundingful Farm in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, and contains roving that mixes both coats, like the famous Lopi yarn.

I've been toying lately with the thought of another spindle. I taught myself to spin initially on a handspindle, but soon developed a ferocious desire for a spinning wheel. Once I made the acquaintance of Rastro, my spinning wheel, I had little patience for my spindle.

However, as I've become more skillful with the wheel, I understand drafting and twist so much better that I think I could enjoy the spindle more as well. I've also learned about having spindles of different weights for different purposes. And you sure can't beat the portability. This beauty is a lightweight 1.5 ounce spindle made of zebrawood, from Millpoint Emporium, in Amsterdam, New York.

What might I want to try spinning with my delicate new handspindle? Well perhaps this lovely little one-ounce sample of pure superfine cashmere from Hillcreek Fiber Studio in Columbia, Missouri. It seems too fragile to spin on the wheel. In fact, I'm not exactly sure what I will do with it. I really just wanted to see what it's like. I may spin a little on its own and save the rest to blend with a bit of alpaca. Or I may just keep it around to fondle. This downy fluff is incredibly soft.

There were a couple of other items, but I think I'll leave it at that for now. As I write this, at a time when I would best be in bed, outside the window a late-awake bird is singing his heart out. He's perhaps a mockingbird, as he's working his way through a whole repertoire of musical numbers. Though it's been dark for hours, he's chirping away cheerily, for all the world as if he were in a meadow on a bright sunny day. Odd, but nice.

It'll Do In A Nostepinch

Recently, I'd been trying what I call lap-skeining: knitting directly from a skein lying loose across my lap, instead of winding the yarn into a ball first. It was an interesting experiment but, ultimately, I decided, not my cup of tea.

I tried it when I was facing a 400-meter skein of fingering-weight silk and anxious to get started on my project, instead of sitting down for a marathon ball-winding session. Here, it seemed, was a way out! What did I need a wound ball for, when I had knees and gravity? So, laughing my evil henchman laugh all the while, I gave it a try. What I found, though -- once the initial exultant sense of getting away with something had ebbed away -- was that it turned out to be more extra fuss than warranted for the amount of time saved. This probably shouldn't have surprised me; otherwise, I suppose there would be lawless lap-skeining breaking out all over the land.

So it seems there's a reason why the wound ball was invented. Pulling a strand of yarn from the skein each time I needed to loosen another length was quite a delicate operation. It meant drawing the yarn centrifugally from the carefully laid-out skein, lifting the working strand off its fellows, their tendency to cling and pull up right along with it not always overcome by their own weight, and keeping the far loose end of the yarn from getting involved and causing a tangle. Nor was the knitting itself as relaxing and serene as it should be. In the back of my mind, there was a constant low-level buzz of worry that an ill-advised shift or motion could imperil the whole scheme. On the bright side, as Mary pointed out, when I really needed to relocate it, I could just hang the whole business rakishly around my neck. But on the whole, it was uncomfortably immobilizing. I couldn't do something as simple as re-crossing my legs without thinking about it. And that must be something I do a whole lot more than I ever realized, because not being able to do it sure was driving me crazy!

So it's back to the ball for me. Join the lap liberation front! Wound balls forever!

As knitters know, you can make a ball of yarn that pulls from the center by first making a little butterfly of yarn, then, making sure the loose yarn end stays out where you can see it, grasping the butterfly with your finger and thumb, and winding the yarn around and around over them. You have to keep the thumb in there for a good long time as you wind the yarn, to keep a hollow core in the ball so the end won't get sealed in too tightly to pull freely. You keep turning the ball on your thumb this way and that so the yarn will wind on evenly.

But as I learned when I started to read about spinning, there's a tool made just for the purpose, called a nostepinne. (That should actually be the special Scandinavian "o" with the little slash through it, but since I don't know how to make one, please just pretend it's there. :)

This pleasantly tactile nostepinne, made in Poland by the Kromski spinning wheel people, was one of my fun acquisitions last October at the Fall Fiber Festival in Montpelier, Virginia. This handy little tool helps liberate my thumb as well as my lap. In fact, a surrogate thumb is in essence what it really is. You hold it by the comfortable handle, and wind the ball onto the post, leaving your thumb free to answer the telephone, make a cup of tea, and generally come and go as it pleases. Just one of life's little luxuries.

But, of course, if you don't happen to have one handy, why let that be an obstacle? Even a pencil will do in a nostepinch! :)

Too Tightly Wound? Part 1: Knitting

It strikes me to wonder lately if I'm a little too tightly wound and need to loosen up.

To the best of my memory, it seems like I've generally knit at a fairly average gauge. But some recent observations have shaken me to my boots. Could it really be that I've been a tight knitter all these years and didn't know? No, that's just not possible. Consider the following exhibits:

Exhibit 1.
I had to go up a needle size, from US 0 to US 1, to get gauge on the Gentleman's Fancy socks, now underway. That's funny; I don't think this is usually the case (but maybe I haven't been checking carefully?)

Even so, I have a sneaky feeling that maybe I ought to check it again, because the first sock of the pair seems suspiciously narrow. It's a stretchy stitch pattern. But still.

I'm a little concerned about whether it's going to fit a man-sized foot. It's a bit large on my average-sized woman's foot, but I'm not sure if it's large enough, especially up near the top of the cuff, for a man's well-turned muscular calf. Maybe it's just that Nancy Bush, whose pattern it is, is an exceptionally loose knitter. Sure, that's it.

Exhibit 2.
I like my needles pointy. I've seen it said somewhere that those who dislike blunt-pointed needles are probably tight knitters. I remember trying my first pair of Addi Turbo circular needles, in a US size 7. Addi Turbos are finely honed instruments, veritable weapons in the knitter's arsenal, gleaming and dangerous. I liked their sleekness, appreciated the nickel-plated slipperiness that makes for fast, smooth knitting.

The points did seem a little blunt, but not so much as to be a problem. For another project, I went ahead and ordered a pair in US size 3, figuring the points would be scaled down along with the needle diameter. Not so. To my dismay, when they arrived, the points on the size 3s seemed no smaller than those on the size 7s. Not one whit. (OK, that might be an exaggeration. I think they were actually a little smaller. Maybe one or two whits.) That, I did not care for at all. Slipping those great big dull points under a thin little strand of sport-weight yarn was not my idea of fun. I soon abandoned the Addis and went back to an old standby set of needles. But that was surely just a fluke.

Exhibit 3
Lately, after a whole row of purling, the stitches have not been sliding so easily on the needle. But I have monkeyed around a lot over the past year with my purling technique. Having been unthrilled by the characteristically loose leftmost stitch I was getting in ribs and cables, I was looking for a way to eliminate it. Oh, I know there are a couple of tricks people use for this (for instance, here), but I was determined to solve it my way. I may have tightened up my purling a bit too much in the process. A minor adjustment out of whack, that's all.

Exhibit 4
I saw a side-by-side test. I sat next to a friend in one of the Market Session classes at Stitches East. We all knitted, as part of the lesson, the same pattern, with the same yarn. My knitted sample was just that little bit smaller than hers. With the same size and brand of needles. Hmmm.

My stitches looked small and even (for the most part). Hers were more comfortably relaxed. Well, then probably she was knitting a little too loosely for the most consistent results. Obviously. That would be it. Of course.

Exhibit 5
My great-grandmother, who gave me my first knitting lessons, was known in our family as a famously tight knitter. All her work was beautifully done, but very tight. OK, but I was barely knitting at all then! I was too young! It was years later when I really learned how to knit! I'd forgotten everything!

Coincidence? Who can say?

(I wonder if anyone has ever done a research dissertation on the effect of genetics on knitting style.)