DesigKnit

As of last Friday, my first year of teaching is done. Students are graduated, grades are in. There are (of course and always) a few loose ends to tie up for this semester, but the most active part is finished.

I am exhausted.

I’ve pushed harder than I really could afford to push all year, and then I’ve been pushed farther by a department hungry for service. I wish I could say that the year ended with triumph at graduation, but really it was more of a falling over the finish line, gasping for breath. By all accounts, it was a successful year, but making it so has taken a lot out of me. (The fact that I’ve been too tired to knit for most of a month says a lot about just how much.)

Next week (as in tomorrow), I have three students starting in my research lab to work over the summer, so this past week was my only chance to recover a bit before diving back in. I ended up having to go in to work for two days of the five (sigh), but other than that I stayed home and did not much of anything.

I spun up a couple more skeins for the embroidered shetland sweater. I knit a few more inches on the body of Branden’s Blue Eyes sweater. There is hope that I will one day reach the end of it. I finished up the weaving on some tea towels to make room on the loom for new projects. And, yesterday, we spent all day finishing the landscaping in the back yard. Just the plants left to add, now.

Mostly, though, I kind of wandered around aimlessly and worked on projects when they happened to fall into my hands. I don’t have the brain power yet to be creative and think of new projects, though by Friday I was starting to see some glimmer of hope that it might return someday. I can’t say that I’m back on my feet quite yet, and I’m really not ready to start all over again tomorrow, but at least the pause let me catch my breath a little bit before the rush begins again.

I knew this year would be hard, and I intentionally cleared everything else from my schedule to make room for it. There were no ambitious projects, no outside activities. Simple stockinette with no deadlines, and no projects that required a lot of thought. There’s a time to buckle down and focus, and this year needed to be it. Next year is the year where I need to find some kind of balance, or (more probably) some kind of off-balance oscillation that allows me to exist outside of work for at least some portion of the year. I hope that means more time for crafting, among other things.

I have to say that I am looking at the ever-increasing list of things added to my workload for next year and wondering how on earth this is really going to happen, but I’m sure that somehow there must be a way. Hopefully the summer will be a place to work on that a bit, since most of the work for the summer months is long-term projects and building foundations for next year. These, at least, are things that depend on me alone, where I can set the pace. The list of things to do is overwhelming any way that I look at it, but at least the schedule will be my own and there will be fewer interruptions and emergencies from external sources (I hope). In the meantime, I fished a lingering UFO out of the closet to become my purse knitting this week, and I might just be able to reclaim my commuting space for knitting over the next few months.

So, yeah. Not much crafting at the moment, but at least a hope that there will be space for more soon. Yay for summer!

There hasn’t been a lot of knitting progress lately. The Blue Eyes sweater is slowly growing:

And this week I managed to ply off a couple of skeins of the oatmeal yarn for the next Shetland sweater:

Mostly, though, I’ve been working late, attending end-of-year campus events, and getting distracted by the nice weather outside.

The daffodils opened last week, and we have quite a happy display by the front fence now:

Then, the tulips began to make an appearance. (We just added the grape hyacinths today. I love grape hyacinths.)

And this week, our front yard has turned purple with violets. I am so glad that there are some out there; I had been thinking how perfect this yard would be for violets, but they take several years to really establish themselves. Fortunately, it seems that someone before me thought to add a few to the front yard, and now there are millions of them, and it seems that there are more every day.

While all of that is going on in the front yard, we’ve been moving mountains in the back yard, too. When we moved into this house last August, one of the big downsides to the property was the fact that the back yard was, quite literally, a sheet of astroturf held down by some red tiles. It doesn’t get a lot of sun, and apparently the landlords decided that they were tired of dealing with a lack of grass. So, they covered everything in mulch and landscaping cloth, and added a touch of green with a 10′x30′ patch of plastic grass. To their credit, they did a really professional job of laying the landscaping cloth and the mulch, and the whole yard was nicely done. But, astroturf.

Usually, I’m ok with things that are simply functional, but in this case, it made my gardeners’ heart weep. So, this spring we asked them if they’d mind if we did some (pretty major) landscaping. They said to go ahead and do whatever we wanted to do. (Have I mentioned that I really like our new landlords?)

I’ve been plotting and planning all spring, and for the last month we’ve spent almost all of our weekend time digging holes, filling those same holes with a ton and a half (no kidding) of rock, renting a plate compactor, learning to lay tiles properly, and installing in a trellis fence along the back edge of the garden. It’s far from finished, but it’s getting there. We installed a small patio for sitting, and another to hold the new grill. Then, we put in landscape edging to make some strong lines, and last weekend we started laying out the raised bed. Today, we filled it with soil, and we bought our second big round of plants.

This will be a mix between an herb and a flower bed; a few flowers and a lot of foliage plants to add green and texture to the yard. There’s a hibiscus for the center, and a couple of colors of begonia for a ring around it, with nettles, white licorice, sage, thyme, rosemary, cilantro, parsley, and a few others I forget at the moment, for an easy-access herb ring around the outside. We’ll need to go somewhere else to find savory and tarragon, and the basil and oregano will come after the last frost date. It promises to be a flavorful garden, though!

Most of the plants will get put in the ground in a week or two, probably, since there are a few that are frost-tender and we’re not quite out of the woods here just yet. But it’s a start, and the yard is actually starting to feel like a garden now that the plants are all sitting there in the middle of the bed. That was a 4-foot high heap of dirt this morning, and it feels really good to see progress every weekend. We still have a couple more panels of trellis to install, lots of planting to do, and we still need to finalize the garden path and install some more landscape edging, but it’s coming. And, if you ignore the huge piles of tools still sitting around the yard, this view from the patio is starting to actually look like a yard you might want to spend time in.

We poached those hosta plants from my grandfathers’ yard a few weeks ago, since his were in serious need of dividing. There are bleeding heart bulbs in behind the hosta, and calladium bulbs in the front. No signs of life yet, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they’re coming soon. There are also some lily of the valley planted off on the side that I’m impatiently waiting to see poking up. I wasn’t too sure about the quality of those bulbs, so it’s hard to know if they’re really coming, but I hope so.

It’ll be a few more weeks before we have everything tidied up and settled, but it’s been fun to see it coming along, and it will be even more fun to have a nice place to spend time outside this summer. Who knows…I might even manage to knit out there once in a while…

I took a break from knitting Branden’s sweater last week to do a little spinning in preparation for the next project. I have some Shetland lambswool in a beautiful oatmeal color, that has been just dying for a project to go with it.

I bought the fiber at Greencastle about a year ago now, (was that only a year ago??), intending for it to be a sweater for Branden, but lately it’s been calling my name instead. Last week, I  spun up a couple of bobbins of singles, but then couldn’t decide whether I wanted a 2 or a 3-ply. So I did something unusual for me (in spinning, at least). I actually spun up a sample of yarn!

(I know…it’s just like a swatch, and I don’t know why I never do it, but for whatever reason I just don’t. Until now….)

The two yarns were plied from the same singles; a slightly high twist three-ply on the left, and a lower twist two-ply on the right. The weights came out almost identical for the two yarns, which I’m attributing to the higher twist in the three ply. They also came out beautifully elastic, which is something that I have been working at for a long time and have only gotten with my last couple of spinning samples. Fiber prep really is everything.

Tonight, I knit up a swatch. It’s a rather narrow swatch, because I didn’t make as much 3-ply as I thought I did. Still, it was enough to tell me what I needed to know.

Here, the 2-ply is on the left and the 3-ply is on the right, and the join is marked by that little yarn tail poking up toward the top of the frame. I knit both yarns on the same needle, and despite the apparent similarity of weight in the skein, the 3-ply is definitely heavier. It’s hard to see a definite difference in the stitches themselves, but there’s a huge difference in the feel of the fabric. The three ply is cushy and thick, like you’d want for socks or a heavy winter sweater. The 2-ply is lighter and has better drape, possibly because of gauge differences between the two weights of yarn. I’m thinking of a light, spring/summer cardigan this time, so 2-ply it is.

This will be the epitome of mindless knitting; a simple, classic cardigan in a very plain color at a very fine gauge. But at the end, I have something much more fun in mind.

In this case, the sweater is just a canvas for some embroidered accents. I’ve been wanting to mix embroidery with knitting for some time now, and had just never gotten around to it. Last Friday, I pulled out some linen and did some “sketching” in stitches. The central motif there is probably pretty close to the final idea, and then there are some smaller accent flowers and some practice leaves off on the side, just testing how different kinds of stitches work with the yarn that I’m using for embroidery thread.

It’s an awful lot of knitting to support a pretty tiny detail, but I think it’s going to work out well. And a lot of knitting is never a problem, right?

I am sure that everyone has by now heard every last detail of the things going on in Boston this week. It seems that it’s everywhere you look. For those that I haven’t already been in contact with, we are both fine, and our families are fine, and we know of no one in even our extended circles that was injured, despite a few close calls.

Of course, watching from the sidelines doesn’t make things any easier. There have been two days this week where I have sat at home, unable to go to work because the city is shut down due to violence. It’s been a cloud that hangs heavy over this busiest time of the semester, and a time that should be celebratory, as our seniors prepare to go off into the world.

In a way, having those enforced periods of stillness has made things more difficult. And yet, it has given me more time to process. There are so many thoughts and emotions to be sorted through in the aftermath of something like this. These are just a few of the things that I have been feeling, in no particular order:

anger – That someone would choose to do such a thing, and that there are people out there who intentionally foster the mindset that leads to this kind of action.

awe – That onlookers responded so generously, risking life and limb (quite literally) to save strangers in the aftermath. Humanity is a wonderful thing. That the health care and law enforcement systems were prepared to step up, move quickly and effectively, and make sure that the situation was stabilized and contained as quickly as possible. There are many heroes in this story.

gratitude – That we live in a time and a place where acts like this are rare enough to be big news. There are many people in the world who are not so lucky.

complicity – I believe that we make the world we live in, and the presence of such horror speaks to a gaping hole in our global community that I do not know how to fill, and to hurts that I don’t know how to heal. But even in our ignorance and pursuit of day-to-day happiness, we are complicit if we hide our eyes. We cannot just shake our heads and say we don’t understand how “they” can do such things. “We” are part of “they,” and in this case “they” were two of “us.” It is imperative that each of us find ways to take responsibility onto ourselves for healing this hurt.

hope – The fact that we are a part of it means that we have the power to change, if we can only figure out how. We have the power to move on, and the strength to make sure that we turn this horror into an impetus for positive change.

sadness – At the hurt that caused this to happen, and all of the hurt that it has created.

resilience – It is springtime. Trees are blooming, flowers are pushing their way up through the frozen, stony ground. Even when things look bleak, life continues. It will burst back joyful and vibrant, with time.

fortunate – Despite knowing several people who were at the marathon (standing in those very spots) earlier in the day, or who had planned to go and were kept home by their studies, and despite the fact that my sister lives 3 blocks from yesterday’s drama, no one I know is hurt. Considering the crowds and the importance of this event in this city, it is a small miracle that there were so few who were gravely injured or killed. In the scope of tragedies of this sort, the damage from this one was (relatively!) small. An hour or two earlier, and the number of injuries would have been much larger.

impatience – I wish I knew what I could do to help. The usual things (give blood, give money, etc.) seem trite and inconsequential in the face of this. I want to know how we can make deep and lasting change that ensures that we will build a community where this will not happen again.

dread  - I cringe at the thought of the days and weeks to come. The anger that now has an outlet, the sadness that will be seeking explanation. The slow, careful searching for a justice that will not change the facts or heal the pain of loss. I am revulsed by the bigotry that I have already seen, and wince at the vengeance that some people feel is the only answer. I also know that this is a normal part of recovery, but I dread the ugliness of it, on top of the rest.

pity – I know pity is sometimes considered a bad word, but I don’t mean this in a condescending sort of way. I feel pity for a life that has led two young men to this. Whatever its twists and turns, it cannot have been a happy one.  I also feel pity for their family, who have just watched two of their loved ones hunted down, suddenly lost both of them forever, and are also grappling with the shock of their guilt. Our need to explain and understand must be nothing compared to theirs.

I am sure that I will continue to cycle through all of these emotions (and more) as things continue to unfold. I don’t know where the answers lie, or even where to start trying to find them. But, as with all large tasks, you just have to take it one step at a time, one day at a time. And there is work to be done.

This week was cold, wet, and gray, surely the kind that lies at the origin of the “April showers bring May flowers” adage – an attempt to see hope in the midst of the blah. And so far, cold or no, the showers seem to be working (and even ahead of schedule). It seems like we have a new flower a day in the front yard right now. On Monday, these little blue stars made an appearance (I forget what they’re called, but I do remember planting them).

And then somewhere around Wednesday, the buds on the earliest tulips burst into color. They’ve only just opened this morning, so I’m hoping they’ll be around for a good while yet.

The daffodils are up and growing by leaps and bounds. Their buds are also starting to swell, so we should have a pretty party by the front fence in a couple of weeks.

The back yard is now home to quite a lot of mud, after a week of rain. We’ve gotten rid of (most of) the astroturf now, and have dug the holes that we’ll fill with a base for the new patio. We made a trip to the landscaping store this morning, and there will be 1.3 tons of gravel in our driveway on Monday, ready for schlepping. By the time the patio is in, it will be time to fill the back yard with flowers, too. I can’t wait!

In the meantime, I’ve also been getting a fair bit of knitting done. Branden’s Blue Eyes sweater made good train knitting for the beginning of the week while it was small, but had outgrown my work bag by Wednesday. Note to self: I need to come up with another train project for next week!

It’s been going steadily along at home in the evenings, though, and I’m now a few inches past the sleeve split.

That section just before the sleeve split is always the slowest part in a top-down raglan. The neck shaping goes so fast, and then you get into those endless, endless rows that go all the way around the widest part of the chest and over the longest part of the sleeve all at the same time. It’s such a relief to get back to the main body section and put a third of the stitches onto holders.

I can’t decide how I feel about the colors. In detail, they are spot on, and from far away I like how they pattern is coming out. At each point in the yarn, I like the way the colors combine. And yet, somehow, the magic isn’t there. This colorway doesn’t move me the way some of my dye experiments do. It’s right in all of the particulars, and yet that technical accuracy doesn’t translate into an aggregate that I love. Needs more gray and less brown, I think. The brown was supposed to be a highlight, but in this combination it turned out to be a pretty strong, dominant color. It could also use a bit more of the darker gray-blue.

I like it well enough, though, and Branden likes the colors, which is what matters. And, if I put some of my unconscious expectations aside, it is a rather nice yarn working up into a pretty good sweater. I think it will grow on me in the end.

I do like how the three different plies kind of fade in and out of the yarn. For a while, green will be dominant, then the blue, then the turquoise and gray. The yarn is constantly shifting and changing, which makes it fun to knit with, and the marled yarn gives the colors a dappled look and a depth that I like a lot.

The fabric itself makes me think of an impressionist painting, with little flecks of color here and there adding up to a sum that is somehow different than all its individual parts.

I’m on skein 3 out of 12, so I should definitely have enough yarn to finish the sweater, and perhaps more besides.

Shockingly, the fact that I am past the sleeve split means that it’s time to start thinking about the next project already (especially considering the note about train knitting, above). I thought I’d have a while before I’d have to think up anything new, and here I find myself already needing to start thinking of the next thing. Unfortunately, I don’t have a whole lot lined up and waiting, and with end-of-semester brain it will probably take a while to come up with the next project. I had one plan all worked up, and then there was a snafu with the yarn I was going to spin, and I need to find something else. I’m getting a tiny little tickle in the back of my mind about some baby shetland from Greencastle, but that also needs to be spun before it can be knit.

So we’ll see. I think that there will be some spinning of new yarn, and maybe it’s time for a stash toss to see what’s in there that might stand in for a quick project in the meantime. Only one more month until the end of semester, and then there might be space for the design juices to start flowing again. Soon!

I hope you’re not all sick to death of spring flower photos yet. Around this time of year, I just can’t get enough. My little row of crocuses is happily blooming away:

We bought a mixed bag of bulbs, and so far they’ve almost all turned out to be orange and white. I’m a little disappointed, because the purple ones are my favorites. There are a few of them in there, though. And it’s also possible that they’re just coming a little later than the others; there are still some plants in there that haven’t bloomed.

Elsewhere in the yard, one of the mystery flowers has been revealed. See those buds, right at the base of the leaves in the upper right? I’m pretty sure that means that these are hyacinths.

And this one is pretty certain to be a tulip. (I think I even see pink!)

On the other side of the fence, the daffodils have also put in an appearance. They were the late-sleepers of the bunch this year; I think that everything I planted (and a few I didn’t) are now accounted for, though for many it will still be a while until they bloom.

We’ve begun preparations for our back yard projects now, too. Our job this spring is to turn our back yard (currently astroturf) into something a bit more appealing. First up, we’ll be putting in a small patio, and then I will be going crazy filling it in with shade-loving plants, and anything else I can make grow on 2 hours or less of sun a day.

I might have started on the going crazy already, actually. I bought a few more bulbs when we were at Home Depot the other night:

Honestly, I think I bought at least one of everything that had a “full shade” label on it, and a few that didn’t. I might be just a little over-eager for planting season. It has been several years now since I’ve had a proper garden to muck around in. There’s clematis and bleeding heart, elephant ears and astilbe, lily of the valley, begonias, and caladium. Fortunately, the back yard is huge (at least if you consider how empty it is, and how full I plan for it to be), so there will be plenty more coming as the season goes on.

And, because springtime is always the best time to finish a sweater, I finally finished the second sleeve on the Briar Rose sweater.

I can’t believe it’s taken this long. The last foot and a half of the second sleeve took about 2 months, but it is finally done. The goal was a slightly textured, sweatshirt-like sweater, and I think it succeeded. Much to my surprise, it took all three skeins of the Briar Rose 4th of July, and I even had to cannibalize the swatch to finish the sleeve and collar. My swatch gauge was off a little, so it ended up a few inches longer than I expected in both the body and arms, and a bit wider across the chest than I’d accounted for. There’s a tiny bit of bunching at the front shoulders as a result, but it’s not too bad, and it goes with the sweatshirt feel.

It finished blocking this morning, and I’ve been wearing it all day, and I can definitely vouch for sweatshirt comfort, anyway. Yay for a finally-finished sweater!

March has been its usual, tempestuous self this year. I think we got almost as much snow this month as we did in the rest of the year combined. That hasn’t stopped spring from coming, though. On Monday, we were greeted by this:

The tulips are also coming up, getting ready to take off as soon as the warmer days arrive.  Don’t they have such pretty leaves? I didn’t plant these…they were left here by the last tenants, so it will be exciting to see what they look like when they finally flower.

On Thursday, we noticed this little crocus, poking up right through a leaf.

And then on Friday, there were a few orange crocuses open, too.

If that’s not a dose of pure sunshine, I don’t know what is.

We went to visit my grandfather for an early Easter celebration yesterday, and his rock garden was just full of flowers, opening into the warm spring sun.

We also took advantage of the beautiful weather and our new gray card for the camera to get some photos of the completed corespun sweater, in which the color is actually just about right.

I finished it last weekend, and we just haven’t had a chance to take photos while it was light out. I’ve managed to wear it twice already, though, which is a good sign. I love the openwork in the yoke shaping (though that upper row could stand to be a little bit less stretched).

And overall the shaping came out well. I love how all the little details worked out. You can hardly see the transition from the original yarn to the second colorway (right around the waist and elbow).

Just after I wrote my last post about the sweater, I remembered that I had some beads that would match the color beautifully. I’m not usually a big fan of beads in my knitting, but this was meant to be a fun sweater that pushes against those edges, so a few beads found their way in around the cuffs and hems. I put them in a garter stitch channel that mirrored the garter details around the yoke, which gave the edges a slightly more finished feel.

The beads were about two rows tall, so I knit a set up row first, where I knit a ssk, double yo, and then k2tog at each place I wanted a bead to go. In the next round, I took the double yo and threaded it through the bead, and then slipped a stitch behind it. For the third row, I went back to a plain stockinette row, knitting into the front and back of the loop from the double yo (now threaded through the bead as a single stitch) to make two stitches again. It worked out perfectly, and that extra slipped stitch across the back of the bead keeps them from popping through to the inside of the fabric and disappearing.

I also found the perfect buttons in my stash. It’s a little hard to see in the picture, but their rims are a very faint teal, just exactly the right color to match the sweater.

The corespun worked out beautifully in the cuffs and hem, too. It’s just a simple garter stitch, picked up and knit all the way around the edge in one piece (with a tiny mitered corner at the front). The garter stitch made a very soft fabric, so I reinforced it with grosgrain ribbon to keep the button band from gaping.

The body and corespun yarns were completely different weights, but after comparing swatches and counting stitches I decreased 1 stitch for every three, and it worked out just right. I knit two rows of the original green-ish corespun to transition between the body and the slightly bluer corespun. That tiny accent row really helped to pull the two colorways together; without it, they didn’t quite look like they matched. Having just a little bit of contrast between the two colors highlights their similarities and diminishes the slight differences between the base color in the two yarns. The color in the beads did the rest, accenting both the green and the teal to their best advantage.

The sleeves ended up a wee bit shorter than I expected, but that has turned out to be a good thing, since it keeps the bell-shaped sleeves out of my way while I work. (Otherwise, they’d end up getting dipped into everything I’m working on.)

Right up until the end, I was pretty unsure about whether this would end up being a worn garment or simply an art experiment that goes in the closet and is never seen again. It falls pretty far on the girly side of what I wear, and it was kind of a crazy leap to put a (for me) light/bright color, lace, beads, and art yarn all in one piece. It really came together in the final sweater, though, and I think this is one that I’m likely to wear quite a lot this spring and summer.

Eight ounces of spinning goes really fast when you’ve just spun 3 pounds. The new yarn for the teal cardigan spun up overnight, almost. I had two braids of fiber that were very close in color to the original, but they had been dyed months apart and on different fibers, so there was little chance of a perfect match. One of the braids looked about the same color as the original Polwarth yarn, and the other was slightly darker. I alternated back and forth between knitting the last of the original yarn into the sleeves, and plying one single from each braid together to make another 500 yards of 2-ply yarn:

Looking at it in the skein, I couldn’t tell the difference in color by eye at all; it’s about as close to a perfect match as you could hope for. This weekend, I used the new yarn to knit the last few inches of the sweater body. The join isn’t quite invisible. You can see it here, about 3 inches up from the bottom of the sweater body.

Still, it’s close enough that it echoes the color stripes in the rest of the sweater, and is pretty subtle.

I have enough of the second color to finish the sleeves, and now I find myself back at my spinning wheel working on the corespun accent yarn for the hem. I’m not very good at spinning corespun yet, but I’m slowly gaining more control. I spun a sample yesterday, using a sewing thread core to make the yarn a little finer than the last sample. I knit a swatch last night:

The unevenness in the yarn gives it a little texture, and the different fibers blended into the batt pop up in tiny sections of dark or light here and there. This particular section of the batt was mostly the main color, so there isn’t a lot of accent fiber in it, but you can see a tiny spot of the navy on the left, and a little bit of the white banana viscose in the top right. This has also taught me that I need to blend in more of the accent colors when I make a batt. I like the look less in the batt, but will like it more in the spinning.

The swatch actually encouraged me to spin a little less evenly to emphasize the texture difference, and to make sure that I include the accent fibers at pretty regular intervals to make a slightly less homogeneous fabric. (And yes, art yarn spinners can all laugh at me here, because this is really about the most controlled art yarn I’ve run into. Baby steps. Baby steps.)

Here’s the swatch with the sweater body. I’ll have to figure out my gauge conversion, and then I’ll pick up stitches around the bottom of the body and the front button band and work a garter edge in the corespun yarn. I’m also thinking that I’ll probably play with some mitered corners at the bottom of the cardigan fronts. I’ve never knit a mitered square before, so that will be a fun thing to try here. I blocked both the body and the swatch last night, so I should be ready to knit on, just as soon as I’ve finished spinning the yarn.

In the meantime, I have a couple of sleeves to knit, and then we can sum up this little game of knit-spin hopscotch with a new spring sweater.

Ah, spring. I posted on Feb 28th proclaiming that it was here, and then last Friday we got 10-12 inches of snow. Winter in New England is always a sore loser, and never goes without a fight.

Spring always wins in the end, though. After just a few days of warm weather and sunshine, the snow is almost completely gone. It may be back again still, but it’s certain not to hang around for long.

The extra snow doesn’t seem to have slowed down the bulbs down much, though. I’m not certain what this one is, but I do believe that’s a leaf beginning to unfurl. (I thought I put snowdrops here, but snowdrop leaves don’t look like that, so I don’t know what this one will turn out to be.)

These are mystery plants, too dense to be anything I planted. There are quite a few bunches of them like this around the front yard…they must be leftovers from the last tenants. I’m excited to see what they might be!

The crocuses are popping up like crazy, and they’re starting to send out their long, thin leaves, a sure sign that they’re really ready to go.

I think these are the “deer resistant” tulips that I planted. There’s just one bunch of them, down by the driveway.

(We don’t have deer, nor did I know that they had a taste for tulips, but I suppose it’s good to be covered, just in case.)

The daffodils and narcissus by the front fence have not yet made an appearance, but they tend to be latecomers to the spring party, hanging back until they’re really sure it’s time to come out.

I think that these are my miniature irises; I had expected them to come up late also, but they’re jumping up faster than anything else, and seem to be completely undeterred by last week’s blanket of snow.

I just had to go poking around to look at their progress yesterday, even if the real reason I went outside was this:

Might not look like much from the outside, but it gets a little more exciting when you get to this:

That, at long last, is my much talked-about drum carder.

I’ve been talking about buying a drum carder for about 5 years. I even went and looked at a used one in Seattle, but it wasn’t in good condition and I decided that I’d rather just wait. I’ve thought about it off and on since then, but the time never seemed quite right. Then, last spring I used Elaine’s carder to process all those fleeces in a couple of weeks, and I played around a bit with blending. It moved up the urgency list, and I was all set to buy one at Rhinebeck last fall.

Thing is, that batt blending made me think that I might want to play around with selling batts, and I could only fit 1-2 oz on a regular carder, and I’d rather make bigger ones if I’m blending for sale. I hemmed and hawed about this for quite a while, but finally decided that I’d rather have a tool that I could grow into than one that might limit me, and so decided on the double wide.

Of course, a bigger drum is a bigger price, too, and so I decided that it would be better to wait a while longer, to give our finances a little more time to recover from my 9 months of unemployment and two moves in rapid succession last year. (I should say here that all of these delays are completely my own hesitations…Branden has been telling me to just buy the thing already for years.)

Also, I didn’t want to buy it right in the middle of the busiest year of teaching (they say the first year is the worst), because I wanted to be able to use it when it came. I’m still not sure that I’m ready to use it just yet, but we ordered it on Saturday, and now it is here and waiting, as soon as I come up with something to try.

I was very surprised by the speed of delivery; I was expecting a couple of weeks’ delay between processing the order and shipping, but Otto had it out the door practically as soon as we’d ordered it. It’s beautifully made, and cranks like a charm (though I haven’t sullied it with fiber just yet…soon). It’s all put together and waiting on the dining room table, waiting for me to get to it soon.

In fact, the dining room table part is the only tiny snag in this whole story. I had never seen a double wide in person, so I didn’t really have a good sense of how big it would be. I knew how big a single wide carder was, and really math says that twice as wide should be just what this one turns out to be, but wow. It’s bigger than I thought. It’s almost as big as my table loom. For all my dithering, I haven’t quite figured out exactly where I’m going to put an unstackable piece of equipment that large, but something will turn up. I’m sure it will find a home somewhere soon, and in the meantime, it’s waiting right where I can see it, reminding me that it’s probably time to play.

I dyed up the fiber for the Blue Eyes sweater back in May to use up the last of my stock of Finn fiber before our move to Boston. The fiber was just shy of 3 lbs, which is more than I’d usually spin for a sweater, but I wanted to use things up and so dyed it all. It doesn’t hurt to have extra, and Branden sweaters require a good amount of yarn, because he is long in the torso and arms.

Well. I have been spinning off and on since June, and have just finally finished the spinning for this project. I haven’t been spinning much at all lately, so it’s taken quite a lot longer than it normally would to get through the fiber. Add in the extra spinning for Mike’s sweater and a couple of other small projects in between, and somehow it’s been 9 months since I started.

The project might have dragged on for another month or two, even, had it not been for the fact that I am running short on yarn for the new sweater I’m inventing on the fly (it doesn’t have a name yet; must fix that). I wanted to get the Finn off of the bobbins and free up the wheel for the new yarn, so I’ve pushed my way through the last 5 or so bobbins in the last week and a half.

I have just a tiny bit of fiber left, and I’ve been debating whether I really needed to finish spinning that last little bit, or whether it could really go into the fiber-mixing collection that I’ve been building up. The best way to answer this was to calculate the yardage for the sweater yarn, and to see where we stood. I usually tally my yardage as I go, but between one thing and another it just hasn’t happened for this project. I knew I had a amassed quite a pile of skeins, but had no idea of the actual yardage until I sat down today to count.

I have 2670 yards of 3-ply, DK to light-worsted weight yarn. That’s just shy of 1.5 miles. No wonder it’s been so long on the spinning wheel!

I think I’ll probably have enough, don’t you?