DesigKnit

I’m currently knitting my first hand dyed, hand spun, hand knit sweater. That’s a lot of hands, but there is one step further back in the processing chain left to go (short of buying a sheep, which isn’t happening anytime soon).

Last weekend, I decided to take that last step, and I bought a fleece from a sheep named Molly (who I hear is a sweetheart, and produces lovely wool):

That is what you’re supposed to do at a Shepherd’s Market, right?

I spent all day on Monday separating the colors and fiber types and washing it in small batches. Then we spread it out in the sun to dry, on a rack that Branden whipped together from some scrap wood and chicken wire. There is a lot of fiber there. I’ve prepared fleeces by hand before, but never a 6 pound fleece. It’s going to make a beautiful sweater, though.

I also picked up about 9 oz of Finn roving, and learned from the shepherdess that Finns have a wonderful temperament and are lovely animals (unlike Shetlands, apparently).

It’s spinning into a slightly slubby yarn because there are lots of short fibers in the roving, but it should make a nice 2-ply fingering weight.

And finally, I couldn’t resist buying a couple of skeins of beautiful Corriedale produced on the farm that hosted the fiber festival. I’m thinking that this will make some colorwork hats or handwarmers, but we’ll see. It’s lovely yarn…I would have bought enough for a sweater if I’d had the budget and a few less things in the stash. I might just wait and buy one of their fleeces next year…

When I completed the brown handspun sweater, I managed to succeed in my goal of knitting a sweater that I absolutely want to wear (in public, even).

Now, I’ve decided that I have a new goal: I want to only have to knit the sweater once.

You might say that’s asking for a lot, and you might be right. But I’ve been known to be ambitious about these things.

When we left last Friday, the new sweater looked like this:

I was about an inch and a half short of the sleeve split, and quickly realizing that I was going to run out of yarn. I have 1500 yards, and was expecting to get a gauge of about 5 st/in, but ended up with about 6.5 because I dropped a needle size to get a firmer fabric. Still, it’s two pounds of fiber, so it seemed like that should still be plenty for the sweater (it’s the equivalent of 8-9 skeins of Cascade 220 at this gauge). Since I had no worries about the amount of yarn, I left my ribs deep and unstretched when I measured the final size, and so there was a lot of take-up in the fabric.

Add to that the fact that my stitch count always ends up a little higher than it really should be, and you have a recipe for a somewhat baggy sweater that eats yarn way faster than it should.

By the time I got to the arm split, I had used up almost half of my yarn. Clearly, I needed to pull back.

Saturday morning, I ripped the whole thing out and cast on with 20% fewer stitches. I’ll have to block those ribs harder than I’d originally planned, and the sweater will be a little huggier than before, but it fits pretty well, and better than it did before. Now, it looks like this:

I should be able to make it through the body before having used half of the yarn. I hesitate to declare success, but cross your fingers that I’ll make it through the sleeves!

I had intended to take photos and blog tonight. But then I got distracted, so I figured I’d just blog. There isn’t much going on in the knitting world of late. Two projects with many, many miles left to knit. Some beautiful colors that I will show you soon.

Mostly, I’m preparing. Thinking about how to spin the next sweater (no, I haven’t touched the roving yet. I’m as shocked as you are). Thinking about other things I want to try this summer. Planting my garden.

We have a quiet 3.5 day weekend planned. It might include a fiber festival. At a sheep farm. And three days of not thinking about work, of being in the sun, of spending time together, and of solid knitting time. And boy, am I ready.

Except that I need to go pack.

See you next week!

The sun finally reappeared yesterday, and Branden found a few minutes to take photos between gardening and other weekend chores. (Note to self: promising pictures soon appears to result in a solid week of rain…)

I think the thing that I like most about this yarn is the variety of color.

It takes on a different shade every time I look at it it.

(Somehow all three of those photos are true to color, even though they look so entirely different.)

I ended up with 1500 yards of dk-weight 3 ply, which is knitting up beautifully on size 6 needles. This sweater won’t be the overnight wonder of its bulky cousin, but it will be a pleasure to knit.

I had some singles left after plying, and 1500 yards seemed like it should be plenty for the sweater, so I decided to do a little experiment and Navajo plied the last 100 or so yards. You can see what a difference the plying method makes.

I’m not usually a fan of marled yarns, so I really preferred the Navajo-plied skein with its long single-color repeats and lack of barber pole.

No experiment is complete without a swatch, though. First, the Navajo-plied:

And then the traditional 3-ply:

As I said, I do like the Navajo skein better, but I really love the way the marled yarn looks when knitted. This photo is a bit washed out, but the actual swatch makes me think of an impressionist painting. The color variation is more subtle, and I think I like it better than the Navajo-plied yarn, though I love the intensity of the solid colors in the Navajo-plied skein. The Navajo-plied yarn is also much less even, because the plying amplifies all the irregularities in my single. Just goes to show that prejudices are not always well-founded, and that you can’t tell what a yarn will do until you knit with it.

This little experiment is the first in my summer project. My grand plan is to dye up small samples of roving and then spin them in different ways to see what kind of variations I can get in the yarn, and then to see how those samples look knit up and possibly woven. I’ve wanted to play with this for quite a while now, and the package that brought the fiber for the new sweater also contained 2 lbs of Corriedale for testing. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to starting the project, but seeing the difference in these two skeins has made me really excited to see what happens when I vary more than just the plying. So many variables! Playing with color!

If I learn as much as I did from this project, it will be time and roving well spent, and I am sure that there will be more surprises along the way.

One sweater finished, and gladly worn on a cold spring day. (I’m probably the only person in Wisconsin that was glad that it was winter again this weekend…)

One sweater spun, and hung up to dry.

And one sweater dyed, waiting to begin.

Better pictures later when there is light.

A week and a half ago, I ordered more fiber for spinning. I ordered it online because my semi-local LYS doesn’t tend to carry the quantities of fiber that I am looking for, and the only way to get BFL is through special order (apparently it sells out quickly whenever she gets it in, so if you want some, you have to order ahead. I really wanted some BFL, so I thought it would be easier and quicker to buy online rather than to wait for her to order and then drive the 45 mins to get to her store.

Then the company emailed to say that things were backordered, and I was fast running out of things to spin.

I have about a bobbin left to go on the sweater yarn, and probably could have gotten it done tonight if I hadn’t been distracted by other things. It was starting to look like I’d be scraping the bottom of the barrel, and I hadn’t heard anything from the fiber people.

As I walked home from the bus tonight, I saw the UPS truck outside. They left me a package:

It doesn’t look like much, but that’s two pounds of BFL for another sweater, two pounds of Corriedale for my next grand adventure (coming soon), and a half a pound of Finn because I’ve never tried it before (it’s gorgeous!).

I have some dyeing to do.

I’ve been working away quietly in the background lately, in the moments between, watching a transformation take place.

The hand-dyed fiber has gone from this:

To this:

Which is slowly becoming an increasingly larger pile of these:

All of the colors look more blue in the photos than they really are. When I have more light, I’ll try again on color accuracy. For now, you get the idea.

I am endlessly fascinated. There are more colors in this yarn than I can give names to. Two colors mix, and suddenly emerge as something completely different, something that I love but would never have known how to make. I am learning so much about color from this experiment.

Looking at the fiber, I could not have predicted how the singles would look, and likewise for the singles and the final yarn. This project started as a surprise; I thought I dyed one thing, and I got another.

It hasn’t stopped surprising me yet. And I’m glad it hasn’t. I can’t wait to knit it up and see the next surprise (so soon!).

I have a very reliable habit of finishing a heavy sweater just as summer begins. I don’t know why, but it seems to happen every year that I am casting off a thick wool sweater just as temperatures soar into the 80’s.

And so it was this week.

My first handspun sweater is completed.

I constantly have trouble with my sweaters growing once worn, so this time I knit it tight. Really tight. So tight that I had to keep reminding myself that “it will stretch, it will stretch, it will stretch” to get through. There was not a centimeter of positive ease anywhere. It fit like a (snug) glove.

And then I blocked it, and magic happened. It went from really a little too close for comfort to just exactly the right size.

I may have had to knit it roughly three times to get it right, and there is still a tiny, tiny bit of bunching at the front shoulder where I should have taken out an extra 1/2 inch, but I love it. Completely.

I also finished a pair of socks. Actually, I finished them something like a week ago and just haven’t gotten up the momentum to take photos and blog. (That’s not completely true…we did try to take photos once, and the lighting was just horrible, so we gave up).

These are knit from Socks that Rock in colorway Fall on Tap. I pulled the stitch pattern out of one of my Japanese stitch dictionaries, and knit from the cuff down (also a first for me). I love the way the chevrons work with the color repeats of the yarn, and how the twist-stitch ribs help to keep the socks from slouching at the ankles. I used my own made-up variant of Cat Bordhi’s “Sky” architecture, adding increases at the top of the instep rather than at the sides, which allows the pattern to flow uninterrupted to the floor. Combined with an absurdly long decrease section (is that the heel gusset? I’m never sure…), they fit my high arches very nicely. And somehow, the combination of upper arch expansion and complex pattern manages to make my feet look relatively small, which is really nothing short of magic.

As always, I love the Socks that Rock yarns. I don’t know of any other yarn that I can count on to have this many colors and pool only once per sock, in precisely the same spot on each one. I just have to say that I am always impressed with this yarn.

Seasonally appropriate or no, these are two projects that I am happy to add to my “finished” list. I can’t wait for fall!