DesigKnit

I was a little worried when I ran out of yarn for Branden’s sweater. I had plenty of fiber left, but I’ve heard that it’s hard to spin the same weight twice. Add to that the fact that I’d spun a bunch of fingering/laceweight in between, and I wasn’t sure I could get the same yarn again.

Turns out I needn’t have worried. Sometimes well-worn ruts work to your advantage. Here’s a photo of some of the old yarn next to the new yarn that I plied last weekend. (The strand laid across the top is coming from the ball.)

And here’s a comparison of the two weights together.

Not bad, huh? I can feel a slight difference between them in the knit fabric, but only barely. It’s good to know that I can go back and spin more on demand (at least for this weight).

Once I had the rest of the transition yarn, it was clear sailing on the body of the sweater. The dark brown feels like it’s taking forever, but really it’s moving right along.

I’m a little surprised that the 2:1 to solid dark brown transition is so sharp. The top of the sweater is plain grey, then a 1:2 brown to grey, then a 2:1 brown to grey. You’d think there would be a smooth transition the whole way, but that little bit of grey really dominates in both mixed yarns, leaving a big difference between the gradient colors and the solid brown. One of those interesting things you could only know by trying it, I suppose.

Fall has arrived in force here in Chicago. Not many colors to see yet, but the weather settled in last week, with daytime temperatures in the 60’s and getting down into the 40’s overnight. This weekend has been grey and a little damp, so we’re beginning to really feel the chill. We’ve put on sweaters and started drinking cups of tea, and today we’re washing the winter comforter for the bed. Time to start knitting faster!

Well, I suppose it’s about time I told you about our trip to WI Sheep and Wool a couple of weekends ago. For once, I did remember to bring my camera to a fiber festival, but I can’t say I took a lot of pictures.

We arrived around lunchtime on Saturday, and spent the whole afternoon wandering the two big show barns full of yarn. That part is all a blur of yarn and fiber and friendly faces from the Madison spinning guild.

I picked up a few more dye colors, adding Navy, Russet, Crimson, and Hot Fuchsia to the collection. I forsee more sampling in my future.

And we scored a set of sample cards from my friend Anne’s Blackberry Ridge woolen mill, which I hope will produce a scheme for a colorwork sweater sometime very soon.

Finally, I picked up two skeins of a subtly shaded blue-black yarn from Miss Babs to go with the skein from Stitches. I’ve been noodling around with a design that I’m pretty excited about, but it’s an “interesting” construction and therefore requires much sampling to make sure it will work. I think I’m on (very small) sample sweater #5 now, trying to get the shaping right before committing to a full sized version.

My favorite find of the day was this 2.5 pounds of Cormo roving, just waiting to be dyed up and spun into this years’ handspun sweater. We bought it from the farmer who’d grown the wool and had it processed, and it is beautiful stuff. There’s some for me and some for the shop, once I figure out what to do with it. (Blank slate syndrome is even stronger with “special” stuff.)

We also went to the fleece silent auction, where I resisted a whole room full of fleeces just begging to be taken home.

Many of the fleeces were pretty dirty looking, but there were several Targhees that were calling my name. I didn’t even know I liked Targhee, but it’s now high on my must-get-someday list.

During the afternoon, we met up with Becky and her mom Sandy, and Branden pitched the tent. We spent the evening knitting, plastic-canvasing (Sandy), and reading (Branden) before turning in.

In the morning, we wandered over to the breakfast hall, where Branden ate and I spent a long time talking with the guys are Hogge Millwork about their drum carders. During the walk through the market, and especially during the silent auction, it had begun to seem like quite a good idea to get a carder to help me process fleeces faster (so I can buy more!), and to explore making batts. I particularly like the Hogge carders because they are modular and can be upgraded over time rather than bought all at once. Something to think about, but not quite yet.

We also wandered over to the Hall of Breeds, where we got to see some newly minted lambs.

A while ago, Linda sent me a series of photos, suggesting that they might make a good colorway.

Since I love purple (and pansies!), I was excited to give it a try. And so I sampled.

I ended up with a huge range of colors just from combining a few of my dyes in different ratios. And then, the trick was to choose the right colors to match the photos. This was my favorite of the photos she sent:

Look at all those cheery little faces! I particularly wanted to capture that bright spot of yellow in the center of the flowers. I also wanted to capture the gradual transition from blue to white. After much hemming and hawing over which purples were exactly right, I ended up with this fiber:

By keeping the color patches shorter than a staple length in most cases, the colors should blend as the fiber is spun, hopefully giving a gradient from pure purple all the way down to white. I left a lot more white on the fiber than I normally would, both to represent the white and blue flowers, and to give room to spin the yellow without mixing it too much with the purple. (In places where it does mix, I think it should give quite a nice green, judging from the couple of spots where the color touched on the fiber. You can see a tiny bit in the lower right corner of the photo.)

Next, I focused on these little beauties.

Here, I loved the little veins of dark blue running through a shaded purple. I started out with a purple base, and then added highlights of dark purple mixed with blue on top.

The dark “blue” here is really a violet blue. I took photos of these fibers once with my camera just after I dyed them, then Branden tried a few days later. At first, we blamed our lack of success on poor lighting (evening shots are never as good). Then, yesterday, Branden spent about two and a half hours taking photos of these four fibers before we got even close to color accuracy. Apparently purple is just hard to photograph. We have explored whole new frontiers in camera settings, and this is as close as we could get. So imagine that those dark blue regions are really a more intense version of the light purple (which did come out accurately), with a bit more blue added.

The next two rovings were even harder to photograph, but I think we did finally manage to get accurate colors on them. The first was actually supposed to be a colorway from this photo, which Linda processed in photoshop to help the colors stand out:

Aren’t they beautiful? I especially like the impressionist one; it really could be printed and hung on the wall.

Unfortunately, I got distracted while I was mixing the dyes for this color, and forgot to add blue to one of my dyes. Instead, I ended up adding red twice, which meant that I really didn’t get the purples I was going for.

You can see hints of the iris colors in there, where the dyes with the right mixture stayed unmixed, but this really wasn’t where I intended to go with this fiber.

Sometimes the dye has a mind of its own, though, and in this case I was amused to discover how  little this “mistake” colorway had strayed from our theme. When we were at the farmers’ market yesterday morning, we saw this little guy:

Branden snapped a picture on his phone, and later we compared it to the not-iris colorway. As it turns out, it just wanted to be a maroon pansy instead.

And finally, I made a deep, saturated colorway in purples and blacks, inspired by this photo:

I made a mosaic here, too, to help me pick out the colors. Isn’t it amazing how many shades there are in that one photo?

I didn’t have quite the right purple for this photo in my samples. I think the blue needs to be a little more subdued than the dyes that I have. So I added black to most of the purples, and then added some spots of pure black to deepen the color even more. I ended up with this:

It’s not an exact match, but I think it’s pretty close. Of all the colorways I dyed from these photos, I think this one is my favorite. I am working hard to resist the urge to claim it for myself.

So that’s my exploration of pansy purples. There are so many colors you could create from these photos that I think I’m likely to return to this colorway series someday. I’m especially interested to keep sampling in the purples region of the spectrum, because I picked up some navy blue dye at WI Sheep and Wool last weekend that I think it might just give me those shades that I’m missing in the black velvet sample. And really, I would wear any one of those colors, so more experimentation is probably in order.

Things have been a bit stop and go over here lately (both literally and figuratively). We had the rush of the move, then the slower pace of settling in and working from home for a few weeks. That was great, until the work started to dry up and the guilt complex kicked in (I am constitutionally incapable of being paid for not doing any work).

Then there was a job interview, which is very likely to turn into a real job. But big wheels turn slowly, and the company is a bit of a behemoth. So I might know in a few weeks. Or a few months. No one really knows. (This is just as frustrating for the people trying to hire as it is for me, I’m sure.)

In the meantime, I’m now going into the lab that I might possibly end up working in sometime in the future, except I’m going in as a postdoc, borrowing lab space. So I get to try out the commute, without the paycheck to pay for a second car.

Branden has been experimenting with a combination of bike and train to get to work, which has helped a lot (it takes me 2 hours to drop him off and get to work…not fun.) Still, things are a little up in the air. I need to be ready to do work the moment that it’s available, but there hasn’t been a lot ready to hand. The couple of weeks at home with no work gave me more time to play with fibery things, but now I find myself with a blog backlog just waiting for some pictures that I’m not home to take.

Today, it was almost decided that I should just stop working in the lab for now, and resume again if they really hire me. (Big companies also have lots of red tape.)

But now, it looks like I’ll be keeping on as before.

Stop and go.

Too bad you can’t knit while driving.

I’ve been knitting away on Branden’s MacGyver sweater, spun from the wool I bought at last year’s Wisconsin Sheep and Wool festival. I would have liked to have it done in time for this year’s festival, but it looks like that just isn’t going to happen. Since it’s a Raglan knit from the top, it gets slower and slower with each round. I split off for the sleeves last weekend, so things briefly got fast again.

Unfortunately, the extra boost from the  smaller diameter didn’t last long. I’m into the blended section of the knitting now, and the knitting was just whizzing along, until I suddenly found myself out of yarn.

I’m not sure what happened, since both Branden and I are quite sure that I had spun up more of the mixed skeins from the two fleeces. One thing is certain, though, and that is that there is no more of the 2-dark 1-light plied yarn to be had. I’ve looked everywhere, and there is nothing left to do except decide that I never actually spun it.

So, it’s back to the wheel for me, before any more knitting can be done on the sweater.

Before I could spin more, I needed to ply the Falkland that I’ve been working on. (What a shame, huh?)

I ended up with 950 yds of yarn from my 8 oz of fiber. I haven’t set the twist yet, but I have a feeling that it is going to bloom from a slightly heavy laceweight into a fingering weight yarn when washed. I was hoping to get a lacy sweater out of this fiber, but I think I’d probably need something more like 1100-1200 yards for that. I am now debating - do I stash it to wait for the perfect project, dream up something else to do with it now, or cross my fingers and knit for a sweater? If the lace is open enough, I might just make it, but it will be cutting it close.

You would think that being stuck on my big knitting project would have given me tons of time to finish making the mate for this sock that I finished last weekend:

But no, I’m afraid that it’s partner has barely progressed past the cast on. I may have a chance to knit on it tonight, if I’m lucky. The yarn is Blackberry Ridge Mer-made, and even though you can’t see it, there are blue and teal and purple all mixed together in the skein. I’m very pleased with the fact that there is also no pooling whatsoever, and I didn’t even need to do anything to avoid it.

Now that fall is coming, I’m thinking that I’d better hurry up and get knitting on that sock. It will be nice to have another pair when the weather gets cold. I’m wearing my first wool socks of the season today; it’s a beautiful, blustery day here, with temperatures in the low 60’s. After the heat that we’ve been having, that feels downright cold (it was in the upper 90’s 2 days ago). We have all the windows open to air out the house while it’s nice out, so it’s been nice to have some warm things to put on while the cool breeze blows through.