DesigKnit

The picture gods have smiled upon us, and I finally managed to get the right lighting conditions for good color photos of some of the new fibers I’ve been dyeing lately.

My color moods are always influenced by the season, so I suppose it’s no surprise that all I see are the colors of spring. There are happy daffodils dancing in the breeze:

And then there are crocuses opening in the sun:

I also found some of the leftovers from last years’ garden in my dyepot.

I dyed up some of the new rambouillet last week:

And this week, I have started moving out of the semisolids and into gradients, my next great adventure.

This fiber has 6 different concentrations of dye painted on it, going from pale all the way up to the most concentrated stock. I dyed this one with the fiber folded in quarters, because that’s what I had presoaked that day. Next time, I think I’ll fold the fiber in half instead, to get a longer repeat. This color looks beautiful with the dark walnut brown.

The names for the colors shown above:

Daffodil (Falkland) and Olive (Falkland)

Pale Crocus (Polwarth), Deep Crocus (Polwarth), Saffron (Polwarth), and Brilliant Green (BFL)

Faded Fall (Shetland)

Caramel (Rambouillet)

Walnut Brown (Rambouillet)

Spruce gradient (Rambouillet)

All of these fibers are available on Etsy.

The striped shawl sweater has been slowly creeping slowly forward with the same knit-rip-knit pace. I’m past the striped section and have been working short rows to transition into the main body color. I started out decreasing one stitch for every three rows that I knit, which looked pretty good at first, but looked less good as the fabric grew. I worked short rows for both of the sleeves and half of the body before deciding that it looked a little too puffy.

See how there’s a bump at the edge of the dark fabric? Well. It was bothering me. So I ripped it out, and reknit the short rows, decreasing one stitch for every 2 rows instead.

Isn’t that better?

I’ve since redone the short rows, and finished the main body section. I had to spin some more yarn to make it, but I am very happy with how it’s coming out.

I am to the elbows on the sleeves and I am running on yarn fumes, so I’ll need to spin up another hundred yards or so to finish it off. I hadn’t counted on the short row decreases to add so much shaping, and I added a few of my own, which turns out to have been unnecessary. The final fit ended up a tiny bit tighter than I’d like, but I think it will loosen up with blocking and I don’t think it’s enough of a problem to rip back again. This project may finally be in the home stretch. All that’s left is finishing the sleeves, and then steeking the front to install the zipper. It’s getting close!

While I’ve been knitting the striped shawl, I’ve been keeping my spinning wheel busy finishing up the green for the fall colors sweater.

It’s all finished now, and will be ready to go as soon as I settle on a design. I’d like to say that it will be simple to make up for the last, but somehow I think that’s unlikely. (I’m still leaning toward the last design in this post, which will involve both steeking and a little bit of tailoring, and I’m thinking it likely that it will also have some rather experimental colorwork going on. Never a dull moment around here.)

Amazingly, that brought me to the end of what had seemed like a very long spinning queue, and suddenly it was time to start spinning the wool for Mike’s sweater, months earlier than I had planned. He’s a close friend of ours, and I think this may officially be the first big thing I’ve knit for someone outside of the family (mostly I knit just for Branden and I). We usually stay at Mike’s house over Christmas, and he was especially taken with Branden’s MacGyver sweater this year. He kept asking how long it took to make a sweater, from spinning the wool through to wearing it. I didn’t know, but I’ve decided to find out by spinning up the rest of the Shetland that I bought from that farm. Since Mike is also of an engineering bent and loved the MacGyver angle, I’ll also work in some of the leftover MacGyver yarn, probably as colorwork or stripes around the shoulders. For now, I’m spinning some wool from Harriet:

Doesn’t she have a lovely fleece? I liked it well enough in the roving, but it wasn’t until I started spinning it that I realized how beautifully heathered the gray is going to be. I have to admit that I have been struggling to resist the temptation to claim this wool as mine (as it was originally intended to be), but I am going to stick to the current plan. There will always be more fleeces, and I am getting to have a lot of sweaters!

One thing that has been very interesting about this set of projects is spinning from three fleeces from the same farm. You’d think they’d be pretty similar, given that they are three sheep fed and coated the same way, living in the same flock. The wool was presumably sheared by the same shearer and processed by the same mill. But the fleeces are not the same. As a reminder, MacGyver’s is the light gray wool in the sweater, and Magnolia’s is the dark brown.

MacGyver’s wool was kind of downy, but had lots of heavier guard hairs in it. I tried picking them out as I went, but enough stayed in to make the sweater slightly prickly when worn on sensitive skin (fortunately, Branden doesn’t mind). As Branden has worn the sweater, the guard hairs have tended to poke out here and there, and we’ve been pulling them out over time. I’m not sure that it’s making much difference, but I like to think that the sweater is getting softer and softer with time. Either that, or we’re helping it to fall apart faster, but I’m sticking to the first interpretation. MacGyver’s was the first wool of the three that I spun, and it was full of little pills of short fiber, like the wool had been slightly tipped or there were second cuts in the shearing. I must admit that I was not looking forward to spinning three big bags of wool like that; pills in the spinning make me crazy. But the fiber was beautiful otherwise, and I loved the yarn, so I kept spinning.

Magnolia’s wool had none of the pills, and none of the guard hairs. It was a much thicker feeling fiber, very smooth and greasy, almost like alpaca. The pills must have been from MacGyver and not from the mill, since both Magnolia and Harriet’s fleeces are pill-free. Harriet’s fiber is different yet again. It is much lighter than Magnolia’s and very soft,  more like the downy fleece in MacGyver’s wool. There aren’t many guard fibers at all, though there is a lot of hay. Harriet loved to wear her hay. I pull little bits out as I’m spinning, and I can’t help but imagine this sheep standing by her hay bale, munching away, pulling it down on top of her shoulders. Fortunately, most of it pops right out while I’m spinning, so it’s not a big deal, but it does amuse me to think of how this sheep must have always been wearing her food.

While I knit one sweater and spin toward the next, I’ve also been taking advantage of the beautiful weather to get outside and comb some more of my Gulf Coast fleece from last year. It is slow going, preparing a whole fleece by hand. I spun up most of what I had combed at Christmas to give to a friend, and I’ve only done a few ounces since then. It will be quite a while before I work my way through the whole 2.5 lbs, but it is very satisfying to see my bag fill up with these airy little puffs of fiber.

So there we have it. Handspun wool in all its stages. (Now all I need is a sheep.)

One of the reasons for doing a fiber festival this year was to see how the business side of DesigKnit would scale. It’s an experiment, really; designed to help us identify and work through the sticky spots that are sure to crop up as things get bigger. (It’s always easier to work your way through the hurdles in a controlled experiment than it is when you’re doing things under pressure or on the fly.)

Fortunately, the first part is easy. I have no trouble at all thinking up more colorways. In fact, even with increased production I am still not even scratching the surface of things I want to explore. Everything I do suggests 5 more things to try. No problems there.

We’ve had a few jumps and starts with sourcing larger amounts of fiber. My staple products were no problem, since I just worked with my usual vendor and made a bigger order. We worked out a deal that made both of us very happy, and that was that.

The trouble came in when working with new vendors. I mentioned earlier that I wanted to start stocking Targhee and Rambouillet. It turns out that the Targhee is back ordered for some unknown period of time (waiting for wool to come back from the mill is a very unpredictable thing), so that’s on hold for now, pending further notice. The Rambouillet was in stock, and I was excited about buying directly from a small farmer, but she abruptly stopped returning my emails as soon as I asked about wholesale prices. I don’t know why, and it’s doubly unfortunate since I would have considered paying retail prices for the fiber, but there you have it. Sometimes things don’t go as planned.

This led me off on a quest to find more Rambouillet, at a reasonable price. I didn’t find another farmer, but I found someone that sells large quantities of commercial top. We had to really bite the bullet to pay for three times as much fiber as I’d have liked to order (30 lbs is a lot of fiber!), but we will be all set with Rambouillet for the forseeable future. This is a much more commercial prep, with a little less of the “sheep” left in the fiber. The other was clean and well processed, but it felt a lot closer to wool the way it comes off of the sheep than the more heavily processed version. If you’ve ever bought top at a sheep festival compared to a commercial prep, you know what I mean. (If you haven’t, get thee to a sheep festival to see the difference!) The new fiber is not as spongy as the mill-processed top, but because of that it drafts much, much more smoothly. Honestly, I like spinning it better than the other, though I always have a guilty preference for highly processed top, because it is so smooth to spin. It’s a beautiful fiber, and I’m excited to have it.

So we have the fiber and the dyeing worked out, but we just can’t seem to work our way around the pictures. Getting color accuracy in photos is notoriously difficult, and it seems that I tend to dye colors that are particularly hard to capture. Branden has been patiently clicking away, taking sometimes hundreds of photos with different settings before he gets one that works, but we still haven’t narrowed down the important variables. We think we have it with one batch, but then the same changes just don’t work on the next, and we end up starting all over again.

This has been a problem for a long time, but it wasn’t too bad when I was only producing a handful of colors at a time. It takes longer to take good photos than it does to dye the fiber, but we both like a challenge and we felt it was worthwhile. Now, though, I am making up to 20 colors in a single dye day, and the photography just can’t keep up. We have tried everything we can think of; changing the lighting, using different white cards and white balance settings, tweaking and adjusting every setting on our manual DSLR cameras. We started taking the photos in RAW format and trying to tweak them manually, but we’re not yet very good with the software and it takes forever to get right. (I am also terribly impatient with that part of the process: just thinking about it makes me break out in hives.)

Needless to say, we’ve ended up with quite a backlog of colors waiting to be photographed. After spending a good 6 or so hours of limited weekend time every weekend for weeks on end, we’re both pretty frustrated. Clearly, this is something that still needs work.

So, in an effort to keep things moving along, we’re going to try to take pictures of just a small subset of fibers for posting on Etsy and the blog. I had wanted to give the blog first go at the new colors that I’m making, but there is just no practical way to make that happen until we figure out this camera thing. Unfortunately, no pictures also means that I have no record of the colors that I’m making, and it changes the bookkeeping side of things, but for now I think that’s just how it has to be.

We will try to post photos of as many things as we can, but I’m not sure yet exactly how that’s going to work out. It would be easier if I wanted to just settle into a few standard colorways, but that takes the fun and the experimentation out of dyeing for me, so we’re going to have to find a way to make it work with more varieties.

Not posting all of the fibers has been a hard decision for me to make, because I hate secret projects. One of the promises that I made myself at the beginning of this little business venture was that I wouldn’t do anything that I couldn’t blog about. (That’s particularly important with patterns, since it dictates a lot about places you can and can’t publish.) Blogging is the first thing I want to do when I make a new set of colors or think up a design, and it blocks my process when I can’t talk about the things that I’m working on and excited about. It also makes for really boring blogging, and long silences.

So, we’re still working on that part. The good news is that I do still like to dye, and I don’t think I’ll ever run out of colors to try. I’ve been dragging my feet over the past few weeks, not wanting to dye anything new until we had photos of the old colors, but I really need to ramp it up in the next few weeks to get ready for the show. In the meantime, we’re trying to figure out how to smooth over or get around the other bumps in the road, trying to find a way to scale this process in a positive way.

For now, I need to go plan out the next dye session; there are so many more colors to make!

When I realized that the striped shawl sweater was in fact going to be a sweater and not a shawl, it freed me up to finish the spiral shawl that has been languishing on the needles for ages. The idea for this pattern came from the spirals of a seashell, which made me wonder if adding successive layers of increases would lead to a spiral that eventually wrapped around.

For the pattern, I decided to go for a short shawlette version, something small and simple to highlight the shape and the increase lines.

One of the reasons I’d first put this shawl aside was that I just couldn’t find an edging that I liked. I looked and looked, but nothing was quite right. I wanted something with a little lace to it, but that preserved the simplicity of the shawl. I’ve found myself more and more drawn to simple, understated stockinette pieces lately, and I didn’t want anything too showy to distract from the gentle play of color in the yarn. The edging would also need to have a gauge similar to the stockinette shawl body. When I looked this time, I found the perfect thing right away.  I stumbled across this simple edging with columns of yarnovers and decreases, making a beautifully scalloped edge in the first book I opened. I must admit I’m rather smitten. See how it curls around at the very tips?

Because of the flared shaping, the shawl front looks almost ruffled when worn open.

Or it can wrap around to be worn closed. You can see echoes of the sweater in this shot, I think.

(I also love how that upward sweep shows off the shawl pin that Branden bought for me, from Nicholas and Felice.)

The original plan was to continue the increases and make the shawl a few inches longer, so that the ends would wrap up and over the shoulders. I decided to stop here, largely because I wasn’t loving working with this yarn. The shawl is knit in Knit Picks bare lace, which I dyed with Logwood purple  in a workshop I took a couple of years ago. I love the color, but something in the dyeing left the yarn a little rougher than before, and it wasn’t terribly fun to work with. The workshop dyepots weren’t quite ideal, and the dye didn’t fully take to the yarn, so it kept coming off all over my hands while I knit. I think I’ll probably revisit this pattern again in the future with a different yarn to make a longer version; I can see myself wanting a few shawls with this kind of shaping.

The back looks like a simple triangle shawl, with one column of yarnovers decorating the center.

I used a cabled cast off for the hem, which I think gives it a nice decorative edge. There’s an extra yarnover thrown in there to help keep it stretchy.

And so, the spiral shawl is finally done.

After much calculation and reworking to make sure I got all the numbers right in my scribbled notes, the pattern is also ready for test knitting, should any of you want to give it a try. It’s quite a simple knit, with only one row at the body-to-lace transition that requires some attention.

I didn’t realize that it had been so long since I’ve posted. The last few weeks have kind of opened up and swallowed me whole, but things are slowly beginning to return to normal around here. Or at least as normal as they ever are, which tends to consist of periods of reasonable calm punctuated by bursts of insane overwhelm.

Fortunately, the insanity is calming down, and I’m beginning to actually have room to think again. And as I look up from work and planning, I’m suddenly realizing that spring has come in my absence.

Or, rather, that spring has exploded into being. A week ago we had temperatures in the 40’s, and everything was damp, icy cold. Today, it was supposed to hit 70, and it was light all evening.

This past weekend, Branden and I took a much needed break and went outside. We visited the Chicago Botanic Gardens, looking for signs of spring.

First, though, I was struck by the beauty of the remnants of fall.

But then, pushing up amidst the faded glory of last years’ show, the new guard is bursting forth.

We walked through most of the gardens, finding signs of spring here and there, little isolated pockets of new life poking out.

And then, we walked around a bend in the path, and stumbled across this jubilant display.

If that doesn’t capture springtime and the joy of reawakening, then I’m not sure what does.