DesigKnit

The more I weave, the more I realize that I want to sew with my handwoven fabrics. I also want to spin for handweaving, which is why I’ve been working so hard to spin finer and finer yarns (I don’t need that much laceweight!). I’ve wanted to do both of these things for quite some time, but so far, I’ve done neither.

On Friday, I decided to fix that. I took the long repeat version of the Shetland sample skeins that I spun for the show, and wound it onto my warping board (this is how you make 100 2-yard pieces of exactly the same length).

Then, I put it on the loom and started warping; threading all of those ends through the loom one at a time in the right pattern for weaving.

Once the loom was warped, I tied the ends onto the front beam of the loom and marveled at the color gradient.

(Sorry for the slightly blurry pic.)

When I had done the original calculations, I thought I’d get a piece that was 8-10″ wide, but when I started putting in on the warping board I realized that I needed to make the warp longer, and so ended up with a 4-5″ strip. I almost stopped when I realized that I wouldn’t get the full width, but then I decided to just go with it and see what happened. So I did.

I wove the fabric using the short color repeat yarn (about 2 yards per color), and you can see here how the two gradients interact. In the bottom left, both the warp and the weft are blue. In the top right, they’re both yellow.

An hour or two later, I had this:

If you look closely at the color repeats, you can see an interesting effect of the way I spun the yarn. Remember that I split the top into thin strips before spinning? They began on a yellow, and ended on a blue. All of the colors in between were spun continuously, but at the end of every blue segment I would stop and add on a new strip, starting with blue. That meant that there was no mixing between the yellow and blue while I spun, and so there’s a hard transition between those two colors, and a gradual transition everywhere else.

That wasn’t something I thought much about when I was spinning the skein, but it had a really interesting effect in the final piece. Instead of being one long, smooth gradient, the fabric has short gradient sections punctuated by an abrupt change in color.

The final piece ended up being about 4″ wide and 50 inches long. So, what do you do with a thin strip of fabric?

At first, I thought I might just keep it for petting and looking at. But I really want to sew with my handwoven, and so I kept thinking. Most traditional African textiles are woven in strips of about this size, so clearly there are ways to use a narrow strip like this.

I cut a thin strip of paper, and started playing around. It wasn’t very long before I had this:

That’s one strip of paper folded at 45 degree angles to make a solid tube. Kind of like a bag, in fact.

I wanted a somewhat wider strip of fabric for the bag, so I sewed the strip lengthwise to make it twice as wide. I used a butt selvedge seam, which is something I’d never do on a commercial fabric, because the selvedge on a commercial piece is usually very different than the main material. In handwoven, there’s really no difference, so you can sew the two pieces right along the edge without folding anything over. It’s also especially handy in a handwoven, because the fabric tends to be thicker and might distort around a fold.

When I got to the raw end of the fabric, I folded it over and used a (very messy) whipstitch to tack it in place, just to keep those ends contained.

Then, the fun began. Starting at the tacked end, I folded the fabric into a triangle to make a corner of the bag, and sewed the edges of the strip together.

Then I turned it over, and folded it again.

And sewed another seam.

Then, I trimmed the extra points at the top of the bag, and got two triangles that I could use to fill in the holes.

In all, I had only a tiny bit of fabric left over.

And a little more yarn left over, which may need to find its way into another project sometime.

Then, I made a lining, with a pocket for the inside.

After sewing in the lining and adding a strap made from the same fabric, I had a bag.

I even put the little reinforced-diamond thingys on the handle, to make sure it’s extra secure (and mostly because I like the way they look).

And now, I have a new bag, sewn from my handwoven handspun handdyed yarn. Isn’t that fun?

I am especially pleased with how the colors came out. I did absolutely no planning about the color placement, but I really like how they work together. It’s amazing what a difference it made to sew with the bias angle (45 degrees). I had laid the fabric out in rectangular strips for a simpler design, and didn’t like the colors at all. The bias gives it a very dynamic, almost plaid look that I like a lot. Now, I just need to find an occasion to use it.

I have been taking a little bit of a creative holiday in the past couple of days, trying to take advantage of the lull between two storms. (That’s probably why this has become the week of novel-length blog posts…I’m suddenly giving myself time to think.) You see, we’re moving again in June. I accepted a teaching position in Boston, and so we’re heading out there this summer so that I can start up my lab.

It started out simple; I don’t get paid until September, but I wanted to spend some time getting things arranged so that I didn’t have to juggle too much at once when classes start up in the fall. I’m also taking advantage of these months in between to brush up on my quantum mechanics, since I’ll be teaching that in the spring semester and I haven’t thought about it in a long time. I’ve been spending every morning for the past month or so exercising my brain by working my way through a quantum textbook (I’m almost 200 pages in!), and it is a real workout. In a way, this has been something of a saving grace. I’m not someone who can sit around without a lot of mental stimulation without going crazy. My “off” time is usually composed of designing increasingly complicated knitting, dyeing, and weaving projects, after all. I can be idle for a few weeks, but after that I need somewhere to focus that intensity. Having something to work on for a few hours every day that demands a lot of mental engagement has actually been helpful in keeping me sane.

Of course, I also have to start planning my research projects and writing grant proposals. I have an 8 inch stack of papers to read, and really could use another trip to the library. You see where this is going, yes? Suddenly I’m unemployed, but doing a large portion of the work of an assistant professor. Slippery slopes are slippery.

Then came the opportunity to have a couple of students over the summer. This is good for me, because it gets students into the lab and gets the research running early. Since research is one of the primary considerations for tenure, and because it is also the one that can stall out for a million unforseen reasons completely outside of my control, it is good to get started sooner rather than later.  Of course, having to supervise two students working 32 hours a week means that I just lost my last summer “off” in a long time. As I knew would happen, my 5 months of “free” time before September have become increasingly demanding over the past few weeks. I’m ok with that, but it has been a little overwhelming at times.

Up until the show, I had been saying that teaching and the move had to wait until after the show. Now that it’s after the show, I am working to exercise some boundaries so that it doesn’t swallow me whole just yet.

This has largely involved taking this week to do whatever I feel like. (Which to my surprise has included quantum at least 2 of the four days so far, though not for the same 4-6 hours/day.)

I’ve also been intentionally avoiding dyeing. I love it, I want to do more of it, and I also need some space from it. I was definitely noticing that dyeing was becoming more like work and less like play in the weeks leading up to the show. I loved every minute of it, but it was part of a job that had to be done rather than a creative escape from work. That’s one of the risks of making a hobby into a job: if you’re not careful, it becomes a job. I have a million ideas of things to try, and it’s really hard not to dive right back in, but I’m telling myself that all of those ideas will be just as exciting and ready to go next week as they are today, and that right now it’s time to focus on other things. (Overenthusiasm for projects really is a wonderful thing, as long as you know when to push it back and make it wait. I am not always good at this. The secret is knowing that it only gets better with time.)

In the meantime, I’ve been doing some weaving

This is just a small sampler for a much larger project that I’m planning later on.

I’ve also been working on some fiber prep and spinning, as I mentioned yesterday. Of course, this involves thinking about the sweaters I might make from the yarn I’m creating, and particularly I’ve been considering what knitwear to make that will fit into a professional wardrobe in a more stylish city.

I’ve also been doing a little bit of swatching.

Or, more accurately, I’ve been doing some petting of the swatch that I made just before the show. This is the first swatch for the fall colors sweater, which I have determined needs to be knit on size 0 needles. I’m not sure that this falls into my professional wardrobe criteria, but I’m excited to work on it anyway. I haven’t settled absolutely on colorwork yet, as my original design was much more adventurous. But I do like the look of the colorwork, so currently I’m trying a few things and letting those ideas ripen in the background.

So I’ve been doing lots of little things here and there, catching up on projects that never get worked on because I’m caught up in something else, and I’ve been thinking about tying up some loose ends.

And then this morning, I was working on quantum and I needed a piece of paper. It must be all the natural colors I’ve been thinking about lately, but on the way to my office, a couple of skeins from the stash jumped into my head.

That’s 8 oz of millspun Corriedale that I bought at the Door County Shepherd’s Market two years ago. It’s been calling to me from the stash with increasing urgency in the past few weeks, but it’s been hard to design with since I don’t have very much of it. It really wants to be a sweater, but it would need to be something knit from the top that would be ok as a cropped version if I ran out of yarn.

I got my paper, turned to leave the office, and a thought popped into my brain. I didn’t want to forget it, so a minute later I had this:

(That’s a brilliant design for a top-down sweater knit all in one piece, as I’m sure you immediately recognized from the artwork. Heh.) That quickly turned into this:

And that looked very familiar. A couple of minutes and a few pins later, I had this:

Do you see it yet? How about now?

You can see that the increases in the spiral shawl make just a tiny bit more than a half circle, which just cries out to be waist shaping.

Here’s a slightly neater, more to-scale version:

I’m not sure where this is going, but one thing I can say for sure. Give your brain some space, and you’ll have a million new things to work on. Isn’t inspiration a wonderful thing?

Keeping track of the time is usually the last thing on my mind when I sit down to spin. But the Mike sweater came out of a conversation where he was asking just exactly how many hours it really took to spin and knit a sweater. I realized I had no good answer, other than a few vague estimates here and there. So, I’ve been logging my hours.

Today, I plied off the first three bobbins. The yarn is a worsted-weight, woolen spun, and I got 450 yards in just under 9 oz. The spinning took about 14 hours, and the plying 1 1/2.

At this rate, I’m guessing that the spinning should take around 50 hours total. Granted, this is slower than I usually spin, because Harriet’s wool is full of hay, and I have to keep stopping to pick out bits of VM here and there. They’re not such a big deal in the fluffy roving, but once they get spun into the wool they turn into very sharp, pointy little bits that would be uncomfortable to wear. (I have been making up for the constant stopping by imagining Harriet the Hungry Sheep eating her hay. Doesn’t that sound like a children’s book waiting to happen?)

The funny thing is, I think that the spinning will probably be the fast part. I am guessing that the knitting will take even longer, but I don’t really know for sure. Guess we’ll find out soon!

When I started spinning the Shetland fleece for Mike’s sweater, I suddenly realized that I was almost to the end of my natural fleece stash. (This is a very dangerous realization, as you will soon see. The universe conspires against an empty stash.)

After the Shetland, I had the Rhinebeck fleece that is just dying to become something soon, and two others that I am hand processing from the raw fleece, which could take an eternity.

The first fleece is one that I bought at the Door County Shepherd’s Market in 2010, and haven’t touched in at least a year. I kind of guiltily shuffle it around the stash from time to time, but haven’t worked on processing it at all lately. The second fleece is the Gulf Coast that I bought from Coggeshall Farm in Rhode Island last summer. They’re both beautiful fleeces, and they’re both washed and ready to go, but it takes forever to make a dent in those huge piles of fluff with a pair of hand cards. I start out well; for the first few weeks I’ll do a little bit each day, or at least each weekend. I can’t do much at a time, because the repetitive motion tends to annoy my tendons after a while. I get a couple of ounces in, and then look back at the pile left to go and realize it’s going to take years.

I have been working slowly away at the Gulf Coast fleece for the past couple of months, stealing a few minutes here or there when the weather is nice to sit out on the porch and card and comb. It is making beautiful, airy rolags, but it goes very slowly. I think I’ve processed about 6 oz total so far, and that really isn’t much.

I happened to mention this at spinning on Monday, and my friend Elaine jumped up and offered that I could borrow her drum carder. Well, I jumped right on that, both because I want to process these fleeces and because I’ve been considering buying a drum carder for a couple of years now but wasn’t sure how much I really wanted/needed one. Actually getting to use one would help me decide whether it’s something I really need in my toolbox, or just something that’s nice to have.

Well. We picked up the carder last night, brought it home, and 45 minutes later I had this:

That’s almost 6 oz of Gulf Coast, carded and ready for combing (which I’ll still do by hand). That would have taken me months to card by hand at the rate I go. There is now renewed hope that these fleeces will get processed and spun within the next decade. (Can’t wait!)

On Monday, Elaine had also brought 3 lbs of cloud roving to spinning. The cloud roving is an interesting prep that I’ve never seen before. It’s like huge batts of carded wool, but it isn’t drafted into roving. She wasn’t going to get to it, and wanted to know if I’d like it? If there’s one thing I am not good at, it’s refusing a home to some wandering wool that’s good quality, natural brown, and in sweater quantities, so it came home with me, too. I’m not sure yet what exactly it will become, but I’m betting on at least one sweater and probably two from the lot of it.

Of course, all of this happened just after I’d made a purchase at Greencastle. I wasn’t intending to buy at this festival, because that’s not why we were there, and we’re about to move. I had considered buying some yarn from Briar Rose, but that was it. In the spirit of avoiding purchases, I only made a couple of quick runs through the sale barns. The first was to purchase a braid from Fiber Optic to spin during the show, since we were worrying about having enough to sell (ha!) and I didn’t want to reduce our inventory. (Also, because I love Fiber Optic.)

And how could you not, with those colors?

I also popped into the barns a couple more times to warm up later on. But on that first pass, I whizzed past a booth full of Shetland from Under the Son Farm. They had 7 huge bags of combed lambswool top in all the different Shetland colors. I kept walking, and didn’t even stop to look because I knew it would be fatal. But seeing was enough. It had wormed its way into my brain and it stayed there. Some fibers do this to me, and I’ve found that it’s usually hopeless to argue when they do. I have some pretty good defenses in place, and when a wool makes it past all of them at the first glance, it’s bound to be a good match. There are a couple of skeins that I’ve passed on in the past, and I’ve never seen anything like them again. And, well, I wanted it.

We’ve been discussing Branden’s next sweater lately, and he wants a cabled fishermen’s sweater for the next design. I was planning to buy some Blackberry Ridge yarn, since I’ve been waiting for the perfect project to try it on. I thought that the fishermen’s sweater would be just the ticket, but then this Shetland stepped in. That oatmeal or medium gray color would be perfect. I tried to ignore it. It sat there and looked smug. At the end of the day, I sent Branden in to look at the colors. He agreed.

I bought enough top for a sweater for Branden, and a colorwork sweater for me. I could have skipped the second sweater, but I really wanted to put those colors together, especially with all the beautiful samples they had to look at in the booth. A sweater design jumped up fully formed, and I went with it. So, at the end of Greencastle, my natural wool spinning stash was already looking pretty filled out. (My dyed spinning stash is always looking pretty filled out, and I have a couple of sweaters’ worth there that needs to be dyed up. More on that later.)

And just because I can’t resist the comparison, here’s one of those big 1-lb balls of Shetland next to my 6 oz of Gulf coast:

Isn’t it amazing how much wool compresses?

Add to the Shetland the 3 lbs of cloud roving and the soon-to-be-spinnable fleeces, and I suddenly have quite a lot of spinning to do. I count at least 6 sweaters coming up in the queue, just because I dared to think I might have only one left in line. It should keep me busy, anyway!

We’re back from Greencastle, and I’m working on sorting through the remaining inventory, things that need to be put away, and the lessons learned from our first fiber festival. If you’re not interested in all the gory details, the show went very well and we learned some useful things, and you might just want to look at the booth photo and scroll on past…the rest is all a blow-by-blow account of what we learned, and may not be terribly interesting.

Still, scientist that I am, I can’t help but feel that this experiment needs a lab report, and it’s something that I really wish I’d been able to find 6 months ago when preparing for this event.

Not many people talk about how they prepare for a show. Maybe it’s because you get used to it after a while and it doesn’t seem like there’s much to figure out. Maybe it’s one of those trade secret things, where you don’t want to give away all the answers. There could be a thousand different reasons, but in the end it boils down to a lot of guesswork when you’re getting started. (From what I’ve heard, the guesswork doesn’t necessarily get better later on, but at least you have a starting place for making your guesses.)

There are so many unknowns at the beginning of this process. What do you really need to bring? How much stock is too much? Enough? Way too little? So, to remind myself of these things for the next show, and to help anyone else out there who might be thinking about trying this out, here’s my first-show breakdown.

First, it’s worthwhile to compare the Greencastle show to others that I have attended (as a customer). The biggest thing I noticed is that there was a lot less traffic than I would have expected. Several vendors there seemed to think that this was a particularly slow year, and said that it was usually well attended. The second thing that surprised me was the size of purchases. Most shows I’ve attended have had at least a few people walking around with big bags full of yarn or fiber for spinning. At Jefferson, the sight of a person walking around with 4 or 5 big bags full of fleece and a manic grin on their face really isn’t at all unusual. At this show, I saw very few people with more than one bag, or even more than a few items. This may be because of our booth placement (more on that in a minute), but it didn’t seem like people were purchasing as much as I have seen at other shows in the past. I don’t know if that’s typical in Greencastle or not, but I think it may be related to my third point, which is that this was almost exclusively a cash-only show. We had put a lot of time into hunting down a way of taking credit card, because I couldn’t imagine not taking card. In all of our purchases, not a single person wanted to use credit/debit; it was all cash and a couple of checks. (I think Branden was a little disappointed that he didn’t get to use his fancy Square card reader after all.)  Of the two purchases I made, one was on a card and the other was cash because the booth didn’t accept card.

And now for the lessons learned. First, things about the show in general:

1) Location matters. A lot. We were moved at the last minute to a booth behind one of the big barns. The new booth had a roof (instead of the tent we brought) which was really helpful when it rained on Friday afternoon. It was not helpful that we were one of only 4 booths in that area of the show, and that I was the only one selling yarn or fiber in our section. It was also not helpful that they decided to close the barn doors because it was cold, and that most of the traffic passed back and forth between the large indoor areas through the end of the barn opposite to where we were. From our reconnaissance trips to the indoor areas, I would guess that about 25% of the show participants walked past our booth, and probably only 10% saw us in their mad dash for the door to get out of the cold. The people that did see us were usually at the very beginning of their lap through the show, and so weren’t ready to start buying yet. A couple of them did come back around at the end, but most didn’t, as you’d probably expect.

2) Remember about wind. We knew we’d be outside, and that the forecast was for 60 degrees on Friday and mid-50’s on Saturday. We brought warm things, but we forgot to account for how much colder it gets when there is a constant breeze blowing. It would have been useful to have several more layers, though we got by fine as it was. We had plastic sheeting with us, and it might have inspired longer browsing sessions (and certainly would have increased our comfort level) if we’d hung it up as a wind break.

3) Inside is better when the weather is questionable. From what we heard, weather is always questionable at this show. Every vendor there had a horror story about weather at Greencastle, which really isn’t at all surprising for something in mid-April in the upper Midwest. Because it was so cold, the customers spent the entire time inside the barns or dashing back and forth between them. When it was warmer or sunnier, we did pretty reasonable business, but that meant that we only had a few busy hours in the whole weekend.

4) Demos help. We had brought lots of samples of yarn spun from my fiber and several sweaters knit from handspun. Being able to talk about how to design a yarn from fiber was really fun, and people liked to be able to touch the skeins. Because of this, we had interest from spinners and non-spinners alike. There was also a really noticeable change in the number of people that noticed our booth when I was actively spinning at my wheel. Unfortunately, my hands were too cold to spin for most of Saturday, but it’s good to know that it’s worth the trouble to bring the wheel, both to keep me amused and to draw people in.

5) Our presentation is good. Several people commented that they liked the braids as a way of packaging the fiber. A couple of people wanted to buy our fiber stand right out from underneath us. We didn’t spend much on display because this was our first show, so it was gratifying to hear that we’d done well with what we had. Our booth was small, but at least it didn’t scream amateur.

6) We brought the right amount of stock. This was my biggest obsession up to and during the show, and it’s the one that’s just impossible to predict. How much is enough? Both Branden and I were feeling a little sick at the beginning of the show, watching all the pros bringing in hundreds of pounds of stock. What if we were totally wiped out in the first day? How do you manage inventory to make sure you have enough to offer choice throughout the show, but still make sure you’re not holding back what you could be selling? It turns out that we needn’t have worried. We brought 144 braids of fiber, and sold 7 in the first hour and a half (before noon). After that, we sold 2 more before the end of the day (7 pm) on Friday. We sold nothing on Saturday morning (very cold and windy), but the afternoon was busier, and we had a couple of people take us up on the buy 4 get 1 free promotion, so our total was up to 26 braids sold by the end of the show. Just before closing, we made a wholesale sale of 33 more. We had enough stock to offer choice throughout the show, and we would have had enough to accommodate a busier marketplace. I think it’s unlikely that we would have sold out, even in a prime location in a busy show, which means that we probably had roughly the right amount on hand.

Now, things I learned about the market:

1) There are not all that many spinners. Many people stopped by to look, and almost all were interested in spinning, but there weren’t many who actually spin. There were lots in the “well, I have a wheel….” category, and a few in the “planning to learn soon” category, but not many that self-identified as spinners. Clearly, spinners need to work on PR.

2) People loved the colors. Above all, that was what drew them into the booth. Even non-spinners were interested in stopping by to look at my colors. I take this to be a very good sign.

3) My yarn base needs to be improved if I’m going to offer yarn. Lots of people loved the colors in my skeins, but we didn’t sell any of the small selection of yarn I had on hand. I think it’s just not an exciting enough yarn base. I’m not particularly inclined to explore this area further, but it’s worth knowing that the yarn base I’ve used in the past isn’t terribly compelling.

4) Buying selection was based on color, not fiber. Very few people cared much about the breed of fiber that they spun; most were drawn in by a particular color and went with that. A few people cared about the breed properties or wanted to spin something new, but for most that was a secondary consideration.

5) Most people buy without a project in mind. Maybe this is in the “duh” category, but it surprises me. Only a couple of people actually had any plans for what they would do with the yarn that they spun; it’s just not a factor in the buying decision. (This is completely opposite of my tendencies, so it’s an especially important thing for me to keep in mind.)

6) Quantity doesn’t matter. A couple of people asked if we had larger quantities of a particular color. No one seemed inclined to match/combine colors for a project. Even the people who bought larger numbers of braids bought them as individual units, not as part of a larger collection. I personally don’t really buy or spin 4 oz quantities, because I am always working on a larger project and 4 oz is never enough, so it surprised me that no one wanted larger amounts. (I suppose I should see #5 above.)

7) Multicolor braids sold better than semisolids or single-color gradients. A large portion of my stock was semisolid or single-color, because it’s so easy to spin them into a yarn that I find knittable, and they are easy to use to complement a wilder colorway. Combining #s 5 and 6 above, it’s not surprising that this appeared to make no difference. Multicolor sells better, and high-contrast multicolor was best of all. Good to know.

8 ) I missed the story line. This is more about me than the market, but I really missed being able to point to a photo or an inspiration and be able to explain where a colorway comes from. That’s the part I really like about selling through the blog, and it was definitely missing in the show environment. I will need to find a way to include this in the future.

That’s a lot of lessons! There are even more on my list, but I think that those are the biggest ones. A lot of them are things that you can only learn by getting out there and trying it, so I think the show was worthwhile. Our sales weren’t stellar, but they were sufficient, and the feedback was very good. We had good conversations with a few people, and I’m hopeful that there will be some new voices on the blog as a result (if this post doesn’t scare everyone off). The wholesale order also means that my fibers will be making their way to Maryland Sheep and Wool, so we’ll get some more exposure there. On the whole, I think we can call this a success.

…in which we prove yet again that you really can fit anything in a Prius.

That’s 144 braids of fiber, a couple of tables, and a tent, all packed up and ready for the show in Greencastle. Set up starts in a few minutes!

The final countdown is on…we leave for the show on Thursday. I have quite a pile of fiber (about 150 braids) waiting patiently in boxes, a basket full of sample skeins and sweaters spun from hand dyed and spun yarn, and today I have one more sweater to add to the pile:

The striped shawl sweater (which really needs a better name) is done. I finally finished the zipper this afternoon, and now it just needs its second and final blocking.

I am mostly happy with how it came out. I like the design itself even more than I thought I would, but it came out a little bit too tight around the waist and hips because of a couple of extra decreases that would have been better left out. I tried it on after blocking for the steek and it seemed to fit just fine, but wearing it around the house today I can tell it’s still a little tight. Between that and the way this construction stretches, it tends to ride up just a touch. You can see that a little bit in the back.

There’s a tiny bit of a crease at the point of the triangle, and a bit of bunching under the arms. Both of those go away with a little bit of tugging, though, so I’m hoping that it will relax out with the second blocking. An extra inch would take care of both. Or, I could always just wear it open.

I very much like having the power of steeking in my toolbox. This is my second steeked sweater in a row now, and the first where I picked up stitches and knit a button band (the purple stripe around the zipper is picked up and knit). I’d show you close ups, but my camera ran out of battery and refused to take any more pictures, so that will have to wait for another day.

I wanted to try a crochet steek on this sweater, but found out that that method shouldn’t be used close to the end of a row. Since all of my color changes happened in that front band, I decided to stick with a machine-reinforced steek instead. I ended up using two rows of machine stitching, and then just folding it over and tacking it down. There’s a piece of grosgrain ribbon attached to the zipper inside to help protect the raw edge, and it looks very secure to me. I’m already working away on the next sweater design, and I suspect that it may also have a steek. I have quite a few pullover sweaters now, and am really looking forward to having these new cardigans in my wardrobe. (Bright lights has been getting a ton of use, now that the weather is starting to warm up a bit.)

I’m happy to have the striped shawl sweater finished in time, because I think it will make a fun sample for the show booth. It’s a good example of what you can do to mix different handpainted colors into a wearable garment. The sweater is one of the lightest I’ve made, weighing in at 1 lb, 1 oz. It took 5 braids of fiber because I needed just a little more purple to finish the body.

Linda and Walden have been knitting away at their test knits for the shawl version of this design. You should go take a peek; it’s really interesting to see how the different yarns and colors highlight the geometry of the increases. I can’t wait to see how the final versions come out!

I also finished spinning up a sample of the new Rambouillet for the booth.

I ended up with about 470 yards of 2-ply fingering weight. Somehow I am still having trouble breaking through that fingering-to-laceweight barrier. I’m not sure whether to blame it on the wheel or on myself, but my best attempts at a fine yarn have all been coming out in this range, even using the smallest whorl on the lace flyer. It’s just difficult to get enough twist into the yarn to keep it fine. Some sections of these skeins are in the heavy laceweight range, though, so I think there may be some hope of figuring out how to go finer yet.

This color isn’t one that I would usually gravitate toward on its own, but I am itching to use it. The words “leaves of grass” are all I can think when I look at those skeins, and I’m thinking it will turn into something lacy with a wheat-ear theme. Time will tell, though. The Rambouillet spins like a dream and puffs up into a beautifully fluffy yarn, and I have a feeling that it will bloom even more after it’s bath. It’s upstairs drying right now, so we’ll know soon!

As we get closer and closer to the fiber festival, it’s time to stop and take stock of the dyeing. I finally banded up all the braids last night, and then laid them all out to see the colors. The bottom row is polwarth, then falkland, then BFL, rambouillet, and shetland.

These are mostly semisolid colors, with just a few gradients and multi-color braids thrown in here and there. Next, I’ll be turning my attention back to the real painted fibers with multiple colors, but first I wanted to get a sense of where things stood.

In general, the color distribution looks pretty good. Lots of blue-greens and purples (no surprise there), a few browns, a surprising number of orange. Not much in the true/dark reds, the true blues, or the bright greens and yellows, so those are places to maybe make some more. Also, a few real pinks couldn’t hurt.

We also finished another project for the show this weekend. We’ve been looking and looking for ways of displaying items, and haven’t found much that was a) attractive b) portable and c) relatively inexpensive. So, we made something.

I bought some canvas at Joann’s using one of their 50% off coupons. On Friday, I pulled out my trusty sewing machine and set to work. First, I cut the fabric into strips and sewed the strips together to make pockets. Then, Branden cut and assembled the frame over the weekend. We’re both really pleased with how this came out. I am thinking that it may become a permanent addition to my fiber room after the show. (I’m also thinking I might need a few more…)

Of course, I like it even better when it’s full of fiber.

And the best part?

It folds up when it’s not in use, so it’s really easy to slip into the car when it’s time to go. We’re getting close!

…makes Jack a dull boy, right?

Since most everyone seemed to be leaning toward play (and since I had some pretty strong leanings in that direction myself), I decided to try spinning the second half of the gradient as a short repeat yarn.

As instructed, I kept it simple. No overthinking…not even a bit. (Who me? Overthink? Never!)

I split the top along its full length, making 10 very narrow strips.

Then I spun them, one after the other until I ran out. (I was also careful to keep the cats out of the pile while I was spinning. This was critical, and proved to require more attention than I expected. Apparently lots of little strips of fiber = warm nest in the mind of a cat.)

I chain plied the singles like I did for the first skein, and ended up with about 2 yard lengths of each color (compared to about 20 yards per color in the previous skein). You can see the difference in the color distribution here:

And the two skeins together:

True to form, I like the long repeat version better in the skein, but I’m really not sure which I would prefer in the knitting.

I’d started out spinning this yarn expecting it to become a pair of socks, so I spun a (slightly heavy) sock weight. But then I was thinking about it, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted that long a gradient along the length of just one sock. That’s where the possibility generator kicked in and suggested that shorter repeats would be nice, so that there would just be a few rounds of each color in repeating stripes.

For a sock, I think I’d much prefer the shorter repeat version. I’d guess that there would be 3, maybe 4 rows per color, and then the colors will repeat every half inch or so, for the full length of the sock.

If I were to knit this into a shawl or a larger garment, then the long repeat version would look really good striped with a darker solid color. Of course, you could also alternate sections of long and short repeats to get all kinds of interesting combinations, too.

Because this is me, I no longer want to use this yarn for socks. My brain somehow manages to take a sharp left turn every time I sit down to think about knitting socks. Sweaters and shawls and bigger things are just much more exciting for some reason. (Also, I like my socks to match, which might be hard with this yarn now.)

Last night, I was having visions of a stranded colorwork bag, with the bright yarn worked on a dark blue background. But today, a mischievous little voice is suggesting that they would look very nice woven.

I said I didn’t overthink the spinning. I didn’t promise anything at all about the using of the yarn.

(Of course, all these ideas just mean more decisions, but that woven idea is pretty sticky. I think it might win.)

I like to think of myself as a fairly decisive person. It takes me a while to make up my mind, but once I’ve thought things through I generally know what I want, and I stick to it. There is some dithering in the beginning while I try to hold all the possibilities open, but I am generally pretty comfortable making the final call.

In some seasons of life, though, there are a lot of decisions to be made. And I’ve found that they usually come all at once. It’s never one major decision, but six. In those moments, I find myself feeling terribly indecisive. The decision muscle gets overworked, and suddenly something as simple as choosing what’s for dinner is just too much. Even simple things can be hard to choose when you’re busy re-deciding the whole rest of your life.

(I know I’m being a wee bit cryptic here…everything is fine, the changes/decisions are good ones to have to make, and we’re excited about them. Still, the news isn’t out yet in all the appropriate corners, and it’s best for it to come in the right ways. And no, we are not having a baby. I feel the need to say that right off. Just so you know. No getting excited.)

So let’s just say that I am feeling a bit overwhelmed by the current bounty of choice. I don’t know what to work on. I can’t seem to focus on any one thing long enough to make any particular progress on it before spiraling off to do or research some other important thing. Me being indecisive is pretty unusual. Me being unfocused is downright unheard of, but so it is.

So, I’m keeping my head down and working on what’s next, directly ahead of me. Anything with time pressure comes first, so preparing for the fiber show will be top of the heap for the next two weeks. In that spirit, I sat down last night and spun up a sample:

I want one sample for each kind of wool that I sell, and realized that I am short a Shetland and a Rambouillet from the new supplier. I’m 2 oz in, and have a slightly overplied sock weight yarn, chain plied to keep the color repeats pure. I am kind of surprised at how much I love it. But maybe that’s just because it is solid evidence that I have actually managed to produce one whole skein of yarn. That feels like a good reason to love it.

Something in the spinning must have relaxed my brain, because the “possibilities!” side kicked in first thing this morning. Usually I welcome a visit from the possibilities generator. Even if I don’t end up following any of the crazy paths it suggests, it’s usually a fun ride. But this time, it just brings more decisions. Do I spin the other 2 oz the same way, leave it unspun as part of the sample to show how a gradient-dyed braid will spin up, or do I split it into thin strips of a quarter the thickness of the original top to get a second skein with shorter color repeats as an instructive example of the kinds of control we have as spinners? (This would be particularly interesting if the yarn were worked as stripes in some unknown future project; alternating between the short and long color repeats could do all kinds of interesting things. But then, what would I do with it?)

So here’s the question: do I finish the spinning as I had originally planned, or do I take this opportunity to play?

It’s just a sample, so it really shouldn’t matter what I do. And yet, something needs to be decided, and I’m not sure I have the brain power to do it. Common sense says to keep it simple because I don’t need one more thing to think about. But I also have an almost irresistible temptation to play…