DesigKnit

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?

After months of feeling like my knitting isn’t really going anywhere, I was a little stunned when this sprung off my needles this weekend:

I started at the collar with a vague idea of where I was going, and added lace and purl row details as the mood struck me. I knew within minutes of starting the swatch that this was going to be an addictive project. I think my hands have been missing the texture of handspun yarn, really. I love the Briar rose yarn and it is going to make a beautiful sweater, but commercial yarn doesn’t have quite the same feel to it, and I think I was missing my handspun without realizing it.

It also helps that this is the yoke part of the pattern, and the yoke always goes quickly. Add to that the fact that I’m knitting on size three needles (which feel huge now t0 me) and throw a few pattern rows in there to help stretch the yarn and keep things interesting, and you have a recipe for fast knitting.

The pattern is a simple yarnover mesh, and I really love how it worked out. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to guesstimate the gauge difference for stockinette and the lace based on my swatch alone, so I blocked it on the needles on Sunday night, and am thrilled to report that it seems to be laying flat. I haven’t had much time to knit since the weekend, but I’m looking forward to getting back to it. It’s now past the sleeve split and into the body, so it’s back to a smaller number of stitches again and is moving quickly.

Almost too quickly, in fact. I realized on Sunday that I only have 8 oz of yarn when I thought I had 12, which means that I’m rather short on yardage. Fortunately, I have a couple of braids in the spinning stash that complement the main color quite nicely.

The colors are close but not quite the same, which I think will give it a nice gradient effect and help to prepare for the corespun. (Oh, yeah…I also need to spin the rest of the corespun, too…did I mention that I didn’t really plan this project out carefully?) I am currently thinking that I’ll spin one single from each braid, and then ply them together. The extra 8 oz will stretch the yarn that I have, and should give me enough to make the sleeves a little fuller, and probably also full length. The whole yoke was knit from 3.5 oz, so having 16 total should give me plenty to play with.

I have to admit to being a little torn between forging boldly ahead with the knitting (and risking running out of yarn) and holding back a bit to let myself catch up with the spinning first. If only all problems were so difficult to solve!

Fortunately, spring break is next week, so there’s a good chance that I’ll find some good, solid knitting and spinning time soon. I have about 6-8 oz left to spin on Branden’s sweater yarn to free up the bobbins, and then this project is next in line. It’s wonderful when projects practically knit themselves!