DesigKnit

Well, things have officially gotten busy. I started working last Friday (a day earlier than expected, but I needed to get the building key so that I could go in over the weekend and drop off boxes). Turns out that my commute is about an hour and a half each way, but there’s about 20 mins of walking in there that I’m calling exercise so that it sounds better. (And so that I get credit for being disciplined and exercising every day, when the truth is that I have no choice.)

A week in, I’ve made lots of progress in lab, have failed to make any progress with IT and HR, and have a to-do list that is literally several pages long. And yes, I am falling in headlong, which surprises nobody.

However! I have decided that, since this is my last summer of not technically having any responsibilities besides those I give myself, and since I am already showing up to work 3 months early to get a head start, Fridays are my day “off” to catch up on other things I want to do.

Like blog.

Except I can’t find my camera. I have a bunch of pictures on there that I wanted to show you, and it is just nowhere to be found. I really wish that the house was together enough for house pictures, but there are still a few niggling things that need to be done before it’s done, and right now it looks like a house lived in by two people who work a lot and don’t really feel like hanging pictures in their evening time. (Which it is. At least it’s an honest kind of mess.) All the major things are done, but that last inch is taking longer than the mile, you know?

So. House photos soon, but not today. I was going to show you pictures of our one walk down into Salem, where we peeked in at my new LYS, but that’s on the camera that’s on walkabout.

The one thing that’s great about my hour commute is that I’m on a train. That means that I can knit, at least some of the time. I’ve been getting in about a half an hour each way on the commuter rail, but it’s easier not to knit on the more crowded subway at rush hour. That means that I am zooming along up the second side of the waving lace sweater:

I am well into the neck decreases, and should be done with the shoulder strap in another hour or so of knitting. I need to get the pattern written for the front section today so that I can start the back panel and test all my decrease charts.

We’re leaving tomorrow for Florida, where we’re attending Branden’s family reunion. It should be interesting, as I’ve never met most of the people there, and he last saw them in something like ’95, when he was a freshman in high school. (To give you an idea of the strangeness of “reuniting”, I’ve met his mother in person only once the day before our wedding 9.5 yrs ago, and haven’t seen her since. We got along just fine, but their family really isn’t anything like close, geographically or otherwise.)

I am hoping for knitting time, though I understand that there are lots of “family activities” planned, so we’ll see what happens.

I have gotten some spinning done in the evenings lately. Last night, I finished plying up the Fiber Optic singles with the brown Rambouillet that I dyed to go along with them.

(I also have a picture of the two source bobbins with the plied yarn, but you can guess where that is…)

I really like the way this came out. Using just two plies preserved the long color repeats of the silk, and the brown lends a nice background color to the yarn. I’m not usually a fan of barberpole/marled yarns in the skein, but I almost always love them knit up. When I look at the skein in my hand, the barberpoling seems really pronounced and the brown is almost too dominant, but if you step back a bit the silk pops right out again.

(Can you see it there, sitting on the brown sweater I need to mend?)

I spun the brown and the BFL/silk to the same gauge, but the Rambouillet is significantly fluffier than the BFL silk and so doesn’t take as much fiber to make the same thickness of yarn. After plying the two together, I have 6 oz of yarn, which means that there is 2 oz of brown left on the bobbin. I find it amazing that I seem to have gotten twice the length out of the Rambouillet, but it is pretty fluffy stuff. I’ll ply the rest of the brown on itself, and that should give me another 2 oz of matching yarn to play with.

All told, I ended up with 453 yards in 6 ounces, which puts me pretty firmly in the laceweight category. It still need to be washed to set the twist, but it’s pretty fine right now.

And with that, I am off to begin pattern writing, packing, and otherwise getting my house in order. Hopefully I’ll be back with more pictures soon!