There are some things that I never, ever utter, and “too hot to knit” is among them. I am the person that can wear a wool sweater for an hour in late June because I’m excited that I just finished it. I can be cold when it’s 70 degrees out. I don’t sweat, and I am never too hot.

But today, this weekend, right now, I am too hot to knit. A big, still, humid pocket of air has settled over the city today, and it is warm. I think the real problem is that it only got down to 70 last night, so nothing cooled off overnight. When it’s hot by 8 am, it’s going to be a hot day.

There have actually been a few nights this week where pulling a large, heavy wool sweater over to work on was just really not appealing. So I’ve been working on other things. Cleaning the loom (oh my, it is dirty!). Reading. Taking my cue from the cats and laying around in a languorous heap.

Last weekend, I spent the warm part of the day finishing up my current weaving project. I took the fabric off the loom, washed it, and hemmed the ends. And I now have a set of tea towels:

These have been on the loom for a while, and quite frankly, haven’t been getting much attention. I’m happy to have them finished now, and it is very satisfying to have a little pile of handwoven items to pet.

Here they are all laid out so you can see the patterns:

The thing that I find endlessly fascinating about weaving is how many different fabrics you can get by just changing the order in which you pick up the shafts. All of these pieces were woven using the same warp threads; all of the vertical strings are the same. The only difference is which ones you pick up when, and which colors you use to weave the weft (the back and forth part), and yet you end up with entirely different fabrics. It boggles my mind to think of all the possibilities.

Next, I am planning to make a scarf with these:

Last year, my aunt sent me a package for Christmas containing three skeins of Lion Brand chenille. I love the colors, and I love the look of the yarn, but it’s not the kind of stuff that I knit with. I thought it might be good woven, though, so I bought a cone of bamboo to match the color.

I wound the warp this morning (i.e. I used a gadget Branden made me to measure out 100  5-yard lengths of yarn for the warp threads), and tied them on to the back of the loom, ready to be threaded through one by one. I cannot say how much I love the color of this yarn (the photo of the yarn on the loom is more true to its real color). When this project is finished, I think I’m going to do a textured weave with just this color as both warp and weft.

This will be just a narrow piece; a scarf about 10 inches wide. With such a thick weft yarn, it should go very quickly, and I’m really excited to see how the chenille works up. I am always amazed at how differently fibers perform in weaving and knitting, and I think that this yarn is really going to shine in a woven cloth. And, I can work on it when it’s too hot to knit, which is an added bonus.

I’ve been avoiding my wheel lately for fear that I will finish the sweater spinning and run out of projects (not to mention getting one step farther ahead of my knitting than I already am).

On Sunday night, I stole away to the dye studio (aka the basement) to make sure there was some backup spinning should I happen to run out.

I dyed up the 8 oz of Finn top that I bought along with the sweater fiber in a mixture of blues and greys. I wasn’t expecting to have so much white left in the final product, but I rather like it as is, so we’ll see what happens. I’m thinking laceweight for this one, as long as the color changes aren’t too dramatic.

I also dyed up a set of samples for the summer sampling project, since the summer is half over and I have not yet spun a single sample. Best laid plans and all that…

I am absolutely thrilled with the way these came out. The colors are perfect, and I think it will be really fun to see how they spin up. I would have been tempted to start them tonight, but I spent most of the evening washing down the loom, cleaning away 5 or so years’ worth of grime. There’s a lot of work left to go, but judging by the color of the wash water, progress has been made.

And now, I am going to put my feet up, and knit.

….when you can have a craft house?

A friend of mine told me a while ago that she has a loom sitting around unused, and that she’d love it if I’d borrow it for a while.

Branden enthusiastically enabled, but it wouldn’t fit in our car.

Then another friend told me that she had a truck and would help me move it.

Then a third friend (who also happens to be our awesome downstairs neighbor) helped us carry it up the stairs.

A few friends and a lot of enabling later, I have a loom in my livingroom (dining room chairs and cat added for scale…).

It may still move to the craft room, but it’s really becoming harder and harder to maintain the appearance of segregation between crafty activities and living space. And that isn’t entirely a bad thing, right?

We have a lot of books.

(And no, that’s not quite all…)

When we moved last, we swore we weren’t getting any. more. books,  a vow we knew we’d break even as we were making it.

We’ve been pretty good, but then Interweave had their hurt book sale. I made the mistake of opening the email.

I may have gotten a few spinning resource books (I had only two before).

And this one I just had to have, because I don’t know the first thing about weave structure and it is such a fascinating and complex world.

And then there were a couple for the inspiration section.

If you need me, I’ll be reading.

On this day last year, we landed in Germany. I stayed until November, Branden until February.

Tomorrow, Branden will be getting on a plane for Atlanta, where he will spend the next four and a half months training for his new job. He’ll get back in mid-November.

This year has kind of an odd symmetry to it; 5 months together, three months apart, three months together, 5 months apart. We weren’t thrilled when we learned about this latest separation, but it’s clearly the right decision, he’s excited about the new job, the training is going to be fun and very useful, and at least Atlanta isn’t as far away as Europe. (Though the last week of his training will bring him to Austria, a few hours’ drive from where we lived in Germany…see what I mean about symmetry?)

So what’s a knitter to do with an impending separation?

I cast on a sweater, of course.

Fortunately, even Branden’s sweaters don’t take 5 months to knit, but there will be warm wooliness waiting when he gets back (in November when one can yet again appreciate warm wooliness).

I think the Eco Wool has finally found its calling.

I have one very inflexible rule when it comes to buying yarn: it must have a purpose.

This is mostly to avoid unnecessary stash enhancement, and it has worked very well in keeping my purchases reasonable, even when I might be tempted to let them get out of hand. It’s also so that I know how much yarn to buy, because my stash is full of “almost enough” skeins that never quite turn into anything, obtained in the months before the stash rule was put in place.

Sometimes, though, having a project for the yarn gets in the way of me actually using it.

I bought enough Cascade Eco wool for a full-sized afghan about 3 years ago. I love this yarn. I loved the cables. I hated knitting the long, scarf-like strips. I put it aside, three skeins in.  I’ve never gone back.

I’ve tried to pick it up again, but it just hasn’t stuck; this project is simply not working. (Not to mention the fact that I have since discovered that any knit object left within the cat’s range will be full of pulls from their passionate and blissful kneading.)

A few months ago, I officially crossed that project off the list of UFOs, and off the list of stash earmarks. It’s time for that yarn to reach its full potential, don’t you think?

On Tuesday, I finished the second sleeve of the sunset sweater. After doing a little happy dance, I tried it on and promptly realized that I’d decreased a few too many stitches in those last 6 inches, and that the cuffs didn’t match.

After a few minutes of pouting, complaining, and unsuccessfully trying to convince myself I’d never notice, I tore back and began knitting the last 6 inches again. 

Later that night, I snipped a stitch about an inch from the hem, and spent Wednesday evening in the basement sitting out our first-ever tornado warning while steadily unzipping a row of stitches. (Photo was taken on the porch after dinner on Tuesday, not in the basement on Wednesday…)

Then on Thursday and Friday, I added an extra 2 1/2 inches, and grafted it back on. I’m happy to say that the graft is all but invisible on both the outside:

and the inside:

I can feel the slight difference in tension where the graft is, but I can’t really see it, even on fairly close inspection.

Yesterday, I blocked.

Today, I tried it on.

And I now declare it perfect.

Feels like the summer is just flying along. I had a bunch of blog posts to write this week, and they just didn’t happen somewhere in the time warp that is the workweek.

I usually try not to cram too much into a single post, but let’s get caught up, shall we?

I’ve been hesitating to start spinning for the new sweater before getting a really good idea of how much yarn it was going to take to finish the current one. I’m closer on yardage than I’d like, so I wanted to make sure that it was going to be enough before forging ahead on the next.

Finally, I can say out loud that we’re going to make it. In fact, I’m going to have a skein (or two!) left over. I reduced the sweater length pretty dramatically, so I’m thinking that I’ll probably snip a stitch near the hem and graft on a few more inches with whatever yarn is left over.

But before that, I have to finish the second sleeve, which is currently killing me. Somewhere around the elbow, I was suddenly done with this project (I think it’s the weight of the sweater pulling on the needles that’s getting to me). There are only a few inches left, so it should be finished soon, but I am counting the stitches, which is entirely unlike me.

While I was dithering about how best to spin the next sweater, I shook things up a bit and spun up the 8 oz of Finn that I bought at the Shepherd’s market. (Shook up as in the amount of fiber was less than enough for a sweater…that is fast becoming a rarity in this household…)

I ended up with two large skeins of very soft two ply yarn that total about 500 yards, and one very small one that should be just perfect for a swatch. I’ve been browsing stitch dictionaries for the past couple of days, wondering what it will be.

I figured that I’d have plenty of time to whip up a scarf or a stole before the next sweater was spun, but it’s beginning to look like that won’t be the case.

I started spinning on Monday night, and today I plied the first set of three bobbins:

Which marks the halfway point in the spinning.

So maybe that’s how it got to be Saturday. Either that, or for a single moment the time warp was operating in my favor. Think spinning a wheel might be able to create eddies in space-time?

It never ceases to amaze me that this much fiber:

Fits on one little bobbin.

Two nights, two bobbins. Sailing toward a sweater.

An unfortunate side effect of finding moths in your needle basket is the absolute requirement that said basket be thrown away, or at least immediately repurposed.

This leads to questions about how best to organize the needle collection, which has been a carefully avoided problem for well over a year now.

I have been storing all of my needles in their original packages; small ziploc bags for circs, tiny cardboard and plastic sheaths for dpns. The ziploc bags work reasonably well as long as I keep them in size order, but the cardboard sheaths are a disaster. They split and spill the needles all the time, and most have lost the tabs that say what size the needles are, so there is no good way of identifying what’s what.

Having to rehome the needle collection made this into a slightly higher priority issue, so I pulled out the sewing machine and did what I’ve been meaning to do for a long time.

A few scraps of fabric and an hour or two later, I had a needle case with pockets for all of my dpns.

And I even got to play around with some of the fancy stitch functions on my machine.

Sometimes all it takes is a little kick to get things going.

Now if I could only muster the energy to deal with the circs…