As you well know, Branden is fond of playing enabler when it comes to fibery things.

Of course, this means that he gets reciprocal enabling where appropriate. (Though I must say that I have the easier job…enabling him mostly involves not saying “no” and telling him to go play in the basement on occasion. Not exactly challenging work.)

In the past few months, he and our neighbor have been building a milling machine in the basement so that they can cut parts for whatever nefarious purposes arise.

A few weeks ago, I was at the spinning guild meeting, and one of the members was using English wool combs to prepare a fleece.  It was a funny coincidence, because I’d just bought a fleece and had been wondering how I was going to make a semi-worsted roving out of it.

Well.

Once I’d seen the combs in action, I had my answer. The next day, we went to the (somewhat) local fiber shop that sells spinning supplies, and looked at what they had. Wool combs are pretty expensive (I think the cheapest pair was $79), and the ones I liked were on the more expensive side.

Branden got that look in his eye that says “I could make these.” It was promptly followed by the grin that means he wants enabling.

So, he went to a hardware store, disappeared into the basement, and in a day or two I had these:

They’re not quite perfect yet, but I’ve been told that version 2.0 will be appearing soon, with pointier tips, closer-spaced tines, and possibly a nicer handle (if he manages to construct his new wood lathe in time, you see…).

In the meantime, I’ve been pre-combing the wool and preparing to use the new combs when they arrive. Turning this:

into this:

I love the roving that I’m getting; the combs clean out the nupps and vegetable matter so much better than my hand cards, and even this early version leaves the fibers nicely aligned for worsted spinning.

Synergy is a beautiful thing.

The title says it all, doesn’t it? Well, maybe not quite all…

My lab went to a conference in Minneapolis this week, and my labmate Mariko and I managed to sneak out of the networking dinners long enough to get a tour of the city with Ellen on Thursday night. Unfortunately, I brought my camera to the hotel with me, and then promptly forgot to put it in my purse, so there are no pictures. (Ellen, being better prepared, has a couple of pictures of me on her blog.)

Considering that we were together for just a few hours, we made quite a tour of the city. We stopped at the Textile Arts center, where they had beautiful handmade garments, quilts, and crafted items on display. It’s probably a good thing that they were so expensive (and rightly so), or I might have ended up with a much heavier suitcase on the way back! No pictures were allowed, but I wish I’d thought to at least sketch some of the shapes of the garments; most were a little too haute couture for me, but the lines were good and could easily be modified to fit simpler pieces. The detail was amazing, and all hand-done. The textile center itself was pretty amazing, with space for several guilds and a library, as well as a small gallery and shop. It seemed like a real center for the crafting community, and a great place to hang out.

After we’d had our fill of high fashion, we headed over to StevenBe, which has to be the funkiest yarn store I’ve ever been in, and one that’s truly a reflection of all that’s unique about its owner. His exuberant personality is everywhere you look, from the full-length mirror and the chandelier hanging from the rafters to the cassette tape sweater and handspun art yarn that grace the display hooks. It’s so refreshing to find a place that is unabashedly unique, simply doing its own thing and trusting that everyone that comes in will be charmed (as we were). Definitely a must-see if you’re ever in Minneapolis.

We finished off the evening at the Birchwood cafe, another cute little establishment that apparently doesn’t mind its patrons sitting at tables and painting (as the guy next to us was doing) or knitting while waiting for their food.

In all, it was a very fun evening, and it was great to finally meet Ellen in person after commenting back and forth for something like 3 years. And now that we know it’s only a 4 hour drive separating us, I can imagine that there might be further exploits in our future.

( certainly hope so, and, I will try very hard to remember the camera next time!)

It’s that time of year. Fluttery, soft creatures thump against the windows like tiny bits of feather floating uncertainly through the night air. Moths by the thousands flock to the light, desperate to get in.

And sometimes they do.

I went to get a pair of needles from my basket yesterday, and noticed that some brown dirt fell out of the bottom when I moved it. I stopped to investigate, and found a single skein of leftover alpaca yarn serving as an unintentional banquet.

Alarms sounded, lights flashed, security walls dropped. The needle basket is well separated from the yarn baskets and the stash proper, but no chances can be taken. The entire stash was gone through, piece by piece, checking for evidence of more intruders.

I found none.

But I have seen a few adult moths in the house since then, and some of them were in the closet where the stash is stored.

Thankfully, there is a system of plastic bins and separate bags and a semi-strategic dispersion of the stash throughout the house, so any infestations tend to be fairly well contained, and can be rapidly dealt with.

But still. Moths in the stash a day and a half before I leave town is really just bad, bad timing.

We’ve spent several hours in the past day and a half pulling apart closets, locating every possible food source, inspecting and enclosing. Putting things in small, sealed containers where they can’t contaminate one another. Trying to find the source.

I think it’s under control. Everything is hidden beneath the frail protection of plastic, waiting for its turn in the freezer. There is no evidence of damage in anything beyond that one small skein of scrap yarn. The adults killed are roughly the same number as the casings found, and they can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. The alert level may be down to orange.

Here’s the community service announcement of the day: Check thoroughly, check often.  It’s easy to forget in the heat of summer, but this is the best time for invaders to sneak in undetected, and they multiply fast.

So for the love of wool, go check your stashes.

I’m currently knitting my first hand dyed, hand spun, hand knit sweater. That’s a lot of hands, but there is one step further back in the processing chain left to go (short of buying a sheep, which isn’t happening anytime soon).

Last weekend, I decided to take that last step, and I bought a fleece from a sheep named Molly (who I hear is a sweetheart, and produces lovely wool):

That is what you’re supposed to do at a Shepherd’s Market, right?

I spent all day on Monday separating the colors and fiber types and washing it in small batches. Then we spread it out in the sun to dry, on a rack that Branden whipped together from some scrap wood and chicken wire. There is a lot of fiber there. I’ve prepared fleeces by hand before, but never a 6 pound fleece. It’s going to make a beautiful sweater, though.

I also picked up about 9 oz of Finn roving, and learned from the shepherdess that Finns have a wonderful temperament and are lovely animals (unlike Shetlands, apparently).

It’s spinning into a slightly slubby yarn because there are lots of short fibers in the roving, but it should make a nice 2-ply fingering weight.

And finally, I couldn’t resist buying a couple of skeins of beautiful Corriedale produced on the farm that hosted the fiber festival. I’m thinking that this will make some colorwork hats or handwarmers, but we’ll see. It’s lovely yarn…I would have bought enough for a sweater if I’d had the budget and a few less things in the stash. I might just wait and buy one of their fleeces next year…

When I completed the brown handspun sweater, I managed to succeed in my goal of knitting a sweater that I absolutely want to wear (in public, even).

Now, I’ve decided that I have a new goal: I want to only have to knit the sweater once.

You might say that’s asking for a lot, and you might be right. But I’ve been known to be ambitious about these things.

When we left last Friday, the new sweater looked like this:

I was about an inch and a half short of the sleeve split, and quickly realizing that I was going to run out of yarn. I have 1500 yards, and was expecting to get a gauge of about 5 st/in, but ended up with about 6.5 because I dropped a needle size to get a firmer fabric. Still, it’s two pounds of fiber, so it seemed like that should still be plenty for the sweater (it’s the equivalent of 8-9 skeins of Cascade 220 at this gauge). Since I had no worries about the amount of yarn, I left my ribs deep and unstretched when I measured the final size, and so there was a lot of take-up in the fabric.

Add to that the fact that my stitch count always ends up a little higher than it really should be, and you have a recipe for a somewhat baggy sweater that eats yarn way faster than it should.

By the time I got to the arm split, I had used up almost half of my yarn. Clearly, I needed to pull back.

Saturday morning, I ripped the whole thing out and cast on with 20% fewer stitches. I’ll have to block those ribs harder than I’d originally planned, and the sweater will be a little huggier than before, but it fits pretty well, and better than it did before. Now, it looks like this:

I should be able to make it through the body before having used half of the yarn. I hesitate to declare success, but cross your fingers that I’ll make it through the sleeves!

I had intended to take photos and blog tonight. But then I got distracted, so I figured I’d just blog. There isn’t much going on in the knitting world of late. Two projects with many, many miles left to knit. Some beautiful colors that I will show you soon.

Mostly, I’m preparing. Thinking about how to spin the next sweater (no, I haven’t touched the roving yet. I’m as shocked as you are). Thinking about other things I want to try this summer. Planting my garden.

We have a quiet 3.5 day weekend planned. It might include a fiber festival. At a sheep farm. And three days of not thinking about work, of being in the sun, of spending time together, and of solid knitting time. And boy, am I ready.

Except that I need to go pack.

See you next week!

The sun finally reappeared yesterday, and Branden found a few minutes to take photos between gardening and other weekend chores. (Note to self: promising pictures soon appears to result in a solid week of rain…)

I think the thing that I like most about this yarn is the variety of color.

It takes on a different shade every time I look at it it.

(Somehow all three of those photos are true to color, even though they look so entirely different.)

I ended up with 1500 yards of dk-weight 3 ply, which is knitting up beautifully on size 6 needles. This sweater won’t be the overnight wonder of its bulky cousin, but it will be a pleasure to knit.

I had some singles left after plying, and 1500 yards seemed like it should be plenty for the sweater, so I decided to do a little experiment and Navajo plied the last 100 or so yards. You can see what a difference the plying method makes.

I’m not usually a fan of marled yarns, so I really preferred the Navajo-plied skein with its long single-color repeats and lack of barber pole.

No experiment is complete without a swatch, though. First, the Navajo-plied:

And then the traditional 3-ply:

As I said, I do like the Navajo skein better, but I really love the way the marled yarn looks when knitted. This photo is a bit washed out, but the actual swatch makes me think of an impressionist painting. The color variation is more subtle, and I think I like it better than the Navajo-plied yarn, though I love the intensity of the solid colors in the Navajo-plied skein. The Navajo-plied yarn is also much less even, because the plying amplifies all the irregularities in my single. Just goes to show that prejudices are not always well-founded, and that you can’t tell what a yarn will do until you knit with it.

This little experiment is the first in my summer project. My grand plan is to dye up small samples of roving and then spin them in different ways to see what kind of variations I can get in the yarn, and then to see how those samples look knit up and possibly woven. I’ve wanted to play with this for quite a while now, and the package that brought the fiber for the new sweater also contained 2 lbs of Corriedale for testing. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to starting the project, but seeing the difference in these two skeins has made me really excited to see what happens when I vary more than just the plying. So many variables! Playing with color!

If I learn as much as I did from this project, it will be time and roving well spent, and I am sure that there will be more surprises along the way.

One sweater finished, and gladly worn on a cold spring day. (I’m probably the only person in Wisconsin that was glad that it was winter again this weekend…)

One sweater spun, and hung up to dry.

And one sweater dyed, waiting to begin.

Better pictures later when there is light.

A week and a half ago, I ordered more fiber for spinning. I ordered it online because my semi-local LYS doesn’t tend to carry the quantities of fiber that I am looking for, and the only way to get BFL is through special order (apparently it sells out quickly whenever she gets it in, so if you want some, you have to order ahead. I really wanted some BFL, so I thought it would be easier and quicker to buy online rather than to wait for her to order and then drive the 45 mins to get to her store.

Then the company emailed to say that things were backordered, and I was fast running out of things to spin.

I have about a bobbin left to go on the sweater yarn, and probably could have gotten it done tonight if I hadn’t been distracted by other things. It was starting to look like I’d be scraping the bottom of the barrel, and I hadn’t heard anything from the fiber people.

As I walked home from the bus tonight, I saw the UPS truck outside. They left me a package:

It doesn’t look like much, but that’s two pounds of BFL for another sweater, two pounds of Corriedale for my next grand adventure (coming soon), and a half a pound of Finn because I’ve never tried it before (it’s gorgeous!).

I have some dyeing to do.

I’ve been working away quietly in the background lately, in the moments between, watching a transformation take place.

The hand-dyed fiber has gone from this:

To this:

Which is slowly becoming an increasingly larger pile of these:

All of the colors look more blue in the photos than they really are. When I have more light, I’ll try again on color accuracy. For now, you get the idea.

I am endlessly fascinated. There are more colors in this yarn than I can give names to. Two colors mix, and suddenly emerge as something completely different, something that I love but would never have known how to make. I am learning so much about color from this experiment.

Looking at the fiber, I could not have predicted how the singles would look, and likewise for the singles and the final yarn. This project started as a surprise; I thought I dyed one thing, and I got another.

It hasn’t stopped surprising me yet. And I’m glad it hasn’t. I can’t wait to knit it up and see the next surprise (so soon!).