My waving lace sweater is cursed.

It took me at least 6 tries to cast on and get the right number of stitches for the number of repeats I wanted. At the time, I chalked it up to my general state of mind over the past week, but now I’m thinking it was an early warning sign.

After finally casting on successfully, I knit one and a half lace repeats in, and realized that the piece was looking a little wider than my swatch said it would be. That’s not abnormal for me; my swatch usually tells me what needle to use, and then the first few inches of knitting the actual garment are what gets me an accurate gauge. (I almost always rip back the first few inches. I just don’t knit the same way on a small piece as I do on a large one, and no reasonably-sized swatch seems to help.) I solve this by thinking of the first few inches as a really big swatch, and count myself lucky if I don’t have to pull back.

This time I did have to pull back, and took out half a repeat of the lace to make it a couple of inches narrower.

I cast on again, and knit a repeat and a half in. Then I realized that I’d shifted the lace pattern from my sketch when I started knitting, which then put the side shaping in the wrong place.

So I pulled out, and cast on again.

I’m almost done with the bust shaping, and tonight I was getting ready to move into the neck front shaping when I noticed that the ball is looking a little bit small.

I have 5 balls of yarn (1350 yards!), and this is one side panel of the sweater front, which is a little less than 1/6 of the knitting in the sweater. If I use a whole ball on this one piece, then I’m in trouble.

I probably called this curse upon myself when I typed the words “Since I am not short on yardage this time, I can make the fabric much more solid than before, and more like my original vision of the piece.” See that there? That bit about short on yardage? Hmmph.

The photo above shows the fabric as I’d imagined it for this sweater. The lace is barely stretched, making it look almost solid, but with a very three dimensional texture. I really like it. I weighed what I have knitted so far (50 g), and what’s left in the ball (21 g). That’s not good news, since I’m only to the underarm and still need to knit to the shoulder.

So, I looked at what I could get by blocking it harder.

Even dry, the piece stretches easily to almost 13″ rather than the necessary 10.5. I could take out a half a repeat to save yarn, if I’m willing to go with a more open fabric. (Of course, I’d have to knit the whole thing again, too.)

But something in the math didn’t quite add up. I was pretty sure that these were 100 g skeins, and I had a total of 70. That was odd.

Then I remembered the swatches.

Sure enough, a couple of dense stockinette swatches and a few repeats of lace add up to about 30 g.

So, I’m close. It looks like the sweater front is going to take about 70 g. If we assume that one front panel is about 1/6 of a sweater, that would mean that the whole thing would need about 420 g, which is 20 more than I have. 420 g is hardly an exact number, but it’s enough to tell me that I’m probably cutting it close.

Now I’m torn. Do I forge boldly on, and trust that kind fates will see me through? Keep knitting, and see how much the front panel weighs when I get to the shoulder? Or tear back now rather than knit another third that will need to be ripped in the end?

This feels like a case study in one of those popular non-fiction books that talks about the psychology of decision making and economics (I’ve read a few.). Some academic expert goes on and on at length about how our decision making isn’t rational, and how the decision you think you’d make isn’t really the one that makes good economic sense.

Those books always leave me feeling slightly less able decide. There’s always the question looming “yes, but is it rational??” in a slightly mocking father-knows-best kind of voice. The arguments are so counter intuitive and inside out that I can never quite remember which part is the rational part and which part is the one that most of us common mortals would choose.

I’m pretty sure in this case that it’s stupid (from an economic standpoint) to knit on. The probability of pulling back is high, and it’s very likely just my loss aversion getting in the way of ripping back now and being done with it. And yet, I still hope.

If I can get to the shoulder at under 65 g, I might just make it.

And, unless my intellect manages to stage a successful intervention, I think I might just try.

20 minutes later, edited to add: 5 skeins x100 yards = 500 yards, not 400. 420 is less than 500 (I think I can be completely certain about that). It’s totally possible that I could make it at this gauge, as long as the side panel is less than, say, 80g. Good thing I didn’t rip before going to bed…

Take that, economics brain!

First, I finished a sleeve.

Isn’t it amazing how big those sleeves look? It always amazes me that the sleeves take almost as much fabric as the body. I know it makes sense, but it always surprises me to see the pieces all laid out.

This has been hiding as a background project for so long now that you might even have forgotten that it exists. (I think I almost did.) It’s a reknit of the lace ribs sweater, which we last saw in February. The second sleeve has been inching along as my travel knitting project, mostly advancing by a few rows here and there at knit night. But it’s finally done, and the pieces are all blocking in preparation for seams. I’ve been writing and sizing the pattern as I go along, which is part of why it’s been so slow. It is almost there, though. A few more tweaks to the charts, and some more sizing calculations for the sleeves and I think it’s done.

Since I’m finishing one pattern project, I thought that it might be time to start another. Last weekend I did some swatching for the updated version of my Falkland lace sweater.

Since I am not short on yardage this time, I can make the fabric much more solid than before, and more like my original vision of the piece. These swatches were the result of me slowly lowering my needle size to get the fabric I wanted; something solid and firm that still shows off the lace. I’m also converting the pattern to be knit flat and seamed, because I think the structure is worth the trouble (though I much, much prefer knitting in the round). This sweater will be a far less fitted version than the last, with similar shaping but a lot more ease. It’s knit in Madeline Tosh Sport, and I am loving the fabric that it makes. This is another knit where I am writing the pattern as I go, so it will probably be a while in coming, but I think it will be worth the wait.

I’ve also been swatching for the fall colors sweater.

Isn’t that an awful, lumpy looking swatch? I’m still working out how to tension a fairisle swatch knit flat. The back looks like this:

I also haven’t blocked it yet, so that might also have something to do with the unevenness. Even though it’s not pretty, I think it’s told me what I need to know. First, I need to knit on size 0 needles to get the fabric that I want. (This sweater is going to take forever.) Also, the yarns didn’t come out quite as different as I’d expected them to be. You can see how the complicated stitch patterns tend to disappear, because the orange and brown are sometimes quite similar  in tone. Look at the difference in this pattern knit in the high-contrast region

(at the very bottom edge there) and in the low-contrast region

See how much it gets lost there?

I’ve debated whether to dye the brown yarn darker or whether to work with it as-is, and right now I think I’m going to stick with it the way it is. Much as I like to think I control how my yarn will come out, I generally prefer to take my design cues from the fiber rather than forcing a yarn to fit. In knitting the swatch, I found that I really like the subtle color play of these yarns when knit in patterns with big, solid blocks of color.

I’m thinking of using this as an allover body design, possibly bordered with another blocky pattern as an edging or an accent detail. I’m particularly fond of this one:

This design is still settling into place in my mind, so I have a feeling that it will be a while yet before I cast on. But it’s starting to come together, slowly turning into a train knitting project for the months to come.

One by one, new knitting projects are sending up shoots. I’m hoping to have a few on the go by the time I start my new commute in a few weeks. Yay for dedicated knitting time!

One of the biggest drawbacks to the new house is that there will be no dye studio. When we viewed the place, the landlords seemed open to the idea, and even said that they’d be willing to consider putting a sink in the basement. After we had committed to rent it (and after we’d turned everyone else down), we approached them about it again, even offering to pay to have a sink installed. At that point, they decided that it was “too complicated” and that they didn’t really want me to dye in the basement. (We’ll try to convince them otherwise once we arrive, but I’m not sure I hold out much hope after seeing all of the “thou shalt nots” in the lease. In the meantime, I am trying to remind myself that this is within their rights as landlords and to not hate them for it. Most days I have some success.)

So, we’ve been looking at other options for places to dye. Right now, it’s looking like I’ll probably use Mike’s (of the Mike sweater) garage, but he’s over an hour drive away. That means that dye days will require more planning, and will likely not happen as often.

I’ve been thinking hard about what this means for DesigKnit, and especially for the Etsy shop. I have a lot of stock left from the show, and I am planning to use that to slowly populate the Etsy store, mostly after we finish the move. After that, I’m hoping to do a dye day once every month or two, focusing on dyeing from pictures like I’ve done before, since that’s the most fun.

Since I want that dyeing to be primarily about the shop, I’ve been trying to dye up some things for my own consumption over the next year. We already know that I have lots and lots of natural color spinning coming up, but I also wanted a couple of colorful things to throw in between. Last week, I popped downstairs and made this:

That’s 3 lbs of Finn for a sweater for Branden that I’ve had percolating in the back of my mind for at least a couple of years now. Each colorway will be a different ply, which should make for a very interesting barberpole yarn.

The first ply is a mix of pale greens and blues

The second is a slightly brighter mint green, with accents of a yellow-brown.

And the third is mostly black and gray with bursts of turquoise.

I’m hoping that dyeing the plies separately this way will give me the same almost-impressionistic color patterning that I got in the Sunset sweater, with perhaps a little less variegation. This isn’t an immediate spinning project, but it’s one that I’m looking forward to this fall and winter when I’m sick of grays. (And yes, 3 lbs is really, really overkill for a sweater, but after needing to match colorways in the last one, I wasn’t willing to take any chances. Also, I have a hunch that I might be able to find other ways to use these colors if I just happen to have extra.)

I also dyed up 4 oz of Rambouillet to go with the BFL-silk singles from the Fiber Optic top that I bought at GreenCastle.

I spun the Fiber Optic expecting to chain ply it into a three-ply, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to stretch the yardage. Most of the handspun skeins languishing in my stash are there because I don’t have quite enough yardage to do this thing or that thing, and I want this to be a yarn that I’ll use right away. I didn’t want to do a random 2-ply, because I wanted the color repeats to stay separate. After a few days of mulling it over, I started thinking about maybe mixing it with another color, preferably something dark and mostly solid that would stand back and let the BFL-silk be the real star of the show. Then I started thinking about Jocelyn’s experiment with woolen and worsted spinning, and how much I liked the yarn she’d gotten. Of course, I hadn’t spun the BFL worsted, but I think I might be able to get a similar effect here. So I dyed up some deep, dark brown to match, and I should end up with quite a lot of 2-ply laceweight by the time I’m done. Isn’t it interesting how the brown dyes separated in spots to give reds and oranges that pick up the colors in the Fiber Optic?

Since many of these braids are a little denser or a little stickier than I’d like, they’re not really super fun to spin. They do make beautiful yarns though, so every once in a while I’ll pull one out and spin it up (that’s how the Striped Shawl Sweater began, if you recall…one 4 oz braid from the shop rejects bag).

However, it occurred to me that I currently have a drum carder. As I sat and processed through all that cream and gray, I started thinking about mixing color at the carder, and how carding the rejected braids might turn them into something more fun to spin. I certainly had a good range of colors, and I’ve never tried making blended batts, so this was a chance to learn something new. If I decide that I love to blend batts (and especially if I consider blending for sale in the future), that may also affect which kind of carder I want to buy, so this seemed like a good opportunity to nail down one of the parameters that I’ll need to consider when I do eventually get around to purchasing a carder of my own.

I gathered together a few colors that I thought would work well, and I started mixing.

I put the red on the carder first, and then layered on a bunch of white. Then I blended until I had a pretty even pink.

I put a layer of orange on the carder, then a layer of pink, and then covered it all up with a layer of purple.

That gave me a batt with three distinct layers of color.

Because I was experimenting, I passed it all through another time, which blended the colors together.

The colors ended up a bit more blended than I’d like, so I kept that in mind and moved on.

I also played around with mixing two very different colors; a deep navy blue and an almost orange gold. I was interested to see what these colors would do together, since it’s hard to dye such a high-contrast combination, and I thought this might be a way of mixing the two for an interesting yarn.

This experiment taught me that blending batts is far less forgiving than dyeing; I ended up with a pretty unattractive muddy green. I’ve found it almost impossible to get mud from my dyes, but blending at the carder is a lot more like mixing pigments than it is like dyeing, and there were a few combinations that I expected to work that flopped.

I kept this one as a reminder, but I also took a piece of it and kept blending and blending until it turned into a much more even green. Then I mixed some of that in with a red and blue mix that I didn’t love, and ended up with a very complex reddish-brown.

These still aren’t really my colors, but they do work well together. It’s almost like overdyeing; since all three colors have the same yellow (and two have the same blue), they match pretty well. Processed together, they made an interesting batt.

I wondered if maybe the yellow and blue had been too far apart in the color wheel, and so I did the same kind of blending with a red and blue instead, being careful not to overblend.

I do like these better, but I was beginning to suspect that I’d prefer mixtures that had one dominant color and a minimally blended stripe of an accent fiber, at least for the very bright colors that I had on hand. I would have liked to try “diluting” them down with browns, or grays or black to make a more subtle mix, but didn’t have any of those base colors on hand (and no, I wasn’t about to use my natural fleece for that!). I could dilute with white, but I’m not too big on pastel, so decided to work with a solid base color and minimal accents.

With that in mind, I revisited the purple, orange and pink combination from the top of the post, and ended up with this. See how those accent colors are  really just a very thin layer on top of the base pink? I assembled the batt in 4 layers (2 main color, 2 accent layers) to make sure there was some accent color in the body of the batt, but I think this proportion is a lot closer to what I’m going for.

I do like it quite a lot better than the first.

There really isn’t much of the accent colors in there, so it will be interesting to see how the colors work out when its spun up.

I liked that technique so much that I did it with a few more colors.

After all this testing, I was ready to try the mix I’d started out wanting to make.

I had a green and blue semisolid Polwarth that I snagged from the shop, and wanted to blend it with a sample of banana viscose that I bought on a whim a while ago. I thought that if I blended it with a little more green (BFL) and some Navy (Finn), I’d end up with the colors of the ocean, and the shiny viscose would be like the whitecaps. Again, this is something that would be very difficult to dye, because I wanted very fine stripes of pure white, and just a touch of the different accent colors, which is almost exactly what I got.

I decided that the first one was a little overblended, so I adjusted my method yet again and finished up the 4 oz.

It looks like I made a ton of fiber, but actually I probably only have about 12 oz of batts. This carder seems to fit about an ounce per batt, and sometimes a little more depending on the fiber. It really didn’t take much wool to experiment, and it converted some less-than-exciting leftovers into something I can’t wait to spin. I’ve never spun a blended batt before; have you?

They’re also looking for volunteers to do things like help with parking and monitor kids’ games & crafts, should you be so inclined. A 5-hour shift gets you free admission and a free lunch. Just thought I’d spread the word!

20 ounces of prepared roving takes me about 35 hours to spin into 1094 yards of three-ply yarn at a light worsted weight. Not bad, actually. I would have underestimated, but if you think about it, each one of those 1100-yard plies had to pass through my hands and then three of them had to be plied together to make the final yarn. That works out to about 120 yards an hour, or 2 yards per minute, which is really just about right when I’m spinning long draw.

I don’t think I’m likely to continue tallying hours spent on spinning, but it’s been very interesting to see just how long each step takes. And really, 35 hours to make a sweater’s worth of wool isn’t bad at all. I’m curious to see how long it takes to knit. (I’m guessing it will be longer.)

It is perhaps a good thing that I feel that way about spinning, because I realized last night that I’d spoken too soon. When I went back into the archives to check for a breed on the second fleece, I noticed that it had originally been 6 lbs. I thought the bag had looked a little small when I took it out of the closet to start carding, but I dug around a bit and didn’t find any more, so chalked it up to storage in a small space and didn’t think much more of it.

When we were carding, I thought I remembered that I’d had a darker gray color, but again dismissed the thought. But then when I saw that the fleece had weighed 6 lbs, I was pretty sure there must be more around here somewhere. I went and weighed the fleece we’d carded, and it’s just about 3 lbs, which would mean I’d lost 3 lbs in the washing. Even for a dirty fleece that would be a lot, and this was not a dirty fleece.

So last night I went stash diving to see just where that extra fleece might have got to. There really aren’t that many places for a bag of wool to hide in this house, and certainly not one of any size. But there is one deep shelf at the top of my stash closet that I am too short to access easily. It’s one of those shelves where you toss (soft) things up there and hope they don’t bounce back, and it’s where I have been storing the fleeces. I had checked back there, but if there was anywhere that a bag of wool could be, that would be the place. So I got a chair and poked around, and sure enough, there was another bag of wool, tucked away in a corner behind the fleece from Rhinebeck (which is now looking very lonely on that big shelf all by itself).

The remaining fleece is about 20 oz, and it was separated into three smaller bags: two are completely unprocessed, one is already hand carded, and one was full of that beautiful dark gray that I was sure I remembered seeing in this fleece. Apparently we’re not done with carding after all, but at least I found it before we returned the carder!

Since I haven’t been knitting, I have been spinning like crazy. I’m about a half an ounce from done with the yarn for the Mike sweater (photos tomorrow, hopefully). And, we’ve been carding.

I say we, because Branden has been helping turn the crank for an hour or two each night, in addition to the cranking that I’ve been doing on my own. It goes pretty fast when he’s cranking and I’m teasing locks apart and feeding the fiber in, and we’ve made it through both fleeces:

The Gulf Coast needs one more pass through the carder before we’re done, but that should be really quick. The second fleece has been carded twice, so it’s set to go. I’ve decided not to comb that one, since it has a beautifully long staple and is pretty well aligned in the batts. It also has no short fiber in it at all, so it doesn’t need the combing to clean it up. I wish I knew what kind of wool it was; I know I bought it in Door County at the Shepherd’s Market a couple of years ago. Looking back in the blog archives, it appears the sheep’s name was Molly, and that she was a real sweetheart, though that of course tells me nothing about the breed. I remember that the vendor had very precise labels for her wool; I think it was down to the 1/8ths and 1/16ths for what kinds of breeds she had mixed in there. I think this was part Cheviot, but I’m not sure. I was hoping we’d find the label in the bottom of the bag, but it seems she kept it, so I’ll never know.

We carded the coarse part of the Molly fleece right after the Gulf Coast, and it felt thick and awful at first, more like hair than wool. But as we went I started to realize how much I liked it, especially when we got into the softer body of the fleece, and as the carding broke apart the thick, curly locks. It’s a great gray color, and there are a few different shades mixed in there. I separated them out in the locks, and we carded them separately, so I should get at least two different colors of yarn. The wool is definitely coarser than the Gulf Coast, but it’s actually quite soft so I think it will make a nice yarn. As with most longwools, the shine is amazing, and it feels very smooth to the touch. The staple is almost 7 inches, too, which will be a fun contrast to the short staples I’ve been spinning lately.

As we buried the kitchen table in wool again and again, I was really struck by how much the volume of wool increases after carding. Two fistfuls of locks become a huge, fluffy batt, and a couple of those batts look like they’d make a really good pillow, until you touch them and it all collapses again. The two fleeces fit comfortably in one garbage and one shopping bag before we started, and now they’re bursting out in all directions. It’s so delightfully fluffy that I hate to compress it down, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to if we want to fit into the moving truck. (Unless, of course, I spin it first…)

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.

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?

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!