DesigKnit

Wow, December’s been a slow month for blog posts. (Actually, looking back, it’s been a slow year. Or two…)

I guess that’s partly because it’s been a slow year (or two) for knitting. Since the last post, I believe that I have managed to produce (dum dum dum)…three handwarmers! On big needles!

At least all four of them now have thumbs, and have been wet blocked, though there are ends yet to be woven. I have always found that handwarmers look absolutely terrible in pictures when they are not posed on human hands, and while I did ask Branden to put them on briefly while wet to make sure they stretched to roughly the right size for blocking, I wasn’t about to push my luck asking him to pose for photos, too. (It’s a patient man who tries on sopping wet wool…ick!) Photos will have to wait for another blog post.

Fortunately, knitting has no deadlines, and knitting with deadlines can usually be scuttled, which is exactly what I did to the holiday knitting game when I came down with a cold on Monday. Because really? Virus-laden knitwear isn’t really what anyone wants for Christmas anyway.

Our holiday celebration was delayed until yesterday in any case (work schedules, etc, etc), so I was back in the saddle in time to host, and it seems that everyone had a delightful time. Much food was consumed, gifts were enjoyed, and general holiday cheer was had by all.

Look at these itty bitty needles from a husband who takes hints (that would be a 1.2mm, 1 mm, and 0.7 mm needle size):

They also came with their very own 3D-printed knitzi (from his homemade 3D printer, which he built from last year’s Christmas gift from a wife who takes hints. What can I say? Reciprocal enabling at its best.)

So here I am, back on my feet again, holidays managed, and with a week free from work (except for a day or two of unexpected consulting that popped up the week before last). Who knows? I might actually knit on a sweater!

Hope you all had a great holiday, and that you’re finding your way back to the needles after the rush of the season!

Sometimes stalling out on one project is a great way to finish up a bunch of other things. While the sweater has been in limbo, there have been lots of other projects springing unexpectedly off the needles.

I started this scarf months ago, and it’s been my bag knitting all semester. I was puttering along on it, and it was looking like it would take forever and a day to finish. Turns out that all it needed was a couple of days of undivided attention.

I knit the scarf expecting it to be for me, but when I laid it out to block it told me that it wanted to belong to someone else. So, it will probably be packaged up and mailed off tomorrow for a holiday surprise.

When the scarf was finished, I needed something else to work on, so I asked Branden what he might want. He is always happy to get another pair of handwarmers, so we picked some nice grays and greens and browns from the stash and one of these sprung off the needles too. (Yes, it still needs a thumb.)

The second has been a bit slower to spring, but it’s coming.

I finished a quick project on the small loom; a stashbusting waffle weave scarf (also for Branden).

And, since that one’s done, I wound another warp for the loom. I’m also planning this one for me, but I have a feeling that it may go to an aunt. I think I probably have enough warp on there for two, though, so we may end up being twins.

And last weekend, I went over to my friend Heidi’s house and spent the whole day crafting. (We thought we were going to spend a couple of hours, and it turned into more like 12.) She had purchased some felt bags, and I brought my dye scraps, and we needle felted the day away. Here’s my (completely unplanned) bag. Not bad, considering that the final design has absolutely nothing to do with where I thought I’d end up when I started out. Sometimes you have to go where serendipity takes you.

I’m only barely started on the first sweater sleeve, but taking a break has made me feel like I’m getting lots done! (Now let’s see if I can manage to finish the last minute Christmas knitting and spinning that I’m tossing on the pile, in the rush of madness that follows a bunch of quick finishes!)

I was pretty sure at the end of the last post that the Basketweave sweater was going to be ripped out. I’d rather reknit and get it right than live with a garment I don’t love, and I half expected to start ripping as soon as I finished writing the post.

And yet.

Something, somewhere in my brain said to wait and think about it. So I did.

I asked Branden to try the sweater on again. And again. And again. (He is a very patient man.)

Each time, I tugged and pulled and stood back with tilted head and folded arms to take a good look. Each time, I came back with no clear solution, and no clear idea what I was looking for. But something said to keep looking.

I left the sweater out on a chair in my office. I picked it up and looked at it disconsolately a few times a day, then shrugged and put it back. As I refolded it for probably the 100th time, a little tug at the back of my brain said that it looked shorter than it had just after blocking. Well, that was odd.

I laid the sweater out to measure it again, and it had indeed changed. The length was 33″ and the width was 25.5″ just after blocking, and now the length was 31″ and the width was 24 inches. Shorter and narrower. Hmm.

I’m constantly making my research students crazy asking “is it repeatable?” Bad data is worse than no data, and it’s important to be sure that your measurements are really correct. (Especially if your first measurements were strange.) So, I went back and measured again.

The sweater was a bit shifty in its answers; changing by more than an inch in either direction from one measurement to the next, depending on how I happened to lay it down. I took 4 different sets of measurements, and it did seem to have settled in at about 30.5″ and 23.5.”

Ok, then. But is it repeatable?

I blocked again, this time stretching the sweater wide and then scrunching it down again. Laid out as the wet fabric wanted to (before any interference from me), it was 36″ long and 20″ across. With some scrunching up, I got it back to 33″ and 25.5, intentionally leaving it a little wider for a more relaxed fit.

After drying, I picked it up and shook it, stretched it around a few different ways, had Branden try it on again, and then subjected it to random investigations over the next few days. It’s now measuring 31″ and just under 25″.

So, what exactly is going on?

Well, I think it’s something like this. The basketweave stitch is basically a ribbed pattern, and ribs are very elastic. But they’re not elastic when wet. The wet fabric flops and stretches any old way, behaving more like the loose stockinette that makes up the ribs, but when the fabric is dry and worn, the elasticity comes back into play, sucking it back down to its preferred size.  (Ever tried to squeeze just another inch out of some ribbing by blocking aggressively, only to have it spring back to its original size when you wear it? I have.)

The floppiness in the wet fabric probably is an indication that I knit the sweater at a gauge that’s slightly too loose. If this were stockinette, I’d be sunk, and there’d be no question about ripping back. If the yarn were slippery or didn’t have a lot of bounce, it would also be finished. But the combination of the bounce in the yarn and the structure of the stitch pattern seems to have balanced out the loose gauge and the extra weight. (Of course, the wet the fabric is even heavier and the yarn has no bounce to it, so it just grows all out of proportion.)

Even in its “bounced back” state, the sweater is still about 6 inches too long, so I’ll have to pull back a couple of repeats and reknit the ribbing, but that’s a small adjustment compared to reknitting the whole sweater body. It should also decrease the weight considerably, and it answers any concerns about yardage, since the fabric used in the body is about the same amount needed to finish the second sleeve and I’m quite sure that I have enough left in the skein to finish the first sleeve.

And so, surprisingly enough, it seems that this story has a happy ending after all. I wasn’t expecting this plot reversal at the end of last week’s post, but I’m happy to accept the “miracle” ending. I’m glad I held off on the frogging long enough for the recalcitrant sweater to communicate all that it had to say!

I don’t find that I have occasion to complain about the honesty of swatches here very often. I tend to knit at a fairly firm gauge, and I knit large swatches (often 6×12″ or more), so I usually have a pretty good idea of what kind of fabric I’m going to get.

Usually.

Sadly, the swatch for Branden’s Basketweave sweater is turning out to be one of the unreliable variety.

Does that swatch look shifty to you?

Now, to be fair, I knew as soon as I touched the washed swatch that the knitting was much looser than I usually use for a garment. I like a firm fabric that doesn’t stretch with wear, and I almost always go down a needle size or two from the gauge that most people would use. (Almost without exception, a knitter picking up one of the sweaters I’ve knit will comment on how dense the fabric is.) I’ve been bitten by loose gauge before, and unless the garment really calls for it, I prefer to knit something that I know will stand up to wear and tear without stretching.

For instance, here’s a sweater that I knit for Branden in 2008:

And here’s the same sweater after 6 years of use:

I don’t think it took more than a few months for the sweater to stretch; certainly not more than a few washings. You can see how the fabric at the shoulders has deformed, which makes the drop shoulder far more pronounced (an extra 3-4 inches per sleeve?). Sleeves that were once just a little long now hang an inch or two past his fingertips – and let me tell you, it is hard to make a sleeve that is too long for those arms! Branden still loves this sweater and wears it happily, but I cringe every time I look at it.

Knowing all of this, I decided to stay with the looser gauge on the basketweave sweater, first because I didn’t want the rib/welted fabric to be too stiff, and second because I wasn’t confident that I would have enough yarn to finish in a tighter gauge. (I’m also already a needle size below the low end of the recommended gauge, which says I should get 5-5.5 stitches to the inch on size 4-5 needles. I’m getting 6 sts/in on a size 3, in pattern.) I measured and weighed the swatch, and it suggested that I would be pretty close on yardage, so I went with a bigger needle.

I finished the body of the sweater this week, and started on a sleeve. I had carefully measured my swatch to get a sense of how the fabric would end up, and my stitch and row counts seemed right, but the sweater just took forever to knit. I chalked it up to impatience, and kept on knitting. I finished with a 17.5 inch underseam from the armpit to the hemline, and 28 inches from shoulder to hem. So far, so good.

Then I started knitting on a sleeve, and I started thinking that it would be good to get a really accurate row gauge for the blocked fabric. So, I decided to block the body on the needles. I put it in the sink to soak, and wandered off to do other things. When I came back to squeeze out the fabric, I was surprised at how much give it had. Then I laid it out on the floor to dry.

Allowing the fabric to stretch to its natural size, the sweater was 33 inches from shoulder to hem, and 56″ around the chest (gauge said that it should be just shy of 50″ around). That’s an increase of 20% in length and 12% in width, for those who are counting. The shoulder area appears to be better-stabilized by the raglan shaping and the cables than the body, which is just knit in the round, but there was significant stretching in both areas. A garment designed to fall right below the belt line suddenly turned into a tunic that would hit in the upper thigh.

I scrunched the fabric up a bit to reduce the stretching, and let it dry. It feels bouncy enough, and keeps its shape fairly well now that it’s dry, but even slightly damp it deformed with no trouble at all. Here’s the body post-blocking. Remember, this is the less-stretched version!

(Don’t raglan bodies look funny without their sleeves?)

The sweater now measures about 31 inches from armpit to hemline; 3 or so inches longer than expected, but not nearly as bad as before. It’s about 48 inches around, so it’s even a little bit on the snug side of the original gauge measurement in width (this makes sense, since stretching longer usually makes fabric pull in and become narrower).

I can easily pull back a few repeats and reknit the ribbing, which will also help with yardage, since the extra length probably uses almost as much yarn as a sleeve, but that leaves the question of whether the fabric will maintain its integrity in the long run.

On the plus side, the basketweave pattern will tend to pull in if possible. That should help to fight stretching out over time. As I said, the yarn is quite bouncy and elastic once dry, and that will probably help to reduce stretching (unlike the Cascade Eco wool used in the other sweater, which doesn’t have much bounce on its own). I could add some crochet seams on the inside of the body to help stabilize the fabric, though they can only do so much.

Or, I could reknit the sweater on a smaller needle and get a better fabric. (That would also give me a chance to redo the color mixing, which isn’t as uniform as I would like.)

I think the sheer weight of the yarn is the reason for my swatch failure. It’s not a terribly dense yarn, but it is heavier than many  on the market. It’s looking like I’ll need to use a full 2.2 lbs in this sweater, which is quite a lot of weight, even for a sweater of this size. The swatch was only about a foot long, so it didn’t have all of the weight of the rest of the garment pulling down on it. It simply wouldn’t have stretched as much. The looser gauge makes it possible for the yarn to shift quite a lot with blocking, and the two factors combined make for some very stretchy fabric.

Of course, that same weight is going to work against me in the wearing of the garment, too; it will tend to put extra strain on the structural elements of the sweater, and will tend to stretch it out of shape over time. The question is whether the elasticity of the yarn and stitch pattern will be enough to counteract the weight and the loose gauge and make a relatively stable fabric. The short answer is that I don’t know.

I’m currently inclined to pull it all back and knit it again on a smaller needle. A few more weeks of knitting time now will be better than several years of watching Branden wear a sweater I don’t like. (And the barrier to ripping back a finished garment is high enough that I’m unlikely to change it once the decision is made, so a wear-now, reknit-later plan won’t work here.)

I’m still concerned about the yardage, and a denser fabric will make for an even heavier sweater than the one I have now. I’m considering ordering a couple more skeins of the yarn: it won’t be the same color lot, but having a couple of extra skeins would help me match the colors better, and it would solve the yardage problem. I’m not sure I want that many leftovers, though, and a 2.5 lb sweater might feel more like chain mail than a comfortable garment!

I’ve spent the past 2 days ignoring the sweater and letting my brain mull over the options while I waited for the body to dry. I don’t want to wait forever to make a decision, so I’m going to have to pick something soon. I’d rather do it right now and end up with a garment that I like, but I’d also rather not reknit the whole thing. (I thought about felting, but that’s a one-shot deal, and there’s no recovery if it fails.)

At least one thing is sure: in the future, I’ll have to remember to be more thorough about interrogating any swatch that looks even a little bit loose and shifty!

Has it really been 2 weeks since I posted? I’ve been knitting away on Branden’s Basketweave sweater, lost in that endless middle section where there is no apparent progress to explain where the hours go. It has been slowly growing, though – helped along by a rather extended bout of inexplicable insomnia – and all of a sudden it’s starting to look like a sweater.

I’m not 100% happy with how the color is pooling. I ordered all 4 skeins at the same time because the yarn is batch dyed to order and I wanted to make sure that I ended up with only one colorway, but one of the skeins is significantly lighter than the other 3. I hoped it wouldn’t show, but with the sweater laid out it’s clear that there’s a difference. I’ve been working 2 balls together to try and even out the lighter skein, but the color is still not looking even across the whole garment. We’ll see how much it bothers me in the finished product. If it’s jarring enough, I may go back and overdye to reduce the contrast. I’d rather not have to, since that will probably also eliminate the subtle shade variegation in the yarn, but we’ll see how it looks. Good to have overdyeing in my back pocket, at least.

Deep in the middle of the sweater slog band, there was a day where I just couldn’t knit on a never-changing object anymore. And so, I cast on for a sweater that I knew I could finish in a day.

(Sorry for the terrible lighting, on both photos…it was a beautiful day and I was home for all of it, and yet it didn’t occur to me to take photos until well after dark, so poor lighting is what we get.)

It always surprises me how long small knitting projects do take, but this was fun nonetheless, and it used up a tiny little ball of leftover sock yarn that I had kicking around in the stash. I cast on 5 stitches for the front and back, and 2 for each arm section, and whipped up a simple little raglan in a matter of a few hours (I think I put 8 stitches on holder needles for the arms, and then picked up another 2 or 3).

I’m not usually into fiddly little projects, but this one was just right. It took the edge off of my need for progress, inserted a little color into a lot of black knitting, and the finished sweater is very cute indeed. I think I may have been subconsciously influenced to try some miniature knitting by the Yarn Harlot’s recent adventures with an advent calendar. There is no way I’m going down that crazy path, but it did seem like it would be fun to have a tiny little sweater to hang on the Christmas tree (which we put up today…is it really December already??).

It was fun to have a tiny project, just for a day. Here’s a photo to give you a sense of scale:

Off to knit a few more repeats on the body. Only about 6 more inches to go!

Branden’s sweater looks about the same this week as it did last. I’ve knit another 6 inches, but it’s in the bunched-up stage of a raglan sweater where you can’t really tell that anything is happening and the rows just keep getting longer. The increase section is up to 11 inches now (of the 14 that I need in the end), so I should be to the sleeve split soon.

In the meantime, I’ve been planning for spring.

We’ve had our first snow flurries of the season (about a quarter inch, last weekend), and overnight temperatures are getting into the low 30’s. Most of the garden is dying back, which means that it’s the perfect time to plant bulbs for spring. That’s one of the things I love most about gardening – at the end of one season, you can always start preparing for the next.

They say this winter is supposed to be a long and cold one, so it felt like an act of quiet rebellion to go out and tuck 150 little bulbs snugly into the cold soil. Most bulbs need to spend some time in the cold or they won’t come up at all, so it’s good to plant them when the soil temperature has dropped but before frosts make it hard to work the soil. Some of the bulbs even have a tiny white bump beginning; a sprout set already, patiently awaiting spring. I didn’t realize that they set their spring growth so early; no wonder they’re ready to go the moment that the snow gives way!

There’s something encouraging in the determined optimism of a plant setting its spring growth before winter even begins. It’s kind of a vote of confidence that it will make it through the cold and darkness to come. My hydrangea has all its spring buds already, and when I transplanted the Solomon’s seal and bleeding hearts a few weeks ago they also had tiny white leaves already starting to form.

Of course, less than an hour after I’d finished planting the bulbs, there were already several holes in the garden bed courtesy of the local squirrel. (I’m sure he was watching from his tree the whole time, just waiting for me to go inside.) He got a couple of bulbs before we put the chicken wire out, but hopefully that will keep him at bay long enough for the ground to settle and for him to forget that they’re there. I have to say that I have a lot less sympathy for the summer-fattened squirrel than I did for the bunny who nibbled the first of my greens this year!

Of course, knowing squirrels, there’s a good chance that he’ll plant the bulbs he steals somewhere else and forget about them, so maybe we’ll have some fun surprises come spring.

There are a few tulips to plant and a couple more plants to move, but other than that, things are mostly tucked up and ready for the winter. It’s nice to know that everything is set for an early spring celebration…provided that the squirrel keeps his little paws out of my flower beds!

I haven’t been feeling much like thinking at the end of the day lately, so it’s been nice to have a mindless spinning project to work on when I get home from work.

It’s also nice to have a pile of finished yarn.

I forgot to measure the total weight before washing to set the twist, but the final length is just over 3200 yds. The yarn is a fingering weight 2-ply, and will make a beautiful colorwork sweater one of these days.

This is something of an unusual spinning project for me. Normally, I only spin up the fiber when I’m actually ready to start knitting. This time, I knew what yarn weight I wanted, so I just went ahead and spun it up without a project in mind. I’m expecting that it will go back into the stash to marinate for a while longer before I knit the actual garment, but it’s nice to have it ready to go as soon as I get around to the design. (It’s also helpful to know how much length I have in each color when planning a colorwork design).

When not spinning away at the Shetland, I’ve been knitting on Branden’s new Basketweave sweater:

It’s currently too big to stretch out on the needles, but since it’s a raglan you can get a pretty good idea of the overall design just by looking at the increase sections. I put a tiny cable along the increases, and am working the basketweave as an allover pattern in between. The fabric did flatten out a little bit with blocking, but it has a nice drape at this gauge. I decided not to go down a needle size because I’m not sure I have that much extra yardage, and because we didn’t want the final fabric to be too stiff. This sweater is about 6 sts/in on size 3’s, so it’s moving along pretty quickly, and I’m really enjoying the texture and the squishiness of the yarn.

One of the things that I like most about knitting is the long timeline. Sometimes a project goes quickly from idea to item, and sometimes it sits on a back burner and simmers for a while. In most things, I don’t delay much between idea and implementation. But in knitting, there are no deadlines, and sometimes things just need time to ripen. If a yarn makes it into the stash, it seems that my average turnaround time is 2-4 years before it comes back out and gets made into something. Designs are the same way; some are knit immediately, and others simply take their own sweet time.

In October of 2009, I had a scarf project that failed.

We were living in Germany at the time, and Branden had brought me back a couple of skeins of Claudia handpaint (in the Ink colorway) from a trip to the US. I only had two skeins, but I hoped to use them to make a scarf. I came up with a highly textured knit-purl pattern, and began to knit. Sadly, it turned out that two skeins wasn’t enough, and I frogged the project. (The yarn later became one of Branden’s favorite pairs of handwarmers.)

I loved the way the ribbing and welt texture worked in the fabric, though, and I decided that this would someday become an allover pattern for a sweater.

I decided on the yarn that I wanted: a BFL worsted from the Blue Moon Fiber Arts Raven clan. But I had other things on the needles, and it just wasn’t time yet to start the project.

In April of 2010, I went to the BMFA website to order the yarn. They were temporarily out of the BFL worsted, and I decided to wait again.

This August, I ordered the yarn. It just happened that they had a new Targhee yarn base, and I decided to go with that instead, in the Shadow colorway. I put in an order for 4 skeins, which they estimated would take 10-12 days to arrive (they hand dye to order, so it takes a little longer than the usual yarn order).

It turned out that there was a delay in their shipments, though, and they ran out of the yarn base just after I ordered. It is sourced from a single farm supplier, and there had been a snag in the processing somewhere along the way. They knew that there would be a delay, but there was no way to know how long it would be. Well, I figured I’d waited 5 years already, so a month or two probably wouldn’t make much difference.

The yarn came last week, and it was well worth the wait. When I showed it to Branden, his first comment was the it reminded him of the colors in my Irtfa’a shawl. The man has a good eye for yarn; Irtfa’a was knit from a BMFA laceweight in the same color clan, but a slightly different colorway (and it was knit in 2008, though I’ve worn it quite a lot since then!). I was impressed that he was able to call it so quickly.

Over the past few days, I’ve been swatching it up in a couple of different designs to get a feel for the yarn.

It will be interesting to see if the pattern keeps this depth of texture through the blocking process. It’s probably terrible for my yardage, but I love the 3D feel of the pattern in the swatch. Knowing that I wanted a highly textured pattern, I bought 2464 yards of yarn, so yardage shouldn’t be too much of a limiting factor (I hope).

The pattern on the right is actually a pattern of spirals, but they don’t show up quite as strongly as I’d like.

The left hand side is a simple basketweave pattern.

That one keeps all the wonderful curves where the ribbing and welting wrap around one another, and it’s currently winning the design competition. Looking back at the pictures of the original swatch, I’m thinking I might try one or two more patterns before I’m done, though Branden tells me that he likes the basketweave and I can stop now.

So, 5 years after I first conceived this design, it is finally inching its way toward completion. This isn’t the oldest design in my backlog, but it seems that it is the one whose time has come.

Branden and I drove out to Rhinebeck yesterday with a couple of friends for the NY Sheep and Wool festival. The market seemed quieter this year, but that might be because we got there after the first morning rush. There was still plenty to do and see, and it was nice having (a little) less jostling and jockeying for position inside the barns.

As usual, I didn’t take very many pictures. It’s always fun to scope out the knitwear, but I don’t like to take photos of other people without their permission, and it seemed that there wasn’t quite as much on display as usual. (I have this sneaking suspicion that I might be becoming a Rhinebeck old timer, constantly going on about how it was different in the old days…)

I did notice that a lot of rust and green color combinations were calling to me, and yellow was surprisingly attractive, too. My one yarn purchase stayed pretty true to form, though….blues and grays, even if I did spring for a little bit of an acid green.

I went into the festival without any plans for what to buy. I usually have a theme of one kind or another, but this year there wasn’t really anything that I needed, and so I left it open to serendipity. A few barns into the festival, we stopped at the O-Wool booth, where I was sold by a swatch. It was just a simple stockinette square knit from the O-Wool fingering weight yarn on size 00 needles. The fabric was just beautiful. Good drape, very soft, and beautifully springy. (I think it was the springy that got me, in the end.)

I know better than to buy one-off skeins. I’ve done this often enough at festivals to know that a single skein or pair of skeins will sit in my stash forever, no matter how much I love the yarn. It’s sweaters that get knit. But did I want to knit a sweater with 8-9 sts to the inch? Well, kinda, actually…yeah.

I’ve been needing a lot of mindless knitting lately, and the more I knit with tiny needles the more I love them. (I may have spent a couple of hours investigating sources for sub-0000 needles recently…) Miles and miles of tiny stockinette might be just the thing. Throw in a little colorwork, and it was hard to say no.

And so, 2568 yards (21 ounces) of the base color came home with me, along with a few skeins of accent yarns for the colorwork. I have no idea how many yards it will actually take to knit a sweater at that gauge, but I’m hoping that that’s enough. It seems like it should be, right?

Just look at these colors:

The color names are Appalachian Stone (dark gray for the body), Night Heron (dark blue), Brook Trout (light blue), Black Bear (black/dark brown, depending on the light), and that beautiful green is called Arrowgrass.

I was also tempted by some Astral (just look at that shine, and those colors!), but decided to hold off on that one until I have a project for it. I’m pretty sure I saw some of this at Wisconsin Sheep and Wool back in 2011, and have often thought about using it since. At least now I know what it’s called!

The Fiber Optic booth is always hard to resist, and Just Our Yarn is one of my favorite stops. And I love everything in the Briar Rose booth. In each case, though, I decided to wait until I have a project in mind…the O-wool should be more than enough to keep me busy until the next Rhinebeck, don’t you think?

I did notice this shop sample of a Stephen West pattern in the Fiber Optic booth. I’m thinking that this might be a good alternative project for the neon slip stitch project if I decide that my own design just won’t work.

I also noted the gauge of his fabric (you can see how open it is in the photo…light shines right through it). My preference is always to knit at a pretty firm gauge, but a more open fabric might get me a bit more fabric for my yardage, which would be helpful with that particular set of yarns. Something to think about, anyway.

My favorite thing about fiber festivals is finding ideas that are new or unexpected. This year, it was a really interesting knit/woven shrug by Koochi Ku (looks like her site is undergoing some maintenance at the moment).

The weaver in me was very intrigued by this fabric. It’s made from a simple stockinette ground fabric, with a heavy weight accent yarn woven in during the knitting. The knit base fabric keeps all of the stretch and flexibility of knitting, but the primary design element looks like a weave. The artist said that she knits the ground fabric on a loom, and then lays in the accent yarn as she goes. The end result is a fabric with a beautiful, open feel and nice drape, but the very low-spin accent yarn thickens it up enough to be nice and warm. I just love the colorplay in the accent yarn, too; I very often prefer a weave pattern for showing off a handpainted yarn.

I think it would be possible to do something like this with a slipped stitch technique, though it would take a little engineering to figure it out. I thought it was a really beautiful piece, and an interesting way of mixing two different textile forms to make something new.

Instead of knitting at home this week, I’ve been spinning. I think I mentioned in the last post that I had started spinning up some Shetland lambswool that’s been hanging around for a few years now, and I’ve been focusing on that instead of new knitting projects.

I am always surprised at how fast fiber spins up, especially when it’s a nice, fluffy top like this one is. I’ve just finished up the light oatmeal color (this is the same color I used to knit the Embroidered sweater). It’s a fingering-weight 2-ply, and I got 1348 yards out of 556 g (just over 1 lb) of wool. Forgive my mixed units there, but my niddy noddy is in yards and measuring the weight of fiber is much more precise in grams than in pounds and ounces.

Even after knitting a sweater in it, the oatmeal is still the color that I have the most of, by far. I have 113 g of the dark brown, 360 g of a medium brown, and 225 g of a pale fawn color that’s just a tiny bit different than the oatmeal. All of those together add up to 698 g, so I’m just under halfway there.

Considering that the last sweater used up just a tiny bit more than the 1500 yds I originally spun for it, I should have more than enough for a second sweater by the time I’m done. Until then, I’m just enjoying feeling the flow of fiber through my fingers. This week, it will be fun to watch the colors changing as well.