inconceivable!

I found myself without any active WIPs on the go yesterday. Since I found the idea of not having any socks on the needles inconceivable (anyone out there who can say that word without thinking of the Princess Bride needs to go and watch that film NOW!) so I cast on for these Cheery Littlebottom socks. It’s the April/May mystery KAL pattern for the SolidSocks group, and I thought of this Regia yarn from my stash as soon as I saw it. I’ve been meaning to cast on since halfway through April but never quite got around to it so I’m glad to finally have it on the needles at last. I think it’s safe to say that I’m not going to get these finished by the end of May!

My Baby Surprise Jacket has been off the needles for well over a week, but it’s still lingering as a WIP since I still have all the ends to weave in and all the buttons to attach. I better get a move on though, the baby is due in a couple of weeks and I still have soakers to knit and onesies to embroider!

I used an applied i-cord to bind off, and I love how it turned out. I always thought that i-cord borders involved knitting yards of i-cord, followed by painstakingly sewing on said i-cord, which sounds like an incredibly tedious thing to do. Not so with an applied i-cord! You’re knitting an i-cord, attaching it, and binding off in one fell swoop, and it gives a lovely polished edge. I’m a definite convert.

There was also a bit of spinning action that went on this weekend. I hand-dyed this fibre a few months ago, and perhaps it’s a touch of Jubilee fever but I thought it looked a tad patriotic (if you squint, and imagine that the purple is actually blue….).

It was a quick spin, started on the Saturday night as a Champions League football avoidance measure, and finished on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t have an exact picture of how I thought the colours would look spun up, but I suppose I thought there would more prominent sections of the undyed white so I was initially a little surprised by the levels of pink. Of course, if I’d bothered to apply any common sense at all I might possibly have realised that white and red obviously blend to make pink, which is why the finished skein has such an overwhelming pinkish hue!

It’s about a 4ply weight, and I was quite pleased that I managed to keep my singles fairly consistent, especially since I was balancing my kindle on one knee and reading at the same time! What can I say, I just can’t put down the whole Game of Thrones saga. I’m not typically a fan of this sort of epic fantasy genre, but this stuff is engrossing! I read the first book out of sheer curiosity from all the hype, and I was completely hooked. I’ve been devouring them all in quick succession and I’m now on the fifth book of the series. Not looking forward to finishing it and having to wait such a long time for the last two books to be published!

Pin It

not so ugly after all

The other day I thought I’d try a different way of dyeing roving. Things didn’t exactly go to plan. The first time I pulled it out of the dyebath I wasn’t thrilled with the results. The colours were off and it looked like it had fulled. I let it dry for a while, but hated it a little bit more every time I looked at it. I panicked and threw it back in the dyebath with more dye, but the light was fading by this point and I couldn’t actually tell what I was doing properly, our indoor lights are terrible for colours. When I looked at the roving the next day I was sure that I’d dyed the ugliest roving ever.

A few nights ago I was fighting the urge to cast on for a new project when I already have so much on the needles, so I decided the start spinning this ugly little bundle of wool. Turns out I don’t think it’s quite so ugly after all. It’s spinning up into a pale silvery purple which I’m finding quite pretty. It’s also nowhere near as fulled as I thought it was and is quite a joy to spin!

I finished spinning half of it in only a few hours whilst starting to watch Game of Thones (I heart Sean Bean, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite so much rutting and boobies!), and I’m looking forward to spinning the rest up. I was aiming for a thicker single than I usually spin, but it’s proving a bit of a challenge because if my concentration wanders and I don’t actively concentrate on spinning a thicker single then my fingers naturally fall back to drafting for a thinner single. I often hear that spinners reach a point where spinning thick yarn becomes an effort, and it’s certainly true in my case. This single is probably quite uneven as a result of all my concentration wavering, especially towards the end where I started to rush to finish my spinning before the end of the episode I was watching so that I wouldn’t be tempted to start another!

Pin It

birthday hauling

Yesterday was my birthday, and to celebrate my lovely Boy drove me down to Yorkshire and treat me to a little wool hauling. I had planned to bring my camera along, and show you pics of all the lovely places we visited, but in the rush and excitement of the morning I forgot to pop it in my bag! But I did manage to snap the occasional phone pic…

So here goes. A snapshot wool filled birthday tour…

Giant needles at Texere. These things were ridiculously large!

Beautiful snowy Bradford on the drive to Coldspring Mill. It’s nice to see pictures of Bradford being beautiful because I lived there for 5 years as a student, and the area that I lived in by the university was thoroughly awful. I won’t bore you with the details, but needless to say my last couple of years there were miserable. Hopefully my bad memories can be overwritten with images as lovely as this!

More of the drive to Coldspring Mill, followed by…

a nice cup of Yorkshire tea at the Mill! And a lovely lunch of giant Yorkshire pudding, sausages, gravy, mash and peas (that I was far too hungry to stop and take picture of) for the utterly bargainous price of £3! I’m a bit of a sausage snob, so I was dubious when I saw the price, but it was completely delicious, and I still can’t believe how cheap it was.

We rounded it all off with a stop at Whitby on the way home, and an obligatory visit to the Magpie Cafe for fish and chips and mulled cider, followed by lovely moonlit walk along the pier. There really is nothing nicer than being wrapped up in deliciously warm handknits, staring up at the stars with the sound of the waves crashing against the shore, and the wind whipping around your face. A perfect end to the day.

Well actually, the perfect end to the day was coming home to the birthday cake that my Mum had baked for me! Vanilla cake with lemon buttercream is my Mum’s specialty, and it is delicious.

But I suppose the important part of this post is the haulage, so here it is!

Some King Cole Riot DK, which is touted as being a Noro dupe. This ticks (almost) all my boxes (grey? Check. Jewel tones? Oh yes.)

Mystery yarn from Coldspring Mill. It’s a beautiful rust colour, looks like a DK weight, feels like merino and I’m pretty sure it’s Debbie Bliss but I haven’t a clue what line it is. Might have to do some investigating one of these days. They had a larger pack of this yarn, and I’m kicking myself for not getting it because it’s such a lovely colour!

Chocolatey brown Debbie Bliss Rialto, in what I think is an aran weight.

According to the pack this is Extra Fine Merino 4 ply, so although I initially thought this was a Debbie Bliss yarn, I now think it’s probably Sublime Extra Fine Merino 4 ply. Yellow is not a colour I’m usually drawn to, but I love this. It’s not quite dark enough to be a mustard, not bright enough to be lemon, and not brown enough to be biscuit. It’s just lovely and buttery, and I’m surprised at how much I love it.

There was more haulage. I picked up a couple of balls of colourful acrylic for my best friends daughter as I’m giving her knitting lessons for Christmas, and a few balls of Stylecraft 4 ply for knitting dolls clothes and accessories. There was also a huge amount of fibre haulage!

I’ve been a little obsessed with dyeing tops at the moment, so I’ve stocked up on undyed merino as well as picking up a few other fibres and blends so that I can try my hand at spinning wools other than merino. It looks like 2012 is going to be the year of the wheel!

Pin It

jewelled silk

I’m still obsessed with silk hankies. The other day I tried my hand at dying them, and I love love love the results.



The silk soaks up the dye so beautifully giving these wonderfully vivid jewel tones that I am completely in love with.



This was quite a thick stack of hankies, so the dye didn’t always completely penetrate, but I’ve learned my lesson and I will be sure to prepare more dye than I think I need next time!



I actually quite like the bare patches of silk, it feels like a little cool oasis amongst all that colour. Besides, I’m convinced that this is going to spin up pretty regardless of undyed patches.



I really don’t have much more to say about this silk beyond the fact that

1. I think it might be one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever done,
2. I can’t wait until the merino I’m currently spinning is finished so that I can start on these pretties, and
3. I got a little excited and snap happy when it was all finished and dry, so excuse me while I keep quiet and blog a ridiculous number of pictures of lovely lovely silk!

I cannot wait to play with these pretties!

Pin It

Dyed & Plied, A Tale of Two Yarns :: 2KCBWDAY1 ::

Part of any fibre enthusiast’s hobby is an appreciation of yarn. Choose two yarns that you have either used, are in your stash or which you yearn after and capture what it is you love or loathe about them.

What better way to break my blogging abstinence (holiday, followed by new job means that I haven’t quite managed to fit much knitting and blogging into my new routine!) than Knitting and Crochet Blog Week.

My tale begins with the dyed:

This hank of 4-ply Bluefaced Leicester is destined to be a birthday Ishbel for the Boy’s sister. I’ve had it in mind to knit her a shawl for a while now, but after gifting Holden to their mum for her birthday she proclaimed how much she would love one for her birthday. Whilst I’m a little sad that it’s not going to be a surprise any more, at least I know that it’s something she wants!

Anyway, back to the yarn. The Boy tactfully managed to find out that she’d love a shawl that was a dirty lilac colour but definitely not too purple, and proudly relayed his good work back to me. I was a little perplexed as to what exactly a dirty lilac was, but luckily my Google-fu was on form that day, although I still wasn’t sure how to stop it from being too purple. In the end I just decided to dive right in and see what happened.

It’s been a while since I did any dyeing, and this is the first time I’ve dyed to order. My usual dyeing “technique” is to have a vague idea of an end colour and then throw colours in the pot until I’m happy, so it was a little stressful to try and dye to something quite specific but it was still a lot of fun. I added things a little ad hoc, a bit of this and a little of that, and just played around with it. I wish I’d kept a few notes on what colours I’d used, because I think this is a lovely colour and I’d love to try reproducing it for myself some day. Perhaps it’s a little too purple for L, but I did try to grey it out slightly and I think the result is wonderfully fresh colour which reminds me of Parma Violets, perfect for spring.

It’s come out as a subtle semi-solid, which is my favourite kind of yarn. I’m not too big on variegated yarns, and solids can sometimes be a little too plain, but there can be so much depth in a semi-solid. I can’t wait to see how this knits up!

Onto the next yarn, and a bit of a cheat since it not strictly plied!

I’ve obsessing over spinning some silk for the past couple of months when I remembered that I had some silk noil lurking in my stash.

I carded some vanilla noil with some turquoise, added a dash of petrol blue and a generous helping of waste silk strands.

I’m still very much a novice at fibre preparation so I’ve no idea whether I was doing it properly, but I ended up with some pretty rolags. I love how the brilliant white of the silk waste contrasts against the pillowy cloud soft noil. It has such a dreamy quality to it.

 

I did start spinning this up, but I think I’ve spoilt it (plus the photos are terrible because they were taken at night!). 

I’ve spun it pretty thin, and although it’s still kind of pretty and still soft, nowhere near as wiry as it looks… it still looks wiry. I knew when I carded the fibre that it was going to be a textured neppy yarn, which is something I usually shy away from in favour of smoother yarns, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve made an incredible mess of this. I know that silk can take a lot of twist, but I think that I’ve overdone it slightly so I’m hoping that a lot of this comes out when I ply.

To be honest I wish I’d spun this a lot thicker with a little twist to preserve all that poufy loftiness that I loved so much in the unspun fibre. Or even just drafted it to a thin pencil roving and knit it up like that. But that’s what happens when I rush headlong into a project without thinking things through, and these are lessons learned for next time. And it’s still a pretty yarn, even if it’s not as pretty as I’d planned.

Pin It

Spinning berries

Remember the berry braid?

After leaving it to linger on the wheel since October, I finally finished spinning it up!

Thanks to my eager-beaver dyeing attempt, the fibre was quite felted, although thankfully not unsalvageable. It did mean lots of pre-drafting though, and I’m not sure whether it is because of this or something else entirely, but it has spun up quite fine.

It’s not very even, and some parts are woefully underspun but I love the colours. It’s a measly 24 grams, and it varies somewhere between a fine laceweight in places, and a heavy 4 ply but it is oh so soft.

I really have no idea what to make with it. I have about 7 or 8 skeins of handspun in my stash now, and I’ve never actually knit with any of them. I would have loved to have made a shawl with this, but it’s such a tiny amount that I don’t think it would go very far. Perhaps I could stripe it with something, or make some other small accessory, but for now I think I’ll just pet it.

Pin It

WIP Wednesday

I can believe it’s time for another WIP Wednesday. This week has flown by and I don’t really have much progress to show for it!

The Sliding Leaves socks I was working on last week are still on the needles…

I was working on the heels last week, so I’ve only managed about an inch since then. It’s a nice pattern, and I like the socks, but to be honest I’m a little tired of knitting them! I usually manage to memorise most of a pattern by the time I’ve knit this much, but this one doesn’t seem to want to stick and I’m getting rather tired of having to read every line of 2 different charts. I’ll certainly be glad to finish these and have them on my feet rather than on my needles! It’s probably a good thing that I’m making them 2 at a time, otherwise I’m fairly certain that they’d be victim to the dreaded second sock syndrome…

I’ve also started spinning my hand dyed berry fibre from my last post.

I’m quite pleased with the way it’s turning out. I split it in half lengthways so I could preserve the colour changes as much as possible. It is a bit felted so I’m having to prep it quite a lot which is resulting in a very well pre drafted fibre which is spinning up to be very fine. I’m somehow managing to spin it fairly evenly, so I’m hopeful about the resulting yarn. I think plied it might be somewhere between a laceweight and a 4ply. I’ve got no idea what the yardage will be, but I’m hoping there’ll be enough for a small triangular scarf.

And just to finish, a little mystery sock spoiler alert– if you’re doing the Through the Loops 2010 Mystery KAL then look away now!

We’re up to Clue 3 and the penultimate clue is due for release tomorrow, but here’s how the sock looks so far, just past the heel turn…

Pin It