Second wind...

Spinning once again :) Filled a bobbin with the navy/black superwash merino and it only took me an hour. An hour to ply and one more skien done. It goes pretty fast once you get started, but it's the whole getting started that sometimes takes a while.

Spinning was very soothing, very calming and very enjoyable, so much so I ended up predrafting 2 more batches for me to spin up soonish. Perhaps my spinning wheel will not be put up as soon as I had hoped. I predrafted 4 ounces of optim fiber from Chameleon Colorworks in the Midnight colorway. it feels almost like tencel or silk in how it predrafts. A lot of work, and I think I may need to predraft it some more, but it's so soft and shiny. I'm really looking forward to spinning it up.

I also predrafted 4 more ounces of Pigeon Roof Studios superwash merino in the Vanity Fair colourway. I think I did one 4 ounce batch in that colour way before, but I under plyed it and would like to try again. It's not my favourite colour so if I mess up, I won't feel as bad as if I messed up something I really wanted to do well.

I spent some time looking at other people's handspun and I think I'm getting closer to producing stuff that I would like to be able to use to knit things with. I am still having some issues with underplying (loose areas in the yarn), and with consistant thickness. I believe that is an issue with my drafting. I need to predraft better. Or maybe find a better way for me to predraft. I'm told that preparing the fiber well beforehand is more than half the battle, if you do it well, spinning the fiber up is easy.

I've tried predrafting by spliting the fiber into very long very thin strips of fiber and spinning each of those, and frankly I don't really enjoy doing that. I wonder if I can adapt the technique I saw at madrona by some unknown lady, she had one hand on her roving (full size) and the other just sort of pinched the bits that she was spinning, and she spun directly from the roving, no predrafting/drafting that i could see. It looked pretty even, and she wasn't even watching what she was doing. Perhaps it's practice, I don't know how much time she spend doing it, but she looked pretty bored.

In any case I have a ton of fiber to practice on, both in pencil roving format (just to practice spinning and plying, and in roving format where I can practice predrafting and getting even consistant singles.

So many things to think about and investigate, makes me wish I had started doing this earlier. As if I had time. :)

Procrastinating...

Sigh, what is it about spring that makes me want to just do very little inside the house? I have all this stuff I *should* be working on, but frankly it's tough to get myself motivated to move these days, so much other stuff happening in my life.

I do need to get stuff squared away ASAP, as I'm running out of time before my houseguest arrives... And I want my place to be immaculate while they are here. So much stuff to do, so little time!

On the WIP side :) I finished weaving in the ends on the grey hat, and started a purple/green scarf, that I think I may frog cause the colours look much nicer in the skein than in the pattern I choose. Plus, this scarf was not even on my todo list, so I shouldn't even be considering working on it. I'll frog the scarf, and do the spinning this weekend. Then 2 things are off my list, and I'll be able to put the spinning wheel away and make the living room more tidy.

One thing I *may* add to my todo list, is a pair of socks or something out of Alpaca Sox Heathered Grey. Of all the balls of yarn I left on a chair last night (yeah I know that is a very bad idea with a cat in the house), that was the only one that she touched, and she brought it up and put it beside my bed. Maybe she is trying to tell me something.

Spring Cleaning!

Cleaned out a bit of my stash (only 3 garbage bags full), dropped them off at A New Yarn, a shop that accepts yarn donations :)

Feeling good. So good that I promptly dropped a bunch of cash (all for a good cause right), on 2 books, a bit of yarn on sale (to finish the yarn I need for that sweater I have been trying to start) and some gorgeous Alice Starmore yarn that was on their discount table.

I can see already that I can NOT go to that shop that often, way too much stuff that is interesting to me. There was this single ply icelandic yarn that was calling to me! But I was good, resisted it.

Deep knitting thoughts

What if...

What if I could manage to keep my place clean without any effort, I could knit more!
What if I could find me a sugar daddy, I could spin more!
What if I could get me a housekeeper to cook and manage my house, I could design more sweaters!

Back to reality :)

This weekend is going to be spring cleaning and donations to charity I believe. I don't expect to get much spinning or knitting done, but we will see.

Have several things I'd like to finish up, see yesterday's post. Finished the grey hat, just need to weave in the ends and it's done. Not sure I want to block it, but if I don't it's going to have a pointy top, which doesn't look as nice as it could, so I probably will have to block it.

I found 2 pairs of half finished socks (yeah, I have WIP scattered everywhere right now) So perhaps I should finish those, both are toe up and done past the heel, just need to do the cuff, and they are done. Each pair shouldnt take me more than a couple of hours.

Should work on that blue basketweave scarf, or it will NEVER be done... Shoot me now if I ever decide to do a basket weave scarf using very thin fingerling sock yarn again... 2 inches on this thing take roughly 3 hours... Even slower than socks! I don't know what I was thinking when I started it, other than oooo soft, ooo pretty, ooo nice pattern. Hopefully I know better now :)

I also need to clean off my dining room table. It is going to be my drafting table for my sweater pattern. My knitting supplies have just exploded all over it. Very little yarn or fiber on the table, just lots of needles (big closing store sale at Pacific Fabrics in Issaqua), various stationary supplies (big rolls of tracing paper, since I can't find large size grid paper anywhere!), magazines and books to do with knitting, and somehow some of my quilting supplies have managed to find their way to the dining room table.

Pico is also helping in her own unique way. She's slowly bringing my yarn (one ball at a time) down from my work/storage room upstairs, to place it gently under the dining room table. I think she may be telling me something, perhaps that I have too much yarn, and that I should put it away so she can't reach it? I'm almost scared to go see what kind of havoc she has wrecked upstairs, cause I really did think I left all my yarn out of reach of a little cat. However she is devious and crafty when it comes to getting into small places that she *wants* to get into.

Time is finite...

So annoying, I have an infinite number of things I want to create/make/knit/spin, and a limited amount of time in which to do them. Not to mention RL other things are starting to rear their heads and demand attention. I would love to block out several hours a night just to be creative, but it's getting harder and harder to do that these days.

In the short term, I'd like to get the following things done and off the plate:
1. Finish design of blue/blue/white stripy sweater
2. Finish spin of second pound of navy/black fiber
3. Finish grey hat
4. Start and finish second Midnight Sun Tam
5. Start and finish second ipod nano case - space invaders theme
6. Start and finish first iphone case - space invaders theme
7. Start and finish second iphone case - pirate theme
8. Start knitting blue/blue/white stripy sweater

I think 2, 3 will be easy to knock off this week, but the rest are going to take a bit more time for me to finish. 5, 6, 7, shouldn't take me more than 3 hours each, so maybe by the end of March. OMG time flies too fast... Need to find a way to make time slow down a bit more.

One more weekend bites the dust...

Bunch of knitting on the needles this weekend, finished yet another hat, have another one more than 70% done. Moving along nicely, not bored with them yet. Might even start another midnight sun Tam. It went fast and was a fun knit. Love the fabric that the first one turned out, but it looks like a tam, I want one that looks like a ski hat! Won't be using larger needles on the body, that should fix the problem. Odd how even a quarter of a mm can make that much of a difference when knitting.

Reorged my fiber/yarn on Sat. OMG, I have a lot of fiber/yarn. Almost fully occupies a very large closet. I really do need to knit faster! But, I have a serious thought of a sweater, need to rework my numbers a bit, but I think it will work. Perhaps a project for next weekend? Then another sweater for the next project. Need to start working on my mission possible 2008 goals. Otherwise I'm going to be giving away a lot of yarn! and possibly frogging a lot of projects.

Spinning is going wonderfully, I'm starting to get some really nice even yarns out of it all, I do need to work on my plying, I believe I may be underplying sometimes. It shows up only after I wash the skeins and hang them to dry, that I notice the loose spots in the yarn. The one that I "overtwisted" came out gorgeous, so maybe I need to *overtwiste* to get good consistant tightly spun yarn. On target for my goals, finished the Agent Orange (one skien gorgeous, one skien kind of blah, maybe I should reply it again). One skein of the navy/black done, 3 to go, then I'm done my spinning for a while. Till the spinning bug hits me. Perhaps I should put my spinning wheel away so that I concentrate on knitting. Yeah, that's what I'm going to do once the blue/black is done.

Wish there were more hours in the day...

Hats, Hats, Hats and more hats...

Socks, scarves and mittens are so yesterday, I've moved on to hats.

I'm working on Hat #7 now, wonderful red Jacque Cousteau hat that is a breeze to knit up (well I haven't hit the decreases yet, but the instructions don't look all that daunting). I've also figured out why my hats were all consistantly big... I completely forgot about Negative ease...

So lets say someone has a 22 inch head, I was knitting a 22 inch hat, not a 21 inch hat that would "stretch" to fit that 22 inch head. No wonder everything was large (Not to mention sometimes my swatches don't represent the true guage of my knitting, and many thanks to Jean Wong for pointing out to me that I was knitting on needles consistantly too large for the yarn I was working with. Those 2 bits of information have helpped me immensely.)

So now, I need to remember to knit with negative ease for hats. You want hats to be snug. All I need to figure out now is how snug they need to be :) 1 inch negative ease? 2 inches negative ease? 1.5? I think perhaps it all depends on the pattern at hand.

So... since I now have so much more insight into it, I have 4 more hats to "redo", perhaps I can find people with larger heads so that I can "gift" my prototypes to.

Reprioritizing...

So after having a gander at my stash of fiber and yarns, I've decided that I need to reprioritize what i'm working on these days. Once I've finished the second skien of Pigeon Roof Studio's Agent Orange Superwash Merino, and plied both, and the second pound of Navy/Black superwash merino pencil rovings, I'm going to focus my attention on knitting. I really do need to work my way through several projects, since spinning produces yarn, and I have a surplus of yarn, it only makes sense for me to knit rather than spin :) Well I also have a surplus of fiber, but I won't go there yet.

I've been inspired to knit a couple of sweaters, I swatched for one last night, and spent a good part of today looking for grid paper that is metric... AND IT IS NO LONGER PRODUCED! So I may have to resort to creating my own (pain in the arse and probably quite expensive), or making do with imperial measurements (annoying but possible). I also figure that after I have designed a couple and knit a couple of sweaters, I will have a much better idea of what kinds of yarns I love to knit with, and therefore have a plan on what to spin up some of this absolutely gorgeous fiber I have in my stash. I should have enough of the stuff for several sweaters, and rather than blindly spinning, whatever comes naturally when I spin the fiber, having a plan and a target would probably be best.

So looks like this week will be finishing spinning, and locating some grid paper, and next week I'll be off to the races designing and knitting stuff! Wish me luck!

Weekend Knitting Madness!

Wow, what a wonderful way to spend the weekend. I took 4 days of knitting and knitting related classes at Madrona, and had a blast. I'm so very happy I decided to go and do the classes. I took all of Jean Wong's knitting classes. My brain is full of thoughts, ideas, things to try, things to do, wishlists of things I want to work on. It's tough to revert back to real life stuff, and limit the crafty/creative side of me to just evenings and weekends again.

Knitting Patterns
2 day course, all about creating a fitted sweater from your measurements. This class was amazing, the whole math (wonky math but still math) behind how to create a pattern, draw it up, figure out how to get the armholes to match the arms, and how to create different kinds of neck holes. Very very cool class, makes me want to go back to my parent's place and find all my drafting supplies and bring them back so I can design some more sweaters. I do think I will use much of what I learned. Learning the Japanese knitting notational shorthand was just a huge bonus!

Finishing
1 full day, Wow, 11 swatches later, this course was so cool. Learning how to do invisible bind off for 1x1, 2x2 ribbing was way cool. The Japanese short rows for shoulder shaping was awesome. I don't think I will ever look at short rows the same way. So many fancy, efficient, precise ways to finish sweaters. No more stiff seams for me!

Button holes
1/2 day, this was a very interesting class. I never really gave button holes much thought, but now I know how to do at least 5 different kinds of button holes, and how to make button bands look good on sweaters. Very very useful class, I hope she runs a Button Holes 2 class next year. I would definitely take it if she ran it.

So now the dilemna is if I should sign up for her 13 month course. It looks amazing, truely amazing, I had no idea she ran it down here in Seattle as well as up in Vancouver. The sheer amount of work is daunting, but I very very much enjoyed wrapping my brain around designing sweaters and thinking about how to make the sweaters fit just perfectly. Well I have a couple of months before the open house, when i would need to decide.

New Fibers
I broke the bank... well almost :) I now have about 6 pounds of various types of fiber to spin, amazing, colourful, beautiful, soft, fluffy and just darn right gorgeous fibers stashed away in various places around the house. Maybe these next couple of months I will spend spinning it up so that I can use it if I take that course I want to take... Perhaps that is way too ambitious, maybe using commercial yarns would be easier/less stressful in the long run. I certainly have enough other yarn to do that.

FO
And to top it off, I was suffering knitting withdrawls while I was in the knitting course, watching all the people around me knit all kinds of things, so I started a hat on Thurs. Absolutely love it, so much that I stayed up late to finish it last night, spent 40 mins weaving in ends this morning, still have an hour or so to go finishing it, then blocking, and it's done! First hat that I have ever had that took *9* balls of yarn... Ah well, I will have yarn for future projects :)

That's it for now!

Swatching, and swatching, and swatching and more swatching...

So I've managed to sign up for all of Jean Wong's classes at Madrona this year, and am really looking forward to learning new and interesting techniques. However, it's getting down to panic time for me, as I've never been very good at getting swatches done, something about knitting little squares just doesn't do it for me. And for these courses I have to knit millions of these little squares, and I have to follow very detailed instructions for doing it.

I've finished the swatches for the first 2 days of classes (Deep breath of relief), however I have not blocked it (and I don't think I will), and I produced 2 swatches when I only was required to produce one :) I think it will really depend on what she is going to tell us, which one I will use. One is this gorgeous dark purple/blue/black irridecent silk/wool japanese yarn that I picked up in HK last year. I believe it is DK weight. The other is some of my 2 pounds of handspun olive merino that is aran weight.

The Sat class swatches are bogging me down, I have 5 more to knit (I think, please only be 5 more), and have completed 9 of the rest of them. I just need to buckle down and do it. Maybe tonight... I will sit there with my instructions, yarn holders, size 5 needles and just put the nose to the grindstone and finish them off. It REALLY shouldn't take me that long, but for some reason I just don't want to do them, looking at the instructions always seems to get me moving doing other stuff, like taking out trash, and washing bathrooms, and cleaning litter boxes.

Then the Sun class swatches are staring me in the eye, and taunting me that I haven't done them yet either. I did get my ass in gear and dye the yarn into 6 (not the suggested 5) colours and will be swatching them up as soon as I finish the swatches for the Sat class.

I SHOULD be able to get it all done. If I can finish a sock in a night, how come I can't do 8 swatches? Must be some weird mental block... Swatches seem to take much much longer than actual real knitting.

How much yarn is enough yarn?

So I have this pattern, a very cute pattern that asks for 219 yards of yarn, well 94gm of yarn that is 234yard/100 grams. Which if you do the math (very very loose math that it is), would take 219 yards of yarn, of that specific weight.

I have 2 balls of gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous navy blue wool/silk yarn that weighs in at 171 yards/25gm... If I were to double it up, I should be able to match guage (I think I may be dreaming HUGE fantasies here, but let me dream on for a bit), and then I might (if I knit fast enough) be able to complete the pattern right? It SHOULD be enough yarn... I think... Maybe... *sigh*

I would absolutely hate getting to the end of the yarn and have less than an inch to go at the top of the thing!, that would absolutely suck... so maybe I need to pick another yarn out of my stash to work with...

So this other yarn, that I have been wanting to cast on with (100% baby alpaca, how yummy is that), is 50gm/unknown yardage. it looks pretty thin. I do have 2 balls of it, so if I double it up, it *looks* like I would have enough yarn, but I donno... Would it be thick enough? Perhaps I need to go do some WPI measurements with these yarns, maybe that would help me decide (I think not).

Or if I were really proactive I could do a swatch (not that the pattern has anything other than 22s/4", which doesn't help me much cause I STILL DON'T KNOW how much yarn it will take me to knit the thing.

Perhaps I should just cast on and hope it will all work out. If I believe hard enough, it will come true, Right? Or perhaps I should just wait a bit and see if I have something else in my stash that would be more appropriate for the project... but this wool/silk is boootiful, and the baby alpaca is sooo soft and squishy.

Hrm... Decisions... Decisions...

Downsizing and upsizing!

Since I have so many projects on the go, I decided to reorganize my home slightly (well slightly more than slightly) to better accomodate my hobby/vice/addition.

My master bedroom was HUGE, it had space and good light, and huge windows, and lots and lots of closet space. My spare bedroom is much smaller, but has a walk in closet (a huge plus in my view, even if it isn't as big as the closet in the Master bedroom).

What occured several weekends ago (and the decluttering is still ongoing), is the swap of the Master bedroom and the spare bedroom. My spare bedroom is now my master bedroom (it's okay, both rooms have ensuites :) :) ). And my former master bedroom has now become my craft/work/hobby room.

I actually like this set up a lot. Moves a lot of my crafting stuff upstairs and out of my living room, and gives me a huge closet and many bookshelves to store books/patterns/yarn/fiber. I do need to acquire several more items before I can fully utilize this room as it should be used. 1. A reasonable sized TV, for the mindless background noise I like when I'm working on something, 2. A comfy chair/armchair/loveseat/somethingorother that I can sit and work from. 3. A cheap work table that won't mind getting a bit of dye splashed on it from time to time.

Once I have those bits, my work room is almost set, it's going to be amazing, having such a large space to work in, I even have a bathroom with full bath to hang my freshly dyed yarns and rovings from!