The Ultimate WIP

It has been mighty quiet around here, hasn't it? Well, believe it or not I do have an explanation. I haven't been making much progress on my knitting WIPs, but there has been major growth with one very important project:

That's right - we're expecting a baby!! EDD 5/27/10

We're super, super thrilled and excited and nervous and everything else that goes along with this, but mostly excited and full of hope and wonder.

What I have not been full of, however, is food and knitting. I've been touch-and-go for the past few months and knitting acts as a nausea trigger. Terrible! So my knitting has been almost entirely packed away until the day when I wake up with itchy fingers and a settled tummy. Hopefully it won't be long.

Sorry for the long silence, but hopefully I'll make up for it in the future with lots of tiny adorable baby knits! And thanks for your patience in the meantime!

The Wheel Restored

This wheel has done its fair share of traveling. According to Dave (who restored it) it was probably originally made between 1780 and 1820. All I know is that a friend of my mother's found it in the 1970s and had it restored and gave it to her as a gift. After that, it came across the ocean with us, and last year it made the flight across the US and the drive up to NY. Hopefully it'll be settled down for a while now.

So! First things first.

You'll notice that there's no flyer/bobbin unit on the wheel. Well, as it turns out this is a quill wheel! Dave made an adorable tiny flyer bobbin that fits on the wheel, but I'm hoping I can learn to spin on the quill. You know how I love a new challenge.

The maidens (the things holding up the quill (that's the pointy thing)) are from another old wheel. The originals were damaged beyond repair and Dave did a wonderful job of finding these replacements and then painting them with the black stripes like the rest of the wheel has.

After a good cleaning, the old painting shows through beautifully.


Here you can see how people have futzed with the wheel over the years to keep it spinning. The deep, blackened groove is where the axle used to go, but now it sits higher up. Someone at some point put metal supports into the wood.

The wheel alignment is suuuuuper finicky, and I'm going to be fussing with it quite a lot over the coming weeks, but I'm hoping that pretty soon I'll be spinning up a storm on this old beautiful wheel!

Thanks to my Mom for letting me fix it up, and thanks to Dave at The Merlin Tree for doing such a fantastic job on the restoration! I love the wheel and feel so lucky to have it in the house.

Rhinebeck 2009!

Yes, we made the trek north again for the New York Sheep and Wool Festival. And what a year it was! It was such a good time that I hardly took any pictures, but I have plenty of haul shots to share, not to worry.

It's always a big treat to get to wander among the sheep who grow all the wool for us. Thank you, sheepies! (and shepherds!!)

(this photo doesn't begin to capture the enormity of this Rambouillet ram. He's HUGE!)

The Ravelry meetups are also a blast.

(thanks for this photo, E!)

And it is was great to catch up (in the rain and frrrreezing cold) with Ysolda. (Her Vivian design from fall 2008 Twist Collective was a very popular sweater at this year's fest!)

And that's where my actual Rhinebeck shots end. Sad, no? Next year I'll try to take more pictures. The knitwear spotting was fabulous and I wish I had caught more (any??) of the beautiful sweaters in photos.

I came home with everything I wanted, and stuck well to the shopping plan. Hurray!!

Braving the early Saturday morning crowds in the Briar Rose tent rewarded me with this beautiful slate green merino/tencel laceweight.


And holy Coopworth. This pile of yarn comes from two farms in Maine that shared a booth at the festival, and both farms raise the longwool breed Coopworth. I wish you could feel this yarn! It counts as next-to-skin soft in my family!

The naturally dark brown yarn comes from Hatchtown Farm (4 skeins) and the natural silver/pewter comes from Ruit Farm North (10 skeins!). Lots and lots of 2 ply dk weight fun in my future!!

I decided that I was allowed to buy one really special fleece for myself, and so parked myself in line for the opening of the fleece sale. I knew it would be crowded, but I wasn't quite prepared for the Filene's Basement style of the opening moments of the sale.

Phew! But everyone was courteous and even kind. People seemed genuinely happy for one another when they found what they wanted!

And boy did I ever find what I wanted.

Check out that beauty. Four pounds of merino, dark dark dark brown (almost black in sections), cleanest fleece I've seen in a long time, and with an incredible staple that ranges from 2 to just over 3 inches! AMAZING. Not a hint of tipping or matting, almost zero VM, thoroughly skirted, and did I mention the staple length??

Swoon. And that isn't even one of the longer locks.

Sadly I forgot to write down the name of the farm before checking out, and they collect the tags with the farm names for the sale records, so I'll never know where this beauty came from. (Unless one of the ladies hovering behind me eyeing the fleece at the sale stumbles across the this post and happens to remember!)

The real highlight of the weekend for me was picking up the spinning wheel I dropped off for restoration at LAST year's Rhinebeck.

I am so thrilled and can't wait to tell the whole story of this wheel, but really - she deserves her own post. Check back for the saga of this late 18th century Norwegian wheel and her wonderful restorer, Dave of The Merlin Tree.

FO: Striped baby cardigan

Tada! It turns out that I still knit, too!
Pattern: b14-27 Jacket from Drops

Yarn: Anny Blatt Baby Blatt

Needle: US2 addi circs

Mods: I added a color to the pattern so the stripes were alternating blue and purple. Since this caused ther eto be lots of floats across the edges I did a single crocheted edge.

This really is a clever pattern. I love the way that short rows are used to create the narrowing stripes, which also then creates the cardigan shaping.

I am no not super pleased with how my crocheted edge turned out. It could be (and is fairly likely!) that I'm a crappy crocheter, but it looks messy and is way less elastic than I'd like it to be.

But I'll deal.

I've had enough of garter stitch to last me a good three years or so, so don't expect this to be a repeat pattern! It took much longer than I anticipated and while the clever stripes were novel at first, by the end I was ready to stab my eyes out.

Out the door it goes! Let's see, that takes me down to (mumblemumble) WIPs. And my fingers are itching to cast on with my Silk Forest yarn so the number just might grow. Whatever happened to project monogamy?

Silken Forest

And she's done!

I was aiming for a deep, deep, deep green with the subtle movement between a black green and a slightly warmer than forest green.





I'm delirious over these colors.


So there she is. 410 yards of light fingering silk cashmere blend in a color I'd like to swim in for the rest of my life.
Pattern suggestions?

Silk step two

Plying this silk was so satisfying, and while it was hard to see all my mistakes as I learned to deal with this new fiber (especially in the first batch of singles) overall I'm pleased with the yarn. All 410 yards of it. It's between 15 and 19 wraps per inch and So! Freaking! Soft!!

Today: step three. Dyeing.

Silk spinning

You know the drill. Summer, distractions, etc. I'll just sheepishly (HA!) say sorry and pretend there wasn't an enormous lapse in blogging, mmkay?

So, to distract you from my distraction, here's a fibershot!

Shiny.

Last night I finished spinning singles from a cashmere and tussah silk blend I picked up at Rhinebeck last year. This stuff is pure luxury, and I felt entirely NOT up to the task of spinning it how it deserves to be spun. But I was determined to learn to spin non-wool fibers, and there's no way to learn to spin these luxurious fibers without, well, a learning curve. So. Off I went.

Silly as it sounds, at first I found it terrifying. I mean, it isn't like the silk was suddenly going to turn into a spider web with a giant Vilde-eating spider attached. But that's what I was feeling: terror. My good, old wool had become so comfortable to spin that I completely forgotten the feeling of being out of control of my fiber. And I swear this silk just wanted to jump out of my hands and dissolve into a million pieces. (all of which, by the way, would go right up my nose and start a sneezing fit.)

One challenge of this particular blend is the mix of staple lengths. The silk has a staple of around 7 inches, longer than any wool I've spun. The cashmere? Less than an inch. Finding a drafting technique that suited both of these fibers was my biggest challenge, and eventually I ended up with a super light gripped short forward draw.

Another challenge is the fluff/shine balance. Should I be smoothing down the cashmerey fluff as much as possible to let the shine of the silk come through? Or keep a light touch to give a halo to the yarn? I don't know! I ended up feeling lucky just to have relatively even singles on the bobbin, even if the fluff/shine balance is extremely UNeven.

By the end I felt confident in how I handled the fiber, but I'll withhold any declaration of success until after plying. There's time to screw this up yet!

The natural color of this blend is luuuuucious. Sort of a steely gray with caramel undertones. I love it, but I'll love the yarn even more after dyeing it and I'm curious to see what my colors look like on this new-to-me fiber. So tonight I ply, and maybe tomorrow I'll dye.

This all started as an experimental kick, but now that I'm ten hours into this spinning project I'd be lying if I didn't say I really really really want pretty yarn when I'm done with it. But I'll try my best to remember I'm a beginner, and keep this in mind as I poke my nose back into the "non-wool" box of fiber in my stash to see what new challenges await me.