My oldest daughter, Aurora, has definitely caught the knitting spirit from her dear, old dad. She’s knitting a scarf for each of her friends. She has a way to go, still, but she has the first one finished. I particularly like how she wrapped it to look like candy.
It has been a long time since I have posted, so I’ll try to catch up as much as I can. I know I’ve missed some of my spinning adventures, so when I notice them, I’ll post them.
The fiber from the last post (autumn squash, falkland) has been turned into a lovely pair of socks. The first picture shows the colors better, while the second picture shows the textures better.
I haven’t worn them, yet. But I’m solidly convinced that I will spin more falkland in the future.
I spun this in my office, while I was waiting on phone calls or for processes to complete, or whatever. I took it home and just barely plied it together. It’s superwash Merino, and yielded about 465 yards out of four ounces.
It will be some lovely heathered socks. Or something.
Aurora and I tried our hand at dying some fiber. We did cake dyes set in a crock pot with citric acid. Here’s what it looked like dying:
Here it is drying in my office:
Here it is as a skein of yarn:
And, finally, here it is on Aurora’s hands:
That’s what she had in mind when we started, although I think she had hoped for the yellow to show more rather than morphing into a green.
I joined a fiber club, from the inestimable BrewerGnome, aka Dan. His first offering was called “Anubis”, and was dyed the black, turquoise and orange associated with Anubis. It was a new fiber for me, Wensleydale, which has a surprisingly long staple length, especially when you’ve been spinning Merino. Dan also suggested that we might try fractal spinning, so that’s what I did with it. Here’s the resulting yarn:
And here it is, almost finished as a hat. Aurora thinks it need ear flaps before it’s done.
Another project, Woodsman. Superwash BFL. I’ve already posted about the fiber, so here’s a picture of the finished object, a pair of socks which I gave away just a couple of days ago. I should have tried them on, first, because I think they’d feel wonderfully warm.
I spun some Dorset fiber, which is apparently very tough to felt. This would make it ideal for socks, of course. I should get around to that…
That should be it, for now. I do know that I’ve got more to take pictures of, but that will wait for another day.
One side note: it’s snowing today, and I’m very glad for the wool I have on my feet, on my hands and on my head.
I have set a new record (for myself) in that I spun this four ounce braid of top
Into 435 yards of 3-ply fingering weight yarn in 7 days.
Because I was having “a whale of a time” spinning it (as I wrote elsewhere), I tried to look up the characteristics of the breed. It turns out that there is no “Falkland” breed. It’s more of a location identifier than it is a breed identifier, much like the Punta wool I spun last year. As far as I can tell, the wool on the Falkland Islands from the various breeds of sheep is blended together (according to some fairly strict sets of criteria), and that’s what “Falkland wool” is.
Now, part of why I liked this so much is that is isn’t Merino, and it isn’t Romney. It has its own feel while drafting and its own hand as a finished yarn. So I hope that “Falkland wool” remains much the same as it is now–although I did read that the islanders have been introducing more Merino sheep in hopes of making the wool softer. I can only hope that this isn’t true, but market pressures probably are messing about.
In any case, I loved spinning this batch of wool, and I hope to get some more soon.
And, following up from last post, Aurora has indeed knit the BFL yarn she asked me for into a 50″ garter stitch scarf. There’s plenty left over for tassels, which she might do later on, but this is a nice picture showing the kind of drape she got from the yarn.
Blue-faced Leicester (BFL) is a pretty common wool for handspinners to use. It was the third type of wool I tried (after a bad experience with Corriedale and a so-so experience with Merino), and the batches I bought from Spunky Eclectic were so much more fun to spin than either the Corriedale or the Merino that I fell in love with it.
Now, with a few years of experience under my belt, I have come to understand that the Corriedale I spun first was probably overly compacted, and spending a bit of time loosening the fibers before spinning would probably have made it just fine. I still look at Corriedale with squinty eyes, but I’m willing to try spinning it again sometime in the future.
Likewise, with the Merino, it was a bit trickier than I would have liked to spin a shorter-stapled fiber, but I have spun enough of it since then that I have come to understand Merino well enough. I think it’s overused in the commercial yarn world, but the last batch I did (see my previous post) of “acorn” was a joy to spin and is one of my better yarns ever, so I can’t say I hate Merino.
But BFL… well, I might not be buying a whole lot in the future.
BFL has a longer staple, but is soft and has a bit of luster to it. Usually the long wools have more luster, so that’s no real surprise, but the fact that a really good BFL can be as soft as a middle Merino is what makes it stand out. But one of the things I’ve noticed over time is that BFL can be sticky, which has started to make me think I might be parting ways with it. I don’t like sticky fiber.
I have spun some gloriously smooth BFL, of course. The stuff I bought from Spunky Eclectic was very nice, although I didn’t keep notes back then, so I’m going by memory here. But I have purchased a bunch of BFL from various sellers and have found most of them to be sticky in at least some places.
Now, I realize that some of this might be due to the dye used on the BFL. In fact, some of the sticky patches were clearly in the darker dyed patches, so I’m pretty sure that the dye did have something to do with it. But some of them were not. In fact, one of the stickiest four ounces of BFL I every laid hands on was white, undyed commercial top. And some of the dyers are people I trust to treat the fiber right (and have had some great fiber from in the past), so I hesitate to completely blame the dye.
And thus, the pound of BFL I have in my stash may be the last batches of BFL I spin. The four 4-ounce batches may be as smooth as butter to spin, and I might change my mind at the end of the end of them, but at this point, I am bidding farewell to BFL because I just can’t trust it.
Oh, and I finished up the 7.3 ounces of this BFL. A nice 4-ply worsted-weight yarn at around 320 yards, and it’s a very soft and squishy yarn–but oh, was it sticky in places to spin.
Aurora and I have already wound it into balls so she can knit it into a scarf for herself. I can’t wait to see how that works out.
I didn’t finish the yarn from my last post in time for the February challenge (has it really been that long since I posted?) but I did finish it. Yarn is here:
It’s about 375 yards, so that should be enough for a pair of socks. My wife wants me to make some for her sister, so now I’m just waiting for foot measurements…
I also started (and finished) this wool pool yarn.
It was fun to spin, and although it isn’t as soft as some yarn, I could easily make gloves or something similar from this. It’s about 340 yards of three-ply yarn.
I finished this yarn from some top I bought in 2008 when I first started spinning. This merino was VERY squishy, and was easy to spin.
I got 540 yards of three-ply yarn out of this, which surprised the heck out of me. It was only 3.8 ounces to start with. Not sure what I want to make from it, either.
I bought this BFL a couple of years ago, too. It’s slated to become my new watchcap, so I spun it a bit thicker and made it 4-ply to try getting up to worsted weight. I didn’t quite make it (more like DK weight), but it is gloriously soft.
It’s about 340 yards.
Lastly, I finished the Exmoor Mule from my last post. That’s this yarn. It’s only 280 yards, which kind of surprised me, but that’s enough for gloves. I already knit some gloves for myself (should get a picture of them), so I’m not sure what this yarn will become yet.
For the future, this is on my wheel right now:
And this is on the spindle in my office:
On Ravelry, there is a group for spinners who use spindles. While I do have a wheel, which I do use, I do most of my spinning on my spindles. Ever since I discovered 9-inch shafts on Bosworth spindles, that’s been my most-used spindle. I probably need more spindles, now that I think of it.
In any case, the Ravelry group has a monthly challenge. The idea is to start and finish in that month some spinning which is related to the theme. February’s theme is “New Beginnings”, and I thought that this fiber reminded me of new growth and fertile soil. This is the picture of the braid as it was listed on etsy.
I started spinning it on the first of the month, which puts me within the guidelines for the challenge. I’m already over 1/3 done. This is what it looks like, so far:
The goal is for 3-ply sock yarn. I’m intentionally not worrying about keeping any of the colors aligned when I ply because I think these colors will all mix pleasantly, and if some of the plied yarn does end up with all three plies being the same color, that will also be nice. Good thing I ordered more plying spindles already, because I have the Exmoor Mule I spun last month sitting in a plying ball, ready to go.
That’s this stuff:
That will be three-ply yarn as well. I have decided during these colder days (was 4°F yesterday morning), that I need to make some gloves to keep in my truck. That steering wheel gets cold. Maybe this yarn will be those gloves.
I try to make stuff each year for my kids to wear. Alaric already got his pair of socks for this year. I just finished these gloves to go with the hat Aurora already got. She shouldn’t expect any Christmas knitting from me.
The gloves were her request. She picked the fiber off etsy. It looked like this:
I’m a little surprised at how different the two ends of the yarn ended up being. When I look at this picture of the fiber, though, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
In any case, the gloves ended up being more fraternal than identical. That’s cool by Aurora, and I kinda like it, too.
The hat also has some handspun in it–the brown stripes.
Now I just need to finish Elenna’s socks and cast on Cambria’s mittens.
One day a few months ago, we suddenly became a puppy house. I’ve never really been a dog person before, but these little guys have grown on me.
It’s amazing to me, although it probably shouldn’t be, how different these two puppies are. Taters is arguably the cuter of the two, but he’s dumb as a post. I think he’s trying to skate through life on his looks. Pouffles is quite a bit smarter. Taters likes sitting on laps. Pouffles likes sitting next to me. I’m sure we’ll find more things like that as time passes.
My parents built what I think of as our family home when I was about three years old. I have vague memories of that time.
I remember stepping on the driveway when my father was troweling it, and I remember that I got in trouble for it, but it may have been a simple, “Don’t do that!” from my mother as she wiped the cement off my shoes.
I remember cleaning construction materials from the front yard and finding a snake under some plywood. It scared me. I was sure it was a rattlesnake (were there even any other kinds?) until my father picked it up for me to hold. I felt my panic ease as I felt its smooth scales run through my hands–and more importantly, as I could see no rattle.
I remember the boysenberry bushes which grew behind what was then the car port, and the sand box my father built for me there. I remember burying a wasp in the sand in that box and uncovering it the next time I played in it and wondering to myself if wasps can still sting when they’re dead. I thought that they would not be able to–and to prove it to myself, I pushed my thumb quite deliberately onto the wasp’s back end. Turns out, of course, that dead wasps can sting quite well, thank you.
I remember playing with the girl who lived a couple of houses up the hill, Andrea. She was my first friend after moving into the house. Her grandfather owned the sand and gravel pit on the other side of the creek from our houses, and her father worked with him. I remember that her father let us sit in the cab of the big dump trucks while they loaded it up with material, and how exciting that was. I remember that he drove us home that afternoon in the bucket of a big front-loader. Those were simpler times, of course, and we didn’t worry one bit about not having adequate seat belts for the ride.
When I got a bit older, I remember that there was a rumor among the neighborhood kids that we were strictly forbidden from playing at the sand pit. I don’t actually recall my parents ever explicitly warning me to stay away from the pit, but the rumor was of such strength that my knee-jerk memory is that we were to stay away from it. There was a darker rumor that someone had been playing over in the sand pit and had accidentally been covered up with sand and they didn’t find him until months later when they were digging out that part of the pit with front-loaders. We certainly didn’t want to end up like that nameless kid, so any time we ended up playing even just near the sand pit, we got a bit nervous. Even as a teenager, walking through the pit at night looking for bats, there was a little tickle at the back of my head that told me I shouldn’t be there.
By the time I was a teenager, the pit had mostly ceased active operation. I don’t really know a strict timeline, but I do know that it was kind of a big deal that they temporarily reactivated the pit in the spring of 1983 when the Wasatch Front flooded. Our house was not really in any danger from those floods, but many others were. I recall quite clearly showing up to church in jeans and T-shirt long enough to take the sacrament and then heading back to the sand pit where we were busy loading burlap bags with a few shovelfuls of sand.
Thirty-plus years later from most of these memories, I live in a house built very close to where I spent all those hours filling sand bags in 1983. Andrea’s grandpa passed away and his children took the old sand and gravel pit, and the rest of the land he had owned around it, and developed it for residential houses. They rolled out the fifth-acre and quarter-acre lots in phases, and gradually most of them have filled in with the kinds of houses you’d expect to have been built between 2000 and 2009. There are still a few lots left, mostly prime lots which command prime prices. The cul-de-sac in that part of the development is very near to the spot where we grew an acre of corn and pumpkins with Andrea’s parents, year after year. Those are the lots where I used to tube down the hill in snowy winters, where I used to build dams in the creek in the middle of the summer.
My lot doesn’t have much hill and doesn’t have a creek near it, but it is prime to me because I remember how I felt as I filled sand bags, hoping to stave off most of the water flowing through the city streets down by the hospital.
Most of my neighbors didn’t grow up around here, and they bristle a little bit if some of the old-timers remark that we “live in the pit.” Besides the fact that I enjoy the gentle ribbing that I can give the new-comers by claiming proudly that I live in the pit, I really am glad that I can live here. Even though the landscape has changed a bit from those long-ago summer days, my physical closeness to the pit helps to keep those memories alive just a bit more vividly.
Sorry for no pictures on this post. I truly wish I had some.
UPDATE: 1 picture
Been spinning a lot lately. Found my spinning mojo or something. So, a few pictures are called for.
2-ply sock yarn, 375 yards, 3.75 ounces. Superwash BFL. I wish I had a faster flyer because I felt like it took forever to ply it, and it’s still underplied in spots. I also have upgraded my feelings about superwash from ‘hate’ to ‘dislike’. Perhaps I’ll give it a spin again in the future.
The Abby Batt (“Denny”) after plying and finishing. I did this as a 2×2 cabled yarn, so that’s four plies. Cabled yarns are supposed to make your stitch definition pop, so I need to find something that can be done with 90 yards of yarn that will show off the FREAKING PRETTY YARN.
I’ve never done gloves before, so I’m doing a really basic pattern, and I’m relying on the colors of the handspun to make them interesting. I’m happy so far.
What’s on my wheel now? Oatmeal BFL, of course.
And since today seemed that it might be the last possible time I could take a pictures of the leaves in my yard (after having missed some incredible shots… I has a sad), here are a couple of reasons I love my flowering pears so much.
