not dead, and still spinning some

First, some late-Friday eye candy:

It’s not from today–it’s been rainy and overcast, but wonderfully autumnal–it’s from my direct walk to work.  (I’ve started going to a nearby coffeeshop to write before going to lab, on days when I don’t have early-morning microscope time.)

So, yes, I’ve been putting lots of time and energy into work, but I’ve been spinning a bit to calm down in the evenings.  I got some new-wool-breed-to-me fiber recently, which I carded last weekend and have half spun now.

I had hoped it would turn out more brown than purple, but I’m not really surprised.  I might’ve added in some brown BFL or alpaca, but I wanted to spin the Falklands wool by itself.  So far, I really like it.  It seems a lot like nice Corriedale.  And I know enough people who do like purple that I think I’ll be able to find a use for this stuff.   It’s also beautifully heathered, from the colors in the handpainted fiber, which makes up for its being less than my favorite color.

 

random wednesday

• New knitting content will be delayed.  I swear I have 2.5mm needles and more than one set of 2.75mm, but they’re hiding.  And my mini-swatches (15sts, 4 rows) say that 2.25mm is too small and 3mm is too big.

• Adamas continues to grow.  I’ve been very impressed at how much it does so when it’s my carry-around project, so, despite the fact that it’s a bit big for carrying everywhere, I’ll probably keep doing that for a while.  And I appreciate the simplicity of the lace pattern more if I’m also trying to pay attention to other things.

• I saw a very interesting sweater (on a person) at the art museum last Friday: it looked like a Fair Isle-type sweater with the pieces inside out, so the floats were on the outside.  It made me wonder if it’d been made by a very proud knitter….but I wasn’t feeling outgoing enough to ask about it.

• It took about a week, given how much time I was spending either at work or out with my parents, who were in town, but I finished carding my February Spunky Club fiber into batts:

These are mostly all the New Day corriedale, but I added some tussah silk, some icicle (dyed red/orange/yellow), and a couple of teensy bits of sari silk. I’m plotting a few color combinations of my own to dye and then card, but it’ll be quite a while before I have time to act on said plans.

• Getting up early is really, really hard.  It’s great for my work schedule to have a walking-to-work partner, but my sleep schedule has not caught up well enough for me to fit in much pre-work running (the only time of day that works well for me), and housework is taking extra tolls.

• Lack of time for basic housework does mean that I finally tried the Vietnamese chicken hoagie from Fu-Wah (my local deli) last night–it’s not bad, and I like the inclusion of cucumber in addition to the pickled carrot & daikon, but I think I still prefer the tofu version.

 

some of the recent non-science

I haven’t been cooking much lately, but I’ve managed a bit of spinning and a bit of carding. (And I went to a Sixers game on Friday, which was fun and very much out of my usual range of activity. And great people-watching, especially the people walking down stairs on their hands and the people breakdancing outside the stadium and on the subway.)

Organic merino, part of the January Spunky Club fiber. I separated the purple end for use in sampling, so it won’t contaminate the perfectly nice greens. This is about 100 yards, from what is probably ~18g. (Might be a little more, but it’s definitely lighter than the orange batt shown below, and it’s still damp.)

This is a lot like the previous two pairs of blue batts, except it’s got grey bamboo mixed in–I got some sari silk from Paradise Fibers, and decided to add some bamboo to play with. It’s very soft and flyaway. I think this batt is 14g.

I was trying to card up all of the superwash merino I’d dyed for Sherie’s batts, but I could only manage one more batt before getting sick of blue. As an antidote to all those cool colors, I carded up some orange.

Okay, the orange was also an excuse to use the angora I bought at Rhinebeck…which I surrounded with a little of the natural brown BFL I’ve been using, plus some superwash merino I’d dyed for a different project and some white BFL I dyed orange and yellow, and a few pinches of icicle. I think I may try to open up the angora locks a little more before I use it again, but I’m thinking that clumps of angora are more like clumps of brown sugar than of baking soda. That is, they may be noticeable in the final product, but they’re not necessarily bad.

And now I’m out of tea again and about to fall over, so I declare it to be (past) bedtime.

 

batturday*

The batts I sent off for that swap arrived yesterday, so I can share pictures!

First, the ingredients:

I dyed some superwash merino and unbleached tussah silk with blue and green, leaving some undyed spots, and added some natural brown BFL.  I also dyed some icicle with a green that split into green and yellow.

I blended them kinda like how I cook, by starting with the merino and adding silk, BFL, and icicle until I liked the way it looked.  I had a lot of trouble with the test batt’s second pass through the carder–it was getting stuck on the licker-in drum–so I kept the silk out of the way of the licker-in for the rest of the batts, and all went well.  Those of you who really know what you’re doing: is there another likely problem with an easier fix than feeding silk blends directly onto the main drum?

This is Sherie’s photo of the batts I sent.

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Carding will probably continue to eat into my spinning and knitting time, since I just got some bamboo and sari silk bits for blending…

*like Caturday, but Mel’s been camera-shy lately.

 

the latest obsession

Did I post about my drum carder?  I got a drum carder last month, a Strauch Petite.  Aside from some shipping issues, and the fact that I needed more tools* to put it together (I got the kit) than the instructions suggested, I’m happy with it.

This is the first batt I carded with it, as soon as I put it together:

It’s a wool blend that I dyed with jacquard russet, with natural light brown CVM and some red sparkly bits.

These next two are the same wool blend, but with some tussah silk (partly dyed pink) instead of the CVM.  They’ve grown into yarn and have left my house.

Next up were some test batts for a swap and then the swap batts, but since I’m about to ship them today, I can’t share pictures.

After them, though, I couldn’t just leave the carder alone this weekend, so I made a few more batts:

Each pair weighs about 30g and is merino and silk with a bit of sparkle.

There’s also been some spinning, and some knitting; pictures when I finish the knitting.

.

*The instructions call for a screwdriver, and there’s mention of possible need for a hammer, which I did need, and I also found pliers to be very, very helpful.  I had all of them, so it was fine, but I’d recommend gathering them before starting to assemble the carder.

 

absorption

So, my nose is back to the grindstone during the day, but I’ve been sufficiently absorbed in fibery stuffs lately that I’ve spent the last couple of evenings spinning and dyeing instead of cooking (and doing only minimal cleaning).

It started with dye day on Saturday, at which I produced these:

(Oatmeal-colored wool overdyed with green, superwash merino for overdyeing red, superwash merino for possible overdyeing green, and wool blend dyed just because)

Plus some silver-and-jewel-tones merino/bamboo yarn.

Then, I came home and finished this:

That’s the 3 ounces of Flowering Weeds merino/mohair from the June shipment of Amy Boogie’s fiber club. I got about 150 yards, if I recall correctly. I split the top lengthwise and spun each in one chunk, with the goal of getting a graded-color yarn that would be suitable for a Fake Isle hat or something similar. I’m not convinced that this yarn is a good color for a hat for me, even with a solid main color, so it’s still projectless, but I’m pretty happy with how it came out. (Could’ve been more even, could’ve been fluffier, still pretty nice.)

I’ve also been dyeing and spinning toward another secret project. (I know! I claim to have a knitting blog, and I keep committing to new knitting projects that I can’t show. Bad me. I should really step away from the wheel long enough to finish the swap socks so I can show them.) This amount of spinning is getting silly–I haven’t developed Steph’s spinner’s limp, probably in part because I’ve got a double-treadle wheel (I’d hate to not be able to use either leg!), but there’re muscles in my knees that’ve been twitching as I sit at not-my-wheel.

I really ought to take that as a sign that I should use my next two evenings for cooking and knitting rather than spinning.

 

multiple stages

I finished those mitts on Monday night, and I’ve been wearing them in lab since then. So wonderful! Microscopes are such heat-sinks…

Both colors are from Boogie’s almost-solid fiber sampler–the cuffs are moonflower, and the hands are juniper. I knit them on my Brittany 5″ size-5 dpns, until I lost one of them and subbed a bamboo size-6 for half of the second mitt; 44 stitches; afterthought thumb.

I’ve also been doing some dyeing, carding, and spinning.  I decided a while ago that the brown-and-white blend of cormo that I bought at MDSW last year wasn’t really any fun to spin despite being really soft, so I figured it’d be a perfect candidate for blending.

This is a skein of onion-dyed wool, with two more (smallish) batts behind it–I have a lot more to spin, but my attention has been elsewhere.  I was trying to get a fluffy singles yarn, but there were too many stretches of really fine yarn for me to leave it unplied.  I think it’ll work out well for something that won’t see much wear, but its specific use will depend on what I do with the rest of the wool.

This is a pile of freshly-dyed wool: white wool blend, grey wool blend, and the cormo (same wool inputs as above), which I threw in a pot with Jacquard’s “russet” dye.  I think it might be worth doubling the amount of dye next time, but I really like the color of the dye on the grey.  (Yes, I specifically wanted patchy dyeing.)

The real problem now is that I want to spin both of these, and the corriedale/silk that’s on my wheel, and also knit on Salt Peanuts and the green freeform blanket and my Peacock Feather Shawl.  Maybe this’ll help my buy less at Maryland…which would be a good thing, considering how much the car rental is going to cost.

 

h’ray!

Two FOs in one week!

Quick specs, ’cause it’s late (also here):

Pattern: Fetching

Needles: my new 5″ 4mm bamboo dpns, which have made all this mitt-knitting much more pleasant

Yarn: Elann Peruvian Highland Wool, dyed with some leftover dyestock that broke.

Mods: Other than changing the gauge, all I did was add a couple of rounds to each thumb.

I really like the way Fetching and Dashing insert the thumbs–I found the directions really clear, and the thumbs fit better than some of the other ways I’ve seen. These are the second component of my mom’s birthday present, which I’m going to give her several weeks early, when I see her next weekend.

 

more catching up

I failed to get nice morning-light pictures, but here’s what I’ve been working on:

The onion-dyed Fetchings are finished, including the weaving-in of ends.  (I was wearing them last week, too, with the ends tucked in…)  This week’s actually started to feel like winter, too, so I’ve been wearing them over my gloves.

I’ve also continued knitting on the green Fetchings for my mom’s birthday.

And I finished spinning the red/orange/yellow BFL.  It’s about 275 yards of fingering-to-sport weight, if I counted right.  (I may not have, since the conversation was a bit distracting.)

I find it somewhat interesting that everything here is yarn or fiber that I dyed.  If I want to keep this up, I’m going to need to dye some more wool…

 

sucked in

I’ve been sucked into the gift-knitting vortex. I’m sticking to four five small projects, but it’s starting to feel like a bit much.

Maybe part of the problem is that I decided to dye the yarn for two of them.

I had a couple of dyestocks left over from last summer’s big dye-day, and no yarn in quite the colors I wanted…so I threw the dyestocks and some taupe wool I had lying around into the big dyepot. I’m actually pretty happy with them, despite the fact that they didn’t turn out the way I’d expected.

The reddish one, in fact, has already started to become a pair of Dashings.

The Fetchings are now done except for the end-weaving, and I’m tempted to keep them for myself.  Not only are they both pretty and knit from yarn that’s hand-dyed, hand-carded, and handspun, but I’m not sure they’ll fit the intended recipient.  That’s why I dyed up the greenish yarn.  Oh, well.  If I can knit up a very slightly larger replacement pair, I’ll give those instead.

Or I could finish the half-knit hat, or try to hand-full the improvised bowl I ran through the laundry three times this evening….  It’s the decisions that are causing me problems, it really is.  Well, the decisions and labwork and Ravelry and housework, anyway.

 

stripey two-ply

I finished the spinning of that yellow/green/blue wool blend that I dyed a couple of weeks ago.  (Second from left in the first picture here.)

I predrafted the second (longitudinally split) half all at once, the way I did for the first half, spun it, and then plied the two together.  I wound up misjudging somewhere, as one bobbin had enough excess yardage that I wound it off and spliced it to the end of the other, but I’m pretty happy with this as an experiment.

 

This is about 110 yards. 

Quick knitting update: everything that’s genuinely active/in progress (the wool-mohair toe-hat, the garter-stitch scarf of purpley handspun, the peacock feather shawl) has grown a bit.  Pictures soon.

 

eye candy friday: dye-day edition

I have a huge pile of freshly dyed wool!  I think I know what I’m going to be doing this weekend…lots of spinning.  And probably even more gazing at my wool with a smile on my face.

I showed the first batch of roving on Sunday; here’s the rest:

The three bits on the left were microwave-dyed; the fourth was kettle-dyed blue; the two on the right started out as grey-brown wool blend. 

I think this shows the blueishness of the kettle-dyed stuff a bit better.  Anyway, it’s a lovely greyish blue.

Now, the yarn.  I bought two half-pound skeins of Henry’s Attic kid mohair specifically for dye-day.  One of them is now yellow and orange and brownish-orangey:

This may just turn into an Icarus shawl as soon as it gets sufficiently cool and dry to deal with mohair.

The other skein was supposed to be chocolate brown with bits of yellow. 

That’s basically what it is (the yellow bits are hiding from the camera), but the brown came out a little purplier than I wanted, so I’m going to let it sit for a while and think about what to do with it.

And…I overdyed the stuff I posted about last week:

Much better.

 

dye-day: sneak peek

I spent Saturday with a bunch of the PhillyFiberists, dyeing lots of wool.

This is the one batch of my dyeing that I brought home (they were all still at least damp when I left)–5oz of BFL, which may turn into socks.   (More pictures on Friday, when I’ll have the rest of it.)

Dyeing is awesome.