eye candy friday

I may be in a small minority here, but I prefer Standard Time to Daylight Time, at least this week.  I am not a morning person, at all, though I can pretend to be one when I have to.  This, combined with lab schedules, means that early sunset just makes me feel better about working late–there’s no way I’ll leave before sunset, so why not stay the extra hour to finish that experiment–and I actually get some sunlight before I have to leave my house.  So, taking advantage of some of that sunlight: this is my current walk-to-work spinning, an Abbybatt in Hibiscus.  (This is 3 mornings’ spinning, so probably about an hour’s worth.)

And, though it’s not terribly attractive yet, here’s some other knitting I’ve been doing:

This is my Zombies yarn (which may need a different name…), a couple of rounds into the lace pattern of the Bird’s Nest Cowl from Elann.

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In other news, I think I’ve figured out how to convince Mel to sit in my lap: keep the heat low enough that I want to knit with a blanket on my lap.  He’s always been fond of the acrylic blanket that was the second rectangular thing I knit, but he seems okay with fleece throws, too.

 

eye candy friday: matchy-matchy edition

Last night, as I was waiting for the bus to go to fiber night, I realized that the batt I was spinning was a good match for the skirt I was wearing:

Heh. Maybe I’ll eventually wear that skirt with a shawl containing that batt… That’s an Orange Blossom Abbybatt all spun; I’ve moved on to another, in Hibiscus. (The plan: ply Hibiscus with Orange Blossom, Girl Drink Drunk, and the remaining Hibiscus. Have a set of orangey pinkish yarns for a shawl.)

I got some knitting done on the bus, too (and at Rhinebeck, for that matter), so I have a bit of sock toe:

Not much other spinning or knitting, though–my at-home fiber time (as well as about half the housework time) this week has gone into figuring out how to weave patterns with two heddles. Maybe I’ll post pictures over the weekend, when I might get better light.

 

knitting! and some rhinebeck stuff

So, as I was getting ready for Rhinebeck last week, I realized that my hats are all still packed somewhere, as are most of my scarves.  I briefly toyed with the idea of knitting a hat in the car on the way up to the campground, going so far as to ball an extra skein of yarn, but then I decided that a third knitting project for the weekend would be overkill.  (Y’know, on top of the three spindles-with-projects.)

Still, when I came home, I wanted a new hat.  And now I have one.  There had to be some kind of silver lining to two sickdays right after vacation.  (I’m feeling better today than yesterday, but fever on top of feeling like crap…I stayed home.  And napped more than I knit.)

It’s another Foliage–decent pattern, top-down, and I wasn’t going to make up a pattern, even a simple one, through this headache. I wanted a top-down hat because I wasn’t sure I’d have enough Rhubarb, and I figured the Roses in the Snow would be better as a stripe along the bottom than a patch at the crown. And, as it turned out, I really like the way the Rhubarb striped.

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Rhinebeck was great.  Way too short to actually spend time with all the people I wanted to see, but I got to at least say hello to many of them, and cabin-camping worked out pretty well despite the loss of electricity from Saturday afternoon on.  I may have said this last year, when it was even more true, but I love my down sleeping bag.  It kept me toasty and warm.

The weather this year was less beautiful than last year, but the forecast snow never materialized, and there was hardly any rain, either.  It was sufficiently damp and muddy that I went with Keens and handknit socks rather than my trusty plastic Birki’s, but it was nice to be wearing handknit socks in such surroundings.

I’m still sorting through my scenery pictures, and I have yet to photograph all of my purchases, but here are two of the more exciting things I bought:

That’s an ounce of icelandic lamb with alpaca and silk, from Frelsi Farm, which was rightly labelled as the nicest of this year.  (At least, nicest of the stuff they had, which was pretty much all nice.)  I bought an ounce, plus a couple of other blends of theirs, and I think they’re going to grow up to be a Flicka hat from the Knitter’s Book of Wool.   The braid of beautiful greens is Finn top from Gnomespun.  I don’t have set plans for it yet, but I’m thinking it might become a sweater yoke.

Foliage pictures and the Really Super Exciting Purchase (early birthday present) sometime later.  Maybe for ECF.

 

friday afternoon eye candy

These are all from my (new) walk to work this morning, and all shot at eye level. There’re a few particular gardens I’m going to miss passing every day, but I’m not exactly going to be short on flowers to admire.

And, because this is sort of a fibery blog, here’s a photo of the shawl I’ve been working on lately:

It’s the shawl I’ve been making up to go along with my Chai yarn from Enchanted Knoll Farm. I’m running low enough on the Chai that I’ve started spinning the Phoenix roving I bought to go with it, since I want this shawl to be bigger than it would be with just the 4 oz of Chai. I’ve also started looking through my lace books for the next pattern to use; I think I’ll add one more lace pattern to the body of the shawl and then do a knitted-on edging.

 

random wednesday

• I’m still spinning on my way to work most days. Yesterday morning reminded me why (aside from spindle productivity) it’s such a good thing–without it, I’m a little too likely to fret about the time, and the weather, and all sorts of other work-related things that I can’t actually do anything about until I get to lab. Especially now that I’ve messed up a second pair of earbuds so that the left one doesn’t work.

• I’ve actually done a decent amount of cooking lately. Still probably less than ideal, but I made these

a week and a half ago. The black raspberries I’d bought the day before were already starting to go fuzzy, so I picked out the icky ones, cooked the rest of them down a bit with some sugar (like jam, but not that cooked), and subbed the raspberry mixture into my standard muffin recipe (in place of the milk). The seeds were a little annoying, but they were otherwise quite good.

And I spent Sunday evening in ridiculously geeky cookery that I’ll talk about later, when the person who took the pictures gets a chance to upload them.

• There’s been a teensy bit more knitting on the Estonian lace scarf. I was thinking about photographing it with something for scale, since it was mentioned that it kinda looked like a stole rather than a scarf, but I’ll just say (for now) that it’s maybe six inches wide and knit on US1s.

• I’ve finished the first half of the merino/bamboo Sumac singles and started on the second half. It still amazes me how differently spindles spin with a full cop versus a tiny starter one.

• I finally skeined up the Jacob roving from Gnomespun, though I still haven’t (wet) finished it. It seems to be about 660 yards. Here it is with Mel, who’s wondering why I leant it on him (and maybe why he isn’t enough reason by himself for me to pull out my camera):

• I’ve signed up for the Ravelry edition of this year’s Tour de Fleece, for which I have joined Team Suck Less, with the goal of spinning a mile not in a day, because I can’t commit a whole day to spinning any time soon, but on my spindles over the three weeks of the Tour. (And the side goal of spinning fast enough for the theoretical production of a mile of singles, at least, in a reasonable length day.)

• It’s now July, and I have yet to install my air conditioners this year.  This is wonderful.

 

lace in the sun

I went up to New York this past weekend, to meet up with my parents. I also wanted to see the Fashioning Felt exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt. I was a little worried about convincing them that they’d want to go, as they’d seemed singularly uninterested when I suggested it in April, but I think their recent experience of making felt (cat-toy-like balls, at Shelburne Farms) may have changed their minds a bit. At any rate, we all really enjoyed the excursion, though I will admit to being a little disappointed by the sustainable design exhibit upstairs.  (It was okay, and there were a few particularly interesting bits, but it wasn’t as awe-inspiring as I’d hoped.)

Though most of the Felt show didn’t permit photography, I took a few pictures in the one room where it was allowed:

I’d be tempted to try to set up something like that, if I thought it’d survive for more than a few days without being a very elaborate cat tree…

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I haven’t done any felting recently, but I did add a couple more repeats to my Estonian lace scarf, and I’m getting fairly comfortable with the pattern.

(The second photo is more true to the colors.)  It’s a wee bit longer than that now, but the light on Sunday afternoon was lovely (and I’ve missed all the nice daylight since I got home).

 

zoooom!

At Maryland, I was looking around for a new spindle. I wanted one that was not rim-weighted and neither too expensive nor too light. I didn’t see anything like that, so I ordered one from Butterfly Girl Designs last week. It showed up last night, and it’s very zippy.

It seems to want to spin fine (no arguments here), so I’m spinning my Spunky merino/bamboo in Sumac. (I figure lace is a good use for 2oz of something really pretty…)

I did a bit of wheel-spinning-finishing over the weekend:

I took one of the three batts of my Cabaret Hooves and used it to try to remind myself of how to do one-handed long-draw. It worked better with a modified/supported long-draw, but it was fun to spin. It has become a graduation present for my new-Ph.D. neighbor, so she gets to decide what to do with the 160yds.

I continue to knit on my chai shawl while reading Aubrey/Maturin novels. I’m a little more than halfway through book 19, so I should be back to getting enough sleep only science and cooking and fibers keeping me up late pretty soon.

I’ve added the bud lace pattern from Swallowtail. I think I’m going to switch to something else as an edging pattern, and I’m debating about adding a black-with-sparkles bit so the shawl can be bigger. (I’ve only got the 4oz of chai, so I’m thinking maybe an ounce of black.)

 

changeover

On Tuesday evening, I finished the scarf I started in December:

It was the last week or ten days of knitting while reading that did it, I think, so it’s only a week after its intended recipient defended.

And then I started a new project in some very similar yarn:

This is also long-draw-practice handspun from Enchanted Knoll batts, in Chai instead of Harvest. It’s going to have a bud lace pattern when I get back to working on it, but I needed a totally mindless project yesterday, and I don’t mind having a stockinette top-center. (It’s a design element!  Good or not, it’s planned.) I’m still pondering edgings, but I have some time.

 

hot sunday

What to do on a ridiculously hot Sunday: spin, knit, read, bake before it gets too terribly hot, and take better pictures of the new shawl:

This is Mim’s Adamas pattern. I knit 12 repeats of the second chart rather than 14, because I was worried about running out of yarn, and then added two extra repeats of the last two lines of chart 3. I have some yarn left, but I’m happy with the narrow stripe of dark blue/green at the edging. I do need to redo the second half of the bindoff, and I’d like to eventually reblock the shawl on a surface that’s actually big enough for it, but I may try to keep the more rounded, less triangular-with-deep-scallops shape that it has now.

If I try a project like this again–making a color-graded yarn by blending two fibers–I want to make maybe five mixed-color batts instead of three; the shift from the light green to the first blended bit is more abrupt than I’d hoped.

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I think I’m going to have something cold to drink and maybe another rhubarb muffin now.

 

eye candy friday

Adamas is off the blocking board!

I’ll need to reblock it, after redoing the second half of the bindoff, but I think it’s going to go to Maryland more or less as-is.

The Aubrey/Maturin novels are still taking over my leisure time (I’m on book 12 now!), but I took a break last weekend to hang out with my parents in New York, where I talked them into going to the Cloisters. Fort Tryon Park was absolutely beautiful, so we spent a while there on the way to the museum.

More later–I need to fit some lunch into my midday break.

 

it’s hard to read and spin

So I’ve been doing more knitting than spinning, as I’m still pretty thoroughly absorbed in the Aubrey/Maturin books.

I’m nearly done with Adamas–at this point, I’m adding a couple of rows and dithering about adding a knit-on garter stitch edging instead of binding off, so I can get at least a little stripe of the darkest (unblended) blue.
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And I’ve knit a few more inches onto this scarf that I’d planned on finishing a couple of months ago. Oh, well. At this point, it won’t be useful until next fall, so I refuse to let this add stress to my plenty-stressful-already life.  Even if I wind up having to mail it instead of hand-delivering it.

 

eye candy friday

This week has been swallowed up by science, but the forsythias in the middle of campus are blooming and I had a bit of knitting time last weekend.

Tomorrow, I am off to the frozen north.  My parents have been saying that almost nothing is green yet, so I expect I’ll appreciate Philadelphia weather even more next week.

 

eye candy friday: new knitting!

This is the new knitting I mentioned–a lace scarf from the baby camel/tussah I spun right after Rhinebeck, made up of two lace patterns from Knitted Lace of Estonia.  I’ve just finished the border pattern and expect to start the center pattern this evening.