an ent knits

I’ve been busy lately, and a bunch of it is even stuff that’s relevant to this blog.

While I was doing laundry last Sunday, washing things that were near the moths, I finished spinning my first three-ply yarn:

This is my ounce of Boogie merino in salvia, about 60 yards. (That’s getting to be an awfully common skein size for me…) Anyway, I’m really happy with the way it looks, especially in the bits where the three plies are all different shades.

I’ve also been working on my sock (the toe-up one I cast on at the Harry & the Potters show), both at the Satellite (coffee shop) craft night on Wednesday and at the Sufjan Stevens concert last night. (In addition to bits and pieces of standing on lines and sitting in trolleys.)

It’s grown a lot–the black line is approximately how far along it was at noon on Wednesday.

So that’s about 3h of knitting on Wednesday, plus about 3h of knitting last night…stockinette socks are fast, even on small needles.

But one of the reasons I like stockinette like that is so I can look at other things while I knit. Like the Sufjan Stevens concert, which was (as I expected) fun to watch as well as to hear.

I took this during “Jacksonville”; I think the projected images were supposed to have something to do with either Jacksonville or just small towns…(?) But the sorta movie-ish bits for all of the songs were fun, as was the concert over all. Yay, live music.

Taken this morning, on my walk to work. It’s especially nice ’cause it’s almost at eye-level–the houses on my block are raised from street-level, so the flowerbed is maybe three and a half feet up from the sidewalk.

I found moths in my apartment, and not the mealmoths I’ve been fighting away from my grain products. Wool-eating moths.

It took some hunting to find their nest of evil, hidden under lots of plant-fiber clothing, but it was in a sweater that I’d’ve sworn was 100% acrylic. Turns out that the sweater was 30% wool. I would be distraught right now, rather than merely upset, but the infestation seems (*knocking on wood*) to have been confined to the part of my bedroom by the back windows (incidentally, the only part of my apartment of which I’ve posted pictures), and the only yarn I’ve thrown out has been some ecowool. But my freezer is now stuffed full of yarn, fiber, my highland triangle shawl, and a (woven) wool stole I bought a while ago. And my mountain peaks shawl, which is the only really sad bit–I saw a moth in the project bag and shoved it into the freezer without looking any further. The final determination can be made when I’m not worried about spreading moths. My Sunday afternoon also took on a lot more laundry than it was supposed to have included, as I washed everything that might’ve been hiding moths. (Including a wool sweater I’d gotten for free a few years ago, which is now actually close to the right size.)

I haven’t done an exhaustive search of my yarn and fiber stashes this afternoon, but I’m reasonably confident that there’s no major infestation in either, what with the number of times lately that I’ve poked through them, and the nasty little caterpillars were at the opposite end of my apartment. The thorough stash inspections are going to come after the exposed clothing is back out of the way.

I am now cautiously optimistic. But someone should tell me immediately if the freeze-thaw-freeze system is insufficient.

________

In happier news, I have started three new knitting projects since I finished the autumn sunset shawl. Two scarves and a blanket. Because I am crazy. But one of the scarves is a really simple cable pattern in the fuzziest mohair ever, and the other is the neuron-illusion scarf I’ve been meaning to start for the last year. And the blanket is a freeform thing combining all of the green yarn I could pull out of my stash: mostly single skeins that were gifts, all small enough quantities that I couldn’t do much with them by themselves. It’s coming along nicely, and I’m weaving in ends as I go…so it seems a little less insane than it could be.

And here are a couple of pictures of the mohair scarf, since it both 1)looks like something and 2)fits in the sunny corner of my windowsill.

The first skein (of probably two or three) of the wool-mohair locks from MDSW. It’s about 100 yards of sport-weight. And it’s really soft.

Spindle-spun, wheel-plied. (And now I know better than to try to ply from just a center-pull ball (without my wrist in the middle) when there’s that much mohair in the yarn.)

This is another pic from the wildlife refuge last week. It’s also the largest spider I’ve ever seen. And beautiful.

It’s blocked! I finished it on Sunday night, and had to block it immediately. So I wound up just putting my blocking boards on the living room floor in hopes that Mel wouldn’t destroy anything. As it turned out, I didn’t see him sleeping on it at all, probably because there are so many more comfortable places to sleep right nearby.

I’m thinking I’ll reblock it sometime soon to try to get rid of the side scallops, but I really like the overall drape and look of the shawl now that it’s not all puffy from the garter stitch bits. I like the colors better now, too.

Specs: one skein of miscellaneous fingering wool (about 700yds) from MDSW 2005, first photographed September 25, 2005, knit on size 7 inox grey circular. Stitch pattern taken from the North Sea Shawl from Folk Shawls.

Well, most of my trip wasn’t precisely photographable (and the abstract book and my notebook were heavy enough that I didn’t want to also carry my camera), but I took some pictures at the wildlife refuge we went to last Wednesday. (It’s right near the meeting we went to.)

click for full-size version

I was exhausted enough when we got back to the hotel every night to knit more than a couple of rounds on my flame sock (over the course of five days), but I did do some knitting in the car on the way there and back. Pictures tomorrow or Wednesday.

I will not be making local food this week, nor do I anticipate posting for Eye Candy Friday–I’m off to a meeting for the rest of the week. It should be fun, and it will definitely be exciting. And I’ll have time to knit in the car on the way there and back. *grin*

[click for larger version]

Look at that! Such a small amount of yarn left for the autumn sunset shawl! (The shawl itself is folded in quarters.) I’m going to need another not-quite-mindless project pretty soon. And there isn’t enough left of this to justify packing it for the meeting I’m going to this week, so I may need to find something else that’d be good car knitting.

At least in part because last week’s worsted skeins were so small (about 30 yards total), I spent some of my Sunday afternoon spinning up my ounce of ‘juniper berry’ corriedale as worsted. Oh, my goodness, spinning worsted is sooo much faster than spinning fine. That is, I could actually spin and ply the entire ounce in one sitting. Like knitting with bulkier yarn, though, it has its uses, but it’s not enough fun by itself to lure me away from lace.

The other yarn in these pictures is what was left on one of my bobbins from the Grafton batt. I find it amusing that each skein is about 60 yards.

Despite its general appearance, this is not a quiche. It is an eggy and vegetably thing that I baked for dinner yesterday. But there’s no crust, no cheese, and no milk–the dairy component is yogurt. Although I have sources that tell me that there is such a thing as local flour, and I won’t rule out the existence of local cheese that I would like, I have yet to encounter either. (And I just don’t really drink milk much any more, so I rarely buy it.) So…this is what happens when I take an onion, some garlic, a pepper, three small pattypan squash, two eggs, and three really heaping tablespoons of (plain) yogurt (all from the farmers’ market except the yogurt, which is from Seven Stars Farm via the co-op), and bake the eggs and yogurt and half the veggies as though I had a quiche. (The other half of the veggies wouldn’t fit. I’m thinking of doing something pasta salad-y with them.) The only downside was that it lacked a quiche’s structural integrity, but it was still a tasty Saturday dinner.

I’m even busier than usual at work, to the point that I spent half of Fiber Night last night with my laptop out, doing work…

So this week’s Eye Candy Friday picture is from February, since I haven’t been out with my camera lately.

I spun up the rest of the moonflower wool blend last night. (There wasn’t all that much of it, ’cause it’d been used for a few other things before this experiment with heavier yarn.) It’s not as even as I’d really like, but I think it’s decent for the circumstances–I was holding my cell phone to my ear with my shoulder while I spun.

The hat pictured is the blue Dulaan hat I mentioned last week; it’s knitpicks wool of the andes with a stripe of the corriedale I used for my right wristwarmer.

Look at that! I set out to spin some worsted-ish yarn, and that’s what I got! There’s this amazing trick (please don’t all laugh at me, I can’t imagine why I didn’t think it would work) of not really drafting much while spinning, just doing all of the drafting ahead of time. So I finally tried that last night, and it seems to have worked…the only drafting I did while spinning was little bits to even out places that the predrafting had left uneven. It’s only about 8 yards of two-ply, since I was tired and wanted instant gratification, but I’m so excited! Now I just need to work on skein-matching and figuring out how to spin nearly-balanced singles.