I have readers!

I...have readers...I have readers!

I mean, I know I have readers, of course, since I have pageviews, but I didn't know until this past Sunday that I actually had readers, you know? But I met one! In person! One of the guy at the knitting group that I (finally) made it to said "I read your blog." Cue the emphatic waving to him in this post, since I am utterly and completely stoked, now!

Sadly, I have little to report this week. I've been sewing away on Easter stoles as surprises for the four pastors for our church, leaving little time for knitting...I've also completely neglected spinning, and my poor wheel is stain mournfully at me. I promise that as soon as I'm done with my Easter dress (or after Easter, whichever comes first), I will get back on the horse!

I do have an actual finished project to show for my efforts at Knitting group on Sunday, though!

These are Harvest Dew, by Rose Hiver, knit up in Knit Picks Stroll Hand Painted in Make Believe. I did a fairly short cuff and opted for an afterthought heel, 'cause I'm all about trying new things, and I thought shorter socks would be nicer with the heat. Spring? What spring? We had Fall all Winter and then jumped straight into Summer. Ugh.

With said heat, I think I'm going to be doing a lot more socks and lace. Speaking of lace, The Studio is having a lace challenge this quarter that I'm totally stoked for. I already snagged my needles because I've fallen in love with the Knitter's Pride Dreamz and I was scared that there wouldn't be any more left when the challenge started, so...yeah.

Anyway, the details are that you have a quarter (3 months) to knit up a project (lace, for this quarter) and anything for that project is discounted for the first couple of weeks of the quarter. If you finish in the allotted time, they will double your reward points from your materials purchase. Tres cool, if you ask me!

I'm planning on knitting the Rose Leaf Trellis Shawl, so I have an excuse to buy new yarn for it, hehe.

Voulez-vous...

So, remember that Moulin Rouge colorway of Polworth I was spinning?

I finished the first single!

Ain't it purty? There's some yellows and stuff hidden under there, too. I'll be starting on the second single soon, because my foray into corespun was a fantastic failure due to a not-very-good choice on my part for the core. It got too twisty and hard to deal with, so I scrapped it. I also don't think I like the look of a corespun yarn, so...I'll ruminate on the idea some more before I try it again.

In other fiber-y news, I just ordered some more Polworth from Unwind Yarn Company, in a fabulous pink colorway that celebrates Dana's upcoming nuptials. It's called Chapel of Love, and I'm hoping to get the holy grail of a 3-ply fingering from it...that or I might try for another 2-ply laceweight for a shawl...

Mmm, luverly! I reallly need a better camera, though...

Anyway, that's not all that's been happening around here. I've been knitting lots, but I keep forgetting to take pictures of things...so those updates will wait.

However, I DO have pictures of the sewing I've been doing lately. We were in the fabric shop and I found a lovely cotton/linen blend that both I and my little girl loved, so we got it so I could make matching Easter dresses. Hers is complete:

Little model in training, let me tell you. She got upset that I had started mine first, and beggggggged me to make hers. She's super happy with it, and cannot wait for Easter to come so that she can wear it, heh.

Mine, well...There was a problem with the pattern. There was WAY too much ease built into it, and it was completely unflattering. Princess seams are NOT supposed to be unflattering, Simplicity!  So, after copious amounts of taking-in, I came out with this:

Which I feel so much better about walking out of the house in. Well, I will, once it's finished. I still need to line it. The pattern calls for a partial lining, but I'm going to do a full lining, and I think I'm going to have a little lace edge on the lining, peeking out from under the skirt. It'll be cute...I hope.

Better, Faster, Stronger

Or...just different? I think the re-branding is just about complete. I went through a number of different design ideas before I settled onto this one. It had to be colorful and reminiscent of fireworks, so that's what it is!


I've been a bad, bad blogger, letting so much time go without writing anything. Honestly, though, life has been a little hectic. I have been knitting and spinning, but I've been really, really bad about taking pictures. Here's what I've got:

Here's some SW merino that's sitting on the bobbin in an N-ply. I'm fairly happy with how it came out, but my consistency could have been better...and the posture for N-plying really hurts my back. I'm hoping I can find a way to sit to chain ply that doesn't involve having my back twisted. It doesn't like that, however much I do like to ply otherwise.

Skeined up:

Here we've got some Swirl BFL that I spun up and plied onto itself...It's so bouncy and soft!

And now some sproiiiiiiiingy yarn! For Christmas I got 4 bumps of Frog Tree Yarns Meriboo--2 in pink and 2 in purple. I decided that they would all be Experimental fiber, and for the first experiment, I did a true 3-ply, ending up with a magnificently full bobbin!

 

Which then turned into a boingy-sproingy skein of squoosh-deliciousness!

I don't know that I'm ever going to actually knit with it. I love squooshing it too much!

After I pulled the Meriboo off the bobbins, I started up with some lovely Frabjuous Fibers Polworth that I picked up from The Studio. The colorway is called Moulin Rouge, and it's red and lovely, but that means it's hard to photograph. Darn.

I'm trying to spin it as fine as I can. As you can see, I've made some fauxlags (faux rolags, heh) from the top, and I'm doing a long draw, mostly because I find long draw to be more relaxing than a worsted-style draw. I feel like I'm getting it pretty fine. ^_^

So, aside from the spinning, I've been working on a Lavanda sweater for my little girl. She picked the pattern, and we'll be dying it pink once it's all done, which part of me mourns. I'm loving this Fisherman's Wool. It's springy and has really good elasticity, which made the cables much less harrowing than I remember cables being (let's not talk about cables in acrylic!). I am much pleased, but I'm glad that I'm almost done, because I'm getting a liiiiiiiittle tired of the reverse stockinette field of the sleeves. 

  The red bits of yarn at the band are markers for where the buttons will go. I thought that'd be easier than just trying to guess and maybe not get them lining up correctly with the buttonholes.

My other project OTN is a pair of Harvest Dew socks, from my self-made sock club for the year. Really, it's January's sock, but I'll catch up, I swear!

Oh, and I almost forgot! I whipped up a Percy for the Bits' school fundraiser's silent auction, and I think it was the highest-grossing of the items at the auction!

I replaced the nupps with gold beads, half to go with the "Jazz it up" theme with a sort of Mardi Gras-esque color theme (minus the green, but who's counting?) and half because I wasn't sure I'd have enough yarn if I did them. I don't think I should have worried.

I promise to be more diligent about taking pictures and posting things from here on out!

How do you get to the MET?

Practice, practice!

I'm a little late with getting this one up, but here's my plied up first try on the wheel:

 

Eager to get more yarn under my belt, I threw on my smaller whorl and got a little more consistent. I split the BFL I'd gotten in half and made myself some faux rolags (fauxlags?) to spin up. I was pretty pleased with the single that resulted, although I completely forgot to take a picture of it in the tizzy of having company over last night and showing off my wheel's capabilities. I went straight from finishing up my single to plying it with some black cobweb-weight merino from Colourmart that I happened to have in my stash. (I figured that a nice dark solid color would compliment the color transitions without confusing the eye the way I thought plying two singles from the dyed BFL would. That, and I'm not ready to Navajo ply. Need a little more experience with singles and regular plying first, I think!)

However! I did finish plying it up today and remembered to take photos, both on the bobbin and in the skein, so now I will dump them upon you!

 

 

I'm finding that, at least for right now, it's a lot easier to spend the time ripping off sections of fiber and wrapping them up into little cocoons to spin from. It's still got a learning curve, but I think that drafting from a rolag comes a lot more naturally to my hands than inchworming or even spinning from the fold, which I was really the only way I could handle drop spindling. 

There's something insanely relaxing about the long draw...just slowly stretching the fiber out and letting the twist do all the work in regulating the width of the strand. I can't by any means do it perfect with every draw yet, but when it works (and I remember that a Death Grip on the fiber is a Bad Thing), it makes a beautiful, even strand with so little effort that it makes my heart sing.

Seeing as it only took me a few days to spin up entirely half of my painted fiber stash, I made a little order on Etsy. I laid claim to two braids of Unwind Yarn Company's handpainted BFL, in Memphis Blues and Wide World, as well as a custom-dyed 4oz of Corriedale from Fangrrl Fiber Arts that was made specifically to fulfill my request. 

The lovely green of the Wide World is (my hands willing) going to become a dk-weight single to be knit up into a simple pair of fingerless mitts for a Christmas Present. The other two, well...We'll see what they want to be! ^_~

It's heeeeeeeeeeere!

I know this is late, but...It came at around 6pm last night and I put it together and played with it until I was so tired that I needed to pass out, then I was really busy today, so...Sorry for the late post, but...

It's here! It's here! IT'S HERE!

 

Eeeeeeeeeeeee!  I am in love! 

After much hard work and lots of false starts and strand-breaking....

 

I finally got a little progress, and have some almost-yarn to show for my work!

Yayyyyyyy!

The goal now is to get into a natural rhythm with my girl and see if we can't get some consistency, be it with thicker singles or frog-hair to be plied up later.

Practice makes perfect, after all!

The wait is killer...

So, yesterday I got a little package in the mail. It was obviously too small to be my wheel. However, it hailed from the company that I'd purchased my wheel from (Village Spin & Weave), so I naturally tore it open immediately. Inside, I found the following:

My lovely new niddy noddy, which I immediately used to skein up (and count yardage) on my only real skein of handspun I completed on my spindle (it was 60 yards, by the way), the extra bobbin for my as-yet-not-arrived wheel, and 8 ounces of a lovely wool top.

I don't know what kind of sheep it comes from, as it is labeled "60-62's Wool Top", but it is extremely soft and buttery. It's slightly softer than the Corriedale Cross top that I have on hand (ordered from Pacific Wool & Fiber), and it drafts very easily. I can't wait to get my wheel and start spinning it up!

I read a good tip on one of the spinning groups on Ravelry: that one should spin up some pre-spun yarn (like acrylic) and then run it back through with opposite twist, just to introduce yourself to the wheel. I'll have to dig up that last ball of Caron Simply Soft left over from my pre-fiber-snob days and try that out.

I'd planned to get the living room spotless today in preparation for my wheel's arrival on Monday, but as they say, the best laid plans...My boy finally decided that he was sick of the peeling caulk in the bathroom (We won't mention how long I've been complaining about it) and wanted to redo the whole bit of it. So off to the hardware store I went, to procure caulk, a scraper, and a fender washer to use as a diz (I thought that perhaps dizzing the Ugly Batts I have would facilitate easier spinning, but more about that later).

Of course, things did not go as easily as my boy and our best friend thought it would. It took forever, and the bathroom was a horrific mess. But I cleaned it and it looks really nice now, so I guess that's my silver lining in the face of the living room's scheduled cleaning being pushed back to tomorrow.

During one of my breaks from smoothing the caulk, I sat down and tried this whole dizzing thing. I guess maybe the fibers in the batt I was trying to diz are just too short or something,  because it alternately got stuck in the diz or came apart at the slightest provocation. I was not a happy camper. I think I need to make myself a cheap DIY hackle and try dizzing off of that one of these days...just to see if I can do it at all.

I'll have to do it in secret...I've been forbidden to build anything since my adventure in creating the PVC Great Wheel. I don't usually argue about that, since immediately after he forbade my forays into DIY-ness, he promised that if I really needed or really, really wanted anything, we'd talk about purchasing professionally-made products with guarantees and warranties, heh.

Oh, and since I didn't get one up last post, here is a picture of the BFL that I mentioned. The colorway is Lupine:

 

And after I chained it up into a braid, just 'cause I thought that it was pretty:

I'll definitely write again as soon as my Symphony arrives, and in the meantime, I'm going to be working on a change in the branding for the blog!

The adventure begins...

So, last night my dear darling boy ordered my Christmas present early. Yes, I'm aware it's not even halfway through September, but I've never really been one for antici......

...pation.

But now I have to anticipate, because it's going to take 3-10 days for my lovely new Kromski Symphony to get here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (More exclamation points illustrate more excitement, right?)

I had pretty much already decided on the Symphony when I first started thinking about spinning, but I did my research and even drove the near-hour to the Yarn Barn in Lawrence (and stopped and got some gyuudon at Don Don, too! Delish!) to test one out before I made any kind of commitment. The Yarn Barn couldn't offer me anything over-and-above the standard package and didn't have one in stock, so I didn't order from them. Instead, I ordered from Village Spin & Weave, who offer fabulous extras. I of course got the extra bobbin + Niddy Noddy + 8 oz of fiber package.

I've got a good deal of my Corriedale top left over from my spindle spinning (which I will still do, but only on the go, I think), and I also picked up some Mountain Colors BFL while I was at Yarn Barn. I'm hoping to also start dying top myself, and maybe eventually save up for a drum carder and "paint" myself some batts, but for now I'm good. I mean, I still have most of two Ugly Batts stored away, mostly because they have a large amount of VM in them and I couldn't deal with the predrafting and the VM with a spindle...Might pull them out again and try long draw once I get the hang of my new baby!

I'm going to be good about this whole blogging thing. I've failed many times in the past at writing journals, be they online or on paper, but I've decided to approach this as less of a journal and more journalism.

With that in mind, please bear with me while I hammer out what the template of the blog is going to look like, and as I get settled into some kind of posting rhythm!