Taking class, doing homework and Hey, I learned something…

I finished my homework for the Camel/Silk Spinning Dream Team class I wrote about a couple of entries ago on Sunday night, mostly to reassure myself that I do, in fact, know something about spinning and can make a lovely plied yarn if I so choose. In doing so, I discovered that while I really like the sheen and finish that a worsted draw produces (and my singles are a whole lot more consistent with that draw than with any other sort of a draw I’ve tried, probably because it inches along more slowly and because I’ve spent a great deal more time practicing it), I really do not like the experience of spinning this particular fiber combination with that style of draw.

What I found when spinning this worsted was that the fibers were actually really hard to compact.  Camel is short and downy, and silk is long and slinky and really slippery.  This meant that the fibers pretty much loved the idea of splaying out in every direction and I had to go very very slowly to rein them in and make the sort of tight, neat thread that worsted spinning is supposed to yield.  The whole experience presented a pretty solid argument for adding something to the fiber before spinning it that would make it a little stickier.  Since silk weakens considerably when wet, I probably wouldn’t add water… but I think that perhaps a gentle detergent, or using dyed silk top, where the fibers have had a little bit of opportunity to become misaligned and stuck together by dye molecules and mordants and so on would help matters tremendously.

(That said, the soft, silky, squishy loveliness of this fiber in general is pretty darn amazing).

In other news, I’ve been spinning a very colorful bit of loveliness from A Verb for Keeping Warm.  The fiber is Blue Faced Leicster, the colorway is called Mermaid, and oh yeah, my yarn will knit up in long slowly-changing stripes, sort of like Noro does.  (You have no idea how excited I am that my grasp on how spinning and plying works and my confidence in my own spinning has progressed to the point that I actually got brave enough to attempt to control the way color behaved in my spinning.  I’m almost giddy with excitement about this).

I’m also apparently in a stripe phase at the moment; despite having considered many possible pairings for the Transition Gloves (Ravelry link), which I’ve wanted to knit for at least a year and a half, I wound up deciding that they might actually look really cool in two contrasting colors of Noro Silk Garden sock (a very neutral one and a colorful one with lots of greens and purples and magentas in it).  The weather here has just turned cold enough that I’m wanting hats and scarves and armwarmers… (and tasty soups made of sweet potatoes and butternut squash and so on).  I love autumn.

Learn to Love the One You’re With

It occurs to me that if I’d written this post two days ago, it would have been a much different post than the one I’m about to write.  I would have told you all about how I learned the hard way that I know absolutely nothing about plying and that, wonder of wonders (even though it should be common sense) plying actually makes a really huge difference as to what sort of finished yarn you get.

Apparently, so do the (relative?) ages of the singles.

I’ve been spinning like crazy lately… my fibre stash appears to be multiplying rather quickly as I get excited about the potential to be had in a whole host of new fibers and fiber combinations and color combinations and am discovering, much to my surprise, that I can actually, with a little thought and planning control things like color shifts and weight and fluffiness and so on.

The yarn I am about to show you does not reflect this, of course.  My most recent creation taught me a lot about plying.  And a little about how to love the yarn that I create.   The yarn off to the right there is a two-ply, more or less fingering-weight yarn made from worsted-spun singles.  The fiber is a lovely hand-dyed preparation of merino/silk combed top from Hedgehog Fibres.  I spun it on the smallest ratio my wheel has (around 14:1) and went to a slightly lower ratio (11:1 or so) for plying.

It came off the wheel looking, erm…  rather lively.  “No problem,” I thought, as I skeined it… “it’ll all settle neatly into place when I wash it.”  Well, it didn’t exactly settle neatly into place.  I wound up with a yarn with lots of little micro twists; one where there isn’t enough structure in the ply to even remotely keep the singles locked in place.  Oops.  And when I pulled it out of its bath and twirled and thwacked it in my bathroom, I hated it.  I really hated it.  I thought it was ugly disaster yarn and that I was a hopeless spinner.

Then my stubborn Norwegian blood took over, and not to be beaten by my spinning wheel, I finished the remaining singles, studied my yarn and pondered what sorts of changes I could make from the first hank to the second hank, in order to get something more like the yarn that I want.

I decided that, among factors I could control, there certainly wasn’t nearly enough twist in my plying.  (I mean.  All those teeny extra loops…  I figured I could at least solve those by going a little slower and making sure the ply structure was holding my very energetic singles firmly in place).  For the second hank, I plied a lot more carefully.  I held the singles under somewhat better tension … my hands are still learning that part and I don’t really have the kind of Lazy Kate to do that little bit for me.  And at least this time, even though I wound up with a very bouncy hank where the yarn seems to want to twist up on itself just about everywhere (really.  If I wanted to, I could wear this hank as some sort of weird, avant-garde ice princess necklace.  I’m sure it’d be very stylish.  Other than that whole not really being water-resistant thing…), the singles aren’t twisting between the plies.

I’m counting that a victory.

I’m also glad I waited a couple of days to write this post.  Two days ago, I hated the yarn that came out of its finishing bath.  Today… I’m pretty happy with it.  It isn’t the yarn that I wanted to spin.  It isn’t what I’d been thinking about or setting out to do.  But it is soft and squishy with a nice bit of sheen… and it’s even held up to a bit of abuse so I can actually sort of see turning it into a funky scarf or a fluffy tam or something similar.

Meanwhile I’m reassuring myself as to my ability to make slightly less crimpy yarns by finishing up my homework from last week’s Spinning Dream Team class.

All part of the process

“Now, [not knitting with your handspun] is truly a crime,” my spinning teacher told me recently.  “You learn so much more about spinning that way!”

(I’ve been taking spinning classes.  I intend to take more of them.  I like the teacher and the community… and for some reason, spinning feels like something I have to learn from a teacher.  Perhaps because it is at once highly cerebral and highly kinesthetic and I learn kinesthetic things better from actual physical teachers.  Or maybe I just have a cerebral sort of a teacher and that’s why I like learning from her.  Somehow, though, knitting has never been that way for me).

One sentence led me to change how I looked at my first wheelspun.  I’d been treating it as if it were made of gold or platinum or like some yarn I’d had to spend hours or days or weeks or months searching for… waiting for the perfect project to drop into my lap that would show off the yarn to its best advantage and be a dream to knit besides.

Then I realized something.  It’s my first yarn.  It varies in thickness from laceweight to worsted (though it mostly hovers somewhere between a fingering weight and a sportweight).  The singles have a pretty tight twist and the plying is tight on top of that.  I set the twist with steam instead of with water.  It’s pretty, and it’s interesting, and it turns out that it looks and knits sort of like a very fine boucle’ yarn.

(Yes.  I found a pattern and cast on when I realized that with all the gift knitting in my life, I really do deserve a bit of selfish knitting).

Last night, I started this simple Fabulous Filligree Scarf (ravelry link).  I knew I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 yards (well over what the pattern called for, but I’m knitting it on slightly smaller needles, so I think to get the right finished size, it will all balance out nicely) of yarn to work with, it didn’t require much in the way of picking up stitches and incorporated a lot of garter stitch with a little bit of lace detailing.  Mostly, I hate knitting garter stitch.  Because it’s boring.  But, I figured that I didn’t really know what this yarn was going to do, and that it was multicoloured and somewhat uneven… and if it turned out to be also unbalanced, well, garter stitch hides “flaws” pretty well.  I can save the gorgeous drapey constructions for when I’m a better spinner. So far, it’s going well.  I (mostly) like the yarn and the pattern and how they play together, though I’m used to knitting things that are soft and delicate and this doesn’t really feel that way so I keep thinking that I should turn it into a placemat or a drink cushion or something.  Despite all my tight spinning, the knitted fabric is pretty squishy.  I’m kind of looking forward to seeing what will happen to it when I wash and block it.

Meanwhile, on the subject of “becoming a better spinner,” I’ve been taking spinning classes.  I was really excited when Kristine, of A Verb for Keeping Warm announced, after Sock Summit, that she was starting a class series called the “Spinning Dream Team” (though personally, I think of it as Fiber College).  The idea of the class is to choose one fiber and spin it four different ways using two different draws and knit each of the four finished yarns into a gauge swatch.  This is pretty much perfect for my understands-the-world-best-through-lists-and-categories personality, especially as it means I can try fibers without having to attach myself, when I buy them, to the idea of what the fiber needs to become.  (I’m learning from knitting up my first handspun that I actually *do* have to attach myself to the idea of what sort of project a fiber will become before I start spinning it or the spinning won’t go very well and the yarn I wind up with will probably be sort of a mess).  It’s easier to remember the details and look back at the details when they’re stored away in my own neat little notebook and I’ve done some amount of learning by doing.  It’s also the sort of thing that I would never make the time to do by and for myself.

So far, I’ve been able to take the classes on falkland wool and on a simply heavenly, creamy 50/50 camel/silk blend.  I’m not just learning about the fibers themselves, though.  I’m learning nuances of treadling, and ways to adjust myself as a spinner and how I set up my wheel to help it play nicely with the different fibers I’m spinning.  It’s more detailed and more interesting (and therefore more appealing) than any book I’ve read so far has been able to convey.  I’m looking forward to the next ones.  (And, um, finishing my homework from the Camel/Silk class).

It’s all part of a big process, right?  Good thing I’ve learned to like process.

Wrapping and unwrapping: unveiling a few stealth projects

Every once in a while, I get an idea. An idea that seems good in theory, ambitious in practice and… well, maybe just a little bit crazy in reality. But, I am a great believer in challenging myself because challenge is what helps us learn and grow.

Which must be why, in a fit of creative energy on a sunny afternoon last October (and inspired by the way that a pattern I wanted to knit really was pretty much perfect for a friend of mine who just happened to be a bridesmaid in my wedding), I decided that it would be a good idea to knit shawls for all of my bridesmaids. Which, in the end, I did and it was, but which is also why I’ve been doing a lot of blogging about spinning and not a lot about knitting. (I know. Idea in October, start knitting in March… procrastinate much?) I’ve been knitting a lot, but, in efforts to not spoil a surprise, have deemed pretty much all of my knitting “unbloggable.”

The key, I realized pretty early on, to managing to knit my way through just under 3600 yards of purple Sea Silk, would be in choosing the patterns. I mean, I chose a yarn that I absolutely love in a color I desperately hoped I wouldn’t get sick of (which had the added bonus of letting me be able to work on these things in front of their recipients without much suspicion because, well, I love purple, and the yarn is pretty, so of course I’d be working on a purple shawl for my wedding. This is just the natural order of things in my life), but the thought of knitting the same pattern four times over just didn’t sit well. Thus the idea of choosing four different patterns suited to the four amazing women who were willing to stand up for me in the wedding.

It turned out to be a good strategy.

The patterns (Ravelry links) were Hanami for my friend who has a master’s degree in East Asian Studies, High Seas for a friend who reminds me of waves and water and fluidity and the ocean, Nefertiti because the vines and leaves in the pattern reminded me of many a wooded hike with a third friend and finally the Thistle Scarf (modified a bit to become a stole instead of a scarf) because of its resemblance to wildflowers and the way I associate them with a friend who is all at once beautiful and delicate and practical and sturdy.

Finding the patterns actually proved an interesting challenge… I had a number of requirements — the stoles must be roughly rectangular (two are slightly biased and while I tried to block them to be square, yarn has a way of behaving more according to its will than mine at times which is something I’m still learning to accept), have some asymmetry to their pattern and, above all, suit the people I was knitting for.  I’m actually really happy with all of them.

I learned a few things along the way, too.

I love knitting lace.  I can’t wait to knit some lovely lacy thing for myself.  (It’s true.  I’ve now knit four lace stoles, all of them meant as gifts).  I also (surprisingly) really like having something resembling a “knitting deadline”  for larger projects — it helps me push on knowing that there is a certain amount of work to be done and that I have a responsibility to finish things by a certain date.  I think if I had something like that for my sweaters, they might not spend so much time languishing in a state of being somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 finished… waiting patiently for me to take an interest in them.

I’m not naturally a gift knitter.  Now that every female relative I have seems to want to know how they can get me to knit a shawl or scarf or hat or something for them, I’m going to have to find a good way to set boundaries.  Somehow saying something like “well, when you patiently listen to me be totally frantic and crazy for months on end and love me in spite of it and still help me get stuff done with a hug and a smile and a lot of good stories (I have the best friends ever.  Really.), I’ll knit you one, too” seems sort of tasteless and mean.  It was a joy to knit these, but, you know, I think maybe I’ll give myself permission to do a bit of selfish knitting.

I might also take a little time to revel in the joy that what goes around comes around… the best side-effect of knitting all of these for my friends and being helpful when asked and even when not was that Adrienne knit a beautiful shawl for me to wear at my wedding.  And as a knitter, I think there is very little in life that is more special than being able to wear and wear with pride something that someone else has created for you.  It is a very special thing indeed.

Spinning: It’s more addictive than broccoli

Something clicked, the other week, after I finished my first yarn off of my wheel and I’ve hardly been able to stop spinning since.  That’s a little bit of a lie — I don’t think I’ve spun anything in the last couple of days because I dug in to a whole new knitting project  (which,  like a lot of my knitting lately and quite sadly for you, dear reader, is yet another stealth project) and haven’t really had the time to do a bit of both in any given day.  Something about planning a wedding… it takes a lot of time and work.  I know the day will be really lovely, but in all honesty, I cannot wait to be married so that I can be a more selfish knitter invest time in my work and my friends and my own projects that I want to do and that don’t have tight, looming deadlines.  (Like, oh, blogging about Cookie A.’s class at Sock Summit and my sock design and the redesign it needs that I’m really actually going to start once I have time to figure out how the legends in Twisted-Stitch Knitting work… and maybe even knitting those socks.  Or a sweater.  Or a shawl.  Or an anything that is  just for me because I want to make it and want to wear it).

I digress.

So, the Damson came off the wheel and is currently sitting in a tidy little skein while I try to come up with a suitable project for it that I don’t have to design myself…  I had almost settled upon my next fibre (which, despite all of the fiber-stash enhancing I did at Sock Summit actually wound up being fibre I purchased recently from Hedgehog Fibres … go figure) when this beautiful, creamy silk/merino combed top, also from Hedgehog Fibres turned up in my mailbox.

The colorway is called “Irish Sky” and it’s beautiful.  Everything I could wish for in a fiber and then some… and wonderful, soft, sweet colors.  It doesn’t surprise me that by the end of the night, I’d spun over an ounce of fibre.  An ounce still seems like a lot to me… it wasn’t that long ago that I was spinning on a drop spindle and one ounce of fiber took me about two weeks worth of spinning working at it for over an hour each day.  The wheel seems to be an order of magnitude faster.

In any case… in seemingly no time flat, I had a beautiful collection of singles (at least, I think they’re beautiful, but I am maybe a little biased) collected on a bobbin and then two ounces had gone by and suddenly it’s time to change bobbins.  I’m sort of amazed at how somewhere, something clicked and spinning doesn’t feel nearly as complicated as it did even a mere month and a half ago when Miss Patience was nothing more than new addition to my collection of craft tools.  6 weeks of steady practice, I guess.

Of course, to humble myself, I started reading The Intentional Spinner and proceeded to realize just how much I still don’t know and delve right back into being highly critical of my singles.  I tend to overtwist… which is sort of okay because I get tight plies out of it… but I would like to learn to be more sensitive to what the twist is doing on my wheel.  I think the most precious nugget of knowledge I gained from the spindling class I took at Sock Summit was that my drop spindle is a twist-o-meter.  If I pay attention to how it is behaving, I can learn a lot about how much twist I have in my yarn, and whether said yarn is capable of taking up any more twist or not.  Wheels are so fast and so strong (especially mine which is rather weighty and massive) that it’s easy to misjudge the balance of things.  In time, I’ll learn, I suppose.  My brain and my hands and feet will all learn to work together as a complementary unit that manages fiber with both attentiveness and dexterity.  (Yes, I’ve become one of those people who discusses the way in which fiber has a mind of its own.  Really.  Much more than yarn, actually, which is probably one of my biggest adjustments in learning to spin after spending most of my time and effort knitting.  But that’s for another post).

I’m enjoying the journey.  And pretty sure that after a few days away (I have some travel in my future, after all), I fully expect to find myself missing my spinning wheel in the same way that I’ve missed my clothes, or my toys or my stuffed animals when I’ve been far from home in the past.

First time for everything!

I completed my first wheelspun yarn (made from Wool Candy hand-dyed roving in Damson) very late in the evening on Sunday or very early in the morning on Monday, depending on how you count it.  Plying went surprisingly fast — a wheel with a lazy kate had a lot more order to it than two ball jars with singles hand-wrapped around ball cores — then it was time to skein to set the twist.  Simple, right?

Unfortunately, at the time, I lacked a niddy noddy and found myself wrestling  with my lifelong demon, impatience.  Under normal circumstances, lacking a niddy noddy wouldn’t be so bad, as a year ago, I invested in an umbrella swift… so in theory, I could use that, at least as a temporary measure.  I neglected, however to account for the effect of the way a year of use has stripped and worn the  unfinished wood-in-wood screw.  As a result, the swift really only supports very loosely draped yarn or very fast spinning speeds.  Not so good for skeining unset, rather twisty yarn.  (In the first place, I like yarns with a high twist… and in the second place, well, I’m not experienced enough to know how much twist the yarn needs to just hold and to balance without being hypertwisty or constantly threatening to draft apart).  Turns out my twisty yarn turned into a twisty mess and my 1-yard skein was a little too thick for convenient steam setting.  (I prefer steam setting to washing, at least for now, because I get a great deal of joy out of watching all of the little bumps of fiber shift and “click” into place).

Reskeining didn’t go very well.  I learned the hard way that twisty yarn likes to tangle and that it’s not so easily untangled (plus, you know, it was my first yarn.  I was more than a little afraid of hurting it or, worse, felting the tangles together).  Several hours, and a few Sherlock Holmes stories read by my ever patient and long-suffering fiance’ later, I had yarn.

I measured it a few days later, when my niddy noddy arrived (skeining in other ways? Not for me, at least not for a while.,) and it’s come out to somewhere between 240 and 250 yards of something that I’d guess is more or less in the dk range.  It varies quite a bit, as is probably obvious from the picture… but it’s a lot more harmonious than my spindle-spun and a lot thinner… so I must be making some progress toward creating the yarns that I want to make.  I think my goal for my next yarn is to be more aware of color.  Maybe it’s time for a little light reading…

Spin-sanity

“I’m so doomed,” I told a friend of mine.  I had just seen the beautiful Ashford Elizabeth at an online retailer and discovered that not only did a beautiful style of wheel in exactly the style I wanted exist, this wheel quite literally had my name.  And the particular retailer that I chanced upon was selling her with an option of dark wood finishes.  It was love at first sight, and I knew I was in deep, deep trouble, particularly considering that I stumbled upon it about a month before my birthday.

“Trouble” arrived one month ago.  She has, of course, since been named Patience, as she is quite Victorian looking and thus deserving of a Victorian name… and because I think Patience, above all things, is what she will teach me.

It’s been said that we are drawn to things that challenge us, perhaps because they help us moderate the traits of which we are given an abundance (in my case independence, stubbornness and perfectionism) and cultivate the traits with which we are not so well-endowed (patience and humility are high on that list for me).  Maybe I buy into that philosophy because of an eternal desire for balance in many senses, but it is certainly something that draws me in about spinning.

Patience, thus far, has lived up to her name.   I quickly discovered that unlike drop spindling, coordinating my foot with the wheel with my eyes with my hand was far from the simple thing it appeared to be when I’d seen it in demos.  My first singles were far from impressive. In fact, one might go so far as to suggest that they were downright terrible.  They were spun slowly and unevenly and too thick and… well, it dawned on me that I was not terribly good at drafting in the first place and that the wheel went sufficiently strongly and quick that twist traveled up my yarn much more quickly than I expected it to.  Unlike with drop spindling, I didn’t quite have the luxury of stopping my spinning mass, sorting out whatever I didn’t like and restarting.  (I mean, I do, sort of, after many more hours of working at it and letting my hands just learn without trying to find all sorts of creative workarounds, but those early nights with the wheel I was very much not convinced of this idea).

Fortunately, at some point, I got the hang of what I was doing, realized that it actually was important to fluff out my fiber just a little bit so that the individual fibers slid past each other more easily and… well, suffice it to say that my second singles went a great deal better.

Apparently, my singles weren’t the only thing that improved.

I was interrupted from daily (or almost daily) practice by my trip to Portland, but as I was at Sock Summit, I can’t really complain.  In fact, I think the only thing I could possibly complain about is that the Summit wasn’t long enough.  I wish I had a clone or a time turner some other device that allowed me to be in multiple places at once so that I could take nearly every class there.  But, lacking that, I settled on a sock design class with Cookie A, another sock design class (toe-up this time) with Marjan Hammink who was so kind and so cool as to recognize my name from all of the kits I’ve bought from her in the past and a beginning spinning on a drop spindle class with Abby Franquemont.

It was interesting, taking her class.  I’d already spun (and plied!) on a drop spindle.  But still felt I was a long way from knowing much at all about what I was doing.  I was missing some essential vocabulary and I’d sort of muddled my way through drafting, making guesses at how it might work.  (Which basically meant a lot of carefully crafted predrafting so that I didn’t have to do much in the way of actually drafting fiber while I was spinning it).  It was nice to sit in class and have someone force me to take it slowly and think about what I was doing and how the fiber was behaving and why.   After watching all of the ways in which the amount of twist in a length of fiber affected the behavior of a spindle, I’ve started to pay a lot more attention, now, to why my thread breaks when I’m spinning (even on a wheel).  Snapping does mean I’m overtwisting;  but gently splitting apart means I let the bobbin gather my thread too quickly — before it had the chance to collect the amount of twist it needed.  (To my inexperienced hands, however, spindles are still much better twist-o-meters than spinning wheels).  More importantly, I learned a few lessons that extend beyond the specific discipline of spinning and might explain what some of what draws me to it.

1.  Spinning is better than broccoli.  Or, at least, the first time they try it, most people like spinning better than broccoli.  Or something.  I actually like broccoli, and always have, as far as I know, so maybe I don’t count.

2.  Spun yarn isn’t perfect.  Whether it’s millspun or handspun… it is uneven, it does have slubs, it has parts that are kinkier than others and parts that are thicker than others and… well, spinning seems to be teaching my inner perfectionist to find beauty and joy in the natural and imperfect and in the process.

3.  Anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly.  It really is okay to make mistakes and to learn from them and to adjust and adapt and to be bad at something for a while because some part of you has to learn something before you can be better.

4.  Patience.  Spinning takes time.  It can’t be hurried (much).  Spinning finer yarns takes more time because not only are you creating longer pieces of string, but you are using fewer fibers so they need more twist.  It is important to let it take the time that it takes.  Or invest in a superfast flyer… but I’m finding that doing that might not give me the time that I need to hold and draft and pick and adjust (while my hands learn and it becomes their habit to do these things).

5.  Equipment, for the most part, doesn’t matter (much).  It can help because it shortens a learning curve or hides your mistakes or just gives you the joy of working with beautiful equipment… but it turns out that I am just as capable of spinning on a low-whorl, toy wheel spindle (what amounts to a small toy wheel with a sharpened dowel stuck through it) as I am of spinning on my wheel or on my beautiful, finely crafted wooden spindles.  Which is sort of a comforting thought.  I’m looking forward to the day I can spin using a pencil as my spindle… you know, just for fun.

But before that, I’m looking forward to spinning up my last half an ounce of Wool Candy superfine merino roving so that I can move on to plying and to playing with some of my lovely new goodies from the Sock Summit.

Then again, I could just buy a few more bobbins…

Sock Summit (and its aftermath)

Dear Blog,

Hi!  I’ve missed you.  I’m sorry I’ve neglected you — life has been a little crazy for the last little while.  It’s in sort of a lull now, but only sort of — a bit like being in the proverbial eye of a storm (though having not actually been in the eye of a storm, I can’t verify that statement.  From what I’ve read it seems like a good description, but I digress).

I have about six posts brewing in my head in the aftermath of Sock Summit. One is about why I went and what I bought and what I chose not to buy and why. Another is about the sock that I’m knitting right now. (Which, incidentally, I’m pretty sure I need to frog, rethink and restart. I’m glad I’ve done enough knitting to have gotten a little more comfortable with the idea that every once in a while, something just needs to be frogged. In my earlier days, I would just try desperately to find a workaround or live with a project that I didn’t really like because frogging would mean undoing All That Work). A third is about spinning and all that there is to be gained from it both in spinning prowess and in life.

Okay, maybe I only have three topics that are each in need of their own post. I’m sure I’ll think of more as it all settles in.

Suffice it to say that the Summit was awesome. My first big knitting event and it was lovely. Cookie A broke my brain with her sock design class (in a good way — I actually really love the way there’s all sorts of math and logic to sock design), Abby Franquemont taught me a bunch of neat things that I didn’t know about how spinning works. It blew my mind that after spinning a bit on various spindles and my shiny new spinning wheel (!) I can now actually spin yarn on what amounts to a toy wheel with a pointed stick jabbed through it.

I fantasize about the day I’ll be able to spin on a pen or a chopstick or similar.

The marketplace was stunning and overwhelming and beautiful and after a couple of initial rushes, I know I basically walked around in a daze. I made an attempt to see everything, but reading the threads on Ravelry now, I know that there are probably quite a few booths I missed. (Not counting ones I skipped over because I knew where to find the dyers closer to home).  Despite all that, or maybe because of it, I didn’t take any pictures.  None.  Not one.  (I’m sort of sorry about not having pictures of the hundreds of knitters all gathered to break the world record, but otherwise… I’m not actually sure I would have known where to begin).  It was that colorful and beautiful and overwhelming and amazing.  My photography skills just weren’t up to the challenge.

I bought way, way, way too much yarn and made a good haul of fiber as well. I think I’m making a new rule for myself that I am not allowed to buy any more yarn until I have catalogued and photographed my entire stash on Ravelry. Which, with the upcoming wedding and all should give me several months worth of opportunity to knit and spin

(I am, incidentally, totally in love with my spinning wheel — a cherry-finished Ashford Elizabeth that I was given as a birthday gift by my eternally sweet and supportive fiance’ — I have named her Patience because she’s quite Victorian-looking and thus needs a Victorian name. Also, patience is what she is teaching me. There will be photos eventually. Hopefully even on the sooner side of eventually).

Knitting, knitting, knitting along…

I will be the first to admit that I’m not exactly what you’d call a “social knitter.”  I don’t have a regular knitting group, I do most of my knitting while I’m on public transit (with the exception of really complicated patterns that need a lot of my time and attention and therefore can’t really be pulled out and put away on a whim the way that simple things like, say, socks can)… and well, I never quite understood the idea of a knitalong.

Nevermind that last fall I tried to join the group knitting Mystery Stole 4… it was a good theory but really fell apart in practice.  I think the project is still hibernating in a drawer somewhere, stuck solidly near the beginning of chart 3… on the first half.

But, when Cookie A published Sock Innovation and a couple of knitting groups popped up around it on Ravelry it suddenly seemed like a good idea to join one of them.  Because, after all, here were a bunch of people, who just like me, were going to race out and buy this book and knit… most, if not all of the patterns in it.  And not just the patterns in the book.  These were people who, also just like me, were going to be pretty shameless in their love for Cookie’s patterns and knit sock after sock by the same designer.

I joined a group and merrily cast on for Glynis, the first pattern of the book and the first pattern for the group… which has all sorts of fancy rules and fancy prizes.  I knit away, and at 8 minutes to midnight on May 31, I cast off my first socks for the KAL.  Unfortunately, a jetlagged, life-fogged brain failed to remember the part of the rule that said that to count for the month’s prize eligibility, one had to post a picture in the Finished Object thread before midnight.

I was heartbroken.  Really, really, cursing-my-computer-and-stupidity heartbroken.  I had, from my own error in misremembering the rules, disqualified my self from the month’s prize drawing, and the big prize drawing from finishing every pattern in the book and… well, basically all the parts of the competition except the consolation round.  Suffice it to say that I felt frustrated.  (No, I’m not actually very competitive, except for that part where I really am… why do you ask?)

Then I realized something.  If I let myself think just a little bit outside the box, I should have been relieved to disqualify myself from the uber prize as quickly as I could.  After all, this freed me to participate in other Cookie A knitalongs.  It freed me to not knit patterns I wasn’t interested in knitting.  It took SO MUCH PRESSURE away.  And I had an epiphany that knitalongs are NOT about the prizes.  Not even for competitive people like me.  They’re about knitting something you like with people you also like.  The competition part, and the chance for a prize, is really just a bonus.

I’m spending June finishing up the Marlene D.s (in the beautiful beautiful Wollmeise 100% sock yarn, color La Digitessa yarn that I had hanging about in the stash) that I started in February (and subsequently frogged and started again in April) and I’m thinking I’ll cast on a pair of Nebulas (rav link) to participate in another knitalong, which I undoubtedly won’t finish before the end of the month.  In the event that I do happen to come close to finishing, this time I’ll remember that it doesn’t count as finshed until the picture has been posted and maybe, hopefully, plan my time a little better (or cut myself a little more slack on the race to the finish!)

In the mean time, I’ll be taking pictures and posting pictures and reveling in the pure, simple joy of making and wearing my own wonderful, soft, colorful handknit socks.  I might also delight in the fact that I have really small feet, so sock knitting goes really fast.  I have a sneaking suspicion that I’d be less inclined to knit such things if I had say, Size 11 feet instead of the cute little size 6’s that I’m blessed/cursed with.

I’d be better off with a stitch dictionary, anyway.

In keeping with a theme of “bad knitting habits” (see recent post about Not Swatching), I think it’s time for me to acknowledge Bad Knitting Habit number 2: not following patterns (does it count as a theme if it’s only been brought up in two posts? Even if they’re successive ones? Perhaps I’ll write my next post about stashing, and then I will be thoroughly justified in calling it a them. But, I digress). I realized while I was working on my Chinook Caress socks that, unless they’re relatively complicated patterns by a relatively small number of designers whose work and patterns I really love, I should probably stop spending money on sock patterns. So far, I’ve modified the pattern by going up a needle size, decreasing the stitch count, swapping out the intended cuff (which was either twisted rib or normal rib… at this point I’m really not sure which) with a picot hem, and trying to figure out the best way to give the socks short row heels. I may decide that eye of partridge really is the way to go, but there’s something really delightful about a good short row heel. This is not the first time I’ve done this. In fact, I may have swapped out pattern parts enough times to suggest that I “generally” swap out the cuff and heel for picot hems or twisted rib and only vaguely glance over the instructions about insteps and gussets and toes and such.

When I realized that the stitch pattern was basically a feather and fan motif, I felt a bit silly for feeling like I needed a pattern to knit it.

I’m pretty sure I’d be better off investing in stitch dictionaries. I’d like a to use a wider variety of cuff patterns, and maybe this would facilitate that. I might also spend a lot more time frogging, but, after the last two projects, I might be more okay with frogging than I used to be.

Then again, maybe this is all a great big sign that it’s either time for me to start knitting sweaters and shawls and other large projects that aren’t all approximately the same, at heart, or to start designing at least some of my own projects. (As a side note, it’s possible that my inability to follow patterns might have a great deal to do with my inability to complete a sweater.  I’ve started at least two; one’s been hibernating for a while because I got annoyed with a beginner’s mistake of not alternating skeins of hand-dyed yarn and the second has been hibernating because I just haven’t felt like working on it.  Plus spring/summer isn’t so inspiring for knitting an alpaca sweater anyway, even if it’s small).

It’s funny, now, to think that a year ago I was afraid of knitting socks (though strangely not sweaters…). I had doubts about double-pointed needles and turning heels all the rest. And now? Well, now I find myself loving things like the first half of Cookie A’s Sock Innovation specifically for all the good advice it gives about various kinds of heels and toes and cuffs and so on and how they relate to sock design and construction. I really hope I get to take her class at the Sock Summit. I think it’s a good match for where my head is with sock knitting right now.

In non-sock (or patterns still worth buying) news, I think it’s time to choose a pattern to start in on for another lace stole. My Hanami came off the needles yesterday. It’s beautiful, and generally, I like how quickly the pattern went. Also fun to be knitting in the same spring where I went to Washington D.C. and saw all of the beautiful cherry blossoms at their peak. The only question left is what to get…