How’m'I doin’?
I was getting tired of referring to this post with the neverending WIP report whenever I talked about a project, so I’ve been focusing more on the finished products than the arbitrary goals involved. But I do want to return to the list, all at once, now so that I can keep track of things for my own sake.
Crossed-off things are totally done (or frogged, in any case, no longer in progress), italicized things have been worked on. Links where appropriate, additional notes where needed.
1-A big loose black ribbed hat for my uncle.
2-Hooded baby sweater for baby C.
4-Spindle project, 4 ounces of handdyed BFL, spun as a 3-ply DK weight.
5-Wheel project, with two 2-ounce batts I got at Roc Day.
6/7-Mittens and hat for the little guy, which were already too small when I finished knitting them on his birthday. (Hat is missing presumed dead, I’ll finish it if it ever resurfaces.)
10-Convertible mittens–found the buttons, at least. Next thing to work on on the bus.
11-Yak/merino spindle project.
12-Sweater spinning project 3-ply DK weight, 6-8 ounces into a 2 pound project.
Proof of progress:
It’s the thing I’ve been working on at home.
13-Some socks in Jitterbug. Frogged, they were too big and it’s a shame to do that to such nice yarn. They’ll be something else someday, but they’re not a WIP anymore.
14-Geography Bee shawl. Have not touched it. That’s a lie–I touched it when I was reorganizing my yarn bag, and said “Oh, this is pretty,” and put it back in the bag. To return to it will require some inspiration and some time with the notebook to sketch out some lace ideas.
15-Christmas fiber. Haven’t touched it, but haven’t been avoiding it–just did other spinning projects first.
16- Cashmere. Cashmere, untouched! A crime against spinning. I found the bag of fiber at least.
17- Some samples for an article for the guild newsletter. Samples spun and knit. Article not written, but it’s not a WIP on this list anymore.
18-V-Yoke cardigan Frogged for overoptimistic gauge calculation. I swatched with different yarn, with much better results. Will start knitting soon, but again, it’s not a WIP now. (Or, yet.)
19-Thrummed mittens for Th. Frogged the two whole rows I’d done, it’s getting too warm for thrums and by the time next winter rolls around they’ll doubtless be too small.
20- Curtains for Th’s room. One good free afternoon or evening will do it, but I haven’t had but free moments recently. Now that I’ve been able to clean up the fiber areas, though, I have room to leave everything out for a few days, which will make finishing them easier.
21- Yarn organization. Ongoing. Isn’t it always? But as is often the case, getting rid of a few things has made room to really organize more thoroughly. I really needed to take care of a few things on this list before I could make a dent. My knitting bag closes now, I know what’s in my spinning basket, many random bits have found permanent locations. I really want to make a better craft space in the new house, and the next step for that will be to hunt down some inspiration. Anybody seen some nice-looking craft rooms, tables, corners, etc?
22/23-Cross stitch projects. Have not touched, do not care. They don’t take up much mental or physical space.
———————–
From 23 things in progress to only 9 in about a month, three of which are of the infinitely-ongoing variety, so it’s really only 6 undone things. Wow. WOW. I am really proud of myself. My craft space is looking much better, and I’m actually getting ideas for things to work on again–I’m not caught up with the hate-all-projects cycle.
Two more of these things (the convertible mittens and the curtains) will probably be taken care of within the next week, and at that point I will take a well-deserved return to starting a project–the V-Yoke cardigan.
YAY.
Frog Pond
Well I’ve had a good look at the v-yoke cardigan, and I’ve had a good look at my swatch, and I have a sinking feeling that never the twain shall meet. I don’t know what I was thinking casting on for this (fortunately it was juat a few stitches), but now I understand why I set this aside when I was looking forward to both working with the yarn and knitting the pattern.
Now, I’m trying to decide which feels more like cheating on the list–knitting the v-yoke cardigan in another yarn, or using this yarn for a different cardigan? I have this lovely navy yarn from Blackberry Ridge that I’ve been trying to put a project to for a very long time; it’s well onto the fingering end of laceweight and I think it would work for this project. On the other hand, I’m also looking at lighter-weight cardigan patterns now, and there are a bunch that would look great with the chocolate brown hemp yarn that I’ve been looking forward to wearing. On the other, other hand, if I’m frogging the thing, maybe I should just remove it from the “UFO” list entirely, as it is not actually IN progress, in any way.
Nnngggh. I was enjoying plugging along on all the unfinished things but I’m ready to reward myself with something new. (And it WOULD be a relatively large-scale project like a fingering weight cardigan that would attract me, wouldn’t it?) Perhaps I will keep with the finishing old stuff this week, and then get something else going next week if I’ve made some good progress. I’m nearly to the halfway point on the ridiculous list of ridiculousness, after all.
FO-rama
Finished on or worked on some more things from the Ridiculous List of Unfinishedness:
5-Wheel project-3-ply yarn from batts
Done!
270 yards, 4 ounces all together, just to the light end of worsted weight. I had a vague plan of making a hat for Jeremy but the finished yarn seems much sparklier than the batts did–in chatting to my main batt dealer, this seems to be a pretty common thing. The thicker diameter of the sparkles may push them to the outer edge of the yarn, giving them a stronger effect in the yarn compared to what you see in the fiber.
That’s the only thing that got finished this week, but I made some progress on #2 (sewing a zipper onto a baby sweater), after trying to sew it on a few different ways and ripping things out. I think I’ve got it going better, now, and should have it finished and sent to the recipient before she’s too big for it. I finished frogging the yarn that is now intended for the linen sweater (#18), and need to finish some calculations before that gets going in earnest. And there’s some progress on #11 (a spindle project in a yak-merino blend), I’m hoping to finish the singles on that one next week, if not the plying.
I’m really pleased with how much I’ve been able to get done. It seems like I haven’t finished a project in months and months, so it’s wonderful to get out from under the weight of all these bits and pieces sitting around. Once I get more than half the projects on the original list finished, I’ll reassess the list and see if there’s anything that needs to be updated or modified.
Un
Day 1 of the tour’s not over yet, but I think that I am. Here’s the progress so far:
1) A charkha spindle-full of cotton, which used up about half of the natural white I have left and about 1/5 of the total naturally-colored fiber I have left. My return to cotton spinning was natural-feeling but still minorly disastrous–a number of bits that just fell apart when I was winding off. I blame the fact that I was socializing and assuming that muscle memory would pull me through. It really did look like just a matter of remembering that extra turn per make. The bright side is that improving my technique over the course of the Tour is now pretty much guaranteed!
2) Significant progress was also made on a batt project that I was working on before the Tour started. The goal: a light fingering weight 2-ply. I have two batts, and have been splitting them up carefully to preserve the color shifts evenly.
That’s an untouched batt, and half of one that is ready for spinning.
I’m using a technique pretty similar to what I’ve described before, except that at the beginning, I’m splitting the batt into two equal-sized pieces. The first piece I spin from yellow to red, the second from red to yellow. Soon, I’ll ply them together, and hopefully I’ll end up with a nice yarn that slowly shifts in color from one end to the other.
At the beginning of the day I had just started the second batt, and now at the end I’m about 3/4 of the way through that one. I will almost certainly finish the singles tomorrow, and after that I’ll either ply or spend more time with the charkha.
3) I also did a bit of knitting with some handspun, didn’t goof around online too much, and mostly succeeded in keeping cool.
Overall grade: 8/10, mostly for the cotton not being very good.
Arrgh
I often end up like this–2 or 3 projects that I’m putting significant time into, which just seem to drag and not get finished. No good blog inspiration. Then all of a sudden, I finish them all in a single weekend, and have an embarrassment of riches.
Which is to say, after slogging through some stuff that I wasn’t finding very interesting, I’m weaving in a lot of ends and washing a lot of skeins and FOs in the sink right now. I’ve finished things for the first time in ages! And then I promptly started a new project, which is halfway done after 4 days! And found a long-unfinished project that is compelling again and will probably only take another week to finish! And spun through a big wad of stash! And used a ton of exclamation marks!
Clearly I’m getting some mojo back that had wandered away for a while.
Pictures soon.
Batt Man
I’ve been a spinning fool the past few weeks. I’ve knit about 5 inches of a hat, which is nothing. But for spinning, I’ve:
-plied 1400 yards of 2-ply laceweight and spun a few more hundred yards of singles,
-spun and swatched a little sample for a sweater for J,
-spun and plied 100-odd yards of worsted weight 3-ply,
-plied up 70-80 yards 3-ply sportweight alpaca I had sitting around,
- started spinning on some 3-ply sock yarn–I’m about 2 ounces into 8 ounces for kneesocks,
- started some 3-ply DK weight for a sweater for me.
I’ll talk about all of these eventually, but right now the one I’m most excited about is the very last one, yarn for a sweater for me.
A few weekends ago I was planning to go to the New York Sheep and Wool festival but wasn’t able to due to some health-related messiness. I’d been thinking of buying batts at the festival to spin up, so I took the money I’d planned to spend and went wandering over to Etsy instead. I’d seen some recommendations for Corgi Hill Farm from folks on one of the Ravelry spinning forums, and ended up with four wool/silk batts (about 7.5 ounces total) in a colorway of browns and blues.
I am in love, man.
The sweater that has caught my eye is Tink’s Racing Stripes Pullover (Ravelry link, pattern link), a raglan-sleeved sweater with variegated striping along the sleeves and sides. I may borrow the idea without using this specific sweater, as it’s a little heavier than what I’m spinning, and it’s not clear from the pattern notes of other users whether the shaping would need a lot of mods or not. Also, I think I can handle a striped raglan.
I was starting to spin this batt up at a recent knitting group, and someone mentioned that they had batts in their stash but didn’t feel very sure about how to process them. Honestly, *I* don’t feel very sure of how to process them; this is only the third batt I’ve spun up. But I thought I’d document my methodology in case anyone was curious.
If you lay out this little jelly roll, you find that it’s a single large sheet of mostly-aligned fibers.
When you look at it like this, it’s also pretty clear that there are multiple layers of fibers, sandwiched together. If I’m reasonably gentle I can separate some of them from the others:
So the first question is, do I actually *want* to separate those different color layers? This would make a nice tweedy yarn with occasional flecks of brown, blue, and white. But the sweater I have in mind originally used Noro, to give you an idea of the color separation. I wanted to have at least several-yard lengths of different colors, while still having a reasonably manageable fiber format to work with. So I separated a piece of the topmost layer of batt and removed a strip of that layer.
You can pretty clearly see where I removed the top layer; it’s the area with the blue peeking through. In looking at the strip I did remove, you can also see that I didn’t do a perfect job of getting a single color; there’s a bunch of lighter and darker bits in there. That, I don’t mind at all. While I’m encouraging the batt to work in a particular way, the batt is at its heart a fairly random fiber prep, and I’m trying to let it do that to as much of an extent as my desire for control can allow. I do want it to show a bit of its history as a mixed-up fiber, that’s a big part of what will give this yarn a character that is distinct from a dyed top. Really, it’s the whole point of buying a batt, along with being so open and airy that it spins beautifully.
Time to strip out the next layer.
Again, this isn’t too perfect, again I don’t care, again you can see a new layer of fluff under the previous one. Note that instead of removing the next layer from that strip, I could just remove one whole layer at a time. Personally I find that a bit hard to work with, unless I’m going to strip this whole batt down and spin it all in one go. Usually I remove a bunch of layers from one strip, spin that up, then move to the next piece. The whole chunk of batt is much more stable and transportable than these little wispy things, so I only do this processing with an amount I know I can use at a sitting.
I keep removing layers from that same strip until I get all the way to the bottom, and twirl them around a bit so I can carry them down the hall without them falling to bits:
Different amounts of fiber, and different mixtures of color. I don’t care too much about exact lengths of color here–I couldn’t begin to match this with other plies, I’m going to chain-ply to preserve what color order I can.
Spinning it up, you can see that there’s definitely color variation, and on a reasonably long scale. This means that the individual stripes should be a few rows a piece if I have my act together.
I started working on this project last week, and finished spinning up one batt. I started to chain-ply on the wheel but that was a thorough failure–looked like garbage, totally uneven, really frustrating, incredibly slow. A few yards in I threw the whole thing into a corner and sulked. The remainder of the skein went much more smoothly on a spindle, but I thought I’d use the ugly bit on the wheel just to see how the colors and general thickness worked as a knitted fabric–didn’t even wash the yarn, just knit it off of the bobbin. It’s a pretty wide swatch, about half the width of the sleeve at the top of the arm, and so for success the stripes would need to be at least 4-5 rows long, hopefully with some intermediate coloring in between.
Success! The yarn goes from brown to blue to light gray to dark gray at a decent rate. The errant flecks of other colors make it interesting, but don’t dominate. It’s a bit hard to tell with the crummy plying job but I think the remainder of the yarn will be a fair DK weight, this is 5.5-6 stitches per in on US 6′s, slightly mushy, may move down to 5′s. Batt #2 is half done now, so I expect that another week or two should finish this guy, as long as I can keep the wool-loving cat away from the lovely sheet of wool that she eyes every time I lay it out to tear into strips.
New Spinning Toy
A new spinning toy! One that doesn’t actually do any spinning, assist in holding singles or plying, or even help to make my yarn look prettier.
What is? Just a gram scale, that I got during a clearing out of some less sensitive equpiment at work. But wowwie, it is giving me some useful info.
Take this yarn,
2 ply laceweight
I’ve been working on spinning the singles off and on for ages now–I had a half-filled bobbin that had been set aside at least two years ago, possibly three. Finally, FINALLY, last week, I actually get around to finishing off the second bobbin of singles and plying everything up. I knew I had about 10 ounces of fiber, and that Ashford claims that their standard bobbins hold about 4 ounces of fiber each. The two larger skeins, 720 and 700 yards respectively, each filled the bobbin pretty thoroughly, but at the same time they weren’t completely maxed out. The pile of fiber that was left sure looked like a lot, but how much did I actually have left, and how much yarn might I have at the end?
2 ply laceweight wpi
Now that I have a gram scale, I know all that, and I also know how similar the two skeins are. I’d been spinning to match a small sample I had, but this was spun up over such a long time that I had little confidence in its consistency.
First skein: 105g. Second skein: 97.5g. Third tiny skein: 6.2g.
So, it looks like with really well-packed, worsted spun, fine yarn, the practical limit for an Ashford bobbin for me is about 3.7 ounces. If I had a Woolie Winder and cranked down on the tension I’m sure I could get it up to 4 ounces, but 3.7 is good “best usual case” info for me. The grist was reasonably consistent between the first and second skein. Considering the many life changes that have happened in the intervening time, I’m pretty pleased with that.
I also weighed the remaining fiber: 93g. So I’ve got one more skein, slightly smaller than the first two, left. That’ll give me about 2100 yards of this 28-30wpi 2-ply wool-silk blend, which means that I can start looking up useful patterns even as I spin up the remainder. The yardage is actually less than I’d guessed–somewhere in the 3000 yards-per-pound range, when I’d been thinking vaguely of Jaggerspun Zephyr which is in the 5000 ypp range. But over 2000 yards is plenty for a nice-sized shawl, probably knit on US2′s or 3′s.
I’m finding it to be a useful thing to have around. In the couple of weeks I’ve had it, I also used it to weigh all my spindles. I have six which is not too many for a happy spindler. They all look totally different from the others, but three of them are 14-15 grams, and three are 37-38 grams. Apparently I had preferences I wasn’t even aware of. I’m also clearing off all my spinning bobbins, so I can weigh them. I’ll make a small note of their weight on the bobbin itself, so I can try to have the same weight of singles on each bobbin for a multiply yarn. I have a few different styles of Ashford bobbins, so this will be considerably more accurate than my current “scratch my chin for a minute and then guesstimate” method, which is entirely dependent upon my inconsistent spatial awareness.
So yeah, a convenient tool, one I should have gotten a long time ago.
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