Hats off to the holidays

My previous felted hat turned out well enough that I decided to do some quick knitting, and I finished up two more felted hats, one for my mother-in-law (blue and black), and one for my mom (in her favorite shade of green, to match a scarf I knit a couple of years ago). 

I figured the moms would prefer it if a lampshade modeled the hats, rather than their faces! Both women admired their hats and forgave things like seeing the hat drying on the bowl+orange juice jug hat-drying contraption and seeing me stitch the contrasting bands onto the hats in their very presences... during which I'd reveal that this hat was not, in fact, another felted knit for myself, but something for them to take home. I didn't exactly intend it to go this way, and would have preferred the whole official opening-the-present routine, but life being what it was, I'm just glad they were finished on time!

Coffeeboy and I had a lovely week with first his mom, and then my mom and her friend. We celebrated the first night of Hannukah one night early with my MIL, and then we celebrated Christmas two days early with my mom... and ever since then, my clock has been somewhat messed up!

The big triumph of the week, on December 21st, was getting the antique wheel to spin!

I haven't had too much time to play around with Eleanor yet, but I really want to confirm that she still works! I've found out that she was most likely not an old family antique; my grandmother says that neither her mom nor her own grandmother were spinners, so the wheel, so far as she knows, doesn't come from them. She had no idea where my aunt and uncle got it from, but all I can say is that I'm grateful it came from somewhere, because it's a beautiful treasure to have.

Speaking of being confused about the time, Coffeeboy and I head off to Austria and Munich, Germany, tomorrow, for a fun New Years' trip! His dean asked him to return to the early January conference he went to last year, so this time we took advantage of the advance notice and booked a trip for the two of us the week before the conference. Tomorrow we're off to Europe! I will certainly keep my eyes out for any gems of a yarn store in my travels!

A very special WIP

When I drove home from New Jersey last week, I packed a very special item into my car.  I took it apart carefully, I wrapped it in towels and secured it with seatbelts, just as you would a new baby you're bringing home for the first time.  (OK, not quite just as, but nearly so). 

   

Still confused? I may have alluded to this particular WIP a couple of months back, during my September trip north. I can't seem to find a reference, though, so we'll just have to pretend that I warned you that at some time in the future, something really, really cool would be coming home with me from New Jersey!

This is an antique wheel that, for as long as I can remember, has stood in the front entryway to my aunt and uncle's farm. Ever since I started knitting, and then spinning, I've eyed it occasionally, and when I visited my relatives in September, they got to asking about how spinning worked, and whether or not the wheel in front hall had all its parts. Finally my uncle just came out and said, "what we're driving at is that this wheel is just decorative for us, and we'd love to see it put to use by someone who knows how. Would you like to talk it home with you?" To which I said, in a voice full of emotion, "I would love that."  

This most recent trip, we cleaned and polished the wheel. My uncle has an interest in wood-working, and my aunt in horses (so she knows about leather), so with their help, we took parts of the wheel apart, cleaned it with a wood cleaner, and "fed" it with some Howard's Feed n' Wax.  My aunt soaked the leather that holds the flyer in some leather toner that she uses for her saddles, and my uncle brought in an awl and mallet to help with some of the small pegs, as well as finding soft cloths and the cleaning and polishing items.  

When I headed home, I put the wheel in one seatbelt and wrapped it with a towel, and the bench behind the other passenger seatbelt.  I wrapped the wheel's posts, the mother of all, and other parts, in towels on the floor of my car, and upon arrival at home, after greeting Coffeeboy, immediately set to putting it back together again.  So now my home has been graced by a truly beautiful wheel. My aunt thinks she remembers seeing it in her grandmother's home -- my great-grandmother's home -- so in her honor, I'm calling the wheel Eleanor.

The wheel has some problems: the maidens and mother of all were wobbly; the flyer and the bobbin don't quite fit right together yet; the drive bands are sometimes crooked and fall off.  But with help from the internet (and especially the Antique Spinning Wheel group on Ravelry). I'm getting her put back together again.  Hopefully I'll have this WIP up and working in just a little while! 

Lilac yarn and mountain laurel

Last week, I finished my lilac yarn, but I haven't had a chance to let it dry / take pictures / upload them until today, when I'll share them with you!

I'm really happy with how this yarn came out. It's somewhere between a fingering and sport weight, 350 yards, a merino-tencel blend. Look at that tencel shine!

I'm very happy with how it came out, as you can imagine!  There seems to be a clump of blue and a clump of pink/lilac, and then other colors, green, grey, and violet, in between. I'm looking forward to making a nice scarf out of it for next year's spring - maybe Palette or Lace Ribbon (knitty spring 2007 and 2008 respectively).

 

Coffeeboy and I also took another hike this past weekend, and we saw some mountain laurel blooming (no rhododendrons, yet!)

(This one is by Coffeeboy himself, lover of macro-flower-photos!)

It's been amazing to watch spring and then summer come out in the mountains. This weekend at a juncture between trails, we stopped for a few minutes and listened to the birds chirp, and to the wind rustling the trees. It reminded me of when I was a kid, living in the suburbs, hanging out at my friend's house. There I'd listen to the wind in her pine trees and think of hiking and camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains (we lived in CA when I was a kid). It was lovely just to take a moment to hear the wind in the trees.

Tomorrow, we're headed out of town, to go visit Coffeeboy's family in Chicago and Milwaukee for a family event. We're driving - still cheaper than flying, especially where we're coming from and since we're going to more than one city - so we've downloaded some books to listen to, and I'm debating whether or not knitting will make me carsick! Sometimes it does, sometimes not. I'll definitely have a range of projects to choose from, though!

When I get back, my busy month of June will already have started. I'll spend a few days renew books at my home library; much of that time will be spent traveling, also. Then, a few days after that, for the last half of June, I'm off to Chicago (again!) for two weeks to do a whole lotta research. If any of you live in or near the Windy City, let me know of some good fiber haunts to check out!

Fibers of springtime

Lately, my knitting and spinning has all been geared around the weather: a mohair sweater perfect for those ever-fewer still-cool mornings, or a braid of roving aptly named "Lilac" by the lovely folks at Three Waters Farm.  (I bought some of their Lavendar-Oatmeal Goat's Milk Soap at SAFF last year, and it is divine!  Come to think of it, I knit a stole/shawl for my mom out of their merino in that same colorway!)  Here is what it looks like, however, in roving and unplied singles of a merino-tencel blend (purchased at Yarns Etc. in Carrboro):

I've also been trying to knit the trees and sky and trails that I've been hiking on these last few weekends. It seems every time I get out into the woods, I start thinking of knitting a stole to wear when I'm inside a cold, air-conditioned library thinking about being outside in those woods. I finally screwed up my courage this weekend to learn a new cast on (a basic provisional cast on) and start the stole, ideas for which have been roaming around in my mind these last few weeks.

While I like how it's going so far, unblocked it is only 14" wide. I don't think blocking will quite get this to a respectable 18-plus inches for a stole, so off to the frog pond it'll head shortly - unless a bunch of you tell me that it's likely to grow that much. Knowing how I tend to block lace (which is usually not as vigorously as is likely possible, due to lack of blocking wires and frustration with many tiny poky pins), even if it's technically possible, I doubt it'll work for me, so I expect that before too long, it's froggie-frog we go!

Navajo ply!

Last night I needed to clear a few singles off a bobbin. A few weeks ago, I'd spun up a little bit of this juicy merino fiber from Lorna's Laces that I got for the holidays. I thought I'd give reputedly slippery merino a test-run. As I recall, it wasn't too bad. It was, however, a while ago.

Then I was left with very little on the bobbin, but I didn't want to spin the rest of it then. So I set it aside, and last night, I navajo plied it. See?

This new type of plying was a bit tricky. Since I'm a lefty, I tried doing it with my left hand, but I kept needing to use my right to help pull the single through the loop. Eventually I was getting my left index finger to take care of the pulling through the loop, while the right did something with the twist. I saw what hadn't been clear on the on-line video, that somehow the creation of the loops gives you a three-ply. Pretty cool! I'm not an engineer, I can't explain how it works, just that it did!

What I got was something like this:

I have a few questions about navajo plying for you more experienced spinners: Do you see that purple strand on top, on the right side? Right there you can see where the two loops interlock. Why is that? Is that normal for navajo plying, to see where the loops are?

I had another question, which is how the heck do you finish it? When I was done I had an awkward floppy loop that didn't quite twist and ply up nicely.

Also, why is it called "navajo" plying?

Here is the little skein-let, only a few yards long, all twisted up.

I think it looks pretty good for a first attempt. Of course, that's probably half the dye job on the fiber - hard to go wrong with such gorgeous colors!! They remind me of summer berries. I don't remember what the official colorway name is, but these sure do speak to me of berries.

Last week I went to a conference at my home institution, a conference I've been planning for the last year or so. It went really well - great papers, interesting people, good networking. The conference involved people working on topics very similar to my dissertation, so it provided a lot of excellent food for thought and really has me actually thinking about the diss with excitement for the first time in about a month. I came home and scanned 16 pages of notes so I'd have electronic copies of what I wrote down. I've never actually scanned in notes before, but it seemed to make a certain amount of sense. Add them to the e-file for the conference, and I'll always be able to find them. The paper notes - who knows?

Of course, I can't really capitalize on that excitement because now that I'm home, I'm preparing the house for Passover & the arrival of guests this weekend! (Granted, since the Judaism represented here is Reform, the housecleaning isn't as, um, thorough, as it could be, but there's still plenty to do!) I'm going to try to put in some time on the diss this afternoon and tomorrow, but I still have to clean the house and go grocery shopping, so it's looking like the diss will have to wait till next week!

Let's start with... I'm alive?

Hi everyone - everyone who hasn't dropped me off bloglines, that is! I am still alive, believe it or not!  I've just been away from the blog, mentally speaking, and from blog-world too.  Since I last posted, I: 

• made a quick run to visit a friend who lives a few hours away and has access to some really old books that I need in the dissertation. She wrote about my visit way back when. (I was tempted to link to her blog to say, "Look what I've been up to!" and that's when I lost my blogging mojo...)  
  
• a week later I found myself in New York City, surrounded by big tall buildings, for a week of research and crashing in a hotel room with a relative. I got so busy with family, research, and seeing the city that I forgot to check out yarn stores. I did see Spamalot, though, and I laughed a lot; I did get to go to bookstores, which are sadly in short supply where I live
  
• then I had a week off from travel, except I got off a wait list for a retreat
  
• and I went on the retreat March 14-16, which wasn't quite what I was looking for but was probably a productive time anyways
  
• Now I have a couple weeks off from travel before I head to my home institution and a conference I've spent the last year planning... 
  

So it's not as if I haven't been busy! I've just been focusing my free time on things that don't translate well to a fiber arts blog! I also feel like what I've been working on in the knitting world hasn't been terribly interesting, in that it doesn't merit more than a "show and tell" type post. I'm not sure, right now, how to make the blog more than a show-and-tell, without making what it's not meant to be.  Maybe when I finish the prototype of a shawl I'm trying to come up with, then I'll have something more fiber-related to talk about. But for now, I don't know if I'm going to come out of this internet-hibernation, or remain in it?  

Regardless, there's still fiber. I finished the long-suffering socks for my MIL, and have been spinning some pretty, baby-blue, tweedy corriedale from Greta_Jane.  I have three 4 oz. balls of the stuff, and I'm spinning it fairly thin. I'm about halfway through the fiber; I have still another ball to go. One of these days I'll get to try three-ply! Or the gorgeous merino-tencel I bought while in Carrboro a few weeks ago!

Coffeeboy and I also have been hiking, looking for signs of spring and finding beautiful scenery nonetheless.  In that picture on the right, what you see are the evergreens of the North Carolina mountains - pines, rhododendrons aplenty, and mountain laurel.  

I hope all of you are well! I do stop by many of your blogs from time to time, but truth be told, I haven't been reading blogs all that much of late, either.  (There's been a fair amount of book-reading, as in, books that are not related to the dissertation, and that cuts into the knitting time, too!) I hope wherever you are, you are having a beautiful spring!

For love of sock yarn

Remember how I said I'd made sock yarn? Well now I have pictures! I'm pretty tempted to let the pictures express how very, very excited I am to have made fingering weight yarn that's enough for socks!!

The Fiber:

4 oz. BFL fiber from The Painted Sheep, in the Dublin Bay colorway

The Fiber, unfurled

I divided this in half lengthwise, and then for half A I split it again, for half B I split it lengthwise four times, following a trick I saw on Ravelry about making space-dyed roving into barberpole-striped yarn.

(Click to make any of these bigger in Flickr!!)

Spinning the fiber:

All plied up, it overflows from this bobbin said to hold 4 ounces:

What it looks like washed and dried:

All bundled up as a pretty little skein:


What we have here is 380 yards, 4 oz., fingering weight. It's not superwash, but it sure sounds like sock yarn to me!

I think I'm in love. I'm half tempted to pull out the sock needles right now and cast on to watch this yarn make socks! The other half wants to stare at it, squeeze and pat it. It's soft. It's squishy. It's enough for socks. I'm a happy, happy spinner. I think I'll hang onto it a bit before turning this FO back into a WIP.

As we close this week and come to the weekend, I only hope you find something fibery that makes you quite this happy!

Handspun yarn or rejected writing?

As I considered my options this afternoon, I decided I'd rather tell you all about my latest spinning news than spend too much time worrying that an article submission I sent out a couple of months ago was essentially rejected for not having enough postmodern theory in it. Actually, they didn't reject it outright. They wanted me to revise it based upon a whole lot of theory I'm not entirely familiar with, and I'm not at all sure I want to write the article they want to read! Instead, I think I'll try it with another journal! On the bright side of the schoolwork, though, I have finished a draft of a chapter for the dissertation and will send it off to my advisor soon!

I've been procrastinating on showing you my latest bout of spinning, which occupied me from January 4 - sometime last week, at which point I sent it off to its intended recipient, Greta_Jane, for a belated birthday present. I haven't been showing you many pictures of this spinning because I didn't want her to see too much of it (and she tells me she liked what she saw when I let one little image slip through).

What you see here is about 550 yards / 8 oz. of Louet Corriedale fiber in the colorway "warm wine." It worked out to be about worsted weight. Although it wasn't as even as I'd hoped it would be (it never seems to be, once it comes to plying), I was quite pleased to see that the yarn turned out pretty light and fluffy, not nearly as dense and tightly spun as my previous yarns have been. Maybe I'm getting the hang of this!

The first picture is more true-to-color. I had a really hard time getting good close-ups of the yarn that weren't either entirely blurry or entirely washed out from the flash. This one will have to do.

I also managed, over the past few days, to spin up 4 oz. of yarn that, once it's dry, will be worth of the esteemed title "Sock Yarn." At about 17-19 wraps per inch, it ranges between sport and fingering weight, and has enough yardage for socks - 380 yards! This accomplishment, my friends, is a big milestone as a lover of socks and spinning! But you (and I) will have to wait until it dries to see pictures.

January's Effects

January has a way of doing things to me. You might guess that what happens in January is hibernation, the effect of darkness, the quiet of the snow. Instead, I often feel a sense of things moving and shifting, as if on some level, I must be able to detect the after-solstice lengthening of the days.

Maybe I'm thinking about all this because a week ago a very good friend converted religions and entered a new decade of life, all in the space of a weekend. Somewhere in there, my talk of spinning into a new phase of life must have got me thinking about the deeper things in life that only rarely write about on this blog. Or maybe it was seeing the past twelve or so years of my life flashing before my eyes, sometimes literally, as I set up my new computer.

Juniper likes the spinning, too, and sometimes checks out the fiber

I'm not kidding about the computer and the flashing. Things really did flash, and it wasn't a trick of the mind or eye. I went quickly through the past seven or so years of digital photos, which is as long ago as my first digital camera. iPhoto for some reason had only imported some of my pictures, so I needed to get it set up in order to download the latest knitting photos. As I merged different collections of pictures together, they literally flashed across the screen. (When there were sets of pictures of the cats, it looked like a movie of squirming and wiggling, I swear). Transferring from Eudora to Mail meant that I had to literally reopen and rebuild files of email that I wrote home during my first semester of college.

So what is it about January? My first January in graduate school, the seclusion of writing papers and exams turned some corner of my brain into a monastic, hermetic retreat. One the one hand, I was totally stressed and anxious (I think I ate nothing but reheat-able, frozen Trader Joe's dinners for two straight weeks I had that little spare time) - and on the other hand I finished the exams, ended a relationship that had gone on far too long, and came out the other side feeling really great. I didn't yet, for that matter, know how to knit, but life was still good.

And now I knit with my own handspun!!

This January, we finally got some snow, just like all the Januarys I used to spend in the northeast. On Wednesday night it finally snowed here in this little mountain town, and the world got really quiet and slippery. I drove home from knitting in Asheville through the snow, doing 25 in a 45 zone so I wouldn't slip down the steep slope. I got out of my car. You could hear the hisses of snow and sleet and ice, but not much else. The world had hunkered down by 10 o'clock at night. I woke up yesterday to the sound of drips and told the cats to look for icicles.

It's supposed to snow again on Saturday!

This January is not the same as all those other Januarys. But the quiet of the snow and the essential aloneness of writing a dissertation makes me pause and think of Januarys past. I wonder what the next ones will bring?

Happy holidays!

This year December has just flown by. I cannot believe that Coffeeboy and I are leaving tomorrow to visit family for Christmas, and then to visit his family for a belated Hanukah and for New Year's. Is it really that far into December already?

Part of the disbelief, I think, has been caused by the weather. A week and a half ago, it was warm enough to go for a nice hike in our beautiful mountains. The clouds and the light combined to make for a truly eerie backdrop.

Looks a bit like Middle Earth, doesn't it?

This weekend, however, the weather took a turn for the colder, and although it didn't snow (like the forecast said it might) in my little town, on Saturday snow did dust the ground in Asheville where Coffeeboy and I went for dinner and a "Swannanoa Solstice" concert.

I've been knitting and spinning a lot, realizing that the spinning has bitten into my plans for holiday knitting. But, I spun up the BFL from Jessica into about 220 yards. That's enough to actually make something with!

The yarn was still quite unbalanced; I haven't quite figured out how to ply correctly. It also didn't work out to be nearly as many yards as I'd hoped; at only 220 or so yards for 8 oz, I think I made a pretty dense yarn. Oh well. I'll learn. And thank you all so much for your encouragement of the spinning!

I don't have a picture, but I think last night I did get a balanced yarn! I experimented with some plain fiber of unknown variety, only spinning enough to cover a single layer on the bobbin, and then plied it together, this time really trying not to overdo things. It worked! Let's just hope that when I return to my wheel in January, things go as well and I remember what to do!

Besides spinning, there has been a remarkable amount of Cobblestone, and remarkably little sock progress. Cobblestone has just a few inches of sleeve left before I join it all up for the yoke. Fun stuff! But now the crunch is on, and I need to finish those socks up before I can really focus on Cobblestone!

Thankfully, I have until after Christmas for the little red sock, and the brown/blue socks are for Coffeeboy, so that is a bit more flexible as well.

Now, the question remains, what knitting should I take with me this holiday trip? And how much work? I'll have 2 weeks worth of knitting and working and seeing family, so the question always returns, just how much is realistic? So many possibilities!

Fiber on Friday

What's this? Fiber Friday? I have some finished yarn photos for you! It's as if it were "Fiber Friday" or something!

But first, a word to the non-spinners. A long time ago, before I decided I wanted to spin, I used to read people's spinning posts and feel a bit bewildered by all the different terminology. I felt a bit left behind, if you will. I know it wasn't intentional on the part of those bloggers, and I stuck with them through the spinning (even if I didn't quite read the posts, but simply tuned in for the "oooh, pretty yarn pictures" factor).

So, to the non-spinners reading this, hang in there, this is still a knitting blog, and I sympathize if you're a bit weirded out by the sudden prominence of the word "spinning" in my topic tags. You don't really want to see a few more inches of Cobblestone, though, do you? Because that's all that's happening around here, I swear. Socks? Hats? Other holiday knitting? It's not happening. Cobblestone is on the needles and wants to be worked on, gosh darn it. (I've actually finished the body and started a sleeve, but I don't have a picture. Besides, it would look like a very small version of the body anyways, so my point stands).

That said, how about some fiber?

Thanks for all your hints and suggestions about the overplying of the blue lagoon yarn. I've decided to leave it as-is for now (partially because I lack any easy way to wind a center-pull ball).

Look, a dime shot!

I also spun up all of the not-quite-4-oz. of the "autumn lake" roving. It went really, really quickly, quite possibly because I love the colors. I love how tweedy it turned out. I'm also glad that it's not quite as overplied as the previous skein was.

I don't exactly love that there are only 100 yards; I would have liked something longer. Nor do I like that it's a bit scratchy and scraggly, but that might be because I was playing around with letting the twist eat up the yarn.

Looking at the close-ups, I'm thinking the singles weren't very tightly spun; at least, they don't look that way in the closeups. I wonder if this is why it's scratchy and why there are so many fibers hanging out from the singles? Hmm.

Speaking of fiber, I'm highly suspicious of all the mysterious packages that have arrived at my door in the last half hour. I've seen a mail truck, a DHL truck, and a FedEx truck dropping things off. Good gracious! It's a veritable delivery parade out there. Now I only need to see a UPS truck to collect the full set. You'd think my birthday were on Monday or something, and that I'd be entering a whole new decade to boot!

(My birthday is on Monday, and I'll now have to say that my age is 3x, instead of 2x. I'm going to feel very old, I think. I also suspect I don't get to explore these enticing packages Coffeeboy has ordered until then. One of them, though, has a suspicious Amazon.com marking on the box, and two have really interesting return addresses that I shouldn't have looked at. Bad me! - but this is what happens when one works from home and receives the mail, I guess.)

Happy Friday, all, and have a good weekend!