Weekend bind-off

Yesterday I actually bound off the mohair sweater! I tried it on, too, and was very happy with the fit. Now all I need to do is add the neckband, sew up the armhole seams, weave in a few ends, block it, and it'll be done! Excellent!

I also acquired some new yarn to work with that I'm excited by for two different reasons.

The dishcloth yarn excites me because it's dishcloth yarn in pretty colors, and was inexpensive. The Malabrigo on the right, there, well, that's my first ever Malabrigo purchase, and I can't wait to start using it! The color is just gorgeous, "indigo." I'm hoping it'll work out gauge-wise for the Tailored Scallops sweater, but I think it might be a hair too thin. We'll see. As soon as I get that mohair sweater blocking, I'm going to turn to the Malabrigo Scallops!

Earth Day Dishcloth

Well, folks, I'm behind, as usual. Behind, that is, on the dishcloth craze. Right about when dishcloths came "in" a couple of years back (remember the Mason-Dixon Ball Band dishcloths[Ravelry-only link], anyone?), I ignored them. After all, I'd recently switched to sponges, and all dishcloths did was get smelly in the sink, just like they'd done when I was a kid. (Yes, they did get washed, but the smell left a stronger mental impression!)

But a couple of days ago, Earth Day caught up with me and I thought to myself, I should really get back in the habit of using dishcloths, rather than so many paper towels! I mean, I'm not that bad; I do try to use the sponge, but sometimes I just want the convenience of a paper towel... but still, I should try, shouldn't I?

Yes, we recycle and watch the temperature of our house and buy cars that get good gas mileage - but couldn't I be better about this one little item? Maybe if I had my own handmade dishcloths I'd use them, I thought, so out came the cotton and the needles...

...with this result. 

Coffeeboy swore he wouldn't use it, that he couldn't subject anything I'd knit with to such treatment as scrubbing dirty sinks and counters. Besides, he'd grown up with sponges, not "those cloths" as he used to call them back when I was using cloths, not sponges, so I expect there was some resistance to the dishcloth funk. But knit one I did, use it to wipe the counter I did, and now, boy doesn't our sink look too pretty for its own good?

There are other ideas I'm finding equally inspiring - many of them, to give honor where it's due - mentioned on Zarzuela's Earth Day post. There I was introduced to the Greencraft group on Ravelry - if you're on Ravelry, you should definitely check this group out! It's fascinating what people are doing, the little ways they are getting back in touch with the world!

Yarnovers and Passovers

I bet you thought that I was preparing last week for an actual Passover seder, not passing yarn through itself? Well, in the end we had a little of both:

Also this weekend, a visiting friend was winding some yarn on my swift. I noticed she was taking a really long time to wind yarn, which, granted, takes a while when you bring several skeins, but still... I went upstairs and found scenes that looked a bit like this:

It was like a game of cat's cradle sprung into existence on the swift. Twice every turn, the yarn caught in a loop and we had to thread the growing ball of yarn through the loop, or the loops, as the case may be. Sometimes things got really, really messy. Eventually we finished, and miraculously the yarn eventually also stopped being caught in its own loops, but wow, was that not one of the more messed-up skeins I've ever encountered!

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to getting back to the wheel and to the mohair sweater, for which I'm rapidly running out of cool days to wear it!

I haven't blogged this one yet because it's all stockinette. However, now that it's starting to look like a sweater, I decided to take a picture. I'm hopeful that I can control the roll on the bottom there. Silly me. Rolled hems and mohair sweaters do seem to go together in my mind, but who was I not to do something to stop the roll? Oops! Oh well, I will just have to hope that the powers of the iron are enough!

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!

Happy Valentine's Day

May yours be as warm as, well, a handknit sock resting uneasily close to the jaws of a kitty:

Coffeeboy thought that Juniper would make an ideal background for the sock. Juniper thought the sock - and my handspun yarn nicely wound into a yarn cake - would make an ideal lunchtime plaything.

Luckily, as the camera indicates, she had plenty of supervision, and no yarn, WIP-socks, or cats were harmed in the making of said photograph.

I've been a bit of an MIA-blogger lately. Last week, I visited my academic home back in New Jersey, taking along the handspun sock yarn and turning it into what you see above. I met with friends, advisors, and lots of library books. My trunk was noticeably heavier on the long, 10-hours-plus drive home. I even made it into New York City to visit an archive, always fun after spending a while in the small-town mountains!

I find it interesting how the sock's colors are spinning up. I would never have guessed that it would have a large chunk of red like that, and be so mutedly tweedy elsewhere. The yarn is a pleasure to knit with, though, not only because it feels nice but because I made it all by myself! I decided to reinforce the heels with some mohair, or rather, with some Kidsilk Haze, to be precise. Believe you me, my heels cannot wait to slip into that softness!

Well, regardless of whether or not you celebrate this commercially-induced festival of sugary-sweetness, I do hope you get to feel a bit of the fiber-love either way!

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.

I thought I lost the sock love

I've been having a problem with socks lately. Specifically, socks using those hand-painted yarns I often love so much.  I mean, just take a look at this one. 

This one, folks, is supposed to have a pattern. A pretty pattern called "Laburnum." (It's in the Sensational Knitted Socks book, a 5-stitch pattern).  You can see some examples over there at Flickr. But my sock, it does not have a pattern. Hence, it's been frogged.

Or there's this one, Cascading Leaves. Again, check these out. See those nice little leaves? Now look at this:

Ugh, right? OK, it's not that bad, but it is a little bit, well, blotchy. I haven't quite frogged this one, but I'm tempted.

In desperation, I pulled out some Koigu last night, a nice, reliable handpaint. A colorway, I should add, that hadn't worked well with a pattern involving cables and lace. You'd think I'd have pulled out a nice, and definitely reliable solid color. But no, I decided I wanted to try this particular yarn. After all, it's blue and white and makes me think of winter sunsets. After a bit of poking around on Ravelry, I thought that the Hedera pattern might have just the right amount of interest, but I wasn't so sure about the whole handpainted business. I gave it a shot last night. This is what I found:

I like it. In fact, I really like it. Color me surprised, hand-paint me amazed! I think what you see there must be my personal record for the most sock knit in one evening yet! Thank goodness, my sock love hasn't, as I had feared, quite left me yet.

Handknit and handspun

Hey guess what everyone! It worked! I knit something with yarn that I spun! 

Remember this bit of overspun, blue tweediness?

Well, with it I made a hat!!

Pattern: Tweed Beret from Interweave Knits Winter 2006
Yarn: My Own Handspun!!
Needles: Size 7 in DPNs and various circulars
Time: About a week

The overspun tweediness of the yarn ended up working out really well for the pattern. I also had the perfect amount of yarn: just a tiny, smaller-than-a-ping-pong ball's worth at the end. I was surprised; I'd thought I'd have too little yarn, but no, it was all fine! It was a big tough on my hands: very little stretch to the yarn and therefore not the nicest to knit with. I also could have made the hat a bit floppier.  It's pretty thick yarn, and was nice and toasty when Coffeeboy took this picture yesterday during a snowfall.  Overall, though, I really like how it came out and am terribly excited that my yarn actually "worked"! 

I have another FO that I've been forgetting to post: Coffeeboy's socks. I finished these while we were in Colorado, a few days before New Year's - the last FO of 2007.

Pattern: Retro Rib socks from Interweave's book Favorite Socks
Yarn: Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in Pioneer, 2 skeins
Needles: size 1, magic-looped
Time: Nov. 2007-Dec. 2007

I really enjoyed this pattern; the socks were easy to knit and the ribbing controlled some of the pooling of the yarn. Coffeeboy seems to like them too! I "gave" him the yarn as a graduation present, with the promise that they'd become socks, and I finally have kept that promise!

I've been spinning a lot lately, as you might have seen in that last post. For the past almost 2 weeks I've been spinning 8 oz. of red, "warm wine" yarn. It's amazing how much longer it takes when I'm really trying to do things right and spin more even, consistent singles!  Last night I plied it onto 2 bobbins; today I need to take that off the bobbins and finish plying the yarn, probably a bobbin and a half. Then I will have a spinning FO to show you, too!

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?

Rest in Peace, Old Mac

Well, it's finally happened. My trusty old iBook has been set aside and replaced. It didn't die in a horrible crash of unutterable proportions, but simply got old, as few computers get to do. Old, slow, cranky, but thankfully never wrinkly.

RIP: August 2001 - January 2008

The new computer's on-board camera

takes a picture of the old,

now shut down, its sleep light no longer glowing. 

Goodbye and Hello. 

That old iBook and I have seen a lot together. It's been my trusted technological companion since August of 2001, a few months after Mac OSX and the new, square, white iBooks came out. It saw during its 7.5 years of service:

• an upgraded hard drive, from 10 to 40 gigs
  
• new memory added
  
• an airport/wireless card added
  
• a new keyboard (after the cats kindly removed the 'E' key)
  
• an external screen when its own became dim
  
• a new battery after the old one failed to charge

It helped me through many projects, fun times, and transitions:

• 1 close call in which I nearly left the Mac universe (I've been a Mac user for as long as I've used computers) for the PC universe, and this Mac kept me so securely in the fold that now I can't imagine using anything else
  
• 1 master's program and over half of a PhD
  
• 2 autumns of PhD applications
  
• seemingly countless term papers and their associated documents
  
• 1 breakup (one which was a very good thing, too)
  
• 1 wonderful spouse (really and truly: way back when he first met me, Coffeeboy was impressed that I had an iBook and that it was running beta software. He figured I must have been a fellow geek of some sort). 
  
• 1 year of wedding planning
  
• 44716 emails stored in Eudora, now successfully and safely transferred to Apple's Mail program
  
• 5 homes in 3 different states
  
• all the photos for a knitting blog, slowly, slowly opening up in iPhoto, and slowly loading in Flickr
  
• innumerable history files in my web browser for knitting patterns and yarn
• the beginnings of a dissertation, and its very many documentary demands

You almost never crashed, old friend. You never lost my data. (I have all my emails going back to 1996, freshman year of college, for example. That's almost an insane amount of memory and data). You would have kept on trucking along, maybe at 15 mph instead of 60, if I had let you.  You got me through a good majority of the previous decade of my life, and I can only hope that my new computer proves to be as excellent a machine as you were, that it can assist me through whatever comes next with just as much ease and style!

Stranded for the New Year

Guess what? I've now fulfilled a childhood dream... of being stranded in the mountains by a snowstorm. Coffeeboy and I spent the new year's holiday with his family in Colorado, and a week ago Friday, we went into the mountains to spend time at their condo at a ski resort. We cross-country skiied happily on Saturday, were joined by friends that afternoon, and snowshoed Sunday morning. As you can see, it was quite snowy! After a leisurely late lunch at a local restaurant, we went home to the condo to pack and leave.

We ended up leaving at about 5 pm, the same time as everyone else heading home from the slopes after Christmas week, in this case, east towards Denver on highway 70. (You might have read something about this on the news a few days ago.) About an hour and 5 miles later, we decided to turn around and call it a night. This was a wise decision, as the tunnels and passes were all closed by the time we returned a half-hour later. Everyone decided a trip to the hot tub to relax was in order, followed soon by a plate of what cheese we had left and simple dinner of pizza.

When we woke up on New Year's Eve, we figured they'd open the passes soon, and we'd leave that morning. But the passes didn't open till late afternoon, by which time it was getting dark, snowy, and stormy--not looking much better than the night before.

This is how I came to run out of yarn for Cobblestone, knitting away the time in a condo at Copper Mountain while the snow, -30 windchills, and 0-degree temperatures kept us inside reading and playing games. Being stranded on New Year's Eve turned out to be not so bad, to put it mildly! I'd happily strand myself there any time, for anything!

Speaking of strands, when we returned to my in-law's house on New Year's Day, I found the remaining yarn for Cobblestone (just a partial ball, a lot smaller than I thought it was) and knit up the rest of the sweater, giving it to Coffeeboy late that evening after weaving in all the ends. But now, it is finished. Except for blocking.

Pattern: Cobblestone pullover
Yarn: Mission Falls 1824 Wool, 15 balls
Needles: KP Options size 6
Time: about 2 months

It was a long trip, those two weeks. Great to see family, and i actually finished a bunch of knitting (the sweater, a pair of socks for Coffeeboy, a hat for my BIL, etc). I'm glad to be home with my kitties, my wheel, and my stash. I'm also looking forward to getting back to normal life. My list of to-dos grew and grew while away, and the amount of dissertating shrank considerably as well. It's time to put my brain to the grindstone once again, and turn the wheel on the productivity in more ways than one. With Coffeeboy off in Salzburg Austria this week for a fancy seminar (paid for by school), I'm sure I'll have plenty of quiet time in which to get caught up!

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!