Bulky Yarn + Fat Needles = Finished Object

I have never before knit with bulky yarn. Nor with U.S. # 13 needles. It felt like manipulating tree trunks. But in less than a month, ta-daaaaa !

This is the Abrazo vest, a free pattern from the Fall 2008 issue of "Knitty." It's actually written for "super bulky" yarn, so I had to knit a size up to get a good fit. Of course I had to make a few adjustments to the pattern cuz I didn't entirely approve of the designer's choices: I left off the "shaping," made the shoulders wider, put a garter border at the armhole edge, and re-engineered the center back . . . nothing much really.

No complaints about the yarn either. This is Knitpicks Cadena, 70% wool and 30% alpaca. (Yes, ALPACA – my greatest fiber love!)

And the frosting on the cake? Total frugality. Cadena is just under $6 per skein, and the vest used three skeins. Soooooo. . . yes, a custom-fit, wool/alpaca vest (with cables) for under $18.

Roses and Roses and Roses

I went to the Orange County Rose Society's 2011 exhibition this past weekend.  Lots and lots of amazing roses. 

They were large, tiny, scented, unscented, and colors I'd never seen. Here's just a few.

This is a miniature rose, barely two inches across, floating in a silver dish. The colors are difficult to capture. The red is a medium deep maroon, and the yellow is an intense light gold.

This doesn't look like a rose at all, does it? There were a few others of the same form, more daisy-like than rose-shaped.

I love the combination of yellow and pink on this one

Yet again a traditional rose shape (with lots of petals!), but multi-colored – deep pink and white.

The curling petals on this one definitely curled my toes.

I think this one might be my favorite – just enough petals to look like a rose, but not so many as the pink-and-white one. And that incredible pale pink with deeper pink at the edges – yum!

I didn't get any pictures of the roses that won the prize for best scent. Darn! One was peach-colored and had a deep, almost musky scent, and the other was lavender with a lighter, sharper smell. Both wonderful.

Color in Spindling

It all began with an itch to use the long-neglected spindles. Then I found this.

Madly inexpensive Brown Sheep Mill Ends from Suzoo's Woolworks. There was a lot of blue, a moderate amount of yellow, and just a bit of red. It didn't even occur to me until much further along that these are the three primary colors.

Of course yarn isn't paint. You can't expect to combine blue and yellow to make green. And yet . . . . Look at this first ply.

I used 15 grams of yellow and 10 grams of blue, feeding them in more-or-less side by side.

The second ply was almost all blue with little bits of red spun in at random intervals throughout.

Then I plied both singles together, ending up with 5o grams and 260 yards of light fingering with a predominant look of blue, but other colors mixing in here and there. I think I like it.

Here's a close-up:

Interestingly, these "mill ends" were some of the best fiber I have ever spun – soft, smooth, and super easy to draft.

There are two similar singles waiting to be plied, for a total of about 500 yards. Not sure what to do with this yarn. It's too pretty for socks. Maybe a little neckpiece?

Another Free Pattern

Just a quickie (perhaps to mark the six-month anniversary of my last post??). I have moved -- again -- and Internet access here is problematic.

Anyhoo, I have added another free pattern link on the side. The "Staggered Lace Socks" pattern has been up on Ravelry for a while, but not available ouside the Rav world.

I'm working out another new pattern -- a pillow cover -- and should have it up in a few weeks (fingers crossed).

Lots of Little Lacey Lessons

It is done. It is done. The Celtic Stole, my very first project with laceweight yarn, is finished at last. I may never knit with laceweight again. Love the pattern, but oh, my goodness. Knitting with thread is a whole other world. So . . . here it is --

This is my second stole (y'know, rectangular-type shawl), and I'm realizing that with this shape you get a lot more of the decorative part in the front, unlike the triangles, which usually have their prettiest part draped across the back. The back of a stole is not so interesting.

Both shapes are good, and then, of course, there's circles and half-circles and all sorts of adventures to come. I'm definitely not done with shawls, although a light-to-medium fingering weight yarn may be as thin as I will go in future. Aside from the difficulty in knitting (not to mention tinking), laceweight, once blocked, is almost too drapey.

Anyhoo, I had the fun of learning two new cast-on's for this project. First the invisible cast-on for the start, and then the crochet cast-on for the knit-on border.

I had a slight difference of opinion with the designer as to how the border should be cast on. This is due to my reluctance to break off the working yarn unless absolutely, totally, completely necessary. Other knitters are more carefree about trailing bits of yarn. So, I cast on with my working yarn, adding one stitch to the cast-on number, and then eliminated one row from the beginning. Worked just fine.

It's an amazing pattern, perfectly easy to knit (as long as you pay close attention). There are no nupps or other fancy maneuvers, just basic stitches. And, most importantly, the pattern has not a single mistake, not one, not anywhere. And, oh, by the way, it's FREE. And the chart comes as both a PDF and an Excel spreadsheet. I found the spreadsheet to be quite handy. I could change the color of the grid, increase the font size, cut out just the pieces I was working on -- all sorts of useful stuff.

My hat is off to Sarah Kendra Hughes, who created this amazing pattern and then shared it with the world, asking nothing in return. Huzzah!

Apparently I Am A Designer

Well, we all are designers really, whether we start from scratch, modify a pattern, or cobble several patterns together into something different. But here's what happened to me.

I bought this fabulous alpaca yarn from Knitpicks intending to use it for a specific vest pattern. That so did not work out. Then I tried it with some other patterns. No and no and no. But I really wanted a vest. I vaguely remembered seeing a demonstration of a very open, lacey drop-stitch, and I stumbled upon several sideways-knit vest patterns, none of which I was exactly crazy about, but the approach is pretty much the same for all. So I used the drop-stitch idea to improvise a vest, which I liked very much.

I liked it so much that I thought of making a few more in different yarns. It didn't take long to organize my notes into something that vaguely resembled a pattern, and I thought I would simply upload a PDF to Ravelry, to join all the other free patterns available there, so that it would be available for me and for anyone else who might want to use it too.

Well, the process is not so simple. First you must designate yourself as a "designer" and give yourself a "designer name." So I did that, although I felt like a fool ("it's just a few notes," this humble little voice was whispering). There were more steps – a pattern page, a store (yes, even though it's free), links, etc., but they are all done.

The last and most difficult step has been to get a link up on my blog that will allow people who are not Ravelry members to view and download the PDF. I think I have that working, although I'm not thrilled with the way it looks. More tinkering will be needed.

It's been a fun, although sometimes frustrating, experience, and having a place to put my improvisations has inspired me to take better notes and to work harder on writing an understandable pattern. Given the problems I've had with patterns written by others, I know how incredibly difficult that can be. Just when you think you've explained it all, someone comes along with a different mindset (like me) and just doesn't get it.

Right now, I'm reverse engineering the Staggered Lace Socks into a pattern. No notes anymore, but I have the actual sock in hand, and it's easy to count rows and stitches. Soon I will have two "designs" up on Ravelry. Woohooo!!

So . . . About That Spinning Wheel . . .

I have, in fact, purchased a spinning device. Notice, I did not say "spinning wheel." Although extensive research into spinning terminology suggests that this device may be considered to be generically a "wheel" despite the absence of an actual wheel. No treadles either. No footmen. Have you guessed yet?

Yep, it is an e-spinner. A HansenCrafts miniSpinner to be precise. What we have here is an Ashford jumbo flyer with sliding-hook yarn guide in Kevin Hansen's beautifully carved mount with a tiny but super powerful motor in the base. Also comes with a foot pedal that operates in two modes. I love it.

Alas, on the day it arrived I had just come down with a dreadful head cold and could do no more than set it on the table next to my laptop and admire it from afar between sniffles, sneezes, and naps.

But then, oh, then . . . when I began to feel better . . . I put the miniSpinner on a low table to the right side of the bed, plugged it in, piled my fiber on the left side of the bed, lay back on my pillows, and spun. Now that was fun!

The whole process was so different from spindling that I had trouble at first determining when the fiber had enough twist in it that I should allow it to wind onto the bobbin. Working with some hairly, snarly Coopworth/Columbia blend acquired several years ago, I drafted away, struggling to keep up with the spinner (at one of its lowest speed settings). But it got easier, and by the second bobbin I was doing better.

Plying was really exciting. No worries about direction. Instead of flipping the switch to the right, I flip it to the left. Done deal. Woohoo! And this is where the speed is seriously great. It was so quick that I had to remind myself to stop from time to time to move the yarn guide. The only oopsie came when I got down near the end of my singles. That stuff I spun at the beginning of the very first bobbin? Uh, not so spun. It just fell apart. Heh. Lesson learned.

So here is what I have to show for my first spinning experience. About 100 yards of a more-or-less-worsted weight "rustic" yarn.

It's the oddest stuff; reminds me a little of the Knitpicks Suri Dream I used recently to make a vest, although it is not nearly so soft. But, just like Suri Dream, there is a narrow core of yarn with a fairly decent twist and then a lot of hairs sticking out that make it much thicker. I certainly didn't set out to create this effect (wouldn't know how), so I'm guessing it's a feature of the fiber, which came with its own supply of little twigs, nicely embedded, no extra charge.

It feels strange to be a beginner again. I had just got to the point where I could reliably and consistently spin any thickness whatever on a spindle. Now I need to learn to do the same on my "wheel." Much fun to come.