Falling Behind

Posted on May 29, 2014 by Rayna

So, as is always the case when I am not knitting for whatever reason, I was just poking around Ravelry. (I have said countless times that if I spent even half as much time knitting as I spent trolling Rav, I’d be a machine!)

I am experiencing a rare case of finish-itis, and I was looking at my project page to see which WIP to pick up next. I made a startling realization. For the last few years, I have completed 27 or so projects annually. That averages out to 2.25 projects a month. So by my calculations, by the end of May on Saturday, I should have 11.25 completed projects on my projects page. Let’s round that down to 11, shall we?

How many do I have? 7. And that includes a project that’s a single sock – it was a test knit done for my friend Christina, and I didn’t need to finish the second one. So I have to ask myself…what gives?

Yes, I bought a loom and yes, I picked up spinning again. And I have spent more time than I care to admit planning some designs. But all of those new activities were in the past month. Makes me wonder where my winter went!

That being said…I have a pair of socks that I should be able to finish by next week sometime. I’d share an “in progress” pic but they are a sooper seekrit test knit. And I do have three different fingering weight scarves in various stages of completion that I’d like to get back to. This one that I started last fall is high on my list of FOs I’d like to actually have.

Stillwater Zigzag Wanderer

So maybe it will be next out of the WIP bag!

Feeling Rather Scattered

Posted on May 27, 2014 by Rayna

I just realized I had not done any blogging for nearly two weeks. Bad blogger! But I realized that a big part of it was due to not being entirely devoted to one thing…and as such, I didn’t have a specific subject to blog about.

I finished my very first weaving project. (Where project = something about the size of a placemat!) But hey, it’s something!

First Weaving Project

I have warped up my loom again; this time, I have used some Berocco Remix – I am still mostly just practicing and using up worsted weight yarn. I’ll be using some left over Cascades 220 and some Berocco I used to knit Chase a hat a few years ago for the weft. I am looking forward to being able to use fingering and even laceweight yarns at some point. I have a suspicion that some of the two colour stashes that I set aside for shawls may end up woven at some point.

I have been spinning a bit as well…a fractal spin of a blue/purple Friends in Fiber BFL/Silk blend.

$The "fractal" half of a fractal spin!$

The “fractured” half of a fractal spin!

The fractured half is nearly complete – seven of nine pieces spun. Then I get to the half that’s still in one piece. I am looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

I have been knitting a bit…a Hermione’s Everyday sock and a test knit sock for a friend. And I am awaiting an email from a designer about another test knit I have committed to. But I have also started designing. This is a bit of a departure for me. I have had my nose in stitch dictionaries for the past week or so, and have a surprising number of designs in my head, and even a theme for them, if they ever all get done. The first one to make it onto needles is a pair of fingering weight socks, and I have a cowl and a DK weight sock waiting in the wings. The whole experience is pretty fun, I have to admit. Never thought this was something I’d ever try.

All other crafts have had to fall by the wayside…so much to do and so little time! Now, I just need a severe case of “finish-itis” so that some of this stuff actually gets done!

A New Adventure

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Rayna

Last evening, Shireen offered to come over and help me get started warping my newly acquired loom. Only fair when you consider that this is all her fault. I kid, of course, but her enabling really is becoming quite legendary! 😉

She and Tito showed up, samosas and Indian sweets in hand, and the task of warping began with Game 7 of the Canadiens/Bruins series in the background.

I had watched an Ashford video yesterday on the subject so I did have some idea how the process worked, but having someone there who had done it a dozen times and totally knew what she was doing? Priceless!

She advised me to start off with a small worsted weight project to get my feet wet, and brought with her one of the skeins we hand dyed during our dye date last autumn. We proceeded to set the loom up width-wise across my dining table and off we went.

Having a spare set of hands for this was awesome!

Having a spare set of hands for this part was awesome!

When we were done…this was what we had:

Warped Up and Ready To Go!

After weaving a few rows of “lead”, I started in earnest….just trying to get the motions down, and trying to keep the edges from looking like my dog had chewed them up! I think that as this progresses, there will be a Zen-like relaxation that will come from this craft that will be similar to spinning (or, at least, similar to spinning when my newly spun yarn isn’t breaking due to fragility!)

I got this far before Shireen had one more lesson for me: hem stitching, which I am told will serve to keep the fringes in place later

Pre Hem-Stitch weaving

I actually really enjoyed the hem stitching, and after Shireen and Tito headed off for the night, I kept going just a little while longer. I did find it gets addictive in the “just one more pass with the shuttle before I stop” sorta way. In the cold light of day, I found I had woven quite a bit, considering how new I was at it.

Hem Stitched and all!

I am sure it will take me a while before I am weaving scarves for 1000 yards of laceweight…but so far, so good!

Looooom!!!

Image

loom

So excited! My new toy I picked up last night….now to actually learn how to use it!

Creativity is a Funny Thing

Posted on May 13, 2014 by Rayna

I have been involved in that conversation – the “what is creative, really?” debate – several times and in several places, with no real agreement among participants. I, personally, never really considered myself a creative person. As far as I was concerned, buying a knitting pattern and finding a skein of yarn to knit it with….not really all that creative. Many people respectfully disagreed, for the record. To me, creative requires vision, and imagination…and I really wasn’t sure I had either, to be honest.

Lately, things have been different. I am finding myself interested in, well, creating. Shireen taught me some polymer clay fundamentals a few weeks back, while her hubby Tito was showing me some copper metal work.

The makings of a copper bezel for a clay and resin insert.

Clay work done without supervision (I really need to learn to take better pics!)

Polymer clay work done at a later date without supervision (I really need to learn to take better pics!)

I still need to play around with my copper wire and anvil to start making the shawl pins that started all of this!

I have been playing with design ideas for my own knitting patterns; in fact, I am looking at a series of them…who’da thought?! I have been playing with kettle dyeing fibre, and hope to eventually dye some yarn. (I don’t really have any sort of set up or training for hand painting yarn at the moment, but the kettle dyeing has been fun.)

I am super excited! Tonight, I pick up a loom from someone here in Toronto who is destashing hers and hope to get a warping lesson from Shireen ASAP.

Still not sure where all of this is coming from, but I think I should enjoy it and take advantage of it while I can.

A Knitting Bucket List

Posted on May 8, 2014 by Rayna

So…I was bored the other day and started meandering about in WordPress. A blog post caught my eye…a post by The Mad Knitter called “Knitting Bucket List”. Considering how many things I see and ooh and aah over, I wondered if I really had a knitting bucket list and if I didn’t…perhaps I should. Sadly, while Ravelry has favourites and a queue, it doesn’t really have a spot for that, but I digress.

I think a bucket list should be “stretch” goals. I mean, sure, my queue has lots of things I’d like to knit. That’s what my queue is for. For me, a bucket list would contain patterns that I love that would contain something I deem to be a real challenge for whatever reason.

So I started thinking…what would I put on my knitting bucket list? The very first thing that sprang to mind? The socks that made me become a sock knitter three years ago, and that I still have not got the courage to start: Kate Atherley‘s My Vampire Boyfriend. I fell in love with these the moment that I saw them, all pretty and red and heart-y and cable-y. They are basically Rayna in a sock. Yet…each time I contemplate casting them on, I freeze and cast on something simple instead.

How awesome are these?? (Photo by Sarah Fay from Knitty.com)

On the shawl side of things…I’d have to go with Lucy Hague’s Taliesin. My friend Jocelyne linked to it on a Ravelry board that she and I moderate together and I literally gasped out loud. Now this one, I actually have the pattern for. Shireen decided she was going to knit it and sent it to me as a gift with the three word message, “Misery loves company”, a reflection on how hard it was going to be, not the finished item, of course.

Just look at all that Celtic knotwork! (Photo courtesy of lucyhague.co.uk)

Also on the shawl front is Cheryl Oberle’s Irish Diamond Shawl. I fell in love with this one as my friend Caryn made one years ago and wore it to work with great frequency for a long time. It’s so pretty but SO huge. I expect I’d buy a commercial yarn just so that I didn’t have to worry about obtaining five or six matching skeins of indie dyed yarn to make up the prescribed 2200 yards of yarn. I can’t imagine having to alternate skeins on this pattern.

The last thing on my bucket list? A sweater for me. This is another area in which I have no excuse. I have a code that was a gift from my friend Jenn for a Custom Fit sweater by Amy Herzog, a set of Custom Fit measurements just waiting to be entered into the software and not one but two sweater quantities of yarn. For some reason, I balk at the thought of casting it on. I think I have lived for so long with the fear of spending all that time knitting something that won’t fit, that I can’t bring myself to believe those who say that the Custom Fit software makes all of those fears null and void. I am a knitting wuss…there, I said it. Someday, I’ll get brave enough to start. Today is not that day. Tomorrow is not looking good, either!

So…what’s on your knitting bucket list?

Dyeing Alone

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Rayna

Saturday evening’s dyeing experiment made me brave. So when Shireen left her dyeing supplies in my kitchen when she left, Sunday suddenly became filled with colourful possibilities.

When we did our dye date last fall, some of the fibre we tried to dye met with unfortunate endings. One of the couple of batches I did at the time ended up quite felted, and the other stuff never was all that tempting to spin.

So Sunday morning, I grabbed a couple of the single batches of unknown-but-likely-wool fibre and gave them a go.

I soaked the fibre in vinegar and water for the prescribed time and then drained the soaking water into the crock.

The first braid was supposed to be a pale watery blue-green and a chocolate brown – but after immersing the fibre in the blue dye bath, I wimped out with the brown, fearing it would not stick to the fibre properly and that I’d end up with a grungy mess. This one is sort of pretty, but I’d have preferred that it was either lighter and more water-y or darker and more turquoise-y.

Water’s Edge

I had an idea for a blood orange colourway, so I mixed up some orange dye using the colours I had on hand and then when the fibre was fully immersed, I dropped some more red on the top of the fibre.

I left it in the crock and promptly forgot about it….returning later to find the dye bath exhausted, but the water actually boiling. Shockingly, it does not seem to be felted at all and the resulting braid looks something like this.

Blood Orange

I am not delighted with either of them, but it was a fun experiment and I am hoping I’ll get brave enough to try something more interesting next time the spirit moves me.

World’s Craftiest Weekend

Posted on May 6, 2014 by Rayna

It’s always fun and relaxing to spend the majority of the weekend crafting, but those full weekends come along far less often than I might like. Getting to spend half that weekend with like-minded friends? That happens even less often again.

Saturday saw all sorts of fun things, including spinning, knitting, weaving and dyeing.

Weaving…where shall I start? First off, I blame Shireen, The Enabler. She has been posting some of the most beautiful FO shots since acquiring her 20″ Ashford Knitters Loom about a month ago, and she has been regaling me with tales of how quickly these lovely items are going from skeins to wearable items. I have a rather substantial number of single skeins of sock yarn and Kim at indigodragonfly has also been telling me for a long time that a great way to use some of these up is to get a loom, but I wasn’t sure weaving would be my thing.

Then, Shireen brought the loom over on Saturday and let me weave some of her leader, so as not to spoil her actual project. I have to say that while I am sure that producing really nice clean looking edges and such takes some practice, the motions of weaving in and of itself really is pretty easy and the little bit I did led me to believe it could almost be as “zen” an activity as spinning. (Disclaimer: I may be somewhat delusional!)

She has enabled me into looking seriously at acquiring a loom…so much so that I got a line on a second hand one by posting on Ravelry to see if someone had one to destash. I will know more next weekend.

Shireen showed up at my place like she was moving in…there was the aforementioned loom, and wonderful Indian food, and decadent chocolate birthday cake for Leslie, but she also brought with her an entire set up for dyeing yarn. I had a skein of yarn that I got in a swap that I was very unhappy with and I decided to overdye it to see if I could improve it. I won’t mention the dyer name because it’s irrelevant and seems kinda uncool. As it was, it took me a while to reconcile myself to doing it as it feels rather like defacing someone else’s art, but I digress.

The photo made it look pretty nice, if not insanely bright. It was at least enticing enough to make me want to claim it in a Ravelry swap.

Original Skein

What was not clear in this photo was that the yellow-y lime sections had navy blue “smudged” over them, almost like the navy bled and stuck to the lime, rendering it sort of “dirty looking”. I figured that perhaps overdyeing the skein with some blue might render the lime colour a darker green and I was right. I kettle dyed the skein in a Crock Pot, using Jacquard acid dyes in a mixture of Sapphire and Turquoise (I didn’t bother to measure as I knew it wasn’t a recipe I’d ever need again). I let it simmer away until the entire dye bath was exhausted, and hung it to dry. Sunday morning, this was the result.

The “After” Shot

I still don’t love it, per se…but I sure like it a whole lot better. Perhaps I’ll knit socks out of it, and then if I don’t love the colourway knit up, I’ll overdye the socks to make them even more green. We shall see.

My Return to Spinning

Aside

One of my fibre goals for this year was to spin more. Spinning always seems to take a back seat to knitting for me, and even more so recently because I had deadline projects where spinning always has less of a sense of urgency.

When I finally did manage to pick up spinning again recently after a several month long hiatus, I got quite discouraged as I was finding I was encountering some difficulties that I hadn’t previously. I had started using some Schoppel Wolle pencil roving that was a gift from my mother in law for Christmas, thinking this would help me get back into the swing of things after such a long break…I mean, predrafted fibre…what could possibly go wrong? Instead my yarn was dissolving in my hands any time I pulled on it at all, but it didn’t seem woefully underspun.

Time to call in the expert! Leslie Ordal, my first-spinning-class-teacher-turned-friend, offered to come take a look, and Shireen thought this would be a great chance to come learn how to spin on a wheel. So the three of us convened at my place on Saturday, with Shireen and me ready to absorb the knowledge imparted by the pro. This was the inaugural use of my new WooLee Winder (more on this miraculous device at another time!), so I put on an empty bobbin and spun up some new fibre, using some bits and bobs samples I had lying about. I showed Leslie what I had been doing and she decreed that overall, I was doing fine and that while I should probably be putting a little more twist into it, she could not see what was causing the issue. And this new yarn wasn’t falling apart. So I showed her the bobbin with the pencil roving and she immediately knew what had been going wrong. The fibre had tweed-y slubs in it, so when I was spinning, most of the yarn was spun with enough twist, but the slubby parts, because they were thicker, not so much. Those were the parts that were falling apart.

Once I switched to something with a more consistent texture, I got this:

Random Halloween-themed fibre spin

Not bad at all, considering I hadn’t spun in ages.

Once I got the hang of it, I broke out a braid of superwash merino and decided to try that. So far I have turned this:

Into this:

Handpainted Merino

I spent about an hour last night spinning away in front of the Penguins/Rangers game and I am planning to set aside some time each day to try and move my spinning forward.