August 2008

…but oh, my aching knees (we have wood floors). Kneeling around the bulletin board brandishing a yardstick is a little rough, but I am very pleased with the result:

The weather is supposed to be warm tomorrow, even in our neighborhood, so perhaps this will dry by Thursday night. That would indeed be nice.

Because this is a hoodie, the back neck is left completely straight. You start knitting the hood from the live stitches. Well, part of the live stitches. The rest of them are for the shoulders. You can see I did not cut the yarn balls off the two parts yet. I am waiting to see if I like the hood before I cut (anything to avoid weaving in more ends than absolutely necessary).

I have surprised even myself this time around. The front of Apres Surf, that I started on August 19, is at the beginning of the v-neckline already. In the photo here it’s all curled up at the bottom and sides, but when I flatten it out, it’s long enough:

It would have been up halfway into the armhole by now if I had remained oblivious to a point where I started a pattern repeat only halfway through the previous repeat. I spent this morning’s knitting time undoing everything I did last night.

This looks an awful lot like something I was working on just 2 weeks ago:

It is, however, something different. This is the front of the Apres Surf Hoodie that I cast on last night. The back is done but not yet blocked. The front is coming along quickly; again, memorizing the stitch pattern is a great help in picking up the pace. I can knit up to the neckline on the bus, adding more than an hour of knitting time to this project each day than I’d have just working on it at home in the evenings.

Alas, the hat now looks like this:

I ran short of yarn for finishing the top, so I’ll need to cast on with fewer stitches and give it another run.

I wish I could say the big space between my last post and this one was caused by my leading such an exciting life that blogging went by the wayside. Actually, I’ve been watching others lead exciting lives by being Olympians. We pre-record the Olympics so we can breeze through sports and long sections of talk that don’t interest us, but all that extra TV still cuts into blogging time. And knitting time, too, since I can look down and focus on yarn overs and corresponding decreases during the pre- and post-event chatter, but have to look up for the 30 seconds or so it takes a swimmer or gymnast or runner to complete a swim or routine or lap.

Not to say life hasn’t been fun.  Mr. MmmYarn took me out for my birthday last night, to a restaurant at the top of a fancy hotel downtown. We got all dressed up for it (I was in heels), had a tasty dinner, and did a bit of dancing. I find the dressing up part fun, as long as I don’t do it too often. It’s too bad it was so foggy that all we could see was the lit-up sign at the top of a nearby hotel. The rest of the world outside those windows was a wall of solid white.

I am not participating in the Ravelympics. I set myself plenty of self-imposed deadlines and I did not want to add a real one to the mix. I will do some deadline knitting shortly, though, as I have signed up for Mystery Stole 4. Want to see the materials I picked out? The yarn is from the stash (I swatched last night) and I went bead shopping earlier today:

The Mystery Stole may be madness for me, as Mr. MmmYarn and I are going on vacation the Friday after clue #1 is out, meaning I may not even get clue #2 before we leave depending on what time of the day it’s released. So it may be out for travel knitting and I’ll have a ton of catch-up work to do on three stole clues when we get back.

Oddly, though, even doing vacation planning and watching that much TV the week has been productive fiber-wise and I have progress photos to share today.

The little hat grows very slowly as I’m only knitting on it in short bursts, such as waiting in line for my turn with the surprisingly and unusually efficient postal clerk yesterday:

Why no marathon hat knitting? Because I’m working on the Apres Surf Hoodie almost exclusively on bus rides and at home. The sleeves are done, as you know, and this is the back at the beginning of armhole shaping:

Why, oh why, the color must be so washed out every time I snap a photo is a mystery to me. Imagine the green more the shade of a spearmint Tic Tac candy and you’ve just about got it.

Under the Ott-Lite, the 2 ounces of thin orange singles I managed to whack out photographs bright and bold. This is for the orange and purple 4 ply. Here it is, 25% done, atop a background of one of Mr. MmmYarn’s early weaving projects:

All in all, I can’t complain. Except that the baby sweater’s neckline continues to be uncooperative. It’s entirely my fault for not writing down any part of my thought process.

I’ll go put another inch on Apres Surf before it’s time to go chop okra and onions for bhindi do pyaaza for dinner tonight. Yum!

Mr. MmmYarn and I went out of town again this weekend, to nearly the same place we went last weekend. It’s a 4-hour drive each direction. I finally have the stitch pattern for the Apres Surf Hoodie memorized (sheesh, that sure took long enough) and Mr. MmmYarn kindly drove a 2-hour leg each direction of our trip, so the back of the hoodie is coming along nicely. Here it is on the road Friday:

I am working a larger size for the lower half and a smaller size for the top half. The back looked like this today when it was time for me to take over driving:

This is all just car knitting this weekend, I got no other knitting done. We got home tonight and I spun some more of the electric orange singles and now I’ll go work on the hoodie while we watch the recorded Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing. 4 1/2 hours recorded? Gads. I bet with fast forwarding the presumably abundant commercials we can cram it in in less than half that. I like the parade of nations. It’s a great refresher of 9th grade geography.

July’s spinning is pitiful: only 1 ounce that I spun relatively thickly and Navajo plied so I would get some practice (and, frankly, so I wouldn’t have to deal with multiple bobbins that day because I was feeling lazy).

This fiber felt rougher, longer, and more crinkly than the natural white merino top I spun a few months ago.  I don’t know whether this is because of the individual sheep’s wool or the top’s preparation, or whether natural moorit merino is simply different in texture than natural white merino.

Fiber: 100% merino moorit top
Colorway: Moorit
Quantity: 1 ounce
Finished yarn: 1 skein, 32 yards, worsted weight
Spun at 12:1 on 7/6/2008, Navajo plied at 8:1 on 7/29/2008

This is my first mostly successful Navajo ply project. There was no cursing involved (!) this time around, simply because the singles never broke. I recently bought Judith MacKenzie McCuin’s Handspinning book and it both has photos of how to start a Navajo ply and offers the tip of pulling through several loops before starting the wheel. This did the trick for me. Usually what happens is I break the strand over and over, trying to get the chain started. I call this project “mostly successful” because the chains are not even and the finished yarn is both lumpy and overtwisted. In other words, I made yarn with character!

I did have one area of trouble while plying. I use my right hand to chain and the left both to control the singles coming off the kate and to smooth out any chains as necessary. Doing this, my left hand constantly was in the way of the right and I had to twist my body. With only 1 ounce of fairly thickly spun yarn, though, plying went quickly so I wasn’t too bothered. Now, had I been able to read bowerbird’s post that includes a little sentence about keeping the singles on the right (about 1/3 of the way down that post) before I tried this, or even thought about perhaps MOVING THE KATE TO THE RIGHT SIDE OF MY BODY when my hands were running into each other (duh!), I wouldn’t have had this problem. Location, location, location. Next time I’ll know better

On the wheel for August: traffic-cone-orange merino that I will spin 2 thin singles of, to ply with 2 thin singles of Grimace-purple merino. Wish me luck; the last 4-ply I did took me 6 months.

The Prezioso sweater was nearly done but I decided on the bus yesterday that I really didn’t like the neckline, so I ripped out the last 2 inches and it now looks a little shorter than this:

Sleeve #2 looks an awful lot like sleeve #1:

This is a good thing.

Mr. MmmYarn and I went to the Mid-State Fair in Paso Robles last night. I was particularly interested in seeing the sheep and the home arts building. As I walked in the sheep barn, I realized I didn’t recognize a single breed. Not that I could have recognized them visually anyway, as all were sheared, but each stall bore a small placard listing the sheep’s name and breed. I came to the conclusion that since these were raised for food, meat breeds must be different than wool breeds. Years ago, when I first learned to spin and was still living in this area, I went to the fair and someone had a llama. She gave me a small bit of the fiber for spinning. No fiber at this year’s fair.

The home arts building housed entries in quilting, sewing, baking (most cookies and pies still looked pretty tasty, but having been on display for nearly 2 weeks some of them looked unappetizing, to say the least!), and, of course, knitting and crocheting. Some of the knitting was very well done with some original patterns, too. The first place winner in the baby clothes category was a well-knitted Feburary Baby Sweater (from Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitter’s Almanac). I was surprised that the first place winner in scarves was your basic 12-stitch garter stitch scarf on fat needles with fluffy yarn. I found some of the other scarves far more interesting and technically challenging than the winner. Perhaps the fact that the yarn was in patriotic red-white-blue helped its cause.

I also saw a chicken getting a beauty treatment as she was going to auction in the morning. First she got a soapy bath in dishwashing soap, then a dip in some rinse water, then a thorough blow-dry. She looked lovely when finished. It’s too bad her breed was “roaster” as this makes me certain of her destiny when the fair is over. All animals get cleaned up before going before the auctioneer: cattle get vacuumed so their fur really shines.