Spinning

No real Yarn People here, but perhaps if there were any, they would be made with this yarn I spun recently that I’ve named “Leela and Fry”. Bright, isn’t it?

Fiber: 100% merino
Supplier: Carolina Homespun
Quantity: 8 ounces (4 ounces of each color)
Finished yarn:
- 1 skein of 4-ply at 11 wpi (= worsted), 401 yards
- 1 skein of 3-ply at 14 wpi (=double knitting), 30 yards
- 1 skein of 2-ply at 15 wpi (=sport), 37 yards
Spun at 15:1 and plied at 7:1
Started 7/30/2008 and finished 2/8/2009

More than 6 months for this? Really? Good gravy, I am slow! Not to mention waiting, ahem, nearly 3 months before getting it off the bobbins. But then again, I do not have a lot of spinning time since I don’t drag the wheel with me on the bus. Nor is there usually enough individual space to break out the drop spindle in one of those seats.

This was a plain merino, easy to draft and easy to spin. The only remarkable thing was that I made a 4-ply worsted, exactly as I intended. No, it’s not as even as if it were machine made (although I know that is physically possible as I have seen a lot of photographic evidence) but it works for me.

Extreme close up!

I realized yesterday that I never posted the collage photos for 2008. There was a lot of knitting:

That is 7 pairs of baby booties, 15 hats, 1 fruit sock, 1 lanyard, 2 sweaters for me, 5 baby/toddler sweaters, 4 washcloths, 6 scarves, 2 shawls, and 5 pairs of socks. I also included the one woven scarf in this collage. That’s 49 items total. Not too shabby for a year.

Looking back at the sock-in-progress photos from last January reminded me that last year we celebrated the new year in the tropics, in Mexico. What a difference. Today I am shivering in our cold apartment. We are both wearing two sweaters each and are grateful for wool socks.

There was also spinning in 2008, but far less than I thought I did:

That’s it? Really? I am definitely a slow spinner.

Waiting is a big theme in the MmmYarn household these days. It’s not all bad. It turns out time spent waiting translates into quite a bit of knitting time. I took advantage of the brief period of sunshine through heavy rain clouds this morning and took photos to share.

The baby sweater nears completion:

I did finish knitting the lower band today and the sweater is officially off the needles as of early this afternoon. Now comes the sewing up of the sleeve seams, the weaving in of ends, and the creation of an i-cord edge with buttonholes along the two fronts. Ugh. Most likely followed by button shopping (much more fun than creating the holes); I haven’t checked the button stash but if memory serves I have nothing that will work with this coloring. This means I might need to go to the yarn shop because I don’t want to wait until Stitches West to send this sweater off to its continually growing recipient. Oh, the torture. Because I can’t buy anything but buttons at the yarn shop because I am still on a self-imposed knit-from-the-stash diet, with an exception for Stitches West, where I typically end up buying from the local shops’ booths anyway. It’s a strange logic.

Time flies when you’re knitting, and the Sweater Girl Pullover is well beyond the swatching stage:

Those safety pins up the right side of the back are marking where I added waist shaping that’s not in the pattern. Perhaps leaving those pins there will help me to remember to add the same shaping to the front. Perhaps if I write about the plan here that will reinforce it in my Swiss-cheese brain. You think? And yes, I nearly always knit sleeves two at a time when they are worked flat. It’s the only way I can be sure I’m duplicating the shaping.

Oh, and I may have done a little plying this week. Yarn, however, is still on the bobbin and not yet skeined:

Waiting took on another form a few months ago when I ordered a book I was sure would be fabulous. I got impatient, checking to see when it would be released and when it would be shipped on a regular basis. But you can’t rush these things and it finally surprised me by arriving last week. I wasn’t wrong about its fabulous-ness, and this sure is some great retail therapy, courtesy of the talented Nancy Bush:

Mmm… nupps. I do like the look of nupps and even enjoyed their execution when I made the Lily of the Valley shawl. I am looking forward to eventually working some patterns out of this one. First I have to read it, though; haven’t had time to really peruse it yet.

I indulged in a little more this week. The reward, me mateys, is my very own pirate-ish YARRRN t-shirt:

Mr. MmmYarn and I decided to stay in for Valentine’s Day this year. Lots of the knitting blogs I read posted something heart-shaped or red today. I give you, instead, Beef Braised in Ale on noodles alongside red cabbage with cranberries:

Hey, at least the side dish is in the pink/purple/red color family. We also indulged in red wine. Yum. Happy Valentine’s Day, all! I hope you are as lucky as I am and can spend it with someone special.

Happy Groundhog Day! I took a vacation day today simply to try to catch up with life a little. Due to circumstances beyond our control, neither Mr. MmmYarn nor I got a weekend this weekend, nor did we get much of a long weekend last week. Today I realized it has been ages since I’ve posted. I don’t have too much finished work to show for this big posting gap, but I’ve definitely been practicing various fiber arts.

Finished item #1, a hat:

Pattern: own, 3×3 spiral rib made on 61 stitches (a multiple of 6 plus 1 to create a right-leaning spiral)
Yarn: 4 ounces of handspun Widdershin Woolworks merino wool
Needles: size 10 (plus a little of size 9 at the very top as it turns out I have no size 10 double-points)
Size: adult
Started 1/23 and finished 1/26/2009

I am very proud of this as it is the first garment I have knit from my handspun. So far, handspun yarn has been relegated to a special section of the stash, the part I don’t knit from. I came to the conclusion: what’s the point of having this yarn if I don’t use it? This stuff is early spinning, probably made in 2000 or 2001. Bulky and uneven, but it sure made a nice hat:

I made hardly any progress at all on the baby cardigan since it went to Stow Lake. The sleeves were truly terrible. Here is a blocking photo from a week ago that I never got around to getting posted here:

Look how big those dots are in the sleeves! I’m working the body on size 2 Addi Turbos and for ease of working I switched to Susan Bates short double-points (with a rubber band on each end to make straight needles) for the sleeves, which completely changed my gauge. The sleeve fabric was totally floppy, nothing like the body. Since I took this photo last week, I have ripped out and re-knit both sleeves, this time on the Addis, and am now chugging away at the body. The sleeves’ gauge is far more satisfactory. I blocked them again just to be sure.

Finished item #2: I had this idea in my head a long time, that as a quasi-environmentalist it’s really shameful that I waste one cardboard sleeve on my teacup every Monday night at knitting group, so I cut a strip off a failed felted bag and needle-felted together a cup holder.

Failed bag with bizarrely wide strap and bizarrely narrow flap:

And voila, a cup holder:

Pattern: took apart a cardboard holder, traced it onto already-felted bag, cut out basic shape, needle felted together, put the cardboard holder in the recycling bin
Yarn: Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride Bulky, 85% wool, 15% mohair
Started and finished 1/25/2009

Of course, three of the felting needles were broken after my last adventure with needle felting and I did not remember where I put the replacements until this item was finished. Grrr. At least I know now I do not need to buy more replacements at Stitches West at the end of this month. And the next needle felting project will go far more quickly with a full complement of needles. When I used this last week, the cafe owner asked if I could make one and put the cafe’s logo on it. Uh… I kind of weaseled out of that one. I don’t see myself going into mass production on these.

I swatched with some lovely Rowan Kidsilk Night for the Sweater Girl Pullover:

However, the swatch lied despite my doing everything you’re supposed to do (wash and dry, hang a bit), and the 5″ of sweater I managed to crank out this weekend I ended up ripping out today because the work was too wide. Ripping is hard in this yarn. I cannot rip the waistband part but managed to re-use the rest of the yarn. This morning I cast on again with fewer stitches and have a whole 8 finished rows to show for it. Whoop-de-do. The Kidsilk yarn is fabulous, though. I can see why it’s known as Kidsilk Crack.

Spinning took place, too. I finished the last bit of purple for the purple and orange 4-ply last night. I’m deciding whether I have time to ply it now before heading to knitting group in an hour.

And wrapping things up, I finally was able to part with the way-too-big-for-me sweater. It’s on its way to its new home with the Cheyenne River Reservation youth project in South Dakota. They need warm, natural fiber sweaters and large ones are welcomed. This one’s Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride Worsted and has a 48″ chest:

Besides the hugeness of it (huge due to delusions about body size for the first 10 years or so after I learned to knit even though it is the correct size as dictated by the pattern), the colors simply don’t flatter me, so I decided a long time ago I wouldn’t rip this and re-knit it. I hung on to it a long time, unable to let go of something I put so much effort into. I was able to very peacefully send it on its way on Saturday with nary a regret. Nice.

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!

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:

This week’s spinning fiber was one ounce of merino sliver. I generically refer to all my fiber as “roving,” but since this fiber was specifically labeled “sliver” I thought I’d try to pay attention to its preparation back when I first picked it up. I found an article in the Winter 2007 issue of Spin-Off magazine that discusses the differences between different fiber preparations.

The article says sliver is thinner than roving and, unlike roving, has no twist to it. Yes, I can confirm both of those with this merino, but I thought it was thinner simply because it’s only 1 ounce of fiber and I usually work with 2 ounces or more. This was far thicker in sliver form than the 1-ounce bits of pygora I spun up a few months ago. The fiber was very soft and easy to draft but I found it harder to spin evenly than the merino-silk blend and English Wensleydale Longwool I spun recently. In this case, it may have needed some pre-drafting (I very rarely do that, preferring instead to simply treadle and go). So I went for a more rustic-looking 2-ply yarn:

Fiber: Merino sliver
Colorway: none (undyed)
Supplier: friend of a friend
Quantity: 1 ounce
Finished yarn: 1 skein, 2-ply, 121 yards, 12 wpi (= double knitting)
Spun at 15:1 and plied at 17:1

I had been having no end of problems with Ravelry lately. It caused my computer to run out of resources very quickly and slowed everything else down considerably. I was also unable to link to old blog posts. Then Mr. MmmYarn suggested I try another browser. So, fellow Ravelers, if you, too, are using Internet Explorer 7 on a Windows XP computer that’s 4 to 5 years old, I recommend you try Ravelry in Firefox. What a world of difference!

In knitting news, Mr. MmmYarn’s socks are finished but not photographed so you’ll need to wait to see those. Perhaps I can get him to foot model up on the roof tomorrow after work. I am also working on a second hat for the family member who needs some hats. And Lily of the Valley (remember her?) sits in a crumpled blue heap in a corner of my desk, looking at me reproachfully for having done everything but tuck in 2 tail ends and block her after all these months. My hope is that by mentioning it here I will be guilted into taking action this weekend. Wait and see.

With the big spinning project done, I can get on with some smaller ones. I have a kind of grab bag of 1 ounce each of various wools and picked out English Wensleydale Longwool top the other night.

The fiber looked like this:

I spun it up into a pretty fine singles. This wool has a long staple length (I had to put my hands really far apart to split the bundle into two sections) and was easy to spin finely once my hands figured out the staple length. It felt course; I wouldn’t recommend it for next-to-the-skin wear. The wool is prettily shiny, though, and reminds me of mohair only it’s less, well, hairy.

Fiber: English Wensleydale Longwool
Color: natural/undyed
Supplier: friend of a friend
Quantity: 1 ounce
Finished yarn: 1 skein, 2-ply, 89.8 yards, 18-19 wpi (= fingering)
Spun and plied at 15:1

I spun 3/4 of the fiber in one evening and the rest plus plying the next evening. What a welcome break after the 8 ounces of 4-ply! It went so fast. However, I wasn’t so even with this stuff as I have a lot of singles left on one bobbin. Or perhaps I was even, but the bundle of top wasn’t evenly distributed when I split it using my highly scientific method of finding the middle of a bunch of roving and pulling it into two pieces at that point. We bought a small kitchen scale over the weekend so I will weigh the next fiber I split.

I picked up the green fuzzy sweater again, the one I started months ago. The sleeves are great, the waist shaping is in the right place, and the armholes are… too low. Since I picked a top-down construction, this means I need to unravel my sleeves and the body back to past where I began the armholes and calculate again. You see where this is going, don’t you? This sweater will end up abandoned like the others that only need a bit of work, in favor of some tempting alpaca that wants to be a scarf or more colorful sock yarn. Sigh.

The 4-ply yarn is done at last. I started it toward the end of October and plowed through this past week to finish it. You saw the preview of my one big bobbin of 4-ply the other day:

I know it doesn’t look like much, just one bobbin, but that really is a BIG bobbin. Next to the regular bobbin it is enormous. It holds the contents of 4 normal bobbins:

This was a long process. Spinning went on hiatus for a while during the colder months because it was really too cold to spin in the apartment. I couldn’t keep my hands warm enough, plus it’s hard to wrap up in a blanket up to the shoulders when you’re at the wheel.

I ended up with 421 yards. Lest you think that doesn’t sound like much for a 6-month span of spinning, remember it’s 4 plies. That’s 4 x 421 yards = 1684 yards, enough to cover the length of 16.84 football fields. There are also two smaller hanks, detailed below.

I am very pleased with how this yarn turned out:

Fiber: 70% merino wool, 30% Tussah silk
Colorway: Red
Supplier: Carolina Homespun
Quantity: 8 ounces
Finished yarn: 1 skein, 4-ply, 421 yards, 10.5 wpi (= worsted weight)
Spun at 15:1 and plied at 3:1

Penny included for scale:

Despite the long periods of time between bouts of spinning, the plies were relatively consistent. I held the 4 strands separately between the fingers on my left hand while plying. The one traveling between my thumb and forefinger was a little looser and thicker than the other three. I didn’t mark my bobbins so I don’t know if this was the first one, when I was still figuring out what I wanted to make, or my last one, when I was sick of the project and wanting it to end. However, having inconsistencies spread over 4 plies made for a more consistent yarn than when spread over 2 plies. You’re less likely to have two too-thick (or too-thin) bits line up with each other.

Plying was easy. Call me crazy, but it seemed I needed to treadle much, much less to twist the 4 singles around each other than I do when I ply 2 singles. Treadling speed when I went from 4 bobbins down to 3, then down to 2, was markedly different. I had to treadle much faster once I got down to 2 plies. Perhaps this is a spinning phenomenon I’m unaware of?

The bit of inconsistency between the 4 bobbins showed when I was finishing plying. After one bobbin ran out, I spun the remaining 3 bobbins as 3-ply and when another ran out, 2-ply. I have 33 yards of 3-ply at 15 wpi (= sport weight) and 25 yards of 2-ply at 18 wpi (= also sport weight):

Apparently I don’t have a photo of this as fiber. It had great streaks of red and dark blue, lots of silvery grey, and big slubs of white silk that I left in as I spun. You can see the color streaks here and there in the finished yarn although it’s mostly well-blended.

By my reckoning, this project puts me in the ranks of intermediate spinners. I set out to make a 4-ply worsted weight and got it. When I was a beginner, I made lumpy, bumpy yarn with lots of character but no goal; I took what I got. I say an advanced spinner can make what she wants, be it smooth and thin or thick and slubby. I’m not at that point yet where I can make a character-filled yarn with purpose, so I consider myself intermediate.

In organizing things for Ravelry, I found the first stuff I ever spun, back in September 2000. It’s really coarse and the little bit of fiber I have left is nearly impossible to draft. I’m surprised I was able to spin it at all and even more surprised the instructor and shop owner sold it to me as perfect-for-a-beginner supplies. But here it is, my first yarn. It’s a lumpy 2-ply spun on a Louet drop spindle and wound between thumb and elbow (no niddy-noddy yet):

The insructor had small quantities of various types of fiber to play with, so I picked out two colors of mohair and spun up a bit of that, too:

Ah, the memories.

After I started the black fuzzy scarf the other day I got worried I might run out of yarn during the commute and started a new project two days into it so I’d have a second traveling project to fall back on. Do you know that feeling? It turns out I needn’t have worried. The hat is already done:  

Pattern: own
Yarn: 3/4 skein Mission Falls 1824 Wool, 100% merino superwash, color LJ-5 (dark green) and a little bit of Wolle Roedel Universal Superwash 2-Color, 100% superwash merino wool, color 2284
Needles: size 4
Size: Toddler
Started May 2, 2008 and finished May 4, 2008

This quick little knit used up an odd skein of green yarn I had in the basket. This is the first time I have used 1824 Wool. It felt great in my hands. It’s soft and squashy and I can see myself using it again to make a toddler sweater or two.

A few nights ago I spun the last of the 4 singles needed for my 4-ply yarn and last night I sucked it up and plied it all. It was not a good night for plying. I came home grouchy after fighting all day with inanimate objects that refuse to do my bidding (I work in I.T.), then circling around the neighborhood for more than 20 minutes to find a parking spot (street sweepers on Thursday morning mean you can’t park on that side of the street Wednesday night). However, watching those 4 singles turn into one cohesive yarn was a beautiful sight, both relaxing and amazing.

Plying took 2.75 hours. I haven’t measured yet but gauging by the crick in my neck and cramp in my left hand, I’d say I have over 250 yards. Luckily I have two tensioned kates that can each hold 3 bobbins. Here is my high-tech two-kate setup for plying 4 strands:

Notice the dining chair legs are exactly the right width to hold the Lendrum kate and the Lendrum kate does a great job holding the other one.  My kates limit me to 6 singles but considering I have only 4 gaps between fingers on my left hand (I run each singles through its own gap to prevent tangles) I don’t see myself attempting a 6-ply anytime soon. More details on this project, including glamor shot and final yardage, to follow.

How about a preview?