Travel knitting

So, tomorrow we go haring off to the Continent for ten days, and I'm trying to figure out what to take to knit. The plane trip isn't all that long, but I'll be in a car touring Bavaria and Austria for a while, so I need some small projects to work on.

Thankfully, I've got a couple of design ideas that need some work, so I'm packing up bits of yarn and lots of different needle sizes, a bunch of Xeroxed pages from Barbara Walker Vol I and II, and I'm hoping for the best. Here's what's on the docket:

A new sock pattern, (maybe) for Sock Madness 2011.

Some swatching for the 4! Ounce! Challenge!.

My Aran Necklace Tank (wait, that's not my design...). This baby is now joined for the body, and it's just mindless knitting in the round from now until I run out of yarn. So I'm packing the last of the splittier-then-all-get-out Jo Sharp Soho DK and hoping for the best.

I'm afraid blogging will be spotty for the next little while - I've got one post in reserve that I'll schedule for next week, but other then that, things will be quiet. And since the Wollmeise shop is closed when we'll be in Munich, I don't even have the lure of serious yarn pr0n to tease you with. And no one is sorrier then me, believe me...

23 Days in July (aka Tour de Fleece yarns 4-6 and a wrap up)

So, the last week or so of the Tour de Fleece I spent with a pound of Falklands top, half dyed in the colorway Five Plum Pie, and half in Grouch.

Grouch was the June 2010 Fiber Club offering, while Five Plum Pie came from May 2009. I decided to spin these two together when I browsed through my Hello Yarn stash and discovered that not only were they the same fiber, but they were very similar colorways. Five Plum Pie was mostly purples, with some greeny-yellow and brown accents, while Grouch was mostly greens and yellows, with a bit of purple.

I've been thinking of spinning up some yarn to knit a striped vest for a while now, using some lovely dark brown alpaca I've had sitting around for a long while. So I decided to do three different yarns: each colorway plied on itself, and one yarn that was one ply of each.

I prepped the fiber by splitting each 4 oz bump into five or six long strips and then mixing them together so they got spun in a random order.

Grouch got spun up first. I wasn't all that excited by the colors in the top, but as I spun up the singles, I got more excited about it. Yellow and greeny browns aren't really my thing, but these colors were amazing - mustard, bark brown, pea soup green, and dark plum.

I was aiming for a DK weight 2-ply, so I spun the singles a bit thicker then my default. Next up was Five Plum Pie.

This really could have been called Iris instead - beautiful blues and purples, with some bright green and beautiful dusty brown...gorgeous!

Then it was time to ply - first up was the mixture, Grouchy Pie.

After a warm soak, I ended up with 160 yds/3.4 oz of ~12 wpi yarn - right in the DK range. Then I did a bobbin of Grouch plied to itself:

Swoon...I ended up with 344 yds/6.6 oz of Grouch, and then did the rest of the Five Plum Pie plied together.

292 yds/6.3 oz. I was planning on alternating stripes of plain alpaca with each of the three colorways, but I'm not sure there will be enough variation between the Grouchy Pie and the other two to show up. So I may just use the 5PP/Grouch skeins for the vest, and save the combo for something else. But this is just another reason why this club is so good for me - I would never have picked out the Grouch on my own, and I think it's my favorite of the three yarns.

My 23 Days in July* ended up being pretty darned productive on the spinning front. Three different fibers, one of which (Wensleydale) I'd never spun before. Laceweight singles, matching skeins of 3-ply, color progression 2-ply and a colorway mixing experiment.

I ended up with 2420 yds of new yarn, 39.4 ounces spun, and a whole new level of inspiration for my spinning. This challenge was just what I needed to get my mojo back after the endless purple cabled yarn, and I had an absolute blast seeing what everyone else came up with. I even won a prize! I can see getting a bunch more yarn done before it gets cold, and then I'll have a wonderful fall and winter knitting with handspun!

*with apologies to John Wilcoxson

FF: Yarn #3

I'd like to introduce you to my five hour yarn:

Fiber: HYFC BFL in "Norway", previously seen on the blog in these mittens.
Spun/plied: 9.25:1/6:1, spun long draw from the fold.
Stats: 183 yds/4.4 oz (665 ypp) of lovely worsted-to-bulky squishtastic yarn

I was inspired by a number of the yarns in the HYFC Tour de Fleece team thread, and decided to do a 2-ply color progression with this fiber. I started by pulling the component color stretches apart, and ended up with six groups.

There was the red group, the orange group, royal blue, turquoise, light greyish blue and grey. I took each batch of fiber, split each chunk in half lengthwise, and made sure the two piles weighed the same (+/- 1 gr). Then I laid out the pieces for each group in the order I wanted to spin and started in on the first bobbin. After spinning the first little baggie of singles, I switched bobbins and spun up the same color group on the second bobbin.

I started with the grey, then went to light blue, turquoise, royal blue, red and finished up with the orange. One hour of Tour highlights one evening, and one viewing of Shrek 3 the next day, and the singles were all spun. I'd forgotten how much faster long draw is! It was also a relief to spin something thicker then the 60+ wpi singles I'd been doing for the previous two yarns...then it was time to ply. First the orange and red sections,

then the royal blue (my favorite!),

then the turquoise and finally the grey.

Plying took all of an hour. My obsessive fiber weighing paid off - most of the colors matched up really, really well, with a bit of bleed over to blend the transitions. I ended up with a few yards of singles left on one of the bobbins, but I just stopped there. No need to get silly about using it all, right?

A nice warm soak in Soak, and that's all she wrote! I was going to use this for hats for the girls, but now I'm leaning towards a nice scarf, maybe on the bias so the stripes slant? Or maybe worked lengthwise so there are really long skinny stripes? Decisions, decisions...

(yum)

Fiber Friday: Yarn #2

TdF yarn #2: Hello Yarn Fiber club BFL in "Insect Wings"
Spun/plied at 12:1, short forward draw (worsted), 3 ply.
Stats: 2 big skeins of 3-ply, at 255 and 254 yds respectively (score!), and one mini-skein of 2-ply from leftovers, about 30 yds. 9.8 oz of fiber total.

So with this fiber, I wanted to spin two matching skeins of 3-ply for socks. I split the 10 oz of fiber I had (double dose FTW!) into three equal weight piles. For the first ply, I split the entire length of top in half and spun each half on to separate bobbins.

The second bump I split in fourths, and spun two strips on to each of two bobbins (in the middle).

The final bump got split into eigths and spun 4 pieces on to each bobbin (bobbins 1 and 1' on top row, bobbins 2 and 2' in middle, bobbins 3 and 3' on bottom row).

And then there was the plying...

I loved the colors in the original fiber, but as I was plying, I was a bit concerned. It looked really...orange. And orange is not exactly one of my most favoritist colors. However, after a soak in warm water and a bit of time on the back porch drying,

I fell in love.

Perfect autumn colors for some gorgeous socks. Sometime in the future. Maybe that should be my Vuelta project?

I've been having fun making collages of my spinning pictures and pictures of the girls. Here's one with the berries I mentioned last week:

And it includes a wee teaser for next week's finished yarn!

Fiber Friday: Yarn #1

Well, clearly the Tour de Fleece coupled with summer vacation is enough to completely wipe out any motivation I have for blogging. Sorry about that! But rest assured that I have a) enough new handspun yarn to last for at least three weeks of Fibery Fridays, with more to come, b) some knitting progress and c) lots and lots of berries.

The first of my finished TdF yarns.
Fiber: Wensleydale, dyed by Adrian in the Mollusc colorway, a fiber club offering from August or September of 2007
Spun: I was going for laceweight singles, so I used the regular flyer for my Lendrum at 7.5:1.
Stats: two skeins, coming in at 467 yds/4.7 oz and 465 yds/4.1 oz - 1590 and 1815 ypp respectively. ANywhere from 35-50 wpi.

This top was an extra batch I ordered when I received my original fiber club offering, and I had visions of spinning it all up for a BSJ for some lucky baby. However, I'd never spun a longwool before, so it sat in the stash for a long time. I decided that part of my challenge was going to be spinning up the earliest fibers from my stash, and this is definitely one of those. This time around though, the colors spoke to me more for a big lacy shawl, so laceweight singles were on the menu.

The fiber was actually really easy to spin, once I stopped being scared of it. The top was much narrower then I've seen before with other wools (merino, shetland, etc), and needed a bit of predrafting after it's long hibernation, but after that it spun easily. I did notice my hands were a lot farther apart then they are for shorter fibers, but it wasn't too hard to adapt to the staple length.

I finished the skeins with a fulling bath. I was really worried that I'd added to much twist because the yarn before finishing was waaaaaaay overtwisted. However, three times through a hot/cold bath tamed that, and they ended up balanced. Yippee! The finished yarn has an absolutely gorgeous halo, and is super soft. The colors blended in the singles in such a way so that there's really nice transitions between the colors. I can't wait to knit this up, but I need to find a good 950 yd shawl pattern. Anyone have any suggestions?

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Now for knitting (and keeping with the color theme): I've been working a bit on my Aran Necklace Camisole in the past couple of days as my spinning mojo has gotten a bit burnt out.

It's coming along, and I'm now working on the front gussets, and should be getting the front done over the weekend. The yarn (Jo Sharp Soho DK) is still pissing the crap out of me - umpteen-plied splitty cotton yarn is not my friend - and I'm pretty sure I'm going to run out before the top is really finished, but I like the color, and I'm hoping it will be long enough not to show off my oh-so-lovely mom midriff. Stay tuned.