Bollocks, I did it again

The Pros: I only have to make one costume (Snow White), because Boo is vacillating back and forth between going as Ariel or Cinderella, both of which we already have.

The Cons: it's Friday, costume needs to be done by teatime tomorrow when we go to M and T's house to carve pumpkins, eat sugar, and imbibe copious amounts of adult beverages (with their parents that is, not the girls), and I am absolutely shattered by several days of ~6 hrs sleep, getting up before dawn* and getting everyone back on to the whole school/work continuum. This ought to be an interesting evening night.

I have been doing a wee bit of spinning as well - onto the second bobbin of merino/silk for a Christmas present, but my stellar walking skills*** have made the wheel a less appealing tool. However, I need to get this yarn done ASAP (like, by the end of next week), so I may have to SIUC**** and treadle through the pain. Ahhhh...the sacrifices I make for my family and my wool!

* which, to be fair, is pretty late** these days. But it still sucks to have to get out of bed when it's dark.
** 7:48 am this morning. Crap. We're practically leaving the house before dawn! WTF is up with that?
*** I turned my ankle walking down a perfectly reasonable sidewalk two weeks ago today, and it's still swollen and bugging me*****. Ehem.
**** Suck it up, cupcake. Or buttercup, if you prefer.
***** Speaking of which, anyone irritated by excessive footnoting yet?

Southwark Collection, design #2

The Brits have a certain dry sense of humor when it comes to phallic symbols, which has resulted in the above building being nicknamed The Gherkin. It even has it's own Wikipedia entry. The Gherkin is visible from many parts of London, but when I walk up Borough High Street coming back from the coffee shop, I can see the tip peaking up into the sky. Pun intended.

I love the swirling lines going up around the building, and have been trying to wrap my head around how to recreate them in some mittens. First up was the yarn:

I bought this skein of StR lightweight waaaaay back in my first Blue Moon Fiber Arts experience (actually, my only BMFA purchase so far, since I ain't paying to ship to the UK, thankyouverymuch). It's been marinating in the stash, waiting for the perfect project to come along. And for whatever reason, my inner magpie decided that it needed to become some twisted stitch mittens.

I was having a bit of a brain cramp as to how to work the decreases so as to maintain the lines of the twisted stitches, but get a bit of the change in the diamond shape as it goes up. I think I came up with something as I was on the verge of going to sleep a few nights ago, but it remains to be seen whether or not my dreamy solution is a real life, practical solution. Stay tuned.

The Southwark Collection, part 1

I've been alluding to this collection of designs that I'm working on behind the scenes, and I decided that since I'm going to self-publish them, there's no premium on secrecy. So the next few posts will talk a bit about the inspiration behind each of the designs, and give you a sneak peek. I'm hoping to get all three patterns released by mid-November.

I work near London Bridge, in a part of town known as Southwark. Each of the three pieces in the collection is inspired by an architectural feature that I see routinely around work: Tower Bridge, the Gherkin and the Shard.

The first design I'm going to talk about is actually the second one I knit, and is inspired by a building that isn't even finished yet. The Shard of Glass is currently being built right next to London Bridge Rail Station, and I can see it going up every day from the platform where I catch my train. Right now it looks like this:

But in the not too distant future, it's going to look like this. To say that this building is going to be a bit incongruous in its current surroundings would be misleading - there is nothing nearby that looks even remotely like this in the vicinity! Ah, progress...

Given that the building isn't even done yet, the Shard hat bears a resemblance to the ultimate (theoretical) finished project, but isn't a direct representation. I knit the first version in Cascade 220 heathers.

It's a pretty good size, about 21 inches around unstretched, but I charted the whole thing. And I wasn't so thrilled at the prospect of doing a new chart for each size. And I wanted multiple sizes. So I decided that the easiest way to get different sizes would be to knit the same chart at varying gauges.

Now I'm working on the DK version, with plans for sport weight and fingering weight. I'm using Drops Extra Fine Merino for the DK hat, and it is amazing yarn - soft, bouncy and superwash. What's not to love? I haven't completely bought in to an Aran weight version, but that might happen too. It's an easy knit/purl pattern, and would be equally suitable for men, women or kids - I think a lot of people in my world are getting hats for Christmas!

Going gray

Picasso had his Blue Period, and apparently I'm in a Gray Period. To whit: in the last week, I have purchased this,

and started this.

I finally started knitting Design #3 that's been percolating in this,

and started knitting a DK weight protoype of Design #2 in this.

Hmmm...one might be forgiven for thinking that the recent rash of Absolutely. Spectacularly. Sunny (but cold!). Weather. is inspiring me towards typical London autumnal shades in an attempt to fool the weather gods in to keeping the clouds away for a bit longer.

Spinning Experiments

For my birthday, I signed up for a new Fiber Club. Or should I say, Fibre Club, given that the packages are posted from my current fair city. In contrast to the Hello Yarn fiber club, which feeds my ever growing need for a fix of gorgeous handdyed wooliness, this one comes with assignments. And directions. And gorgeous handdyed wooliness. Win-win-win. It's a bit like online spinning school, I guess, but without any deadlines.

In any event, the first installment of Spintelligence was a pile of the softest BFL I've ever felt, and the instructions to spin a bunch of small samples of singles yarn, varying the ratios. The idea was to demonstrate how just changing the ratio on the wheel can affect your singles/yarn.

Let me back up, just in case anyone reading isn't familiar with the mechanics of spinning wheels. There are a number of different types of "drives" for spinning wheels - aka, different mechanisms to introduce twist into the fiber and then wind the resulting yarn on to the bobbin. But, no matter what sort of drive system you have, there are different ratios for adding twist, which alter how much twist enters the fiber per treadle stroke. The "ratio" refers to the number of times the flyer or bobbin moves (introducing twist) per single rotation of the drive wheel. On my wheel (which is a single-drive, Scotch tension system), the ratios are changed by shifting the drive band from one sized whorl to another.

You can see in the above picture that the drive band is going around the smallest whorl on this particular flyer assembly - that gives a higher ratio then the larger whorls.

So, armed with the BFL and two flyers with six ratios between them, I set off to do my Spinning Homework.

I set the brake tension and spun all the samples at that tension, with a short forward draw without smoothing, and just changed the ratio, going from 6:1 at the top of the picture to 17:1 at the bottom. The obvoius result of this was as follows: higher ratios mean thinner singles with the same drafting and tension. Eureka!

Ok, maybe not Eureka!, since this is what was supposed to happen. The only misstep was that the 9.25:1 single had a wpi of 32, while the 12:1 single had a wpi of 28. However, that could easily be due to operated error in measuring wpi. It could also be due to the fact that the 9.25:1 ratio is the smallest on my regular flyer, while the 12:1 is the largest on my high speed flyer, so changing the flyers may have altered the tension a bit.

As the ratios went up (and more twist was added per treadle), it became really hard to draft quickly enough to keep the single from getting overtwisted. The sample on the left is 7.5:1, middle is 12:1 and right is 17:1. You can see that, particularly in the 17:1 sample, there's a bit of overtwist that wasn't taken care of in the finishing process.

The second part of the assignment was to pick one of the yarns and spin up a bunch of it to knit a swatch. I picked the 7.5:1 sample as my favorite, and spun up about 8 grams of fiber into an unknown number of yards. I picked a US 3/3.25 mm needle for my swatch, by virtue of doubling over my spun yarn and seeing which hole it went through on my needle gauge.

I knit a bit in stockinette, with a garter border, then did a couple of cables, and then a bit of lace. I was pleasantly surprised at how little bias there was in the stockinette section - singles yarn is inherently unbalanced, since it's not plied, and you can end up with biased fabric in stockinette. For that reason, singles are usually best knit up in stitch patterns that combine knit and purl, or in lace.

The cables were, unsurprisingly, pretty flat and mushy, and the garter stitch wasn't too good. The lace looked pretty good, although I think I would go up a needle size to make it a bit more fluid - this needle size made for a slightly too stiff lace fabric.

The second installment of the club arrived Saturday morning, and I'm itching to get the currently-being-spun bobbin off the wheel so I can get to work on it. The assignment this time is another singles yarn, but this time in some gorgeous handdyed alpaca/merino from The Thylacine.