Travelling

Tomorrow we hop on a plane and head westward for a couple of weeks, so today I have been dealing with the age-old question of which projects to bring. This is a serious consideration - you want to bring a good number and variety of projects so that you don't get bored, but also don't run out of things to do. Running out of knitting might resort to a panic-driven yarn buying spree the likes of which Himself could not forgive! So, I've spent some time thinking about what to bring with me. And here's the pile:

Not actually all the bad, given the circumstances. There's the self-designed sweater that needs only a sleeve to be finished (and the pattern needs to go out to testers by Friday, but that's a different problem). This is the key project for tomorrow's7.5 hr flight, and I'm hoping to land in Boston with a mostly finished sleeve.

There's the August socks, which are lagging woefully behind. I was making good progress, but had to rip everything out and start on smaller needles to get something that might vaguely fit my foot. However, that means they're now being knit on US 0/2.0 mm needles. Metal needles. I know they're technically allowed, but given that my last trip with metal pointy sticks resulted in my being held up at security for a while, I think these will be going in the hold instead.

Third up is my guilty project: the Dahlia Cardigan from the latest issue of Interweave Knits. I couldn't help casting on this weekend, but I've finished the interesting bit (the lace panel on the back). I predict that this one is going to languish now that I've hit the stockinette stage, but maybe it will be good car knitting. This one is also on metal needles, so it will get packed in the checked bags. Hopefully TSA is a bit more understanding/less paranoid about metal needles then the Brits, so I can work on it on the way home.

Lastly, I've packed a spinning project: My oldest remaining Hello Yarn Fiber Club stash, from June 2009. This is Shetland in the colorway "Sour Fig". And my trusty Golding spindle. I haven't tried a spindling project on a trip before, and I'm looking forward to it. I think I'm going to try a 6 strand cable with this fiber - three 2-ply yarns plied together. Means I need to split up the fiber by weight before we leave though. Another item for this evening's list.

I'm looking forward to some quality family time, both with the girls and Himself, as well as with various (grand)parents, brothers/sisters (aunts/uncles) and friends. Happy August!

Fiber Friday: more singles

I mentioned a while back that I was having some issues in the day job. Those issues are not yet resolved, sadly, mostly due to the crapshoot that is the research funding roulette wheel. I've been thinking very seriously about starting some kind of fibery business venture. With that in mind, I've been playing around with different types of handspun yarn, trying to get an idea of how much time it takes me to spin up X number of yards. The first ventures have centered around singles yarns.

This is the skein of Corriedale singles I spun up during the Tour de Fleece. 1.5 hours, 227 yds. Not too bad for 90 minutes work, but my hands and wrists were pretty tired by the end of it. So I wanted to try again with a different fiber, just to see how it went.

Fiber: Hello Yarn Merino in "Harmonia"
Spun at 8.5:1, 282 yds.

The ratio was a bit high for the final yarn - I wanted to add a bit more twist then I did with the Corriedale, given the shorter staple length of the merino, but the thin bits are a bit overtwisted. It will probably come out fine in the knitting, but we'll see. I also fulled the yarn when I finished it - three shifts between hot and cold water baths until the single started sticking together. The finished yarn is nice and fluffy where it's not overtwisted.

This skein took me 2 hours to do, but my right wrist and hand were still a bit unhappy. I didn't do any predrafting with the fiber, just stripped it into sections (6 I think). I think that next time I'll do a bit more predrafting just to loosen the fiber up a bit more and make it a bit easier to spin into a single. I also might try to keep the single a bit more even next time and see if that helps the wrists.

If I were going to charge £10/hour for my labor, these skeins would end up at £30 and £35 respectively with the cost of the fiber, which works out to £0.13 and £0.12/yard. From my research, singles yarns are being priced at anywhere from £0.10-0.50/yard. That's quite a spread, with art yarns running on the higher end of that scale.What would you spend for handspun yarn? Would you rather get a full 4 oz or standardized skeins (i.e. 100 yard skeins)? Would you rather thick and thin singles, even singles or multiplied yarns? Please do leave a comment if you have any thoughts along these lines. Thanks!

A long neglected FO

So, there's a number of unblogged and neglected projects lying around. Sometime in the last few months I managed to finish up one of these unloved things and got it into wearable shape.

I did blog about this project a few times last summer...I started it on June 4th of last year and finished it on August 30. And then put it on and screamed in agony. Behold, the disaster that was the Aran Necklace Camisole:

Not so bad from the front, right? But look.

Ooops! For a summer sweater, that's a bit low in the armholes I'd say. So...the above pictures were actually taken in March of this year. It ended up being an easy fix when I finally got down to it. I started by just using some matching weight yarn and mattress stitching the armholes closed a few inches, but it looked terrible. Out came the yarn, in came a needle and thread. Ta da!

Not the best look up close, but it works in the wearing.

Sorry for the craptastic photo, but I'm on Day 5 of 10 of single parenthood - my photographer is gallivanting around northern China for the week, courtesy of his employer, so I'm stuck with the self-photo.

Pattern: Aran Necklace Camisole (Rav link) by Caroline Bautista
Yarn: Jo Sharp Soho Summer DK Cotton, 6 skeins (approximately 650 yds)
Needles: US 4/3.5 mm
Start/finish: 4 June - 30 August 2010, finally finished in March 2011
Comments/mods: loved knitting the neckline section with the cabley bits, even though I seem to have messed it up a bit so that it's off center. Picking up the stitches around the neckline and then knitting down in stockinette was, um, boring. And the yarn? Let's just say I'm glad that it is out of the stash and into a sweater that I can actually wear. Cotton and I do not get along well, particularly splitty harsh-to-knit-with cotton...

Note: this does not count for my August sweater, since the knitting was finished last year. But it will go in the FO win column for the year.

I swear to Bob I'm going to finish a sweater this month

Sadly, but totally unsuprisingly, I've fallen a bit behind in my quest to knit 11 sweaters this year. However, I have high hopes for the month of August!

That is the body and back, and the start of the front of a manly man sweater. That is going to be for...someone for whom I started a sweater before deciding (with some input from his spouse) that it wasn't quite his thing and I should probably give it to someone who would appreciate it fully. Like my spouse, who has been making goo goo eyes at the thing since I started it, but that's another story.

This yarn was rescued from my abandoned Hurrication vest from the fall of 2008. Intended recipient is a big fan of blue, so I overdyed the yarn with some Jacquard Acid dyes.

I've blogged before about my previous attempts to dye sweaterlots of yarn so as to avoid dye lot variability. As you can see from the above picture, it didn't work out so well this time! So I separated out the various shades of blue that I ended up with and re-dyed the seriously lighter ones. I'm knitting the sweater alternating every row or every two rows from two skeins of yarn, in hopes of minimizing any major color differences. It helps that even the darker/brighter skeins have some variability as well. I don't think you can see a difference...

I'm loving the way the stitch pattern looks. When blocked, it flattens out quite a bit, but still keeps that wavey feel. I'm hoping to finish this up in the next couple of weeks, and get the pattern out to testers by the end of this week. Look for this one to be available in early October, just in time for fall knitting!

The last of the Tour de Fleece yarns

A horrible picture of a nice yarn

Fiber: merino/alpaca/camel/silk from Krafty Koala
Spun/plied: 12:1
Stats: 278 yds/4.5 oz, about sport weight
Comments: I was drawn to two things about this fiber - the blend and the dark, gloomy colors. Maybe it was the fact that it was grey and rainy and cold during Knit Nation...in any event, I was excited to spin this up, and jumped right in during the Tour de Fleece.

I split the top in half across the length and then split each half into four strips - this seems to have become my standard fiber prep these days. I used to do a lot more spinning from the full width of top from one end going straight through to the other end, but I've been trying to mix up and blend the colors in a lot of the stuff I've been spinning recently, to move away from dramatic stripey-ness. It remains to be seen if that approach has been actually successful.

Back to the fiber: I had a tough time spinning this, largely due to the difference in staple length between the various fibers. The merino and alpaca and silk were all ok, but I kept ending up with little puffs of short, fuzzy, presumably camel fibers that wouldn't stay integrated in the top. The silk was also pretty obvious in the blend and not terribly well mixed in. To be perfectly honest, I should have expected this problem ahead of time, just given the composition of the top, but I don't think I'll try a similar combination again.

I was hoping to end up with enough yardage for a Bitterroot shawl, but fell well short. The yarn is lovely and drapey and has gorgeous sheen, so maybe this should be my yarn for a little shawlette design. I can do Bitterroot with last year's TdF laceweight instead.