Distraction by recycling

Despite big horse pills and a wrist brace, knitting is not really on my agenda at the moment. However, I have been un-knitting at a furious rate. Behold:

This is a sweater I knit when we lived in Tucson/Houston, back around 2002, when I really got back into knitting in a obsessive-compulsive serious way. It was the first sweater I'd made for myself in a long time.

I had great fun knitting it, with all those cables, but there were some issues. Number 1: the drop shoulder look is not a good one for anyone with shoulders wider then about 18 inches.

Number 2: nary a whiff of shaping in sight. Nada. Which was great when I was pregnant, but now that I'm past that stage of life, it is not such a flattering look.

Number 3: a finished chest measurement that resulted in about 5 inches of positive ease. I've learned a lot about what type of sweaters look good on me, and it's simplest to say that zero or negative ease is definitely my friend.

Finally number 4: this was clearly before my discovery of the greatest finishing technique ever, aka mattress stitch. Oy...

So, I took some scissors, and after a little while I had this.

And then I took the spinning wheel and ended up with this,

and this.

So now I have a large pile of 75% acrylic/25% wool (that will actually felt!), and no definite plans for it. Some of it will probably become a baby sweater or twelve. And maybe Angostura for me. Not that I can knit at the moment. Not that I'm bitter about that. In the meantime, I can think of two more sweaters hiding in the warddrobe upstairs that could use a trip to the frog pond. Ahhhh, recycling!

Fiber Saturday: Presents!

The girls and I left the house this morning to go to the farmer's market, and there was a wee package waiting on the doorstep. When we got back, I examined it more closely.

Hmmmm....

What do we have here?

Stitches South? Jealous (eleventy million).

Is it? Could it be?

Oooooooo!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...


Thank you so much J (has this been a week of my referring to you, hasn't it?). I need to scour all the dead skin off my hands before I start in on these, but they are gorgeous and the perfect colors and I can't wait to spin them up. Mwah!

Spun up colourways: Coomasssie Blue

In the comments on my last post that showed one of the colorways spun up, Gigi commented that she has a hard time visualizing how colors will blend, both in the yarn and in the final finished object. So for today, I've got another example of how one of my colorways spins up (with a bonus shot of an FO!) - this time it's one of the semisolid series, Coomassie Blue.

Coomassie Blue on Targhee

Blue is absolutely my favorite color, and I love this combination of tones and shades - light blue, some spots of navy, a dash of turquoise every so often - so I was really looking forward to spinning this up. Targhee is a really sproingy, bouncy fiber, so I spun this up as a 2-ply to use for a scarf for a friend. 

Here's the 2-py finished yarn. Doesn't look like much, does it? The dark and light bits of the dyed top look like they've mostly mixed themselves all up together. Not terribly promising...but take a look at how the yarn looks in the finished scarf.

I used the 2-ply as the warp in this scarf that I wove on a rigid heddle loom. You can see how the yarn that looked like it would work up as a mostly solid fabric has really beautiful, subtle stripes across the width of the scarf.

Here's a close up of the scarf where you can really see the stripes fading in to one another. This is one of my favorite characteristics of semisolid colorways - from a distance this will read as solid blue, but come close and you can start to distinguish the different shadings of color.

I hope everyone has a great weekend, and happy spinning!

Rachel

A letter of apology

Dear JoAnna,

I do apologize if my previous post caused you a bit of alarm. I can hereby categorically state that I will always be a Knitter. However,

I might also now be a crochet-er too...(eep!). But I have a few things to say in my defense.

First: I had this pile of Tahki Cotton Classic left over from a baby sweater I knit for a friend when we were in Houston. Said baby is now 8, and I made it for him when he was about a year and a half old, so they've been aging in deep stash for quite a while now.

So I had lots of pretty colors, but not enough to really do anything with. So I put them in a bag together, thinking maybe I would crochet at some point, and I forgot about them. When this silly carpal tunnel thing came up, the bag had somehow migrated to the upper layers of stash, and I found it again. I can only plead absolute desperation as the excuse for my sitting down and actually pulling out a hook.

Second: I have tried to crochet before, on multiple occasions, and failed every, single time.

Apparently, that hurdle has been cleared*. And you know what did the trick this time? I'm crocheting left handed.

OK, to be fair, I am left handed, so it should not be a huge surprise that I can crochet left handed. But besides writing, I do most things right handed - I knit right handed, I draft (in spinning) with my right hand, I do most things in the lab with my right hand. This clearly explains why I also have carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand, so the left hand had to step up.

Et voila!

Before you get worried that this means I'm going to be going on and on at great length about hooking in the near future, rest assured that there is still knitting - I even tried a few stitches on the Hemp Monster today, and didn't feel like I needed to amputate my hands. This is a good sign. But for the moment, it's just me, my mercerized cotton, and a little metal hook.

Forgive me, please?

Love and kisses,
Porpoise

PS - Congratulations on the new wheel!
PPS - And on finishing ConLaw!
PPS - And on your awesome new summer sweater! I'm afraid I don't have any other suggestions on the size problem though...and I'm jealous that it's probably warm enough where you are that you can actually wear it.
PPPS - I think I may have found out where tapestry needles go when they disappear right out from underneath your fingertips. They migrate to the deepest, darkest, hidden corners of the stash. See?

I think those two little f*&^ers have been missing since 2005. They've been hanging out in the crochet stash. Because we all know she's never going to do that...be warned my little pointy darlings: there is nowhere left to hide!

* I must apologize in advance if you notice an increase in bad sports metaphors over the next few months. The 2012 Olympic Games are becoming somewhat omnipresent in these here parts...

Shipping changes

As of today, Royal Mail postage went up quite a bit for packages. How does this affect you? In one of two ways:

1. for UK residents, nothing will change (for the moment). I will continue to have free shipping to UK addresses for as long as possible - I'd like to be able to promise it forever (or at least as long as I'm in the UK), but that's not feasible. If anything changes, and I have to start charging UK shipping, I will let you know in advance.
2. for International customers: the postage price (to me) for shipping one bump of fiber has gone up to £3.86/£3.90 for Europe/Rest of World. I'm sorry, but that's not an increase that I can cover, so international shipping charges will increase to £3.90 for non-UK shipments. However, there is some good news.

The good news is that the increased shipping price will not go in to effect until 1 June 2012. That gives you one entire month to buy all you want at the old shipping price (£2.50) - my loss is your gain.

Enjoy!