The light dawns

This morning I woke up waaaaay earlier then I wanted to (sidebar: why is it that I have to pull my lovely daughters out of bed at 7:20 every school morning, kicking and screaming, but on the weekends they pop out of bed of their own accord before 7:00 AM? WHY? Who have I pissed off in the godly pantheon to make this my reality? I'm really sorry, whatever I did!), and stumbled downstairs for coffee only to discover something really, really exciting.

Those right there? Real, honest-to-goodness, shadows through the skylight in the kitchen from the cherry tree in our back garden. Glory hallelujah!

Now, for many of you, shadows may not be such a big deal. But believe me, for those of us in southeastern England, it has been a loooooong time since we've seen shadows. At least shadows due to sunshine rather then lights after dark. In fact, I think the last time we had an entire day with shadows was the day I decided to wash all the handknits because spring had arrived. Hah bloody hah, weather gods.

Anyhow, the sun is out - finally - and two weeks of no experiments (the upside to having all my cells get contaminated and die - yay!) plus a daily 1000 mg of NSAIDs and a wrist splint means that my wrist has massively improved. So much so, that I finished off these lovelies last night.

Pattern: Fallberry Mitts, by the incomparable Anne Hanson of knitspot.com, published in Knitty Winter 2011.
Yarn: madeleinetosh tosh DK in "Sugarplum", less then one skein (225 yds/skein). This is the first project I've ever done in madtosh and OMG now I understand the rabid fangirls. This yarn is simply gorgeous to work with - nice twist, bouncy sproingy feel, and the colors are glorious. I may or may not be spending ludicrous amounts of time trying to decide how to justify a sweater's worth of this stuff. It is lovely.
Needles: US 2/2.75 mm bamboo double points
Start/finish: 11 April 2012 - 12 May 2012 (did the first mitt in a couple of days though, so they would have been done in a week)
Comments/mods: Disclaimer - I love Anne Hanson's patterns, both in terms of the objects she designs and the way she lays things out. This pattern was no exception - clear, concise, gorgeous pictures, the works.  I like the lack of ribbing at cuff and hand, and I also really like the stockinette thumb gussets coming out of the deeply textured hand. It's a gorgeous design.

Mods? Are you kidding? I wouldn't dare on one of Anne's patterns! They are perfect as they are.

So, the scoreboard now reads:

Weeks of more-or-less-continuous rain/grey skies: 6
Full days of sun in that period: maybe 3
Finished fingerless mitts: also 3
Likelyhood I will need fingerless mitts in the next few months: hopefully miniscule, but it's Britain so summer is really just a state of mind.
Degree of difficulty in restraining myself from knitting everything in sight and totally wrecking my wrist again: 10.0 out of 10.0

That's it - I'm off to take the children and the dog for a walk in the sun. See y'all later!

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...