Between extremes

My "relaxation knitting"* these days is vacillating between opposite ends of the spectrum. First up is the fiddley-beyond-belief category:

A pair of socks I actually started almost a year ago. I pulled them out of the Works in Progress Bin at the beginning of this month, thought "hunh...", ripped them out completely (I had a toe and about 2 inches of instep done) and started over again. The worst part was trying to start entrelac on US 0/2.0 mm needles with a provisional cast on and splitty yarn. Fun!

Then there's the mindless end of things...


That is the Garter Yoke Cardi by Melissa LeBarre, which I have wanted to do every since I saw Caro's version (Rav link). The yarn is the whack-load of Hello Yarn Romney in Timber that I spun up during the TdF last (hooray for casting on one of my handspun sweater lots!!!), and I am operating under the deluded hope that I can finish it before the Tour de Fleece starts. On Saturday.

Oh well. At least there's always (always!) coffee.


* The "work knitting" being my hat project: 2 of 7 prototypes done, one almost totally tested and one about to go to testers. I am on track**. Woot!


** So far. Famous last words and all that...

End of school = OMG panic!

Yet again, I have been surprised by the end of the school year. You'd think that, as a relatively intelligent, clearly overeducated, almost 40-year old, I would realize that if it's getting warmer out and the sun is up at 4:30 am and sets sometime after 9:00 pm, I would clue in to the fact that my kids are going to be on summer holidays soon. The panic results not from the imminent prospect of spending loads of time with my kids, but from the fact that yet again, I have neglected to plan ahead on teacher gifts, and I am looking at trying to knit six shawls in three weeks again.

Actually, this year I am bowing to inevitability, a bit of laziness and the need to keep some sort of grasp on my sanity over the next few months, and only making presents for the girls' main teachers (each has a main teacher and 1-2 assistants). And I'm not knitting.

Now that you've recovered from that last breathtaking statement, rest assured that there are wooly presents in the offing. I spent the weekend spinning up some Porpoise Fur.


These are two practice dyelots from last summer, Xylene Cyanole and Coomassie Blue, both on Targhee. I spun the singles at a much thicker wpi then my usual default; I want to take advantage of Targhee's tendency to expand dramatically after washing, so I aimed for a worsted weight 2-ply.

I haven't spun Targhee in a while, and I really enjoyed it - so springy and soft!  Singles were spun at 9.25:1 and plied at 6.5:1. Today, when I get home, I'm going to skein up the Coomassie Blue (XC is already off the bobbin), figure out the yardage, skipping the yarn finishing step (! - I love this about weaving!) and start warping.

This is the CB scarf I did for Carroll a couple of months ago, using BFL. I'm going to use the same weft yarn (some pale blue light fingering wool recycled from a Goodwill sweater and dyed with same dyes as the fiber), so that picture is probably fairly representative of what the finished project will look. For the turquoise, I'll use the same weft as well, although in the undyed state. I'm thinking about dyeing that as well, but I will probably try it without first to see how it looks.

So...four days to the start of the Tour de Fleece, and I need to weave two scarves, post a shop update and finish washing my fleece. Good thing Himself is away this week - I can take over the entire ground floor of the house with wool!

O Hai!

Didja miss me? Hunh? Didja?

Did you even notice I was gone is probably a more relevant question...no good reason for absence, just not having the energy to put fingers to keyboard or camera to FOs, as the case might be. I do have three finished objects to blog about at some point, but I've spent a lot of the last week washing fleece.

After my initial attempts at fleece washing in the upstairs bathtub, which resulted in still slightly greasy fleece, I took a step back and scaled down a bit.

I took the organic Hebridean fleece I have for the colorwork part of Stasis, and weighed it - a whopping 69 gr (2.4 oz) of unwashed fleece. I split the fleece in half and washed about an ounce at a time - my rational was that since I didn't get all the grease out last time, I would measure out smaller amounts to be washed and make sure I had enough liquid.

I did the same sequence as before: two hot washes, two washes with soap, two rinses. The other major change I made was to keep the water temperature a bit higher then last time, definitely above 50 degrees, and usually closer to 60 degrees C. This was much easier to do in the kitchen, with easy access to the stove and kettle. I also did only one batch at a time, so I could really keep an eye on the thermometer.

In washing this fleece, I came across some "interesting" bits.

I think this is scurf, aka sheepy dandruff. It was definitely not vegetable matter, and it was seriously stuck to the fleece. Once the stuff was dry, I weighed it again - 51 gr instead of 69. So about 26% weight loss due to grease/muck/VM. Then I broke out the handcards. The scurfy cruddy fleece I put to one side, in case I ran low. A few (ok, many) passes with the cards later, et voila:

A kid's shoe box full of handcarded Hebridean rolags, ready for the prologue. If I were smart, I'd do a bit of sampling before I start, just to make sure I've carded enough and that I can get a fingering weight yarn that I like. But...you know what I'm doing instead?

I'm washing more fleece. Only a week to go in prep time, and I've got a big bag to go!

A theme

Over the last few days, I've been noticing a bit of a color theme in my surroundings...

There is purple and green absolutely everywhere! Various types of lavender in various stages of blooming, clematis erupting in my back garden, extraordinarily tall stalks with bundles of periwinkle blooms at the top. It's very striking and also maybe a bit creepy...is everything purple these days?

Thankfully no. There's pink and yellow and orange and brown and blue and turquoise as well. These photos are for next week's update (Wednesday 27th June at noon, BST).

This is going to be the last update until mid- or late August: we're moving house in the second half of July, so all the fibery bits and pieces will be unavailable for a bit. But the good news is that the new house has bigger dye space (hooray!), so I'll be back to throwing color on wool before you know it.

Happy spinning!
Rachel

Double whammy

So, there are a couple of big events coming up in the wooly world, and I'm trying to come up with a plan of attack/list of goals that will not result in me either A) spending copious nighttime hours spinning and/or knitting or B) having a nervous breakdown as I try to spin and knit and move house right in the middle of it all.

Up first is my favoritest wool-along ever, the Tour de Fleece. It combines spinning of the fiber variety with spinning of the cycling variety. Spinners set themselves a challenge, i.e. to spin four miles of laceweight cashemere on a Country Craftsman (!), and spend the duration of the Tour de France (30 June - 22 July) trying to meet that challenge. Last year, I spun up 2425 yds/51.3 oz of fiber. In 2012, I spun up 2420 yds/39.4 oz*. You can perhaps see the trend in the weights? So initially (that would be back in August of last year), I thought I'd aim for continuing that trend - could I spin up 60 oz in 3 weeks?

The second event is, of course, the Ravelympics. Knitters choose a challenging project, cast on during the Opening Ceremonies (27 July) and try to finish before the Closing Ceremonies (12 August). The first time I tried this was in 2006, when it was run by the Yarn Harlot from her blog, and called the Knitting Olympics. My challenge was Adamas, my first ever real lace project. Didn't manage to finish. The second time around (2008) it was the Summer Games, and somehow that didn't quite work for me (oh yeah, summertime in Houston = no knitting! Too damn hot!) In 2010, I boldly ventured into Ivy League Vest territory, and yet again managed to not finish within the allotted time.

Given that 1) we moving in July, and Himself and I are bailing out for a week to go chase some guys in spandex through the mountains, 2) I have a tendency to FAIL at the whole Knitting Olympics thingie anyway, 3) I will actually be going to Olympic events (hooray!) and 4) did I mention we're moving? By which I mean some lovely gents will come, pack up all our stuff, drive it three miles and unpack it, leaving us me to sort everything right again, it's safe to say that I will not be spinning 60 oz of anything. I also will not be knitting any lace shawls or steeked colorwork masterpieces. I do, however, have a plan.

To celebrate our three years in the UK/the Diamond Jubilee/London 2012/going to play in West Wales in October with cool knitting people, here are my combined Tour de Fleece/Ravelympics plans (which were actually first voiced in March...).

1. Spin up my Gotland and organic Hebridean fleece goodies into approximately 1200 yds and 200 yds respectively of 2-ply fingering weight yarn. 
2. Knit up said yarn into the Stasis Pullover. Which will then be my offering for Today's Sweater at P3.

That's it. Of course, since what I currently have is about 1.5 kilos of unwashed, unprocessed fleece, there is some serious prep work to be done. But I think this is challenging enough to be worth trying, but not so out of reach that I'm going to be sobbing into my knitting late some dark evening around 10th August.

Do you have goals for the Tour de Fleece or Ravelympics? What are they? Are you doing any prep beforehand? Or just jumping in on the first day, guns ablazing? Post a comment with your challenges for either or both events, and we'll see what everyone's coming up with. Good luck!

PS - between 15th-20 July, while I'm brutalizing myself in the Pyrenees, I will hopefully manage to do some spindling of some of the masses of Hello Yarn fiber I've got lying around, just so I can post something on the team thread. If I can make it through 4 oz, I'll be pleased. And if I finish off all the natural fleece, I'll start on a sweater lot of HYFC I've got lying around. But I'm making no promises on that score...

* I have only just noticed that I spun almost the exact same yardage both years. It's those damn laceweight singles from 2010 bumping up that statistic...