Button, button, who's got the buttons?

Last night I finished off sleeve #2 of my Garter Yoke Cardigan, out of the Timber Romney I spun during last year's Tour de Fleece (thanks very much BBC online rebroadcast of the men's triathlon!). Today I laid that puppy out on the coffee table and had a good long think about buttons.

I pulled out my (admittedly not very large) button stash and pawed through for some possibilities. First up was the way plain option.

Plain, purple buttons. These look pretty good - they match the darker purple stripes pretty well, and are a good contrast with the more yellow bits.

Choice #2:

Some domed brown buttons with a stripe. Also a good choice, but a bit too big for the buttonholes. Onward...

Some engraved metal buttons. A better size choice, but I don't like the metallic against the handspun. The sweater is such a warm, autumnal palette, that the metal clashes pretty badly. One more option:

These are some gorgeous glass buttons that Mermaid gave me a while back, and they work surprisingly well (at least I'm surprised). They are mostly blue, with bits of pink, purple, green and grey. I really like how these look, and they are the best of the whole lot. However, there is one wee problem...

That pile there is the sum total of these buttons that I've got in my stash. Said button band requires ten, count 'em, 10 buttons. Bollocks! I guess this is a good example of an instance in which blindly following the pattern spacing for buttonholes is not necessarily the best plan if you have limited buttons in your stash.

The upside of this whole fiasco? I get to go back to the local button store tomorrow...result!

FO: Mini-oak cardigan

Pattern: Little Oak Cardigan, by Alana Dakos, from the Coastal Kids collection
Yarn: iKnit or Dye Superwash Merino sock, 366 m/100 gr, 1 skein in "Bachelorette". I ended up using about 3/4 of the skein, so maybe 280 meters total? I'll have to weigh the remainder to be sure.
Needles: US 3/3.25 mm circulars, for a gauge of 28 sts/~40 rows per 4 inches.
Start/finish: 17 July - 2 August 2012 -- gotta love the baby sweaters for (mostly) instant gratification!
Comments/mods: This was a really nice pattern. Worked from the bottom up, easy stockinette body, fun yoke pattern at the top. I like the development of the oak leaf pattern at the top - it wasn't clear to my mind's eye how that was going to end up looking, but I really like it.

The pattern was pretty straightforward, but I did run in to one minor issue (mostly of my own making): the pattern is laid out with the chart on the second page. What isn't clear however, unless you read ahead (which you should always do, and I didn't, so it's my own damn fault), is that there are some shaping instructions for the body before you start the chart. What I did was knit the body and the sleeves, start working the chart, and then discovered the shaping instructions and started doing those. We'll ignore, for the moment, the fact that I didn't actually need to do any shaping for the size I was knitting (6 months) and just say that this is a pattern for which it would behoove you to read ahead and make sure you understand what supposed to happen when.

Yesterday, the girls and I went out on a button-mission. I'm happy to say, I am once again living close to a yarn store, and this one happens to have a fabulous selection of buttons stashed away in the back. They helped me pick out some lovely silvery buttons with red edges, which work really well with the yarn.

The yarn: this was one of my long-neglected club yarns for the iKnit Sock club that I've mentioned before. It ended up as a lovely subtly variegated fabric, nice and soft and cozy, but hopefully washing-machine friendly. I will be recommending the delicate or wool cycle to the New Mum, but I think this is going to be a great sweater for the wee lad-to-be. Who now has full permission to arrive at any moment, because his sweater is done. His blanket, on the other hand, is a big plastic bag of yarn in the attic, but he can't wait until I get that finished, or poor N will explode!

Fiber Friday is back: the Tour de Fleece final report

This year's Tour de Fleece was an unparalleled success! I spun up 8 lbs of fiber, including 3 sweater lots and 2000 yds of lace weight!

Ha ha ha ha ha! Actually, I didn't meet my TdF goal in any way, shape, or form. Here's the final output:

I ended up with two finished skeins and a bobbin and a half of singles of the Gotland fleece.

I'm pretty happy with the final yarn - it's definitely a bit "rustic", as you would expect from inexpertly handcard fiber, and it will definitely end up as an outerwear sweater rather then a next-to-skin cuddly sweater, but I like it. My goal for the weekend is to finish up the bobbin that's on the wheel and ply those up and see what my yardage is. Based on these first two skeins, I'm going to need 8 or 9 to get the yardage I need for the sweater. That shouldn't be a problem unless I get super sick of carding.

I didn't even touch the Hebridean rolags - they went missing! I had several weeks of panic because I couldn't find the box they were stored in, and I was convinced Himself had thrown them away in a fit of tidying. However, when unpacking boxes from the move, lo and behold there they were. Phew!

Since we were traveling, and life was a bit nuts with moving, I did a fair bit of spindling in addition to the fleece on the wheel. I just went in to my stash and pulled out some Hello Yarn fiber (because Adrian's genius makes up the bulk of my dyed spinning stash, and so I could post in their threads!) and threw it on the spindle. 


HY Burnished BFL, 2-ply, spun on a variety of spindles, 177 yds/4.4 oz (644 ypp). The colors on this are gorgeous - it really does look like metal. I think this will become a cowl or a hat or something like that. Maybe some simple mitts? Dunno.

I was planning on the BFL lasting through our trip to the Pyrenees, but I finished it before we left. Back to the HY stash for another spindle project.

This is Seasick Corriedale. I've got two bags of this (approximately 8 oz), so I took one bump, split it into the component colors (i.e. yellows, browns, blues), and then split each piece of top in half lengthwise for two singles.

Here you can see the yellow and brown singles in balls ready for plying. I used my Wildcraft spindle for this fiber, and it was a bit tricky - the Corriedale wanted to be spun a bit thicker then is optimal for the weight of the spindle, which meant I had to be really careful about keeping the spindle going in the right direction - but I'm happy with the singles. I think this will end up being an aran or bulky weight 2-ply, once it's washed.

So there you have it: three weeks, about 550 yds of finished yarn, and a whole load of other stuff going on. So be it! At least all that spindling meant I got some good pictures...


So given that my Tour de Fleece was an abject failure a bit underwhelming, my Ravellenic Games goals have to change as well. Now I'm thinking that I'll hope to finish the spinning of the fleece by the Closing Ceremonies. Then I can get to work on the sweater in September. Which works out well, to be fair, cause it's not really the best weather for rustic-heavy sweater knitting.

Hello August!

Hello strangers! Ehem...my apologies for promising to attempt blogging about things other then the Tour de Fleece during the month of July and then promptly disappearing for four weeks. In the interim, I went to the Pyrenees for a week and packed up/moved house/started unpacking, so it's all been a bit nuts.

The Pyrenees were lovely, the weather was just the antidote to British Summer (TM), the "real" Tour (the cycling version that is) was spectacular, and while continuing to spin, I started a wee baby sweater for a baby due tomorrow.

This morning, I wove in the last ends on the buttonband, and this teensy tiny sweater is now blocked and drying.

The pattern is Little Oak, the child sized-version of the Gnarled Oak Cardigan by Alanna Dakos, from Coastal Knits. A great, fast pattern (hooray for 6-month sized sweaters!), with enough interest in the yoke to keep it from being too boring. I'll give more details when I find some buttons and get it ready to go off to the Wee Lad for whom it is destined - hopefully finding buttons this afternoon will mean that he will realize it is time to evict himself ASAP, as his poor Mum is getting quite uncomfortable. However, I will hold off on button shopping until after I meete her for our dog walk this afternoon - I really don't want her going in to labor on Wimbledon Common!

Spun up colourways: playing with Oregon Green and YFP

Usually I end up with some leftovers after fiber has been weighed and bagged and tagged. These are perfect for spinning up as sample skeins, or for playing around with different techniques. Last month, before crazy vacation and moving plans hit in full force, I did just that with a bunch of scraps of Oregon Green and YFP Dorset Horn (currently available in the shop here).

I took the scraps from these two dyelots and spun up five different 2-ply sample skeins. The first two are the obvious: each colorway plied with itself. Then I did a skein of 2-ply using one single from each colorway.

Oregon Green 2-ply

OG/YFP marled 2-ply

YFP 2-ply

That was all well and good, and relatively straightforward. But then I decided to try another spinning technique to try blending the colors a bit more. I took a piece of each color of top and held them together while I spun, so that the single incorporated a bit of yellow and a bit of green. Sometimes there was more of one color then the other, but I tried to keep it as evenly distributed between green and yellow as I could.

OG/YFP blended 2-ply

You can see that, while it's still possible to distinguish yellow and green, they are much more blended together.

I did all these samples in a couple of days, and then put the experiment away for a bit. As any scientist will tell you, sometimes things need to sit and ferment for a while before you conclude anything. In the meantime, I started thinking about Tour de Fleece, and my goal of spinning up some yarn from raw fleece. This, of course, requires some kind of fiber prep, and my current tools include a pair of hand cards. It occurred to me that a nice addition to the first set of sample skeins would be some color blending by carding. And voila!

Before carding

Final blend

After 3 passes

Final 2-ply

The resulting yarn was a nice yellowy, in some places almost minty (!), green. This is a good demonstration of how it doesn't take much yellow to change a color - given the darkness of the Oregon Green fiber alone (see first picture of the hand cards above), you might expect this to be a darker final product. But a little bit of yellow goes a long way...

So what does this all mean from a knitting perspective? And why would you bother carding or blending during the spinning if you've got two different colors of fiber?

All five samples

I knit up a simple swatch with all of the samples, in this order: OG/OG 2-ply, OG/YFP marled 2-ply, OG/YFP blended 2-ply (colors held together during spinning), OG/YFP carded 2-ply and finally, the YFP/YFP 2-ply.

It's a bit hard to see the transitions between the middle three samples in this picture, so let's add some markers.

The change from OG/OG to OG/YFP is easy to see - as soon as you add any yellow at all, you get a yarn that, from a distance, reads as a strong yellow-green. If you look at it a bit closer, you can see the dramatic marl created by yellow and green singles lying next to each other.

However, the difference between the OG/YFP 2-ply yarn, the OG/YFP blended yarn (where the colors were held together during spinning of the singles), and the carded OG/YFP yarn is harder to distinguish (black line indicates the point where the yarns switched).

Marled to blended transition

Blended to carded transition

To my eye, the biggest difference between the blended and carded yarns is the uniformity of the carded color - there is much less variation since the fibers were thoroughly blended before spinning. The blended-while-spun yarn has much more variation, which may or may not be what you're looking for.

Finally, the comparison between the carded OG/YFP yarn and the YFP/YFP 2-ply.

No black line needed to indicate change in yarn, right?

So what does this mean for you as a spinner? Well, I think that depends...what a helpful answer! But really, it does depend on what your ultimate goal is. If you have a fiber that is dyed in a colorway with a lot of contrast, you can spin it to preserve and enhance those contrasts. Maybe you want very stripey socks, in which case you would chain-ply your singles. Or you think the colors would look great in colorwork mittens, in which case you can split the dyed top into its component colors and spin them seperately - just because it came to you as one piece of top doesn't mean you can't split up the colors just as you like!

On the other hand, maybe you want to blend the colors a little bit, in which case a 2-ply might work well. Depending on how you split the top, you can end up with sections of marled yarn, maybe some sections where the colors line up and enhance each other. A 3-ply will blend the colors even more.

Or maybe you really want to mix things up a lot, in which case you could spin two different colors together, creating a marled single that will further blend the colors with plying. Or maybe you want to create a yarn that is a totally different color then the top you started off with, in which case you could whip out the hand cards or drum carder - a word of warning on carding, however: if you are trying to blend colors that lie across from each other on the color wheel, you may end up with a whopping pile of brown yarn!

OG/OG, OG/YFP and YFP/YFP together

I hope this has been and interesting and useful post. Have you done your own color experiments? What effect do you like best? What's been an absolute disaster? Let me know in the comments, and we can talk about how to get the color effects you want, depending on your starting point.

I hope everyone is enjoying the (late-arriving but finally here) British summer, and happy spinning!

Rachel