Denial

What I should be doing: knitting the prototype for hat numero 5 for the ebook and blocking hat 4's prototype.

What I am doing instead: knitting 1x1 ribbing in the round, with laceweight, on 4.5 mm needles, wondering why the heck my kids aren't asleep yet.

Such a glamourous life I lead...

Preparations

In a little over one week, I will be hopping on a train and heading off to the wilds of West Wales for a weekend with about 30 other knitters, headed up by the lovely Brenda Dayne and the fabulous Amy Singer. To say that I'm getting excited would be a bit of an understatement, although the jury is still out on whether I'm more excited to be hanging around with other fiber people or escaping from my everyday life for a while...

In any event, it's getting on towards the time when I have to decide what I'm going to bring to this event. My mental list is enough to qualify for steamer trunks and Sherpas to get it all to Pembrokeshire. Since there is just me, I'm going to have to cut it down a bit, but honestly: how many clothes am I really going to need? (Correct answer: not many - is it ok if I wear the same shirt for four days?)

We have been instructed that we don't need to bring any yarn - there will be goody bags with everything we might require (squee!), or we can buy stuff at the small but fabulous marketplace that will be set up - danger Will Robinson! But if there's something in particular we want to bring, we can.  I do need to bring needles. And some stitch dictionaries. Needles and stitch dictionaries I have in abundance, so there's a good third of the suitcase gone already.

My big question to myself is: do I want to bring my new toy? I am waffling back and forth...I could bring it with me, but am I really going to want to spin? There's going to be so much knitting going on...on the other hand, spinning is a pretty good mindless thing to do while chatting with everyone, so it might work out ok. Hmmmm...I had coffee with a fellow P3-er this morning, who said I should bring it just because loads of people might want to try it out. Maybe Kevin Hansen will consider giving me a commission on new business?

Decisions, decisions. I suppose it will all get sorted out by next Friday, but I'm pretty sure that I will be the only attendee who presents a bag of skeined yarn and a printed out pattern for Today's Sweater.

One of the many reasons I am a biologist, not a chemist

I've recently been playing around with a couple of new colorways for the October update (as well as a couple of new fibers). One of my experiments resulted in this lovely Southdown - I think this will spin up into a really gorgeous, tinted yarn. I'm hoping the purples and blues and greys will blend together well with the undyed sections of fiber.

So I figured I had a winner, and set off to replicate the colorway on some Cheviot. I've been working really hard to keep good notes on all my colorways so they can be reproduced - this is one of my key selling points for custom dye orders - so I checked my notes and off I went. Sadly, the vagaries of chemistry conspired against me.

I don't know how well you can tell from these photos, but this fiber, while still very pretty, is predominantly brown, with hints of blue and purple.It is defnitively NOT blue/purple/grey with sections of undyed fiber.

WTF? I honestly have absolutely no idea why this dye job came out so completely different from the sample. I used the same dyes, the same dye pot, the same dyeing technique. The fiber was in the dye pot for longer because it was 350 gr instead of 100 gr and it took longer to get everything hot enough to set the dye, but as far as I can remember, that's the major difference between the two runs.

Since I have no idea how this happened, this is destined to be a one-off dye job. Which is too bad - I think it would make some really nice socks, or a lovely neutral-ish sweater. If only I could figure out what happened, I could add it to the list! The next shop update will be 15 October, so if this appeals to you, don't wait to snap some up - it won't be back!

Happy spinning,

Rachel (who is going to lie awake for some nights to come trying to puzzle out this whole thing)

Soggy feet and disappointment

So I have two hat design prototypes left to knit for this hat ebook release due in November. And, despite the size of my stash, I don't have any suitable yarn for these (the mind boggles!). Actually, it's not that I don't have suitable yarn: it's more that I have specific yarns in mind for these two designs (Cascade 220 and Madtosh) that is not in my stash, so yesterday I took a trip up to the Yarn Store (Not Local Except That Technically It's In The Same City).

There I was, trooping through the rain that suddenly arrived on Sunday after a couple of weeks of glorious fall weather, with no umbrella, having dropped one child at the bus, and one child at school. I emerged from the Tube station to find that the rain was pissing down. Waded through the puddles to the door of the shop, my mind full of the rainbow of incredible colors that are Madtosh, wondering what color is going to work best, only to find that...

...they aren't open on Mondays. Talk about a buzzkill. Not only was it raining, it was cold. And truly London-in-Autumn, which is to say, icky. And I had no lovely yarn to lift my spirits!

I've come upon the only possible solution however: clearly I need two skeins of Madtosh, one for the new design, and one to reknit a previous design (originally done in angora-blend, waaaaay too halo-y). Makes good sense, right?

The Ultimate Lanterne Rouge

The Tour de Fleece ended almost exactly 2 months ago. And Thursday night, I finally limped across the finish line, and finished my raw-fleece-to-yarn spinning. At the beginning of the week, I weighed the fleece I had left - I'd been washing it an ounce at a time, and trying to spin on it fairly steadily. Lo and behold,

almost done! So I washed up the last few ounces, and got carding. I found it to be much more effective to card a rolag, spin it straight away, and then card some more. On Wednesday night I finished spinning the Gotland.

I only had 70 yds of the black Hebridean yarn, so I sorted through my bags of colored top that I'd bought, just to try out, and decided that the Black Welsh Mountain was the closest color match to the Hebridean. That got spun up on Thursday.

Can you tell which is which? The Black Welsh Mountain is actually a dark brown, and when put next to the Hebridean, is noticeably lighter. The Hebridean is really, really black. I think that when I knit the sweater, I'll use the BWM for the hem and yoke colorwork, and the Hebridean for the cuffs. I think they'll be fine in isolation, but together the color difference will be noticeable.

The final pile. Yardage stats: 68 yds Hebridean, 115 yds Black Welsh Mountain (I have more of this top so if I run out, I can spin more),  1163 yds Gotland. Total yardage needed: 1125-1270 yds grey, 180-205 yds black, depending on whether I want positive ease or not. Hmmmm...I think I'm going to knit the body up to the armholes, provisionally cast on the sleeve stitches, work the yoke, and see how much yarn I have left and knit the sleeves down until I run out. Hopefully that will work!

In any event, it's a really good thing that I finished the spinning for this project on Thursday. Because you know what arrived on Friday?

My new toy (and 40th birthday present to myself). And since the Gotland/BWM spinning was done, I got to start playing straight away.

I have since finished this BFL, and am working on some Wensleydale that is going to be a present for one of my P3 hostesses in a couple of weeks. It's taking some getting used to, but it sure is fun!