Incoming ebook!

At long last, I'm am thrilled to announce that my new eBook, Travelling Hats, is almost ready for release, just in time for last minute Christmas knitting!

This eBook includes five patterns (all of which will also be available individually), ranging in size from baby to adult. Each hat is inspired by a city that I've visited since moving to the UK almost 4 years ago, and each one has a special story that goes along with it. The inspirational cities are Paris, Copenhagen, Delhi, London and my hometown, Boston.

Details: Yarn weights range from DK to aran (heavy worsted), and there's a variety of techniques to choose from: lace, colorwork, twisted stitches. Hat styles include beret, slouchy hairbag (as Brenda Dayne refers to them), ski hat with tassel, simple beanie and a double-thickness toque with a lining for really cold days. All are fairly quick knits - I think the longest prototype took me under a week of not very serious time investment, and the testers got them finished off in between 5-8 hours, for the most part. So if you are in need of a bunch of quick knits for holiday presents, this may be just the ticket!

I'm hoping to get the final edits done this week and have it up by the beginning of December. I'll post here, on Twitter, and on the Ravelry group with further updates as they develop.

So. Excited. To. Get. This. Out!

FF: Sweater lot

I've been working on a big spinning project off and on for the last couple of weeks. It's my second Hello Yarn Fiber Club combo spin - Silt Portugeuse Merino and Parritch Targhee.


I split the first 8 oz of Silt into 18 pieces (each 4 oz into 3 chunks, then each chunk lengthwise into 3 bits), and finished spinning it up on Wednesday.

I've become more scornful of merino in recent months, but this stuff has a nice wooly feel and grippiness (is that a word? You know what I mean...) that feels very un-merino-like. I suspect it's not going to wear terribly well, since the staple length is still pretty short, but I'm trying to spin the singles with enough twist that the pill factor isn't too horrible. I'll ply on the looser side to keep it from getting too dense. At least that's the plan - we'll see how it actually works out!

The second 8 oz is ready to go. Then on to the Targhee!

Who knew dish towels could be so much fun?

So, since there isn't already enough going on in my world, I joined the Spunky Eclectic Weaving club this summer. I received my first package in August, and a couple of weeks ago, I figured that since October's parcel had been shipped, it was probably time to get August on and off the loom ASAP.

Yarn: Louet Cottolin, 60% cotton/40% linen in a dark and a light blue (Wind color combo)
Reed: 12 dent heddle
Warp: with alternating stripes of color, 180 ends of each color (double warped, i.e. with two strands through each slot and each eye)
Weft: either light or dark blue, held doubled

I ended up with a larger towel and a smaller towel, as I ran out of warp - next time I'll add a bit extra. New weaving moments in this project: warping with two colors, weaving with anything other then wool, and hem stitching!

I think I now love hemstitching with a deep and abiding passion, and I shall hemstitch everything from now on. Now that this is off the loom, I've maintained a bit of momentum and warped up the October weaving club.

I warped with the white and am using the color fade for the weft.

So far, so good...

Fiber Friday: Wool, meet Literature. Literature, meet Wool.

Because I don't have enough to do already, and because I love Craftlit and pretty much everything Heather Ordover does, a few weeks ago I succumbed to the inevitable and joined the knitalong for Jane's Ubiquitous Shawl, being run concurrently with Heather's presentation on Craftlit of "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte.

Determined not to make this easy on myself, I posted the following in the knitalong thread:

 

posted 17 days ago (Tuesday, October 30)

Ok, I’m in. But, since I can’t do things the easy way, I started spinning for my shawl last night. 2 of 8 oz done, for a two ply. Don’t know how many yards that will be, so there may be further panicked spinning when I run out of yarn!
 

So. I had pawed through the HYFC stash, pulled out some gorgeous Shetland, and started spinning it up for a DK-weight 2-ply because....well...I think I just got carried away by the idea of it? Maybe it was wool fumes - I don't know.

8 oz of this gorgeous fiber,

became 560 yds of this yarn.

A lovely, squooshy, DK-to-worsted weight yarn that is very rapidly becoming Jane's Ubiquitous Shawl.

Sadly, 560 yds is less then half the yardage I need, and I don't have any more fiber in this colorway! I thought about dyeing something else for the border and edging, but then tossed that idea out in favor of trading with my fellow Hello Yarn Fiber Club groupies on Rav. Thanks to their generosity, there are 3 more bags of fiber headed my way, so I should have plenty to finish this off.

I'm thinking if I have leftovers, I might make myself a matchy-matchy hat using the first lace chart. Doesn't this look like it could be a hat? Hmmmm...

Apparently the KAL bug is still ruling my every waking moment because I also seem to have signed up for a glove knitalong. W. T. F?

Cured

This past Monday I tweeted that I was sitting in a coffee shop, working on my Color Affection shawl. What I should have said, was that I was binding off my Color Affection, and feeling somewhat bittersweet about it...

Pattern: Color Affection by Veera Valimaki
Yarn: Countess Ablaze Lord of Silk in "Grey Skies in Manchester", "Antique Rose" and "Only When Invited". I ended up using  278 yds of grey, 168 yds of pink and 238 yds of muticolored.
Needles: US 6/4.0 mm
Start/finish: 19 October - 12 November 2012
Comments/mods: well. For comments, I think I'm not alone in saying this is a lovely, well-written, and completely addictive pattern (if you like garter stitch). Once the trauma of choosing a color combination was finished, the actual knitting was fabulous - not too fiddly (good TV knitting), but enough going on that it was interesting. I'm sure others have also succumbed to long hours of garter stitch, just to get the next set of stripes done!

Mods: two major modifications to the pattern. First, I used a garter tab to start the shawl instead of a straight cast on as called for. Second, I knit Section A as written and found that the edges were really tight. Ripped back and added a yarn over between the first two stitches of every row (in the garter border), that got dropped on subsequent rows so the stitch count didn't change. That added enough extra yarn at the edges that it curves into a lovely arc.
 
At some point in the short row section I stopped and counted stitches, and didn't have the number I was supposed to have. Instead of driving myself over the brink and trying to figure out where I'd gone wrong and fix it, I said "What the hell!" and soldiered on. It's garter stitch. It's a scarf. No. Big. Deal.

I'm a bit surprised by the amount of yarn I used of the various colors. Unlike Brenda, I used mostly color A and color C, with color B coming in at the least yardage required. Hmmm...to be fair, I didn't weigh the balls before I started, so I'm not 100% that they were full skeins. But they should have been.

As a scientist, I feel obligated to try to reproduce my yardage results for posterity and the good of the general knitting public. Therefore, I am going to make the sacrifice and knit another Color Infection Affection shawl. Now the question becomes, what colors? Help me decide people!

This is a portion of my sock yarn stash. There are a few skeins secreted here and there, and none of the handspun is in here, but this is what I'm starting with. I've tried a few combinations - see what you think.

#1 - Hello Orange!

#2 - The Manly Subtle Version

#3 - Teal + Sparkly Purple + Grey

#4 - Teal + Sparkly Purple + White

#5 - You Won't Lose Me in an Avalanche

#6 - What goes with Yellowy Green?

#7 - Ugh. In Retrospect, No.

#8 - Rocky Point, Mexico

#9 - Predictable

#10 - I Think My Subconscious Wants to Get Rid of That Orange Yarn...

If you have other suggestions, please do post a comment. Infection 1.0 is currently drying on my guest bed, so modeled shots will have to be for another time.