New pattern: Snowy Pines

I am very excited to announce that I have a sock pattern coming out in the new book American Sock Knitting.

Photo (c) American Gift Knitting

This book is a collection of 13 sock patterns inspired by different states, including socks from Ohio, Oregon, Kentucky, Arizona, North Carolina, New Jersey and Massachusetts. There is so much variety in the collection - cables, lace, colorwork - so there's something to appeal to everyone.  The book also includes some travelogues from Beth's favorite places and five recipes reflecting different regions of the United States.

My contribution, Snowy Pines, was inspired by the woods near my grandparent's house in Maine. It is a great project for a new sock knitter - it's worked in worsted weight yarn (so nice and fast to knit!) from the top down, and includes a stranded colorwork pine tree and snowflake design.

The book is now in preorders until July 15th with a reduced price and free US shipping, and copies will be shipping out soon after that. And since I'm going to have an extra copy, why don't we have a little contest?

Post in the comments about your favorite place, and what sort of sock would be inspired by that place - for example, would it have a lacy motif? Maybe something more rugged, like cables? Or would you need a particular yarn color to capture that place in a sock? I leave the entries open until the end of preorders, July 15th, and then draw a winner. Please note that I won't be getting my hands on the book until mid-August, so there will be a bit of delay in getting it out to you.

And now? Back to carding...

How to prove to the world that you are an idiot who can't read a calendar

So, apparently I'm a bit over excited about this whole Tour de Fleece thing. Because not only is tomorrow NOT the 21st of June (which is the date I had stuck in my head for the start of the race), it is also NOT the start of the race. This was very gently pointed out to me by a dear friend and I am now totally humiliated at my complete lack of functioning brain cells. And my ability to double check my drivel before I exposed myself to public ridicule. Oh well...the up side of this is that I now can stop carding myself into carpel tunnel syndrome, and I can do a bit more organizing of my plan of attack.

There has been a bit of training going on (but only a very little bit): some Oregon Green Wensleydale on the Turkish spindle.



This was my maiden voyage with the Turkish, and it's absolutely lovely to spin with. IST has some with weights added to the cross bars to increase the spinning time - this one doesn't have them, but it spins beautifully anyway.

Then I dove into the Hello Yarn stash for a bit of squish factor:

Hello Yarn Polworth in Troll, the December 2012 club offering
Spun/plied: singles spun at 15:1 on the Lendrum, backwards point-of-contact drafting, plied on the miniSpinner
Stats: 271 yds/~4 oz, 10-18 wpi, 1084 ypp, true 3-ply
Comments: Like all of Adrian's fibers, this was an absolute pleasure to spin. I did this as a real 3-ply instead of chain plying. I split the 4 oz bundle into 3 pieces of equal length, then split those lengths for fractal spinning. The first piece I split into 3 (mostly) equal sections lengthwise, the second into 4 pieces, and the third into 6 pieces. I spun them end to end, but for the first and third plies I reversed every second piece to maintain the color progression. So if the first piece started with yellow and ended with purple, I spun the second piece from the purple to yellow.

I tried to spin the singles very finely  with a backward draw, letting twist into the drafting triangle. I wanted a lofty and fluffy final yarn, and I knew from previous Tour de Fleece experience that Polworth has a tendency to fluff up a fair bit during finishing. Before a soak in warm water, the skein from my niddy noddy was 90 inches around, and the wpi ranged from 13-23. Post-soak, I lost 8 (!) inches in length from the skein, and the yarn plumped up into the worsted/DK range.

I can't stop petting this skein - it's soft and drapey and a lovely blend of colors. The yellow/oranges ended up dominating the final yarn, which I'm not such a fan of, but I'll wait to see how it comes out in the knitting (there are some lovely blue/purple/grey sections too!). I'm thinking Multnomah maybe? Not quite enough yardage...Or Traveling Woman? Hmmm...have to think about that while I'm spinning every single day for three weeks. Starting a week from tomorrow...

Action plan

This blog is about to become an all-spinning, all-the-time zone, and for those of you with absolutely no interest in yarn making, I apologize! But Saturday is the first stage of the this year's edition of the Tour de France. Which also means that Saturday is the start of my favoritist -along of all time: the Tour de Fleece.

I've been participating in the Tour de Fleece since 2010, and each year I try to set some goals. In 2010, I had a list of fibers I wanted to spin. In 2011, my goal was to spin more fiber (measured by weight) then in 2010. Last year my output was somewhat hampered by the fact that I spent a week actually in the Pyrenees doing spinning of a different sort, so my trend of increasing weight of fiber spun came to a crashing halt.

This year I have again come up with some goals for the Tour de Fleece, and in the interests of accountability, here they are:

1) For Team Hello Yarn/Southern Cross Fibre/Spunky Eclectic, my plan is to spin up my Winter Storage Finn (of which I have 1.25 lbs...)

into 6x100 yd skeins of single colored yarns for Brenda's Now in a Minute shawl.

I will also (for variation and instant gratification amongst the other goals) spin up some more of my Amy stash. Maybe some Shetland in Tundra?

Or this BFL? (The name of the colorway escapes me at the moment...)


2) For my other team, Team Craftlit: spin up my "black"* Shetland fleece into a 3-ply sweater yarn.

All of the fleece is washed, and last night I drove two hours round trip (and a grand total of 40 miles - thanks London!) to borrow a drum carder. And then I stayed up until midnight playing around with said carder, giving me a lovely sleep-deprived day, but that's a different problem**.

I split the fleece into two main colors before washing - black and grey/brown. Probably a third of the fleece was black, and I'm about one third of the way through the first pass on the grey/brown, so this isn't going to be an early player in the Tour for me this year. I still need to decide whether I'm going to keep the colors separate or blend them together. Initially I wanted to keep them separate, but now I'm thinking that I'll need the yardage I'll get from combining them. Hmmm...

3) also for Team Craftlit: some silk top on my new spindle, as a running around, mobile project.



So that's it. Hah. Clearly last year's raw fleece failure experiment wasn't enough to deter me from doing it again this year. Or maybe I've just blocked it out...the drum carder should make things move quite a bit faster then the hand cards.

I hope.

Anyone else have truly ludicrous goals for the Tour de Fleece this year? Or am I the only insane one out here?

* I say "black" because after carding a bunch of it, it's really more of a dark, dark brown/grey mix.
** My other problem is that now I want to get the white fleece washed up so I can get it carded as well before I have to give the carder back - aargh!

Baptismal hedgie

Last weekend, I went to the first christening I've been to in approximately 30 years. This being an English christening, I was, of course, a bit concerned about the proper etiquette of gifts. So off I toddled to the John Lewis page of christening gifts.

Blergh. What a load of unnecessary and unispired rubbish. Plus, £95 for a sterling silver box for a lock of hair? No. Just...no.

By this time it was Wednesday, and time was getting short to come up with a gift before Saturday. It will come as a surprise to no one that I ended up grabbing the knitting needles and a bunch of scrap yarn, and came up with this adorable little creature, hiding in the barn Himself built:

Who's that?

Why, I do believe it's one of Mrs. Tiggywinkle's relations...

Be brave little guy, come on out...

Pattern: Knit Hedgehogs from the Purl Bee blog.
Yarn: leftover Cascade 220 from my Christmas slippers and some Knitpicks WotA Sport in natural, both held doubled
Needles: US 10.5/6.5 mm and US 8/5 mm
Start/finish: 5 June 2013-7 June 2013 (it took that long because I had to spin/dye some bulky weight for the eyes and nose).
Comments/mods: I changed the yarn weight and the needle size to fit what I had in the stash, but knit it as written. Lovely, quick little gift option, even if Himself pointed out that it looks more like an armadillo...

I suspect there will be more of these in my future, since Boo found it awfully hard to let this one go!

21st century problem

Our router died last week. Just up and died without warning - no green lights, no yellow lights, no red lights, no nothing (certainly no Internet!). And since it's Himself's name on the account and we do not share a surname, he has to be the one to get the broadband company to replace the router*. And since he's been away at his college reunion and at a course for work over the last week, that has not happened. So I've been World-Wide-Web-deprived whilst at home. Hence the lack of posting.

Now that I've got some spare time and a handy dandy wireless connection (thank you London coffee shops!), I can catch up on the blogging. Today's news is a catch up of all sorts of useful and/or useless tidbits of Porpoise-related information.

Item the First: YitC: tGLYC (previously known as the Sooper Sekrit Project, aka the Great London Yarn Crawl) - we have just released the list of participating shops for this year, and I'm really excited about their involvement! We have visited a truckload of shops in the last 6 months, and this list includes some new venues as well as some very well established shops. There's a broad range of products represented and I hope that the Yarn Crawlers have an absolute blast! You can check out the list of shops here, and join the conversation on the GLYC Ravelry group here.

We also have posted about our charity partner, Refuge. Since Allison and I are organizing this thing as a community-building exercise (and perhaps as a way to justify our weekly trips to yarn shops to our other halves), we are not looking at it as a money-making venture. So any and all net proceeds from the ticket sales for the event will be donated to Refuge this autumn. You can read more about Refuge on the blog here.

Item the Second: Porpoise Fur has again been reviewed in Knitty, and the website has been totally redesigned and updated with a metric crapton of fiber. The fact that this happened at all this week is totally due to Allison, who fed me lunch and let me use her wi-fi. I am really excited with the redesign (which is 99% organizational, so the website looks the same - don't be surprised if you don't notice anything different!), and with being able to list so much product. Go check out the shop and see if there's anything you can't live without.

Item the Third: I have one stuffed toy, two successful sweater surgeries and some handspun to share. Stay tuned!

*Mental note to self: research routers and buy one of our very own so I can tell the broadband company to suck it.