A Birthday Letter to Boo

Dear Boo,

On the last day of February, you turned eight years old, much to the chagrin and shock of your Mum. You'd think it wouldn't have been a surprise, and yet it was - how did you get so old?

Boo helping me out by modelling some finished knitting.

The past year has seen you do a number of quite impressive things. You sailed through the end of one school and into the next (although there were a few blips along the way) with hardly a wobble. You have gone from a small, extrememely nurturing private school environment into a large, busy and chaotic state school with the rock steadiness that you have always had. Your ability to be certain and content in yourself is something I admire greatly, and I wish I had come to that point much earlier in life then I actually did (i.e. sometime in my twenties). You have always been there, and it is an amazing thing to see.

The intrepid explorer in Norway

You have shot up like a weed - I can't believe that my adorable little cuddle bug is now this tall, gorgeous girl, but there you are. You're still a cuddle bug, thankfully, you just have more sharp corners and take up more space in the bed. And have developed a horrific predilection for Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, but that's another blog post...

One of the marvels being a parent to siblings is to see and acknowledge the differences between two children who have the same parents and have grown up in more-or-less the same environment. You and I had a talk last week about your sister's friends expecting you to behave in a certain way because, well, you're her sister and that's how she reacts. You were quite certain that you and Devil are very different, even though you look very much alike. I couldn't agree more. And I'm afraid this is going to be an ongoing challenge for you, particularly if the two of you continue in the same schools: everyone from peers to teachers to parents are going to think they know what they're getting when you come along, simply by virtue of you being D's younger sibling. It's further complicated by the fact that you are both girls - if one of you had been a boy, that expectation might be tempered a bit - but I am confident that you will have absolutely no problems setting people straight as to your existence as a completely independent entity.

Home cloning experiment

Watching you do math warms my geeky heart to its very cockles: in your ability to recognize patterns seemingly without effort, I see something of myself, and it is further evidence (in my mind at least) of the wonder of genetics. I may be a neuroscientist, but my expertise runs to the cellular and molecular rather then cognitive systems. The fact that I can see in you traits that your father and I have is an ongoing revelation. And it is a window on to myself that is hard to escape.

Thank you for who you are and what you bring to my life. You are my sunshine, Sunshine.

Love,

Mumma

And so it begins, with Unravel

This past weekend was the start of the Wool Festival Season here in the UK, and as always, it was a complete pleasure to make the journey down the A3 to Farnham for the wonderful Unravel, held at Farnham Maltings.

It's hard to convey the feeling I had sitting down on the train at 9:15 on Sunday morning with my mum, Allison, and her mum, knowing that I was going to spend the day surrounded by wool and color and creativity. We arrived just after ten, and after a brief photo shoot of Alli's finished Munchkin Baby Blanket, we headed in to the show.

Let me just get this out of the way now, since everyone wants to know: how much did I get?

That's 300 g of fiber from John Arbon (100 g each of Exmoor Blueface, Exmoor Horn, and an Exmoor Blueface/Zwarbtles blend). There were two skeins of Canopy Fingering from The Fiber Company (yarn support so it doesn't count as stash enhancement, right?) and a pile of shade cards for their different yarn lines which have my designer brain jumping up and down in glee. I also managed to snag an old needle gauge/row counter from Eliza Conway. Plus a lovely shawl pin from Textile Garden. Not pictured is my lovely poster of all the different varieties of colors and markings in Shetland sheep, from Judy Hardman.

More important then the buying were the people. We talked to people we'd like to see at the Yarn in the City Pop Up Marketplace in September, we talked to old friends and to (hopefully) new ones. I looked at lots of stalls to get inspiration for my upcoming Porpoise Fur stall at I Knit Fandango in May. I feel like I spent most of my time gabbing with people, but I came away from the show with lots of excitement and inspiration and full of creative energy. What could be better?

Lemons, as far as the eye can see

Every so often, my knitting takes a wrong turn and I end up in the not-so-enviable position of having to figure out how to fix it. When this does happen, it is almost invariably due to knitter-error, rather then a mistake in the pattern. To whit, my current knitting dilemma:

There is nothing sadder than a too-big colorwork sweater body...

This is the finished body of my Insight Pullover, designed by Kate Heppell. The pattern is fabulous, and I've been enjoying the colorwork pattern immensely. However, unlike Alli's Gauge Goggles, which we discussed on a recent podcast, clearly I have been investing in a stunning pair of Realistic Body Shape Googles, through which I am far more curvaceous and shapely then in reality. The problem is this: the pattern is written for someone whose bust and hip measurements are both larger then their waist measurements. Not too surprisingly, actually, as this is a pattern written for a women's sweater, and women, as a general group, tend to be shaped that way. 

Tend being the operative word in that previous sentence. And while I have a waist that is smaller then my bust and hips, it's not all that different then my bust. So a sweater with an outline like this:

does not work so well with a body shaped like this (i.e. mine):

There is way too much fabric around my bust on this sweater. Waaaaay to much. I knit the size that would fit my full bust measurement, but upon reflection, I should really have gone with one size down, which would be closer to my upper bust measurement.

This brings up a tricky point in garment sizing: when looking at a pattern and deciding what size to make, how do you know where is the right place to measure to get the proper fit from your finished sweater? Lots of things come in to play here - ease, fabric, shape of the armholes and sleeves. For this sweater, which is meant to be very close fitting, I decided to do the slightly larger size, thinking that the stranded colorwork would be a bit less stretchy then a fabric worked in a single color. It is less elastic, but as I am not exactly amply supplied in boobage, it turns out I don't really need that extra stretch. It also turns out that my gauge is very slightly larger then that given for the pattern: I'm getting 22.5 sts/10 cm instead of 23 sts. I haven't blocked the body yet, so my gauge might end up being spot on, but over the body of the sweater, that extra 0.5 stitch means I've got an extra 2.5 cm around the chest. 

In any event, my dilemma is thus: what do I do?

Choice A: rip out the entire thing and start over again one size smaller.

Choice B: rip out back to the waist increases and increase up the number of stitches for the smaller size, which should fit me better around the bust, but would still leave room in the areas where I am more amply supplied with heft (i.e. the back forty, as the Knitmore Girls like to call it).

What do you say? I was initially leaning towards B, if only because the thought of starting over makes me want to cry hot tears of woe and despair. Even though I am loving the colorwork. Although now that I've tried it on again, I am thinking that maybe it's a bit too loose through the hips too?

Aaaargh! And sadly, this is only the first of two sweaters I have to MacGyver into fitting. Woe, misery and woe.

Spinworthy

"Knitworthy" is a term that gets discussed a fair bit in the knitting world, particularly in the run up to the winter holiday season. What makes someone knitworthy is an ongoing, and sometimes contentious debate - the recipient's appreciation of and understanding of the value of handknits is dissected within an inch of its life, their ability to care appropriately for said handknitted gift is considered, and the giver's ability to "let it go" (it being the knit item in question) is discussed and pondered. It's a tough thing, putting all the time and energy and work into a handknit present when you're not sure what will happen to it in its new home.

What you don't hear discussed very often is if someone is "spinworthy".  For me, spinning a gift for someone is a different undertaking then knitting something. When I spin, part of the enjoyment is in being early in the creative chain that begins with the sheep growing the wool and ends with the finished object. I take a raw-ish material (the "ish" being reflective of the fact that I'm usually working with already processed but not always dyed fiber) and create something that, while beautiful in and of itself, isn't actually the finished product. There is still potential in that skein of handspun - it might grow up to be a hat, or a cowl, or some warm cozy mittens. It might end up as a square or two in a big blanket, or an edging on a sweater, or just about anything at all. The final fate of that wool is still up in the air.

All of this is a rather long and indirect way of saying I've finished a big spinning project. For Christmas in 2013, I gave Alli a sweater lot of handspun, fiber and colors TBD. After much back and forth and a bit of sample dyeing/spinning, she decided that she wanted yarn to knit the Gradient Pullover by Amy Miller. We went back and forth on colors, but she finally decided to go with the same pale to deep orange as shown on the pattern page. After some disagreement about fiber (I was pulling for BFL, she was enamored of merino-silk), we finally found a solution (that is, she got her way), and the project was underway.

Sadly, this was sometime in late May or early June that all this got settled, and the rest of the summer was pretty much a wash (what with the moving and all). I finally got the fiber out to dye and realised that I was short by about 10 ounces. Thankfully, my parents came to visit in October, and brought some more fiber with them (thanks Mom!). Much singles spinning and plying later, I present this:

Fiber: 80% merino/20% tussah silk, dyed in three different shades of orange

Spun/plied: singles spun at 12:1 on a ST folding Lendrum, plied on a Hansen miniSpinner (hence the ginormous skeins!)

Yardage: 455 yds/6.8 oz of light orange, 645 yds/7.9 oz medium orange, and 660 yds/9.4 oz dark orange. Plus a couple of mini skeins of medium and dark so she can swatch. Total yardage 1760 yds/24.1 oz, approximately 1170 ypp. The medium orange is a bit lighter in grist then the other two (sport vs. DK) but I think they'll be ok all together.

One last beauty shot:

There's a bit of odd plying going on in some places, but that can be fixed if needed down the line. I'm hoping it will be a non-issue when knit up.

So - Happy Late Christmas A! You are definitely spinworthy, but no, I will not knit the sweater for you. 

What's in a name?

I've got a yummy new design that's almost ready to be released into the wild, and I'm running up against my old enemy: Naming the Thing.

Sometimes the name for a design is obvious: the Shard Hat is named for The Shard, surprisingly enough. The Ja'ali Stole name came from the ja'ali screens I saw in Moghul palaces on a trip to India. The Harpswell Pullover is named for the seaside township in Maine where I spent summer holidays as a child, and where my parents now live.

But sometimes picking a name for a design is like pulling teeth. Bonfire Night was called "The October Cowl" in all correspondence and files until I realised that it was going to be published on Guy Fawkes Day, and the name came to me out of the blue.

Handspun Shetland

Luscious, luxury sock yarn

I'm really, really hoping something similar will happen for this piece. It's a garter stitch crescent shaped shawl with a lace edging. The first prototype was done with the leftover handspun Shetland from the Fjord Mitts (also quite easily/obviously named), and is easily big enough to wrap around me twice (note to self: must get final measurements soonest). The second, smaller version was worked out of approximately 350 yds of fingering weight merino/silk/cashmere blend from Spirit Trail Fiberworks. It's a really nice shawlette size - it sits on the shoulders without sliding off, but won't stay closed at the front unless pinned shut.

Sooooo....anyone have any good name ideas they want to share?

Poor, nameless shawl babies

Please?......