In which I channel Elsa

Over the past few weeks I've spent some time cleaning up my office/studio/general dumping ground for all things woolly. It's been a very good thing - I've found yarn I thought had gone missing, uncovered a couple of design swatches I'd forgotten about, and exposed a number of WIPs in dire need of five minutes before they are FOs.

I've also found some things that I've sadly decided need to take a trip to the big frog pond in the sky. First up on the hit list is a sweater that I was really, really super excited about when I started it - Automne by Ruth Garcia-Alcantud, the cover sweater for Knit Edge Issue 4 way back in 2013.

Photo (c) 2013 Alisha Irish

This sweater is gorgeous. Knit in a chunky weight yarn, it's nice and long, has a cool cabled waist detail, and a gorgeous wide lace collar. It's even got pockets! I immediately ordered yarn, discovered it wasn't going to work, ordered more yarn, and cast on in February of 2014. I knit most of the body over the half-term holiday that month, and then the sleeves and even managed to get everything blocked and the body sewn up and the collar knit and blocked.

Mostly finished sweater

Collar and waist detail

And then I tried it on. And realised three things: 1) my well-intentioned modifications to make sure the armholes were deep enough had resulted in sleeve caps that weren't going to fit in the armscyes; 2) that lovely cable waist detail was about four inches lower then my actual waist; and 3) most critically, a long bulky-weight sweater that ends at the midpoint of my thighs is REALLY NOT a good look for me. In reality, it probably looks ok, but I've spent far too much of my life unhappy with my shape to be happy wearing something that doesn't make me feel fabulous.

So, yesterday I heeded the advice of my extremely talented college classmate and Let It Go. I got out the ball winder and reduced my 90% finished gorgeous sweater into a whopping pile of potential.

That is about 600 grams (or just over 900 yds) of lovely red tweedy Elann Highland Chunky (sadly discontinued), which has now been reskeined, given a bath, and is drying over the kitchen radiator as we speak. I've already got plans for this yarn - another sweater, but more or less the polar opposite of Automne in a design sense. And I'm looking forward to casting on. Maybe it will be done in time for next week's predicted ridiculous winter weather? Here's hoping!

How I spent my Christmas holidays

Happy, happy New Year to you all! In my prennially late fashion, my inaugural new year post is coming after 2016 has already kicked off for almost a week. And I'm afraid that I haven't yet settled down on my plans for 2016 - unlike many people, I have a very hard time making plans for the future until it actually arrives. In other words, my brain had a very had time even considering 2016 before it was 2016.

This tendency to procrastinate was not helped by my coming down with some true awful bug on Boxing Day, which left me feverish and miserable on the couch for three days, before morphing into a pretty horrible hacking coffee that is hanging on to my lungs for dear life. And just about the only crafty thing I felt like doing in the week between Christmas and New Year's was spinning. So I did....

First up was finishing off my "Mutable Loci" on Cheviot from the Lab Goddess Fibre Club November instalment (places still available for January - March!). I spun this as a true 3-ply, aiming for a plied fingering weight yarn to knit into socks.

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I got pretty close to fingering weight on the final skein, but the skein is also pretty obviously overspun/overplied. However, seeing as this is destined to become socks, that is not a bad thing; they'll just wear better.

Next up was a bunch of 0.5 oz chunks of Shetland dyed in the original colours in my Vital Dye series. I spun these up semi-woolen, from the fold, aiming for an approximately fingering weight 2-ply.

From left to right: Congo Red, Ethidium Bromide, Yellow Fluorescent Protein, Oregon Green, Xylene Cyanole, Coomassie Blue and Crystal Violet

These are part of my prep for Unravel, happening on the 19th - 21st of February (where I am very excited to be exhibiting AND giving a talk!) (gulp!). I'm planning to offer kits for a handspun, colorwork hat - these colourful miniskeins are going to be paired with a neutral and offered with a new pattern I'm working on. I'm thinking at the moment that I'll have at least 2 colourways on offer: a brown with the red, orange and yellow, and either white or grey with the blues and purples. I have a new blue that might slot in really well with the two colours on the right, so we'll see how that all plays out.  In the meantime, swatches are being swatched, and plans are being planned. Stay tuned for more details in a new edition of the Design Diaries starting next week.

The other exciting news I have is that I am going to be at the Waltham Abbey Wool Show in Essex on 17th January! This is a very new development, as they had a last minute cancellation and I've gotten in from their wait list. In any event, that means that the shop update originally planned for Saturday 16th January is going to be delayed by a few days. Stay tuned for the exact timing, or sign up for the newsletter to get notification of the update timing (and other newsy bits) delivered directly to your inbox.

Happy New Year to all, and here's to loads of woolly goodness in 2016!

Lab Goddess Fibre Club December 2015

So this month's inspirational woman scientist was certainly on my short list from the beginning, seeing as I work at her former institution in a building named after her. But I did not plan to have her front and center quite so quickly. A recent trip to the theatre to see Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler was so moving that I decided that Rosalind Franklin had to be next for the club.

Dark Lady on Bluefaced Leicester

Here's the blurb that went out with the club packages:

Rosalind Franklin and Photograph 51

Born into a prominent Jewish family in Notting Hill, London, Rosalind Franklin grew up in a family that valued education and supported her scientific aspirations. She went to St. Paul’s Girls School and from there to Newnham College at Cambridge, where she graduated in 1941 with a degree in chemistry. She then joined the physical chemistry laboratory of the University of Cambridge, working under Ronald Norrish (winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), but this was not a successful pairing. After resigning from Norrish’s lab, she went on to the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA), where she remained for several years, studying the porosity of coal. This work formed the basis of her Ph.D. research, which was completed in 1945.

At the end of World War II, Dr. Franklin contacted her friend Adrienne Weill, a former student of Marie Curie, for assistance in finding a position for “a physical chemist who knows very little physical chemistry, but quite a lot about the holes in coal”. She ended up in the lab of Dr. Jacques Mering at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’Etat in Paris. There she learned X-ray crystallography, which would be key to her role in the discovery of the structure of DNA a few years later.  

Rosalind loved Paris, and blossomed in Mering’s lab – she was able to work independently but with a group of enthusiastic and collaborative colleagues. In 1951, however, she left Paris and returned to London, taking up a position as a research associate at King’s College London in the Biophysics Unit headed by John Randall. She was originally slated to work on proteins and lipids in solution, but upon arriving was redirected to work on DNA fibres with Maurice Wilkins and Raymond Gosling, her newly assigned Ph.D. student.

The relationship between Wilkins and Franklin was difficult: conflicting communications styles made their interactions rocky. Perhaps if their roles had been clearly defined and expectations laid out at the very start of Franklin’s time at KCL, their partnership would have been more successful, but miscommunication from Randall and Wilkins being on holiday when Franklin arrived, coupled with her understanding that she would be an independent researcher rather then an underling of Wilkins, made this challenging.

After Franklin and Gosling identified two forms of DNA (A and B), Wilkins continued with the A form while Franklin focused on the B form. Franklin’s X-ray crystallography photographs of DNA were extremely suggestive of a helical structure, but she was very cautious of publishing her data without being absolutely certain of her conclusions. Meanwhile, Francis Crick and James Watson from the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge had begun building a model of the B form of DNA using data that had, in part, been derived from research done by Wilkins and Franklin. The ultimate result was that, although Franklin’s papers were submitted either prior to Watson and Crick finishing their model, or almost immediately after (without any knowledge of the Cambridge model), the critical paper was Crick and Watson’s published in Nature on 25 April 1953. Franklin’s and Wilkins’s papers were published in the same issue of Nature, but were presented as being in support of the Cambridge group’s work, not as parallel and independent findings.

By this time, Rosalind had left KCL, and moved on to BIrkbeck College where she headed her own research group. She left DNA to study RNA and the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. Her work at Birkbeck was very successful, as she published multiple papers and was awarded a grant from the US National Institutes of Health. Sadly, in mid-1956, while traveling in the States, she began to feel ill. Upon her return to the UK, it was discovered that she had ovarian cancer. She died in September of 1958, four years before Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for their body of work on DNA, including the discover of its structure.

Franklin has been portrayed as a prickly and abrasive woman, who held herself apart from the old boys network that was wide spread in British academic circles at the time. She and Wilkins certainly had a fundamental personality clash, with her forthright and impatient communication style running up against his contrasting reticence. However, the real tragedy in this story is not that she didn’t win the Nobel Prize, but that she died too young. As Brenda Maddox writes in her excellent biography[1] “She was cheated of the only thing she really wanted: the chance to complete her work. The lost prize was life”.

[1] “Rosalind Franklin: the Dark Lady of DNA”, Harper Collins, 2002.

The colourway name comes from a (not-very nice) quote from a letter from Maurice Wilkins to Crick and Watson announcing with some relief that Franklin was leaving KCL. For this colourway, I was drawn to colours that might have been associated with post-war Paris, where Rosalind spent such a happy time before going to King’s: greys for the cobbled streets and stone buildings, pinks for springtime flowers, and dark red for (of course!) the wine. I'm very tempted to spin mine up over the holidays as a gradient - darker purpley red to pink to grey to slate blue - and knit a top down hat with a DNA motif. As you do...what would you make with yours?

Spaces are still available in the next round of the Lab Goddess Fibre Club, which will ship out in mid-January; the initial instalment is already in the works, and has a much... earthier inspiration, if that whets your appetites at all. Happy spinning!

When yarn choice matters

Some days we can grab a skein of yarn, print off a pattern, and be off to the races on a new project, thoroughly caught up in the excitement of casting on. But sometimes, matching yarn and project takes a bit more thought. As I recently found out with my current sweater project, Dark and Stormy by Thea Colman.

Dark and Stormy is a top-down, raglan cardigan with a shawl collar and a large cable down the  back. There are two smaller cables alongside each front edge, but the rest of the sweater is in stockinette. I have a sweater lot of Berrocco Ultra Alpaca in a dark, foresty green that has been hanging out in my stash for a while now, and I thought it ould be perfect for this project. In a fit of enthusiam, I cast on and started knitting away merrily.

After getting about half way through the yoke, I took a look at the cable on the back and thought to myself "Self, that cable is kind of getting lost..."

While I was loving the colour, the halo from the alpaca content was not really pushing my buttons as far as the texture went. I went to Knit Night and took a wee poll of the assembled multitudes: the overwhelmin consensus was that this was perhaps not the best yarn for this pattern. Allison pointed out that I have a sweater lot of SweetGeorgia Superwash Worsted (also in green) that might work better, because it is a much more tightly plied 100% wool yarn. So I went home, and cast on with the new yarn.

Hopefully you can see easily how much clearer the stitch definition is, and how much better the cable looks. Heck, you can actually see the cable, which is definitely a step in the right direction!

This is a very good example of why some patterns need a particular type of yarn. A design that depends on a texture pattern for full impact, like Dark and Stormy, is best suited to a multi-plied yarn with a fairly high twist so that the stitches pop. The Ultra Alpaca, with it's 50% wool/50% alpaca fibre content, is a lovely yarn, but the lack of crimp in the alpaca makes for a much softer and blurred stitch definition. Not great for this design. It's also not as round and tightly plied as the Superwash Worsted, another reason why the stitch definition isn't what I wanted for the cables.

Other yarn-pattern combinations that won't work so well? Socks in merino singles or pure silk yarn; mittens in softly spun anything; a fitted and shaped sweater in 100% cotton. Singles yarns or softly spun and plied yarns are terrible for anything that needs to be hard wearing, while silk and cotton have almost zero elasticity, and won't hold their shape. Sometimes this mismatches can be compensated for by stitch pattern (like ribbing to add elasticity), but I think I'd rather start with materials that are suited to the item I'm making!

That's not to say you have to knit every design in the exact same yarn the designer used, but take a moment and think about why they chose the yarn that's used for the sample. Sometimes it is as simple as that was the yarn that was available, either in their stash or in yarn support. But hopefully the designer spent some time with that yarn trying to figure out how it would work best. If you take a few minutes to think about the yarn you're choosing for your project, your chances of ending up with a disappointing FO go down.

I'm happy to say that the Superwash Worsted is the perfect yarn for this sweater, and it is moving right along! Body is done, and one sleeve is underway. Whether or not it's finished by Christmas remains to be seen....

New gig

A few months ago, I was asked to join a fantastic group of knitters as part of their tech editing team. Now that the new issue has gone live, I can share my excitement at being part of the team at Knitty! I am thrilled to join Kate and Ashley as part of the Knitty TE group, and was even happier to have patterns from two of my pre-existing clients in my first round of edits!

Elkko by Renée Callahan

Vintage Memories by Ela Torrente

Small world, isn't it? Congratulations to Renée and Ela, and go check out the new edition of Knitty!