Easter holiday

The girls have been on spring holiday since the end of March, and it has seriously cut in to my blogging time and/or blogging energy. In the past two weeks we've been to a farm, a castle, the swimming pool several times, a zoo and multiple playgrounds. Despite that, I've managed to get some spinning and knitting done.

Well, not done, but at least moving forward. Last night I watched Brokeback Mountain and wound off 8 full bobbins of singles in the Neverending Spinning Project of Doom (NSPoD).

I can't believe I even entertained the idea that I could spin up all these singles in the month of January. At the rate I'm going, I may be done (with the singles) by the end of May. And then there's two rounds of plying to be done. Heck, when it's time to start knitting wool sweaters again, I'll have all the yarn done!

Winding them off on to toilet paper cones does show off the gradiations of the dye job though. It looks pretty cool from the bottom.

I have been doing some knitting as well. The most recent issue of Knitty has a cool pattern by Amy King using handspun. I pulled out the yarn I spun during the move last year that I'd been holding on to for another Knitty pattern, and decided this one would work better.

After some swatching (holy biasing stockinette Batman!) and a trip back through the wheel to take out some plying twist and make the yarn less wire-like, and I've been working my way through the yoke.

I'm now about an inch into the body, and facing endless stockinette. The pattern calls for about 650 yds of yarn, and I've got about 1000 yds of this, so I'm thinking I might put sleeves on. Instead of binding off the cap sleeves, I put the stitches on waste yarn, so when I'm done with the body I can see how much yarn I have left and do some sleeve if I can.

So...a new wool sweater in progress and it was short-sleeve weather today. My timing, as ever, is impeccable!

FF: Okey dokey

That birthday post was kind of hanging over my head, but now that it's out of the way, I can get back to the actual knitting/spinning content.

These are my new socks, and are appropriate for a Fiber Friday post because a) I spun the yarn and b) um, I spun the yarn. The yarn was my first "real" fingering weight, discussed in some detail here, and the socks are the first pattern for Sock Madness IV. I'm not participating in Sock Madness, which is a truly diabolical knit-along/caffeine-fueled knitting group hallucination in which the first knitters to finish the newly released pattern advance to the next round and ultimately the winners get some fabulous prizes. However, I did have a sock I designed accepted for the competition, and as a bonus, I get copies of all the patterns.

OK, the details...

Pattern: Simple Side to Side socks by Deborah Swift
Yarn: Fingering weight handspun Corriedale, colorway "Lantern Moon", dyed by the fabulous Adrian.
Needles: US 1.5/2.5 mm circulars (I seem to be doing everything magic loop these days. What's up with that?)
Gauge: ~8 stitches/11 rows per inch)
Start/finish: 17 March - 25 March 2010 (hooray for fast sock patterns!)
Comments/mods: I found the construction of this sock interesting. The top of the foot/front of the leg are knit first as a single panel, and then you split the stitches as needed (depending on size of your foot) and knit two separate sections for the sole and the back of the leg. After finishing these, the sock is grafted together along the length and you pick up stiches for toe, heel and cuffs from the appropriate places.

Hooray for stripey heels! There was much discussion on the Ravelry Forum about the fit of these socks, with those gifted with high arches having some serious trouble actually getting them on their feet. The designer has plans to release the pattern to the general public and will probably incorporate some modifications to make them fit better. Since I've got lovely flat feet, I can get them on (although it's a tight squeeze over the heel!). They're perfectly comfortable once they're on, so the pattern works for me.

As always, it was a thrill to knit with yarn I'd made myself. I used up maybe two thirds of the skein, so I've got plenty left for a girl pair or part of the Sock Yarn Blanket. I'm hoping they will wear okay too - my biggest concern with handspun socks is the possibility of it wearing out instantaneously.

I've started the second sock of Sock Madness, which pays homage to The Nectar of the Gods*. And I'm thinking that it would be fun to actually compete next year.

Using only handspun. Tee hee!

* For the uninitiated, that would be coffee.

60 Months

Dear Devil,

Just over a week ago, you turned five years old. I know it's a cliche to rave about how fast time is going, but I swear to Gourds that only yesterday, you were this:

And in reality (something that I feel I have a tenuous grasp on at the best of times), you are this:

And this:

And this:

You have become oh so grown up and not shy about informing people that you are not a little baby anymore! We went on an expedition with some friends yesterday, and one little girl on the playground made the mistake of referring to the house that you and T were playing in as "the babies' house". You spent the next fifteen minutes following the poor girl around, informing her of the error of her characterization. "We are not babies!" In the end, you were great friends and played together happily until her mother ruined it by leaving, but it's an example of your insistence on fairness and things being right.

Since September, and your first suspicious trip to school, you have become a true convert. You are thrilled to go in the mornings, you proudly tell me when you get stickers on your sticker chart for helping out or cleaning up nicely, and you are usually pretty excited to come home and do your homework, such as it is. Your teacher says that it's as if you've been with your classmates forever, that's how well you've fitted in with everyone.

You are now genuinely reading, which I find more thrilling then I can explain. As someone for whom reading is an incredibly important thing, I'm so happy to see you starting out on the journey, and I can't wait to introduce you to some of the books that I loved as a child (and stayed up late with a flashlight under my covers to read after I was supposed to be asleep. I'm sure you'll do the same.) As a result of learning to read, you're also developing a British/Brahmin accent that would make your paternal great-grandfather extremely proud (not that he cared about that sort of thing, but you sound like him a bit) (although you are much more garrulous then he ever was!) Sometimes it takes me a few minutes to understand what you're trying to say because it's such a bizarre combination of American and English pronounciation. I suspect that this experience, of learning to read phonetically in the UK, will color your and your sister's speech for the rest of your lives. An interesting thought, that this experience may leave such an obvious mark upon you. I do hope it's for the best.

It's been a grand ride this far baby, and I am so looking forward to whatever comes next.

With all my love,

Mama (or, as you now insist, Mum)

Straw into gold

Or in this case, yarn into socks.

Pattern: Rumpled! by Alice Yu, for the Knit Love Sock Club 2010, Installment #1
Yarn: Alchemy Yarns of Transformation Juniper in Rumplestiltskein
Needles: US 1.5/2.5 mm circulars
Gauge: 9 sts/12 rows per inch
Start/finish: 26 January - 15 March 2010
Comments/mods: I loved this yarn colorwise - it was the perfect thing for a grey January in the UK. As previously mentioned, the yarn was a bit splitty, but it wasn't too bad, and it has such gorgeous sproing, that it made up for the splitty-ness. Wearing them is like have wooly elastic on my feet.

I did modify a couple of things. The pattern repeat is 24 rows long, and the pattern as written has you knit 1.3 repeats before starting the heel. I am impatient enough to want socks to be on the shorter side, but that seemed way short for me, so I wanted a longer leg. But since they're knit from the top down, I was paranoid about running out of yarn. So I carefully weighed the yarn I had, knit half a repeat, weighed again, weighed at the end of the heel flap, etc, etc. I worked another half repeat on the leg, and could have done a full repeat, since I ended up getting a sock and a half out of one skein. And I have big feet.

The only other thing I did a bit differently was to use a large needle for the long-tail cast on edge to make sure it was stretchy enough. The stitch pattern was great fun to knit, but easy to remember, so I didn't have to carry the chart around with me obsessively. The first sock took about a week, and then the olympics happened and all other knitting was put on hold. Now they're done, just in time for warmer weather, some sun and daffodils!

Oh well, they'll be very welcome when it gets cold again next fall. Or June...or next week. I guess it could be any time actually!

Mother's Day

Almost five years ago, on my first Mother's Day, Ironman took wee two month old baby Devil to an all-women's triathlon (he was "volunteering")and left me by myself for six hours. It was bliss (except for the exploding boobies part - thank you Medela!). It was the first time I'd been by myself for more then half an hour in a long time, and I loved every minute of it.

This year, I actually got to celebrate Mother's Day on Saturday with a similar event. IM went for a run early, and by 9:45, I was on my way to the Tube, with instructions not to come home until dinner time. Ummm...ok! My first stop was the Handweavers Studio, a lovely shop in Finsbury Park. Although it is largely a weaving shop, complete with shelves and shelves of gorgeous yarn for weaving in the most incredibly array of colors, they also sell spinning fiber and wheels. They had a bunch of undyed fibers of both the animal and plant varieties (mmmmm....cashmere/silk blends!), but I came away with 50 g of tussah silk dyed by Treetops Colour Harmonies, in "Thunderstorm" (always with the blues...). And a copy of Abby's book, which I've been wanting to get for a while now. And I'm much happier to buy it from actual people rather then Amazon.

Then it was off to Loop, in Islington. What a lovely store! Small and cosy, with what I assume is a classroom downstairs (lots of people were coming in for a crochet class). They've got a nice range of yarns, including a bunch I'd never seen before. I came away with three skeins of sock yarn...

Crazy Zauberball, for the first sock of Sock Madness IV.

Some Misti Alpaca Hand Paint sock yarn, in slightly more manly colors, that I'm thinking will be socks for the Man with the -20C toes.

And some Handmaiden Casbah Sock, in "Blackberry", that I just could not resist.

After doing serious damage to my bank balance, I then went to Leicester Square, ate ice cream and saw "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", which was grim and in Swedish (! I had no idea). Thank goodness Hollywood didn't get a hold of this one. The book is very dark, and LA would have twisted it into something with car chases and explosions. But this version was pretty true to the story, and the actress who plays Lisbeth was great. After the movie I headed home to meet up with the rest of the family, who had happily spent the day at the Dinosaur Museum and the Princess Diana playground. It was a lovely day.