Fiber Friday: Stage 1 is completed

And it only took a month!

I was so excited at finishing bobbin #9 (that small, unfull one at the bottom right), that I wound it off into a ball and started Stage 2 plying immediately. One viewing of "Serenity" later, and I'm into bobbin #8, and have almost a full bobbin of cabled yarn. It looks a bit different from my sample, i.e. thinner and less bouncy, but I'm hoping that impression is due to 1) the yarn being under tension as it goes on to the bobbin and 2) the lack of fulling finish.

I was also interested to see that the 2-ply showed a similar, if less dramatic, color gradation as the singles:

I kind of wonder if the finished yarn will do the same, but since I plan to skein this stuff up, wash it, and stick it away in a dark corner until, oh probably October, you'll have to live in suspense for a while. Try not to let it keep you up at night.

The search for the perfect buttons

So I've been wearing my new Tappan Zee around without buttons, but I was very interested in seeing how it looked actually done up the way it was supposed to be. This is a new sweater silhouette for me, and I wanted to confirm that, yes it is quite flattering, before I run out and knit 42 more top-down-yoke-sweaters-that-fasten-just-at-the-top.

After a long day at work (and an Ironman Friday at home, so he could be on Child Duty), I headed over to my semi-local sewing store and spent a while perusing the button collection. After several rounds through the displays (maybe, no, no, no, omg hell no, maybe, no, no, no), I stumbled across these babies.

Dark blue/navy with iridescent green and purple stripes. Just perfect.

And the done-up verdict?

(please excuse the bad T shirt color and the streaky mirror)

Yeah, baby, yeah. Top-down yoke is good. Which one should I do next?

Designing

In addition to doing some knitting and spinning, I've been playing around with some design ideas for a while, and I just now emailed off a couple of proposals for The Sanguine Gryphon's Fall pattern line.

The inspiration for the pattern line is Steampunk (hurrah!), and I came up with a pair of mitts and a vest that I'll be working on. Even if they don't get accepted for TSG, I'll still work them up and publish them myself or through someone else.

The mitts were inspired by Tower Bridge here in London, which is a veritable Monstrosity of Victorian architecture.

But it is pretty...the mitts look like this:

This pattern is even already written up and ready to go. Although now I'm thinking that an elbow length version might be nice, as well as a shorter, more manly wrist length version. We'll see...

The second pattern is for a women's vest with a deep V neck. The swatch looks like this:

This is knit in the same overdyed yarn I used for Manon, and I like the way the stitch pattern looks in a semi-solid. I'm torn between liking it better unstretched, as above, or stretched out.

I like the laciness of this, but am also drawn to the cushiness of the unstretched version. We'll see...all I've got beyond these swatches is a very poorly drawn sketch, and some scribbled notes. Maybe I'll get to working on it one of these days. I'll keep you posted on the proposals in any event.

Now back to your regularly scheduled blog silence.

Hey, it's Friday!

While I have not been blogging so much, I have been doing some knitting and plying. I've been working on the third pattern from Sock Madness, and am on to the leg of the second sock.

This yarn has been in my stash for at least the length of Devil's life, so I'm glad to have finally found a project that seems to be working well. I think this is the third or fourth pattern I've tried with it...

There has also been plying. I've now got five bobbins full of two ply, and am midway through bobbin #6. My prediction is nine total bobbins-ful, but I have no real logic to this. The first bobbin, I managed to fit two bobbins worth of singles on to one with only a few yards difference between the two (!), so I'm winging it here.

Plying this has been nice because it is totally mindless. I get the wheel going, let the singles run through my fingers at a particular speed, and there they are, ready to go. Thank goodness, because after all the trouble spinning the singles, mindless is a very, very good thing!

FO: The yarn that was supposed to be Tempest is now something else!

Pattern: Tappan Zee by Amy King
Yarn: Yarn School Corriedale Cross, ~675 yds.
Needles: US 5/3.75 mm bamboo circulars
Start/finish: 26 March - 26 April 2010
Gauge: 20 sts/32 rows in 4 inches
Comments/modifications: What a lovely and quick (despite my time line) knit! A top down circular yoke is not a sweater style I've knit before, but it was really fun. The lace pattern in the yoke keeps it from getting too monotonous, and the yarn colors helped with the monotany on the body. I made one major modification: instead of binding off the sleeve stitches when I got to them, I put them on holders. My thinking was that I wanted to put sleeves on when I was done with the body, and make them as long as the yarn held out. Once I was done with the body, I decided to keep the cap sleeves for the moment, so I bound off in knit from the wrong side. That way, in the fall when it starts getting cooler, I can pick out that bound off edge and knit the sleeves down.

I love the diamond detail at the bottom,

which matches the diamonds in the yoke.

Now for the yarn. I blogged about the spinning last spring/summer, but discovered when I started swatching, that the yarn need a bit of TLC. As you can see,

I was a wee bit tense when I did the plying. Perhaps I was a bit overplied myself, what with the move and all, but there is some serious skew in that stockinette. Add to that the fact that the yarn was not so pleasant to knit with (read: wiry, stiff and scratchy) and I decided that I needed to do something to take out some of the plying twist.

I took the three skeins I'd planned to use for the sweater (based on relatively similar grists) and ran them back through the wheel to take out some of the plying twist. I basically put the brake band on tightly, and re-plied the yarn with the wheel spinning in the same direction as when I spun the singles. I more or less let the yarn run onto the bobbin with only a little bit of tension, but if I came across a section that was really over-plied I held on a bit longer. Reskeined, rewashed, redried, and reswatched.

Much softer, much less noticeable bias, much more pleasant to work with. I've gotten a wee bit obsessed with grist recently, so I noted what these skeins came in at: 253 yds at 1094 ypp, 285 yds at 1140 ypp and 225 yds at 973 ypp. I started with the heaviest grist on the top, since the skein I have left for the arms is also around 975 ypp, and I wanted the lighter fluffier stuff in the body.

So all in all a great success. I desperately need to find the right buttons for it, but that may have to wait for a bit, since we've now entered The Month of Nonstop Houseguests. We currently have four parents and four girl children, aged five and under, in our house. As soon as the extra parents and children leave, we get an old friend from Tucson and his SO for a few days, and then a couple weeks later, Nana arrives. So forgive me if the blogging is a bit hit or miss for the next few weeks. Maybe I'll be able to get back here regularly when we finally have a functioning government!