Some thoughts on my first trip to Bavaria:
Good beer. Very good beer.
Even better ice cream.
Sadly, even a twenty-something pro triathelete kicking ass is not enough to redeem German men and their obsession with Speedos.
Driving from Straubing to Salzburg = one turned and completed sock heel.
I've recently come to the conclusion that I like the yarn I make myself much better then I like the yarn I buy. And I like being able to come up with my own colorways a lot. This is all well and good when I'm dyeing yarn for socks. Or a hat. Or mittens. Or anything small and one skein-able. But sweater lots? Sweater lots are another story entirely.
I have dyelot paranoia. So when I decided that this holiday's dye project would be the ~1700 yds of fingering weight wool/tencel from Green Mountain Spinnery, I had a bit of a dilemma. How to get all the skeins the same dyelot?
The last time I did this, I had the benefit of a very hot Houston summer to help out with the dye setting. Not being sure whether or not a London summer would have the same effect, I set out to do what I get paid to do: experiment.
First the soaking:
I soaked the seven skeins in plain water (aka no citric acid). Because I didn't want the dye to strike too fast and give a mottled/variegated look, I decided to soak the yarn alone and add the CA with the dye.
We (I) mixed up the dye stock, and waited anxiously for it to cool off a bit before adding it to the bin.
It all got mixed up, along with 1 tsp citric acid, and left alone. After four days, the dyebath was still pretty dark, so I added another tsp of acid.
On day 7, I got sick of waiting and hauled the yarn out.
There was a bit of purple left in the bin, but I liked the yarn color, so I took it out.
Then there was the heat setting of the dye. Everything went in to a garbage bag and into the microwave. Three minutes on high, three minutes rest, three times seemed to do the trick. Several rinses, a spin in the washing machine and voila!
1700 yards of periwinkle colored yarn, destined for Sprossling. Someday...
So, tomorrow we go haring off to the Continent for ten days, and I'm trying to figure out what to take to knit. The plane trip isn't all that long, but I'll be in a car touring Bavaria and Austria for a while, so I need some small projects to work on.
Thankfully, I've got a couple of design ideas that need some work, so I'm packing up bits of yarn and lots of different needle sizes, a bunch of Xeroxed pages from Barbara Walker Vol I and II, and I'm hoping for the best. Here's what's on the docket:
A new sock pattern, (maybe) for Sock Madness 2011.
Some swatching for the 4! Ounce! Challenge!.
My Aran Necklace Tank (wait, that's not my design...). This baby is now joined for the body, and it's just mindless knitting in the round from now until I run out of yarn. So I'm packing the last of the splittier-then-all-get-out Jo Sharp Soho DK and hoping for the best.
I'm afraid blogging will be spotty for the next little while - I've got one post in reserve that I'll schedule for next week, but other then that, things will be quiet. And since the Wollmeise shop is closed when we'll be in Munich, I don't even have the lure of serious yarn pr0n to tease you with. And no one is sorrier then me, believe me...
So, the last week or so of the Tour de Fleece I spent with a pound of Falklands top, half dyed in the colorway Five Plum Pie, and half in Grouch.
Grouch was the June 2010 Fiber Club offering, while Five Plum Pie came from May 2009. I decided to spin these two together when I browsed through my Hello Yarn stash and discovered that not only were they the same fiber, but they were very similar colorways. Five Plum Pie was mostly purples, with some greeny-yellow and brown accents, while Grouch was mostly greens and yellows, with a bit of purple.
I've been thinking of spinning up some yarn to knit a striped vest for a while now, using some lovely dark brown alpaca I've had sitting around for a long while. So I decided to do three different yarns: each colorway plied on itself, and one yarn that was one ply of each.
I prepped the fiber by splitting each 4 oz bump into five or six long strips and then mixing them together so they got spun in a random order.
Grouch got spun up first. I wasn't all that excited by the colors in the top, but as I spun up the singles, I got more excited about it. Yellow and greeny browns aren't really my thing, but these colors were amazing - mustard, bark brown, pea soup green, and dark plum.
I was aiming for a DK weight 2-ply, so I spun the singles a bit thicker then my default. Next up was Five Plum Pie.
This really could have been called Iris instead - beautiful blues and purples, with some bright green and beautiful dusty brown...gorgeous!
Then it was time to ply - first up was the mixture, Grouchy Pie.
After a warm soak, I ended up with 160 yds/3.4 oz of ~12 wpi yarn - right in the DK range. Then I did a bobbin of Grouch plied to itself:
Swoon...I ended up with 344 yds/6.6 oz of Grouch, and then did the rest of the Five Plum Pie plied together.
292 yds/6.3 oz. I was planning on alternating stripes of plain alpaca with each of the three colorways, but I'm not sure there will be enough variation between the Grouchy Pie and the other two to show up. So I may just use the 5PP/Grouch skeins for the vest, and save the combo for something else. But this is just another reason why this club is so good for me - I would never have picked out the Grouch on my own, and I think it's my favorite of the three yarns.
My 23 Days in July* ended up being pretty darned productive on the spinning front. Three different fibers, one of which (Wensleydale) I'd never spun before. Laceweight singles, matching skeins of 3-ply, color progression 2-ply and a colorway mixing experiment.
I ended up with 2420 yds of new yarn, 39.4 ounces spun, and a whole new level of inspiration for my spinning. This challenge was just what I needed to get my mojo back after the endless purple cabled yarn, and I had an absolute blast seeing what everyone else came up with. I even won a prize! I can see getting a bunch more yarn done before it gets cold, and then I'll have a wonderful fall and winter knitting with handspun!
*with apologies to John Wilcoxson
I'd like to introduce you to my five hour yarn:
Fiber: HYFC BFL in "Norway", previously seen on the blog in these mittens.
Spun/plied: 9.25:1/6:1, spun long draw from the fold.
Stats: 183 yds/4.4 oz (665 ypp) of lovely worsted-to-bulky squishtastic yarn
I was inspired by a number of the yarns in the HYFC Tour de Fleece team thread, and decided to do a 2-ply color progression with this fiber. I started by pulling the component color stretches apart, and ended up with six groups.
There was the red group, the orange group, royal blue, turquoise, light greyish blue and grey. I took each batch of fiber, split each chunk in half lengthwise, and made sure the two piles weighed the same (+/- 1 gr). Then I laid out the pieces for each group in the order I wanted to spin and started in on the first bobbin. After spinning the first little baggie of singles, I switched bobbins and spun up the same color group on the second bobbin.
I started with the grey, then went to light blue, turquoise, royal blue, red and finished up with the orange. One hour of Tour highlights one evening, and one viewing of Shrek 3 the next day, and the singles were all spun. I'd forgotten how much faster long draw is! It was also a relief to spin something thicker then the 60+ wpi singles I'd been doing for the previous two yarns...then it was time to ply. First the orange and red sections,
then the royal blue (my favorite!),
then the turquoise and finally the grey.
Plying took all of an hour. My obsessive fiber weighing paid off - most of the colors matched up really, really well, with a bit of bleed over to blend the transitions. I ended up with a few yards of singles left on one of the bobbins, but I just stopped there. No need to get silly about using it all, right?
A nice warm soak in Soak, and that's all she wrote! I was going to use this for hats for the girls, but now I'm leaning towards a nice scarf, maybe on the bias so the stripes slant? Or maybe worked lengthwise so there are really long skinny stripes? Decisions, decisions...
