Experimental swatching

I would really like to rant about the day I had, but seeing as its is still today and time heals all wounds (or at least takes the sting out of them) and attempts at self preservation in this 24hr period seem to be backfiring on me...

I will not rant. I won't even save it for another day.

That does mean that I cannot talk about knitting, but this is OK since I've been in a mad spinning frenzy this evening. Partly coping mechanism, partly wanna finish stuff that I've been working on forever.

First to be finished - my polwarth samples. I picked up 4 oz of polwarth dyed locks at Yarnorama at the last spin in and tried spinning them with different hand preps.

I started out with hand cards and spun about 2/3rds of the fiber with a woolen long draw from rolags. I plied half of it back on itself to see how it changed with plying. I like how lofty the finished yarn is, but the carded prep has a lot of nepps and is fairly uneven. This is typical of woolen yarns to a point but I have spun much more consistent woolen singles than this before.

Part of the problem may have been my cards. Polwarth is a fairly fine wool and I have coarse cloth cards. Part of the problem may also have been the amount of lanolin left on the locks - it was enough to make them somewhat sticky and in hindsight I might have been happier if I had washed the locks before carding & spinning.

I put aside the locks that had the best structure left to them while I was doing this and so for the last third of the fiber I simply flicked them open on both ends and spun them worsted like I would a commercial top. The result is very different from the woolen. Smooth and fairly consistent and it seems to have notably more drape. I enjoyed the spinning this way much more as well. The lanolin effect was vastly reduced when spinning from fibers that were lined up.

The results left to right:

Woolen 2-ply, 176yds & 1.2 oz
Woolen singles, 282yds & 1.1oz
Worsted singles, 420yds & 1.3oz

My missing ~half ounce seems to have gone to a combination of waste/short cuts, VM and lanolin which I did scour out mostly when I washed the finished yarn (I don't like knitting with greasy wool any more than I like spinning it) and this is something I'll take into account in the future when working with locks and fleece vs. roving or top.

One thing I didn't like about these particular locks is the perfume the dyer put on them. It took me a lot more washing than I would normally do to get it mostly out and even now there is a faint scent on them that as one of my knitting friends mentioned smells rather like "Old Lady Perfume". I can only assume this was done to cover up the sheepy smell but I would much have preferred Au de Sweaty Ewe.

I also finally(!) finished the last of my 2oz of 50/50 Yak/Merino.

The finished yarn is lovely and soft. It is still drying at the moment so better photos will follow. I am estimating it at 360yds, but I need to measure the dry hank to be sure of any shrinkage.

This was a complete nuisance to spin and the finished yarn feels like a real accomplishment. The blend was not very homogeneous so I pulled off bits by the "lock" fluffed them and rolled them into mini-faux rolags and then spun them semi-woolen. This mostly limited the tendency to spin out all the merino but there are still sections that are just yak or merino despite all my best efforts. The final yarn is more consistent than I expected considering. There are some thick & thin bits, especially where the first lengths of yarn I spun are, but its a pretty nice heavy lace/light fingering.

Although I really love the brown marl I am considering over dyeing it. I just tend to prefer color to neutrals.

Finally, I spun this much merino:

Its much heavier than all this lace weight I've been doing lately and a nice change of pace. I'm hoping for a 3-ply worsted. Maybe plied with something variegated.

I have a whole pound of the solid so it will be sweater yarn (Or vest yarn if it doesn't get a third alternate color ply).

Mmm... sweater yarn.

My give up

... for now anyway.

I am being punished for some previous crime against knitting, I just know it.

After going on and on and on about how much I wanted a dark red heavy cabled sweater I gave in and bought a bunch of Berrocco Inca Gold in Vino on sale and the Vivian pattern.

This yarn is lush. I love it. It makes lovely popping cables and its soft but firm at the same time - Also favorite shade of red ever.

This pattern is gorgeous and flattering and intricate and interesting.

This sweater when its done will be the hotness.

Now, I was doubly good about this. I swatched the yarn before I invested in the sweater's worth and by swatch I mean I knit half a freaking sleeve.

Seriously.

My swatch is over a foot long. I used half a ball of yarn to do it. I used two needles sizes because one looked pretty close but I went down anyway in case it blocked out some (it did).

I washed it.

I blocked it.

I carried it around in my knitting bag for a week and took it out to pet it and reconfirm that yes, the gauge is workable and yes the cables look good, and yes the seed stitch is lovely.

Now - Technically the pattern calls for aran/bulky yarn and Inca Gold is definitely a worsted weight. But this is fine. Other people have successfully made this pattern in worsted yarns and I went through and read all their notes.

I want this to fit with zero ease, but I want that to be zero ease over something more than a cami. So I measure myself with a dress shirt on and then with a light v-neck sweater and a t-shirt and figure that to accommodate the slightly finer yarn and half stitch off of gauge I have that I should go up one size from my bust. Especially since my last sweater was massively too small.

All this sounds reasonable, yes?

One reason I was really feeling this pattern is that its knit in one piece from the bottom up so I can try it on as I go and adjust as necessary. I'm pretty sure while I'm casting on that this is going to work out extra well because *if* for some reason the size I've chosen looks like its going to be a little loose come the end of the shaping I can do some extra decreases in the waist and slim it down a size at the bust line. I am a little on the hippy side anyway so this works perfectly in my head.

I have knit the first 25 rows or so this week which gives me about 5 inches of fabric and I decide that this is a good point to try it on.

I don't really need to tell you how that went do I? (Just for the record this time it was too big. By something like 4 inches - and i tried it on over jeans and with a sweater on)

Thankfully I was only 1 ball in and so I quite un-neurotically (aside from the brief stomping fit and banging of my head against the wall and cussing) pulled it all out and set it aside.

I will try this again in January.

Maybe 2010 will be my sweater year because clearly 2009 is not.

(Thankfully Inca gold frogs well.)

Oh! Shiny!

spindleset2
Originally uploaded by kleighb

One of the women at my Thursday night knitting group has been working on making a line of drop spindles and I've been having entirely too much fun playing with them as she's worked out how to put them together. Tonight she brought in the first finished batch and they are quite lovely.

One of them (made out of a cool sounding wood that I've already forgotten the name of... it starts with a "Ch" sound I think. Its pretty and kind of iridescent) decided that it needed to come home with me. Because it loves me.

Which is good because I love it back.

(It is the smaller of the two in the picture, the big one is an earlier prototype that came home with me awhile ago. It is also very nice but more of a plying weight at a bit over 1.5oz - the little lovely is 5/8oz. which is right in my favorite weight range. And Oh! their cutouts match! Its like having a paired set!)

I sort of lost interests in top whorls after I first learned to spin, but I am rediscovering the appeal here. I have never had one that's done a thigh roll quite so nicely. And she does spin and spin and spin and spin....

Also did I mention the pretty shiny part?

Ugh

You know that sick feeling you get when you start on a fix, get about halfway through it and then finally admit that no, this is not working out and really you need to just kill the insane number of hours you've put into it already and start over?

No?

Perhaps you are not a Type A personality then.

I remember coaching an artist friend of mine about this a few years ago. The conversation was about anatomy and how it was unfortunately very simply wrong on a certain drawing. It could be fudged sure, and maybe it would be overlooked by a casual observer on a single glance but even an untrained eye would notice that something was very simply not right. Maybe they wouldn't be able to pinpoint what exactly was off but they'd know SOMETHING was. And I said (because these words were just doomed to come back and haunt me):

"Sometimes you just have to say its done and wrong and be willing to throw it out and start all over again. I know you've put hours upon hours into working on it. I know you're in love with the idea of it. I know you want to be able to fix it, but sometimes to get what you intended you just have to be willing to throw it all out and start over."

And yeah, my Tempest? My Tempest is there.

Sure the patches would work. But I would never be happy with them. I can see them and I don't like them. I really really don't like them.

The fabric this yarn created is beautiful and I'm ruining it with sloppy attempts to salvage a sweater that doesn't fit.

The idea of tearing this out makes me feel physically ill. For one thing I covet this yarn in a way that's hard to really quantify. Its SPECIAL in a lot of ways and its already been CUT. Which means to undo all my work I'm going to have to pick out a lot of woven in ends, ball up dozens of smaller bits and then reskein them so they can be washed and reknit. When I redo the sweater there will be a dozen times the ends needing to be woven in (And here I thought the first time was miserable).

But the alternative is a sweater I don't love or even necessarily like. One that doesn't fit and that makes me feel sloppy to wear.

And that depresses me even more than the idea of reknitting the whole thing. This yarn and I both deserve better than that.

Tempermental Tempest

I should, by all rights, be finished with my Tempest cardi by now.

Sure I took a few weeks off of regular knitting to play Dragon Age. Sure I have spent most of the time not playing Dragon Age the last week spinning (cashmere - because how can you say wait to cashmere?).

Still! Before my darkspawn filled hiatus I was down to the sleeves. And I do mean JUST THE SLEEVES. The body was done. ends woven end. blocked. DONE. The sleeves were even started, I just needed to get knitting, seam it up and ha! finished sweater!

So I finally cracked down on myself this weekend and finished the sleeves. And today I went to seam it up, happy dreams of wearing it to Thanksgiving dinner dancing in my head.

Clearly its not done.

What happened is this. I went on my merry way, seaming the sleeve in and closing up the armhole. I was all hyped to start the side seams when I got home from work and I went to try it on to show off to my Mom and.... The arms are too snug.

Not just kind of fitted, but circulation inhibiting tight. Seriously these are made for someone with bony anorexic arms.

Closer inspection reveals that really... the whole sweater is a bit too small. Its very bizarre because I totally followed directions. I swatched and then blocked and then swatched again and then blocked again. I got gauge EXACTLY (I never get gauge exactly). I made ZERO modifications. I knit to what seemed like the right size.

My first instinct is that this is all those weeks of sitting on my lazy bum and killing demons coming back to bite me, but the scale and my tape measure assure me that however flabby I feel I should still fit into this sweater.

See my boobs not being interested in fitting in there? This sweater was clearly designed with the less chested in mind. (Also see my stupid squinty face? This is totally why one should not take mirror pictures of oneself)

This is not the end all of the tempest though. I wear most of my cardigans open anyway and the back is close fitting but not hopeless. So it doesn't close over my chest. Neither do a third of the button down shirts I own (I think they mostly did when I bought them - clearly my boobs have a mind of their own.. And also cotton shrinks. Stupid cotton.). That's what layers are for. The trick here is having armholes that I can fit another layer into (also fitting my arm in there without the tourniquet effect would be nice).

I've devised a cunning solution to my problem. I'm proceeding to set in the sleeves and then I'm frogging them back to the armholes. I can cast on a few extra stitches under the arms and knit the sleeves back down - in the round this time to avoid me wanting to stab myself redoing all that seaming again. This leaves a gap under the arms that is going to require a little gusset and really if I have enough yarn knitting a small 1 inch thick panel between the back and side pieces would do wonders for the fit (I am not really counting on having that much yarn).

Either way, it should end up wearable (please, please let it end up wearable), if not exactly what I intended.

I am beginning to wonder if perhaps I am simply not meant to knit garments.

Wynne knits

I got my copy of Dragon Age on the 3rd and it has very seriously been eating into my knitting time. My Tempest, which would totally be finished by now otherwise, is sitting on my desk trying to keep me from killing darkspawn. Unfortunately for it, the darkspawn are winning. I do however find it amusing to imagine throwing sweaters at ogres whenever I cast a Tempest spell.

I haven't quite crawled into a hole and died yet. I've still been making it out of my apartment to forage and collect a paycheck and I even refused to skip my knitting groups for the game... though that was partly because they fell during periods where I was either tired of being killed by tentacle monsters or annoyed with Alister for being a soul crushing evil man and abandoning me and so far too depressed to carry on with ending the blight.

I eventually solved this by killing myself heroically, which was rather less satisfactory than I'd hoped (The bastard didn't even come and cry on my grave). And then afterward I reloaded and let him have his way and we lived happily (demon babies notwithstanding) ever after.

Maybe.

Um anyway, my point is knitting is everywhere.

Even in my video games.

Because I was walking around a village and Wynne turns to Sten and she goes "You must get cold, I suppose we can't find a cloak in your size but maybe if I can just find some good wool yarn..."

My life is very circular.

Its always what you can't have...

My stash and I are in a pretty good place with each other. It owns my living room and I try to keep its weight down to around a point where I can still fit in there too.

The past few months its been on a little bit of a diet. Somehow before I moved to Austin it had managed to put on a lot of concealed weight. I didn't realize the bloat was at the level it was until I got here and started unpacking and then kept unpacking and kept unpacking and kept unpacking...

It kicked out my books you know. They're all still in storage somewhere in Kentucky because the yarn wouldn't let them in the car for fear some of it might have to sit in storage instead.

Anyway, once the glut was revealed I sat down with it and we had a little talk about its problems with emotional eating, and how this really wasn't healthy and there were bills that had to take priority sometimes. And it agreed that it would try to cut back some. Maybe not try to drop the weight but at least try and manage it some and we've been in a pretty good place, the two of us, since then.

I've given it some sock yarn and a lace cardigan when its been good for the month, and I even bought it a second wheel to help it burn off some fiber.

I've been keeping busy with my knitting, using up some gems its been hiding in its depths for awhile and I've been pretty happy all around with this arrangement. I think we both have.

My tempest is on the last front panel though and I can see it being finished in the next few weeks. And I've been looking through the stash for my next larger project. There's lots of choices - I have more Wollmeise in red for a lace shrug or cropped cardi, there's some gold cotton I chose for a Whisper cardi awhile back. There's an awful lot of Ella Rae Merino Lace if I want to make a second tempest, and I have that blue zephyr that I want to do an Aeolian shawl with.

The problem is - and this is really hard and contrary for me to say - I don't want to knit another lightweight sweater. I want to knit something sturdy. With cables. Lots of intricate cables. Like the Vivian hoodie or maybe a Twist. Or even the Central Park Hoodie, which I acutally already have the pattern for and have for years now and just never get around to finding appropriate yarn for. I want to knit it out of wool. A soft plushie wool. In a very deep red. Berroco Inca Gold in Vino, or maybe Kashmir Aran in Red or Ember.

And I do not have any yarn like that in the stash.

And I do not have any money to buy the yarn like that to put in the stash.

And all I can think is - you couldn't have started craving this two months ago? When there was money to feed you?