The dog ate my homework

Or... I have a good excuse.

Really.

So, I wanted to have a nice picture of the second 4oz bobbin of Targhee to post today.

Unfortunately I do not have a full bobbin of Targhee to photograph.

I was actually pretty good about spinning. I spun through Monday and decided to take Wednesday as my rest day instead because there was just no way spinning was happening Wednesday if I wanted sleep to happen as well. And that was fine.

Then Thursday I threw my left shoulder out (how is somewhat a mystery - but somewhere between packing up the wheel to take to knitting group and the first half of my chai latte the joint stopped functioning correctly).

Friday I skipped due to the injury.

Saturday I spun, but pretty tentatively.

Sunday the shoulder was better and I resolved to get through at least 2/3rds of what was left...

And then I fell down the stairs and sprained my ankle.

Which yeah....

If its throbbing less tomorrow I will persist with only one treadle foot, but I am not holding my breathe (it hurts like hell right now and is all swollen up like a baseball and I'm mostly just praying its not like... broken or anything. It at least doesn't feel like I tore any major ligaments this time but seriously... hurts like hell).

So... maybe next week.

I have been knitting on my Print o' the Wave stole instead.

I would have a picture, but the camera is too far away so it will have to wait until I'm hobbling less.

This is not the blog you're looking for....

I have this idea in my head that no one reads this blog (except like maybe my Mom and a few close friends that just like to look at the pictures) because if I start to think that Other People are actually looking at my crazy I might have to go have a quiet mortified freakout in a closet or random dark corner somewhere.

Anyway this week I sent my mom the following email (verbatim):

[fangirling] OMG Jasmin from the Knitmore Girls commented on my blog! [/fangirling]

So, point being... you out there - reading this - You are not actually reading this. Its all a figment of your imagination. Everything you think you see me saying? Its all in your head.

There.

I feel better now.

I am kind of informally doing the Tour de Fleece this year.

By which I mean I am trying to spin every day of the tour but I don't have set goals that I am aiming for (considering the hours I am pulling at work just spinning every day is actually a pretty challenging goal). I really wish there was a winter version of this because summer is just never a good time for me to take on big endurance projects.

So anyway, what I am working on to start is 8oz of Targhee from yarnorama. I purchased and started it on the 3rd at the spin in and as of last night I'm finished with the first 4oz braid. I'm tentatively hoping to get through the second braid this week (not unreasonable) and then ply the last few days of the Tour with some merino spun up in between.

I brought home a lb of Ashland Bay Merino in English Garden along with the Targhee so I can finish the sweater yarn that started with the teal merino singles I finished awhile back. It has some of the same shades in it, but I'm hoping that plying a solid with a blended multi gives a bit more interest to the finished yarn. I don't expect to get that done during the Tour, but if I could get through 4 or 8 ounces that would still be pretty satisfying.

Alternately (read - if it gets here before I finish the Targhee) I purchased some Foot Notes pencil roving from Fiber Optic this week in the color "Ultraviolet" which I think (with a bit of firestar drafted in perhaps or plied with some holographic thread) will work out to make a pretty badass demon yarn. *

* For anyone that keeps wondering what the heck the the demon yarn is about - in Supernatural when a demon isn't possessing someone they are visible as this black smoke that often contains flashes of purple lightning. I tried to find a picture or video of this but all I could dig up was this fanvid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsMBlEQyeiM which does have the bonus of being set to a song by Imogen Heap and being generally well done even if the cloud shots are a bit short.

Nom Nom Nom...

I am currently spinning 8oz of Targhee, which is the base for Yarnorama's July 2010 colorway and it is AWESOME.

I feel like kind of a dumbass because I could swear I've spun Targhee before, but either it was not this good of a preparation or I imagined it because this? This is dreamy. *_*

Its got a super high crimp and loftiness that I just haven't encountered before. The closest thing I can recall is the falkland I spun recently but this has a smooth light draft that reminds me of a merino rather than the sticky pull I had with the falkland. The singles are about the diameter I'd usually spin for a light fingering 2-ply but if the ply-back I tried is anything to go by the end yarn will be a sport or DK.

I can't wait to see the finished results, I can just see this becoming one of my favorite fibers to spin.

I also finished my Sushi socks today. They are the blackrose pattern from Knitty in Schoppel-Wolle Crazy Zauberball (in the "Frische Fische" colorway - get it? Yeah, I'm lame). I love these socks.

LOVE.

They may be my favorite handknit socks ever (well... discounting handspun socks, but those are a special case). They are stretchy and squishy and surprisingly light - each sock weighs in at about 30g. There's a lot of yardage in one ball and I've got enough left over for an entire third sock if I wanted. The colors are fun and unpredictable and just generally awesome.

The pattern is great fun. Its got exactly enough going on to keep from getting boring, but because a lot of the sock is in stockinette it made for a fast knit. I got the yarn as a pressie from Mom on the 23rd which puts a pair knit in eleven days.

Horray for (nearly) instant gratification!

Fandom is stalking me again

I have freakishly overlapping and unrelated interests.

I guess its not that weird being a knitter and seeing knitting things everywhere, like in Dragon Age when Wynne jokes about knitting Sten a cloak or when the ads on the Citadel in Mass Effect try to sell me handspun and handwoven robes.

Then a few weeks ago Misha Collins joked on twitter* about knitting (I assume he was being facetious but then again the man seems to be both an evil genius - with minions even - and also quite predictably unpredictable so god only knows) and then this week I was catching up on the Knitmore Girl's podcast finally and they were talking about Supernatural and even knitting supernatural socks! With demon cloud yarn!

Not kidding.

The actual yarn from the podcast has a bit too much pink and white for my tastes (really... almost any pink is too much pink for my tastes) but it did give me an inkling to dye up my own evil type yarn in black and violet, maybe with really really small flecks of an acidy-sorta fuchsia (which is the only tolerable shade of pink-like-ness IMO and even then only in small quantities) and ideally on a Kraemer Sterling base because evil demon yarn should be sparkly.

Alternately, it might be fun to ply some of fiber spun in said colors with some of that trippy hologram thread like I used in the Mardi Gras yarn - but ya know.... in black or red instead of gold.

I am not sure if this means that a lot of knitters like Supernatural or a lot of Supernatural fans are knitters. Or maybe it didn't start that way and fandom is just something that knitters pass on to one another like a virus transmitted through yarn fondling (A Knitterly Transmitted Disease if you will).

More likely I am a crazy obsessed person reading too much into the overlap.

Or else my obessions really are stalking me.

One of the two. **

I have new yarn and a finished cardigan that I should talk about also. I think I'll do that when I'm feeling a little less geeky though.

*We're going to ignore the part where I am actually following someone on twitter in spite of my general opinion that twitter-ers are crazy ego-maniacs and no one wants to hear that much about how some random famous or un-famous person got groped by a guy with a purple mohawk at starbucks or whatever

**If Dean winds up being a closet sock knitter in season 6 or something I'm calling it full circle and the second one clearly true which will turn me even more into the first.

June is for spinning

So far this month I have:

1. Spun 4 oz of Falkland

2. Won a speed spinning contest

3. Broken my CPW

(this bearing went boom)

4. Fixed my CPW

(this bearing is shiny and new - also the front maiden now turns again - also having handy friends is awesome)

5. Spun 4 oz of Wensleydale

(2.9oz / 400yds of singles & 1.2oz / 145yds of 2ply - I am thinking maybe an Ishbel with the singles.)

And its only the 17th.

For my next trick (and sticking with the longwools while I'm feeling confident) I am going to spin these leicester longwool locks:

CHAMPION!

Today I won a spinning contest. I spun 68 yards of Alpaca singles in 15 minutes (alternately that would be 272 yds an hour or 4.5 yds a minute. I am not sure if that is uber-fast in the extended world of speed spinning but I am plenty proud of it).

Go me =D

Also I got to play with a sock knitting machine, which - AWESOME (Even though I messed up the heel and had to tear out a sock).

If I was capable of forethought there might have been some pictures of these two things to show off. I don''t though, so you'll just have to imagine how cool my day was.

To Bead or not to Bead....

I have been futzing a lot with the circular shawl, trying to work out how to fit the heptagram design into a lace pattern that still looks like a lace shawl and not just some random mess of lines but that's still obviously a heptagram. I've been trying beading on the outline of the main design elements:

I'm working again with the red Arucania Lonco. I'm still not sure that this is the best yarn choice but it has the advantage of frogging well and being fairly WYSIWYG while I sort out the layout of the interior motif. I'm pretty happy with the pattern of the star and the inner heptagram but still on the fence with the beads. I'm concerned about the weight they add (I've used about half a 20g tube just on the inner design and the outer is likely to take something like 10x that) and also the way they shift the weight due to only using them on certain design elements.

I think it would actually be OK if I stuck with the fingering weight yarn, but if I redo the design in laceweight I'm just not seeing it hold up. I might see if I can try smaller beads (these are size 8 cubes - rounds would be lighter and if I can get a hook into a 10 that would make a world of difference but I just don't have the beading experience to know if that's workable.

I'm also not 100% sure it really needs it.

Still, I am persisting.

I am also spinning:

522yds / 4.3 oz of softspun Falkland singles. Its an average of a sport weight, with some thick and thin sections. I haven't the foggiest what I might do with it, but I feel pleased that I managed it since singles aren't really my favorite to spin and also I didn't really love the falkland. It was pretty sticky and required a lot of predrafting. The upside is it held together with very little twist, but it was still a lot more prep time then I like to put into commercial top.

I did some moderate fulling on finishing (hot/cold rinses and moderate agitation) but wasn't super agressive since I was worried about felting it to itself.

End result is light and lofty. Will have to try again with some merino.