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.

How much knitting have you torn out today?

Sometimes I think my brand of crazy would traumatize me if I stopped and considered it too closely.

Instead of being content with my new project(s) or better yet being all enthusiastic about finishing my Firefly Cardi which is seriously a sleeve and a seam from being done, or finding a pattern for the Black Magic yarn or even working on finishing some of my other spinning projects I am having a weird kind of creative freakout/geekout.

I have somehow managed to restrain myself from any major geek knitting meltdowns since I finished the Deadpool mitts (half-finished and stalled out N7 gloves notwithstanding - I anticipate they will be back in progress either this winter when I start wishing for fingerless mitts again or when ME3 approaches depending on my relative flakiness and the availability of a good gunmetal gray sock yarn which I never did locate).

Anyway. I've been good dammit.

I have however had it in my head since sometime during watching season 2 or 3 of Supernatural that the Devil's Trap Heptagram would make a really really sweet circular shawl.

Seeing as a) Circular shawls are a pretty big time and yarn investment and b) I have never actually knit a circular shawl before I managed to stuff this into the back of my head for later.

Seriously.

I held out like a whole two months.

Anyway, the design that was used in the show appears to be based on a pentacle from the Key of Solomon (which - real book and everything) taken with some artistic licence and a scorpion thrown in. It features a Heptragram inscribed inside a Heptagon inscribed inside a circle. The original pentacle its likely based on actually has a second heptagram inside the larger one inscribed in its own circle.

For the sake of my sanity I decided straight off to ignore the additional details of the design (mostly writing) and for the sake of not having a huge block of nothing in the middle I decided to use a second heptagram in the interior of the design.

This is what I'm trying to acheive (roughly)

There actually end up being 3 Heptagons and 3 Heptagrams in the design. I considered having the interior second Heptagram inscribed in a circle instead but I'm struggling enough with how I'm going to handle rounding the outside edges. Its just easier to either have all flat planes or all round edges. I may yet wind up with a Heptagon shawl rather than a circular one simply because my only possible solution so far is a buttload of short rows.

The nice thing about this overall is that, even though I'm going to be making it because I am a huge geek it doesn't scream "Huge Nerd" the way the DP mitts do (or the N7 mitts will). The design ends up being just attractively geometric.

And face it - if I'm going to bother to knit this giant thing its going to be something I can wear around without it being too obviously dorky.

Rough design sorted I have charted, knit, torn out, re-charted, re-knit and torn out the interior rows working out how the increases should fit. The upside to this is that I am fairly confident now that the rate of increase I have worked out is going to work fine. The downside is that I'm pretty sure this is all getting pulled out and restarted again.

I started out with some of my Arucania Lonco and its giving me gauge problems. If I try to tighten up the stitches I'm fairly confident that this shawl will end up weighing about 10lbs, but its not going to bloom enough to look right at the gauge its being knit. Also I am considering that I may have waited too long to start the interior Heptagon and if I continue on I will be knitting less of a shawl and more of a blanket. A really big not attractive 10lb blanket.

Unfortunately my yarn alternatives are a little slim. I have some Malabrigo lace in a sufficient amount but that means the shawl will be purple... which... purple doesn't feel very badass-demon-hunter ya know? and I have some Wollmeise in Red... but its this really cheerful candy apple red so... again not exactly what I was going for. There is some laceweight merino in light teal which I am tempted to over-dye into a more sinister blue (expect that I actually really like the teal) and some white sock yarn that I could dye into a dark red or navy. I've also considered possibly going with Knit Picks because I can get the needed quantity of Shadow for around 12$ (It even comes in a suitably sinister color called "Nocturne") and that might just save me enough angst to be worth breaking my yarn diet.

What all this amounts to?

I have probably clocked around 15 hrs of knitting time in the past day and a half and all of it has been or will be torn out.

I think I'm going to go work on my Aeolian for awhile and not think about that.

Onward and well... onward

I have been hunting like mad for the perfect shawl to make from my Black Magic yarn. I want to do something like Panache because IMO the long repeats look their best with something that has a strong repeating wave or chevron. I've done Revontuli before and while I loved it, I'm not in a hurry to be repeating patterns right now. Unfortunately I'm short on yardage for the smaller Panache and its not looking like a particularly easy pattern to resize.

So rather than cast on OMG RIGHT NOW with the Black Magic (which I really want to do) I went stash diving to see what I had that could work for another shawl in my freakishly long queue.

I have a lot of yarn.

Unfortunately, a lot of the lace yarn I have is single hanks that all total about 450yds - which is just shy of what I need for pretty much everything I want to knit right now. Also unfortunately, after having finished the Haruni Shawl I only want to knit lace with handspun. Because its extra awesome that way.

I think this probably makes me some kind of uber-yarn-snob.

Like worse of one than I was before.

Anyway, I pulled out some of the yarn I have set aside for a Swallowtail (soysilk) but I don't really want to knit that right now and I keep looking at it and thinking - this would weave so much nicer than it would knit - so I put it back and then I pulled out the Zephyr and the beads I got for the Aeolian shawl back in... er... October? November? (The Zephyr's from the yarn crawl so awhile ago) but I'm just not feeling the navy lace right now and then I pulled out all my handspun (of which there is not actually that much because I seem to always either give it away or use it fairly quickly) and remembered I had this gray-blue BFL/Seacell/Silk blend and even though there's not enough of it for the Aeolian NOW I have 2oz left that can be spun up with relatively little angst and also it looks decent with the beads I already have.

So yay, I have a new shawl cast on!

I don't actually anticipate this with be a fast knit (because of the beads) or a particularly portable knit (also because of the beads) but hopefully it will hold me until I can either a) find the perfect project for the black magic or b) spin something else or c) get off my shawl kick.

Also I may have cast on some socks tonight. I'm not sure. It was a weird night.