blue/teal/pink handspun socks

I talked about making this yarn before, as well as the first pair of socks from it (the ones with diamonds made from traveling stitches). I managed to get another four pairs (five in total), using every last scrap (plus a bit of an additional skein). The second pair had cuffs, heel and toe in the contrasting grey, in an effort to use up all of the remaining grey yarn (I hate wasting my handspun!). Since I wasn’t sure how much I had, I started with the colorful yarn and a provisional cast on, knit the whole sock and then came back to do the grey ribbing at the top. I ended up with less than a foot after I finished casting off both cuffs! The third pair was a variation on the second, but all in the blue yarn. Unfortunately I don’t seem to have taken finished pictures of this pair, and they’re now at my mums…. I was super pleased at how well I got the colors to match on this pair! At this point I decided it was time for a mindless pair, so I knit a plain pair (ribbing along the whole cuff, plain knitting for the foot). The colors don’t match well, but I know that the two socks came from the same roving, and that’s what counts right? I wasn’t expecting to have any yarn left over, but I still had some. Since I really don’t like wasting my handspun, I decided to do a pair of short, small socks. I ended up needing to use a bit of my next handspun skein (I lost at yarn chicken…), but it blends in fairly well

The grey is a blend of 40% aplaca (named Serious), 40% shetland wool (sheep’s name is Treysa), and 20% black nylon, while the colorful is a commercially prepared merino roving that my mum dyed.

Tour de fleece

I did a lot of spinning this year, particularly during the summer (when the tour de fleece happened). The first yarn of the year was the blue-teal-pink sock yarn that I already posted about. Following that model, I started spinning up dyed roving for socks. I had these two rovings in my stash, with no planned project, both from Three Waters Farm, Green Sweetness ( a 80/20 Merino/Tussah silk blend) and Fiery Gems (85/15 Polwarth/silk blend). I really like Three Waters Farm’s roving-it comes in beautiful colors, and is a joy to spin. So, when I realized that these two braids wouldn’t last me long, I ordered up a whole bunch more. I started the ‘cluster of grapes’ Finn roving immediately.

My mom also dyed a fair amount of roving this summer, and I spun up 8 oz of a purple/yellow/green blend (blue faces Leicester) and am in the process of spinning a rainbow blend (merino). With these I decided to split the roving lengthwise into several pieces. I weighed each bit, and then tried to determine a spinning order that would result in the most matched yarn possible, by spinning segments of similar weights on two different spools. You can see the first roving all laid out waiting for me after I split it into twelve pieces (plus a bit of fluff that fell off the end of the initial roving). I’ve got quite a bit more roving from my mum, which should keep me busy for a long time! Particularly since apparently my wheel can be distracting in video chats because of the background noise, so I’ve switched back to mostly knitting.

After spinning up the colorful single, I then have been plying these with the same shetland/alpaca/nylon blend that I used in the last sock yarn. I do a two ply of the colorful and the grey, and then I chain ply that two ply for a final yarn that is six ply, half colorful and half grey. The result seems to be pretty sturdy and knits up very nicely for socks. I don’t yet have any long term data on sturdiness, but the more complicated pying structure (and also the nylon) should help with that. It’s also a fairly dense yarn.

My other spinning project was a blend of a whole bunch of fawn colored fiber that I was using up. The first ply was a 60/20/20 alpaca/silk/merino blend, and the second was 100% baby camel. I made a two ply, one of each, for about a worsted weight final yarn. I’m working on knitting it up into a shawl. The delay has been that a) I think I’m allergic to the camel fiber, and b) I determined that there was a much better construction to what I’m doing. Still, it’s almost done, just waiting for me to do the last 10% of knitting it.

It’s been a heck of a year

For me personally, things have worked out well this year, with healthy friends and family and my long distance relationship turning into a in-the-same-place relationship (in a climate where I get to wear wool more!). I know there are many who have not been as fortunate.

My posts stopped when I really got into mask making, and was devoting all my spare time to that. I ended up making over 1500 masks, which I gave out primarily to my neighbors, the county health office, and a nursing home. People were really kind to me, and through unsolicited donations I didn’t end up too much out of pocket from purchasing needed supplies (mostly elastic, but also wire, fabric and sewing needles, since most of the fabric was given to me by friends and my mum). By the end I’d gotten very efficient, and each mask took me under 10 minutes to make (so probably >250 hrs to make all the masks).

Mask making more or less ended when I moved, since by that time there were enough other suppliers of masks, and I didn’t have a great sewing setup in the one bedroom apartment we were staying in (and both working from home in…). Home hunting and moving in a pandemic was interesting, with much worrying about the safest way to get everyone and their stuff in the appropriate places. My mum is calling it ‘the great shuffle’, since my sister moved at the same time. We’re all very happy with our new living quarters. I think all of the boxes have been unpacked, though we’re still using some of the cardboard boxes for storage…

Since then I’ve been busy getting my new fiber studio/home office set up, plus knitting of course. And some spinning-with the new home came more space, and thus another wheel. More about the fiber projects to come shortly!

diamond traveling stitch socks

I was so excited to play with my handspun, and here are the first set of socks! I wasn’t sure how much a pattern would show up in this yarn, given the effect that cabling multiple colors together produces. I think these diamonds (made by little 1x1 stitch cables) worked well. I was also surprised to find that I think this yarn is a thinner weight fingering than normal! I used fewer stitches than I normally use for store bought fingering, expecting the yarn to be thicker (and thus give me fewer stitches per inch), but I think I probably should have used my standard number, as the socks are snug around my ankles.

Since I have four skeins of this mix of colored and grey sock yarn, I decided to knit each sock from a different skein, since the skeins (mostly) go through the same color progression. That way the socks would have similar colors. You can see that the first sock has a bit of blue at the cuff before going into teal, while the second sock just has a really long teal stretch. After the teal though, they both go to light blue, dark blue, and then purple, although the length of each color on the two socks is different, and the second sock goes into the pink after the purple. Even though the colors don’t match perfectly, I’m really happy with the overall effect and honestly that the colors match this much is a bit of a bonus!

COVID masks

I’ve started making cloth masks for donation. The first step was to take inventory of my fabric-I haven’t done much (any?) sewing in the past two years, so I don’t think I’d actually touched any of my fabric since I moved into this apartment. It turns out that I probably have enough linen to last me a lifetime, mostly in white but also in some other colors, and quite a lot of wool. (I really need to find a project that uses up my scrap wool, because I have lots of wool scraps, and I find them so hard to throw out!) My cotton supply was almost non-existent, consisting of some quilting cotton with knitting sheep on it, some 4x4 prints of my sheeps and other critters, some un-hemmed handkerchiefs and some blue paisley that was originally supposed to become a curtain.

I used the blue paisley for the front of the mask, and for the back I cut up a flannel bedsheet. I had no elastic, but gobs of ribbon, so these get to be tied masks. I went with the pattern my mom was told to use for the local hospitals at home, which is fairly simple, without a pocket for a filter. My mom has been putting wire at the top, to help shape the mask around the nose, but since I don’t have any wire…

The paisley fabric was enough for 68 masks, and I’ve got it down to just under 12 min per mask. I’m really proud of my efficient ribbon cutting skills-I skeined up some of the ribbon, and then cut the skein into 4 pieces for my long ribbons for the top of the head, and 6 pieces for the shorter ribbons at the bottom. Each mask I originally cut at 6.5” x 9” (my cutting guide happens to be 6.5” wide, hence that measurement), and the ribbons are 12’ and 18'‘. Each of the pleats are between 0.5” and 0.75” deep, and the finished masks are about 3” tall.

Stash busting hats

I decided that one of my projects while teleworking would be to do some spiral/helical knitting, and that the best way to practice it would be to make some hats out of stash yarn. I’m up to 13 hats (two didn’t make the group photo), and I’ve definitely made a dent in my stash of this yarn! All but one of the hats are made out of an overspun Knitpicks yarn I got years ago on sale.

Spiral/helical knitting is a method of doing multiple color knitting without a jog when switching from row to row. When we knit in the round we’re actually knitting on a spiral, like a slinky. This method basically takes multiple slinkys and interlaces them. I started with just two yarns, with the pink hat, and then increased the number of yarns. For the red and green hat with variable stripe widths I had 10 yarns going-I decided that was too much. In order to get a stripe that’s two rows tall, I use two balls of that color. You can see that to some extent at the boundary between the cuff and the main bit of the hat, where which color touches the brim changes around the hat.

After making 11 hats with the spiral knitting, I decided to try doing spiral mosaic knitting (red and green patterned hat). I do not recommend this, for several reasons. It turns out it is way more challenging to do mosaic when spiral knitting-there is so much more to keep track of in terms of where you are in the pattern, and I struggled a lot at first with that. The bigger issue though is that, for doing the type of all over pattern I was using for this hat, it is pointless.

I’ve got enough experience with mosaic knitting that I can generally make the beginning/end of row spot fairly seamless. I typically do this by starting my row in a slightly different spot (within 4 stitches from the true start of row) to hide the jog by putting it somewhere where there’s already a color change or something similar. So basically, there was no problem to fix, at least for this style of pattern. The effect of doing spiral knitting with mosaic ended up meaning that, while I didn’t have to fuss over a jog, the pattern didn’t line up properly. If you look closely, you can see some ‘8’s at the join for the spiral knitting, when the overall pattern didn’t have that. That’s because the mosaic pattern is designed for you to knit in rows, but when using spiral knitting you’re emphasizing the spiral nature of knitting in the round, and effectively shifting the pattern relative to itself at the join. To my eye, the spiral knitting mosaic just looks like I consistently made a mistake at that point in the pattern.

spiral mosaic knitting

regular mosaic knitting

Now that I’d started doing some mosaic though, I decided to try out two designs I made-one of birds and the other of boats. I wanted to make sure that they worked in mosaic knitting, and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out! I’m debating whether either need a pom-pom on top. I don’t have enough of the light brown to do anything with, other than as a bit of interest in a pom-pom, so it would help me to fully use up all of my light brown yarn.

handspun sock yarn, again

The super fine alpaca/shetland/nylon singles

This yarn is the followup to the merino sock yarn from February. That time, I took two strands of singles made from the roving my mum dyed, plied them, and then did a three ply of that plied yarn. This time, I took the same dyed single, and did that initial two ply against a heathered grey single.

The grey is a blend of 40% aplaca (named Serious), 40% shetland wool (sheep’s name is Treysa), and 20% black nylon. My mum and I were given these two fleeces in exchange for a pair of socks, and blended it up with the plan to make sock yarn from it. That was in 2014…. it’s been sitting in a box on the shelf since then. I did start spinning some of it back when my mum sent me the blended bats, however I hadn’t spun much, and it was heavier than I wanted to use for plying against the dyed roving, so I spun up some super fine singles.

Dyed single on the bottom, grey single in the middle, and the two plied together (just the two ply) on top

The stuff was (is? I haven’t used it all up yet…) lovely to spin. We carded it in the grease, only alpacas don’t have grease, and I don’t think Shetlands are a super greasy breed, so there isn’t too much lanolin still in the fibers. Amazingly enough, what is there hasn’t gone tacky with time, and the fiber is just as wonderfully pleasant to spin as it was originally. It is a bit weird at times because the staple length of the different fibers and how much they stick to their similar type of fibers is quite different. The Shetland wool liked pulling along the other shetland fiber, and since it was lighter in color there are sometimes regions of lighter yarn. The nylon generally was quite well blended in, but occasionally there were what almost looked like very fine locks of it-little sections that had stayed together, that were about the width of one of my singles. I’d typically start at one end of a batt and have mostly shetland at the start, and then end at the other end, with lots of short fibers that were a mix of alpaca and nylon. If I were more worried about trying to make the yarn as consistent as possible, I’d break the batts up into smaller pieces before spinning, and hold the next piece alongside finishing the previous piece, to make sure that all regions had the same mix of fibers. I’m not that worried about it though.

As I mentioned above, I then plied this super fine grey against the dyed blue, using lots of twist so that it was far from balanced. You can sort of tell that from the picture, since the predominant color of the yarn is blue, not grey. I decided to use the grey in the first place for a few reasons. I liked the idea of having at least a little bit of nylon in the yarn, even though the first batch seems like it should be sturdy enough. I wanted the finished yarn to be a bit finer, so I needed a finer single to ply the blue against. I also didn’t want the dyed colors to get too muddy when plied against one another. For the first batch of yarn I forced the colors to line up every once in awhile, but that was going to be harder and harder to do as my supply of dyed singles decreased, and while the pink against the teal had turned out better than I’d expected, it still wasn’t my favorite.

The final step was to chain-ply the two ply into a six ply. I typically do all my spinning on my Ashford traditional, because I like spinning very fine, and I have the extra-super-fast-lace flyer adaption on my ashford. I can really get that thing going around quickly. For plying, I typically switch wheels though to my ‘country craftsman’ spinning wheel-a beautiful old fashioned Saxony style wheel, complete with distaff and big bobbins. It’s a double drive wheel, while my ashford is a single drive.

To go along with this yarn, I decided to ply up the thicker singles of grey that I’d spun back in 2014 and 2015. I had three partially filled bobbins, and wasn’t super interested in spinning more of it that weight (I’m thinking it will work well for heels and toes, and I’m so happy with how plying it against a dyed single went that I want to use the rest of the fiber for that-I have several other dyed rovings that I can repeat this with!). For this yarn, I decided that a 4 ply was about the right weight to match with my other six ply. (Did I mention that I spun that other grey single super fine?) So, I decided to do another cabled yarn, only this time I’d ply two plied yarns together, instead of using chain-plying to ply 3 plied yarns together.

In order to use all my singles, I ended up using a technique where you ball up the singles, and ply using both ends. This allowed me to turn all of the three bobbins of singles into a single bobbin of two ply yarn. I then balled up all of the two ply yarn, and cabled that. This technique of using both the outside of the ball and the center pull can lead to horrible knots (particularly with unbalanced yarn!), if you’re not careful, so I really like to do this all in one go, if at all possible. I had some struggles with my original singles, but the plied yarn behaved really nicely, and didn’t give me a moment of frustration. I’m not sure I’ve ever had this process go quite this smoothly before…

I think the resulting yarn is fairly well matched in size to the one with the dyed single, and I think they’ll work very nicely together in socks. I’m excited to cast on!

Trellis Shell lace socks

These socks were a super quick knit-very rewarding and fun. I opened one of my knitting stitch pattern books, flipped through the lace section, and got my mum to help me decide which pattern to try. This one was called ‘trellis shell’, and I think it worked quite well for these socks. The lace cuffs were hard to put down, once I started knitting them! They just flew off the needles.

The yarn is from Elevate Fibers, and was really nice to work with. The color wouldn’t come out right in any of these pictures, but it’s a fairly bright pink. with some subtle variation.

COVID-19 hat

covid_hat.jpeg

So, I just designed, knitted and wrote up the pattern for this COVID-19 virus hat. The backstory is that I saw several people trying to use their craft to benefit those around them in these trying times- for example a designer offering patterns for free with the stipulation that you should use that money to support your local yarn store, or a dyer donating half the proceeds from some yarn to local food banks. The yarn made my mum think of COVID themed projects, and then the idea of a virus hat just leaped out at me. I made it because I thought it would be a way to inject a little levity into current events, because I was curious to figure out how to make the little stalks actually stand up, and because I thought that maybe the pattern would be something positive I could offer, particularly through encouraging people to donate to COVID related support efforts.

I debated how publicly to share it, because sometimes the internet can be less than kind. I have no desire to minimize the direness of the situation, and I am highly aware that many are dying, and the death toll will continue to climb. The situation is not something to take lightly. That said, I do not see how a virus hat hurts the situation. Through this pattern I hope to spark amusement, as well as encourage donations to charities working to help the people hardest hit. I’ve decided to post the pattern (link), even though I know it will make some upset with me, in part because I think we do need to have hope and humor in these times.

On a lighter note, you’ll see that I had to rope in my teddy bears as models. I have not figured out how to do a good selfie of myself that shows off the hat pattern, nor have I figured out the correct facial expression! Socks are much easier to photograph. Next update will be more socks-stay tuned!

Handspun socks!

I just finished knitting up these socks from my handspun merino sock yarn. I’m really pleased with how they turned out, and I think they’ll be super durable (at least, I hope). I like the visual effect of the plying, and I think the colors are similar enough that it’s obvious that these two are a pair. I’m also fairly pleased with my spinning, as the yarn felt fairly even when I was knitting with it-there’s a bit of a thinner area around the dark blue heel on the second (more mottled) sock, but other than that I think the yarn was fairly consistent.

Now I just have to figure out what I want to do with the remaining 44g!