Grapes anklets

As promised, I had just enough handspun yarn left from my ‘cluster of grapes’ braid from Three Waters Fibers to make these cute little anklet socks. I’m an expert at yarn chicken, and had less than 3 feet of yarn left over!

This rainbow roving (colorway ‘cluster of grapes’ ) was from Three Waters Farm. I spun it super fine, and plied it against a grey blend of shetland wool, alpaca and nylon that my mom had blended up for me to make socks from. The two singles were plied, and then I did a three-ply cable thing to make the overall six ply yarn. I love the texture of this finished yarn, and the depth that adding that grey ply added. I think the yarn does a great job of providing enough visual interest of its own, without a complicated pattern.

Cluster of grapes socks

I don’t want to admit to how long these socks were on the needles-it was way too long. I got the first sock and most of the second sock done fairly quickly. In fact, I was almost at the toe when I noticed that my gauge was different between the two socks. Not enormously, but… the yarn is my handspun, and I was knitting them from opposite ends of the ball, with the hope that the colors would all line up. Apparently I need to work more on my quality control, as the first sock had thinner yarn and the second sock thicker. So the project went into time out, and sat there until I was willing to face it again. I decided to just make the two socks the same length, and pretend the whole thing never happened.

This is one of the hazards of using handspun yarn, and it shows up clearly on socks. I really like using handspun for shawls, or in weaving, where any variations aren’t as critical. In a shawl you can claim it as a design feature if the bottom is thicker/thinner than the top, and in weaving you can alternate from different parts of the skein to minimize the impact of any variations. However, I knit socks. It’s in the name of the website. So, if I want to actually use my yarn instead of just watching it accumulate, I should spin for socks. And I need to work on my consistency.

Otherwise, I’m really happy with this pair. I love the colors, particularly the muted rainbow. The bright rainbow of the initial roving (colorway ‘cluster of grapes’ by ThreeWatersFarm, hence the sock name) was also beautiful, but I couldn’t see myself wearing those colors. Petting them, enjoying playing with them, yes, but wearing them? I also love the texture of this finished yarn, and the depth that adding that grey ply added. (For those who don’t hang on my every blog post, this is a six ply handspun where half is a brightly colored roving, and the other half is a grey blend of shetland wool, alpaca and nylon. The two singles were plied, and then I did a three-ply cable thing to make the overall six ply yarn.) I think the yarn does a great job of providing enough visual interest of its own, without a complicated pattern-I just love how the foot looks. I have enough yarn left for a short little anklet pair, so that’ll be next!

Green Sweetness socks

I was so excited to start playing with my handspun, and then I went and left it at my Aunt and Uncle’s house when I was staying with them. I visit them for about a week every 1.5 months, and spend my time working in the lab all day. It’s the way I can justify being up north for the rest of my time, and it beats any of the alternatives. However, I have to be careful not to leave my next project in the wrong place…

This is a six ply homespun, where half of the plies are grey (shetland/alpaca/nylon blend) and the other half are a polwarth/silk blend dyed by Three Waters Farm. I am super pleased with how these socks turned out. They are plain, but perfectly matched right up until the toe. In spinning, I split the roving lengthwise, and then spun it such that the colors would be symmetrical from the two ends. Then when knitting the socks, I knit the first one from the outside of the ball, and the second pair from the inside. I was not expecting the colors to line up anywhere near this well, in part because I wasn’t super careful for this roving about making sure the sections were of equal weight.

Instead of using my plastic foot model, I had my mum help me model these socks! As a reward for taking such fine pictures, I let her keep the second half of the skein. I think she plans to pair it with some of her own grey homespun yarn.

two more pairs of blue/teal/pink handspun socks!

I was carefully looking through all my pictures from this year, and I realized I missed two pairs of socks from this set! The first pair uses the solid grey yarn and the last of the solid bright colors yarn. I did a bit of ribbing, the toes and heels in the grey, and then I used helical knitting to alternate between the grey and the colorful for the main body of the sock. Mostly because I only had a very little of the colorful yarn left, and I didn’t want to waste any of it, but also because I wanted to play around with helical knitting. I really like that helical knitting doesn’t have that jump between rows, and I also find the general notion appealing.

The second pair of socks is from the yarn where I plied the colorful against the grey. This was a new pattern for me, but one I think I’ll try again. It’s subtle, yet gives some interest and texture to the sock, so that it isn’t boring.

I got really lazy about taking good pictures of my work when I wasn’t posting, so I only had a shot of the first cuff in progress for this pair. My mom has these socks in her stash of knitted things (primarily for sale), so I had to ask her to find them and take pictures! Happily she also has a foot model, though she doesn’t store hers on the mantlepiece (I’m told that’s a weird place to store it, but it works for me). I used to have a tough time getting good pictures of my socks, but I’ve been really happy with this plastic foot and its magnetic base that allows it to stand up.

Since she was taking pictures anyway, I had her get some nice ones of one of the other pairs from this set. It turns out there were 7 pairs (!!!) in total from this 1 lb of dyed roving plus some unknown amount of grey.

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.

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!

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!

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!

Merino sock yarn

This yarn has been in progress since last summer, when I was doing all the spinning directly from fleeces, although since my mom dyed the roving for me, I suppose one could say it’s been in progress for a lot longer. I just finished up spinning the whole pound of roving, and plied the first skein. I’m planning on plying a few more skeins in slightly different configurations, to play around with what works best for sock yarns. The roving is 100% merino, so I wanted to make sure I spun it in a way to make it last.

I ended up breaking the roving up into 6 different pieces, because that was how many times the colors repeated. Then each 1/6th got it’s own bobbin, with a little extra floof of blue roving going on its own bobbin. (I really love having all the bobbins in the world, and three different lazy kates that together give me 11 bobbins worth of storage. It makes spinning yarns with lots of plies so much easier!) The singles are pictured here first, and you can see that they’re quite fine.

For this skein, I took two singles and over plied them a lot. Then I took that 2 ply, and Navajo plied it, resulting in a 6 ply cabled sock yarn.

the over-plied 2 ply yarn

finished yarn

I’m really happy with how the cabled yarn turned out. It’s a bit harsher than one might expect for merino, but I expect it will soften with washing and wear, and I’m really hoping that it won’t wear out quickly because of this structure. I’m also really happy with how I was able to get the colors to line up when plying the two singles together, and I’m really looking forward to knitting it up into socks.