*knitknit*
Posts tagged handspun
swatching handspun :)
Aug 4th
Another day, another log. The last few days I’ve been occupied with combing and/ or picking open the washed locks of Wensleydale x Gotland fleece. It’s a very slow progress so far and I haven’t completely figured out the best way to do it. Also while picking the locks I figured I should think about the best way to spin the fleece before I’m done with all of it. So far I had three piles of sorted, combed fleece but I didn’t know which one would spin up best. So I decided just to spin some of the combed fleece up to see how it would look. Also I’m trying to get a DK weight yarn and it would be good to see how the prepped fleece would work out. I tried to make a roving by slowly pulling some of the fleece out and roll it up so I had a little ball.
I want the yarn to end up as a 3ply because of the sturdiness and the fact that I won’t have to be thinking about how to distribute the singles on different bobbins and end up with more or less on one.. 
I want to knit this drops design jacket.
I really love the pattern and how it looks, the only thing is that I need 600 grams of DK weight yarn and I need to get it as even as possible because I don’t want to have any ‘weak spots’ in the jacket that’s supposed to keep me warm :p
I tried to be prepared by making a roving so I wouldn’t have to try spinning the weight ‘on the fly’, but would be somewhat prepared. Tho apparently it didn’t really matter much because it’s still quite thin. It’s a small step towards success but there’s a lot of room left for practice. I’m really having a difficult time right now… See I thought I was doing good.. look at the singles.. aren’t they shiny? It’s such yummie yarn already I want to eat it 
*drool*
But once it’s plied it loses a lot of its shininess and turned out to be quite thin even tho I did my best to keep it thick..
So this is what it looks like all knitted up. I used most of the pee fleece because of its color.. quite strange tho that just a small part of it should be blond… I started knitting with 4.0mm needles and moved up to 5.0mm and 6.0mm pens.
I need to knit the jacket with 5.0mm because I want to keep my sanity and having a lot of holes in there (like the yellow part to the left) is definately NOT an option for the fall/ winter
I must say I believe it might take some time but I’ll get there with the DK weight. The 4.0mm fabric looks really nice and since the whole thing is mere stockinette stitch that was all I needed for this swatch (and a little ribbing). So far only the 4.0mm part looks really good. The 5 isn’t half that bad but the 6 really is more lace than stockinette… if I manage to make the yarn a bit thicker the 5 would look much more like actual fabric and would probably be much more windproof.
This is the 5.0/6.0 mm part. The ribbing looked really crappy imo and would probably look much better if the yarn would be thicker and would be knit with smaller needles. I think that if I don’t manage to spin thicker yarn I’ll just have to make a 4ply instead of a 3ply. I don’t know how much thicker that would be but it would probably be enough to fill out the 5.0mm fabric.
I’m not sure if I want to dye the yarn yet or not, I guess I’ll see once I’m done with all the yarn. I want to spin and ply all the needed yarn before starting on the project. Also from now on I want to use the Tailored Sweater Method for all sweatery things I knit.. seriously Tuulia is a genious
some time off..
Jul 31st
I’m finding it difficult to keep blogging in the summer.. the heat.. the stickiness and the stress for my (hopefully) last semester as a student are interfering with my knitting/ spinning time. I do realize that that’s just the way it is and uni goes first and I just have to suck it up, but it doesn’t mean I like it :p.
It’s a bit frustrating but I’ve noticed that I’m completely useless when it gets hot out and I seriously can’t seem to get any work done, whether it’s homework or housework I’m not able to get any of it done when its hotter than 25 C outside.. So today, on a cloudy, rainy saturday my head got clear enough for me to start doing some serious blogging.
You might remember this little post where I show off my birthday present (a whole lot of fleece). Well I finished the first bag of 200 grams of creamy alpaca and I’m so thrilled!
Here’s some spinning in progress pictures. I’m still not that great in spinning but I noticed there’s a huge difference between spinning raw fleece and spinning roving… I like spinning with the long-draw method as I just love how the fibre just does the work and I only need to stretch it out at times or not do anything, and this is much easier with raw fleece than with roving.
This little project was my tour de fleece project and tho unfortunately I was unable to finish it before the 25th I’m very excited about the amount of time I spent on this little project.
This is only my 4th spinning ever so I’m not too worried about the whole thing being very even, I started out with carding and started spinning with my handcarded batts, but after a while I just started spinning the locks. I noticed something weird during this process, the carded alpaca was much dirtier than the locks. This was so weird it was almost as if the carded ones were much dirtier.
I truely enjoyed the whole process and I can’t even begin to explain how proud I am of this little yarn I humbly produced, even tho it’s really not that great compared to so many other spinners (who really blow me away).
The 200 grams of alpaca has become 340 meters of fingering weight navajo plied yarn. I washed it but its still a bit dirty.. I’m not sure how to get it superclean yet but when I do I’ll get on it. I’m also not sure if its actually white or creamy, so I’ll have to find out tomorrow morning
It looks a bit weird right now, but that’s also because of the lighting 
Besides a lot of spinning there’s been a lot of washing fleece.. Most of the fleeces have been washed by now but the huge sack of cross wensleydale and gotland was still lying around.. so it was about time for a good washing.
I thought my cats liked alpaca but now I know for sure they LOVE sheep. This is me removing vegetable matter from the fleece while my kitties were rolling around in the fleece…
And I mean really rolling around… this fleece was seriously dir-ty. I actually already washed it 3 times but it’s not getting much cleaner.. it’s been lying around in water for a while to allow it to soak.. Tomorrow I’m washing the hell out of it but today I’ll show you the pictures of the unwashed fleece
the ‘backside’ looks nice no?
The problem with this fleece is I can’t seem to get the tips as clean as the butt end.. this lock has spent a good while in hot soapy waters and has been ‘massaged’ very carefully, but it just won’t budge.. I totally suck at washing fleece… I hope it comes with experience
I really love this fleece I’m so happy there’s a lot of it
Tho it was a bit dirty, the fleece was easy to comb through and looks nice
This is the progress on the creature comforts cardi I really like the cable pattern on the backside, especially with the wibra yarn
last but not least the socks I’ve been working on
I’ve been working on the Sheherezade slippers with malabrigo sockyarn but the gauge didn’t match at all so the sock ended up being much too small, so in order to understand the pattern and hopefully to be able to tweak it so that I can knit it with malabrigo sockyarn anyway I started a testsock knit in a heavier acrylics yarn.
There’s a huge difference between the malabrigo one and the acrylics one but at least I won’t mind a f*ck up with acrylics yarn
Last but not least, tho it’s a few days old already, my stash of kitty hair
TdF: day.. everything between day 2 and the present….
Jul 22nd
This is horrible.. I have been spinning mind you, but I’m so behind I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make it… :’( I’m actually pretty sad about it, but on the other hand, the weathers been so great the past few weeks I’m not ashamed to say I spent a lot of my time outside the house (away from my fleece and yarn). Tho it may not be a lot I have actually spent some time spinning and especially thinking about ways to improve my spinning. The last few posts about spinning I’ve mentioned things about my ratio and wanting to speed things up as it was getting rather frustrating. So first I maimed one of the three bobbins I have to see what it would do. The result was fine but rather irregular so I started thinking some more and found a nice little solution:
You’ll need a few of these first…
and these…
and then you’ll get something that might resemble this:
so what do you think? Isn’t it pretty? so the holes in the wood part are a little bit bigger than the thingy that goes in it so there’s room for rotation but it can’t move the way it shouldn’t move. Anyways, this little baby has a ratio of 1:10 so I can say I’m pretty darn pleased The little bit of spun stuff is a bit of the wensleydale I have from my birthdaypresent. I wasn’t planning to spin it all, just to try and see how it would go. It works like a charm (tho it does look kinda cheap).
Besides thinking I’ve also been spinning some alpaca and tho I’m not as far as I’d hoped I’d be but its progress none the less
There’s another reason for why the spinning was so slow, at first I was carding the alpaca to create neat little rolags for spinning, but after a while I stopped. I spin with the longdraw method and the rolags weren’t very helpfull because they got all clumpy.. :S The uncarded fleece however spins up niceley so I might actually make some progress here
So here’s some shamless advertising.. (above is a picture of my kitty Noodles in her favorite box) I’m not connected with these people in ANY way nor am I making money off of this but I just HAVE to tell you this: this is the best invention ev-ahhh! It’s for all of you who have kitties, bunnies or doggies and it’s called: the FURminator.. yea lols
So you might now that I’ve been saving up kittyfur to spin me a nice pair of mittens for some winter, but that winter might actually be this winter instead of in a distant future… my kitties are shedding like you wouldn’t believe and there’s kittyfur everywhere in this house.. but then today I discovered the furminator and in one day I doubled my stash of kittyfur…..
there’s a bigger one for doggies I believe but this one caught a lot of kittyfur for me in a few strokes… so here’s the stash upgrade:
this is what I harvested today…. and I just got it 3 hours ago…. all of this fur could’ve landed on my carpet….. 
this stuff is everywhere man….
this is my total stash of kittyfur… I have short haired cats (as you can see above) and it takes a while to harvest a nice load of mitten worty fur.. I’m just so scared it’ll felt before I’m ready to spin this stuff… :’(
Anyways, you might’ve noticed but the artblog is back in business and there’s a link to it at the top of the page called ‘sketches’. On this blog you’ll find my drawings and sketches and maybe later some more artstuff If you’re too lazy to move your cursor to the link above you can click HERE to get there.
So last but not least: I’ve also been knitting because it was too hot to spin but not too hot to knit.. am I making sense?
The pattern is creature comforts cardi and it’s knit in the handspun Dandelion I had finished a few posts back. This version was knit in a bigger size so I frogged it and reknit it. When I was plying this yarn I had underspun the whole thing, causing it to untwist and to break at some points, I was a bit traumatized by this and so I rather overspun the n-ply on the BFL.. I think this is the reason that the yarn is a little bit scratchy. I’ve heard BFL is supposed to be very soft but it’s actually not that soft.. I’m still hoping it’ll get a bit softer after it’s been washed but I’m not keeping my breath. I don’t mind that much anyway because it’ll be my first BIG project using my handspun and I’m proud no matter what
Day two
Jul 4th
I find it very difficult to sit at home and work with fleece and yarn on beautifull days like these. I also noticed I really missed drawing.. I don’t know why but somewhere at some point I decided to split the knitting blog from the artstuff blog and then it all went down the drain. Since then I have not drawn a thing… which is a bad thing since I’m still not done with my brothers airbrush thingy… So now I’m having second thoughts about the second blog but I still don’t think the two subjects should be mixed… The blog started out as a place to organize all of my hobbies, but somewhere along the line my drawing got shoved out of the way by the knitting/ sewing and now I feel like I’ve lost an old friend…
I’m not sure what I’ll do yet but I’m thinking of returning the drawing stuff to the main blog because it’s not working out right now…
Talking about things creative – I’ve been nagging about how slow my bobbins are and that I’m annoying the living daylight out of myself treadling so fast I can’t even hear the tv anymore, but now I’ve come up with a solution. It’s still an experimental sollution but if this works out I’ll take the whole thing to the next level.
I spent a whole day searching the internet for a bobbin that will work out for me, and then came to the conclusion that I’m not willing to spend so much money on something I can make myself (funny, that’s what I said when I started knitting/ sewing/ spinning), so I grabbed my jig saw and the sander, and then the gluegun and I was a happy little girl Obviously this is an experiment, but it’s already a huge success, so the next step is to get me some plywood and making some good calculations to get me a 1:10 ratio
This end was twice as big and completely useless, the bigger side (now) gave me a 1:5,5 ratio, the new part gives a 1:7 ratio. Not a huge improvement but I can definately feel (and hear) the difference!
I know how it really looks very crappy but it’s totally worth it! This little experiment will allow me to actually do something else while spinning, like watching tv or a movie without the need for heavy headphones A total success if you ask me. So for the next step I think I’ll create some custom bobbins with different sets of plywood (recreating the original side). I’ll keep you guys updated
I had mentioned spinning a little today, but I paused because of the greyish color. It’s the first time I ever washed and carded fleece so obviously there’s a million things I could’ve done wrong with this, but the most obvious thing is that it isn’t clean. The fleece is a white alpaca, and not grey… but the singles are very very grey… It feels rather dry and gross on my fingers after a while but that’s not the biggest of my problems, right now I’m wondering if the color will ever go back to ‘white’ after spinning and plying…..
Besides the new singles on the mutilated bobbin I spent some time trying to get the overtwisted Dandelion straight again… I was so afraid of undertwist I really really overtwisted the whole thing in the end. The beginning isn’t even that bad, but the last 50 meters are horrible… It’s 178 grams of a total of 300 grams and I’m really sure I can make something quite large with this…
I was going for malabrigo sock and tho it’s not 400 meters per 100g it’s close enough for a first attempt Here, have some pix 
Tour de Fleece :)
Jul 3rd
I’ll be honest, I’m really not a fan of the Tour at all… I don’t like watching it and I really think its quite boring.. I do however respect the athletes and I think it’s an awesome achievement but still it’s just not for me.. however.. this does not mean I don’t like to use this as an excuse to spin The plan was that I’d be done with the washing and carding so I could start spinning immediately when the Tour started, but unfortunately, because of the extreme heat, I haven’t been able to finish. It was simply too hot to touch any fibre so I haven’t knit or spun at all for a while. This meant that I had to finish plying the BFL before I can do any other spinning, so that’s what I did.
I finished the plying and I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. It’s become a bit thicker than I planned it, but on hindsight I’m very pleased with that fact. It’s rather difficult to only knit very thin materials, sometimes it’s pleasant to have some heavier yarns to play with
This is what it looks like right now, it’s about the same size as malabrigo sock yarn (sometimes thicker sometimes thinner) and so far it measures 406 meters. At first it was a lot of fun to spin this but at the end it was a real pain. I will definately not start the other half before I have a faster bobbin because trying to spin light fingering 3-ply yarn with a 1:5,5 ratio really really sucks if you ask me…. Not only does my foot not like the fast treadling, but I’ve managed to unscrew the wheels main bolt….. I also noticed my hands start working faster and faster and my foot keeps the same pace so when at a certain point the singles break I can’t manage to continue because there’s not enough spin, causing the yarn to keep breaking and breaking every time I try to restart…. very very frustrating.
Another rather funny point is that it took a long time for me to spin the singles and then to ply them, so the end of the plying process was rather annoying because the singles were allmost ‘stuck’ to the bobbin. They were a bit curly and I had trouble getting them off in one piece. Also the plying went too slow because of my recent trauma concering underspun singles.. so while trying to correct this I overspun the yarn a bit causing this pretty mess. At the moment it’s hanging out to dry, hopefully tomorrow the curly mess will have subdued
Besides the Tour and the WC there’s been a birthday to celebrate My dad has become a year older and for us kids it’s the time to bake a cake. Why you ask? Well for as long as I can remember my birthdays have been marked by my dads ridiculously cool birthday cakes. My second birthday I had a barbie cake, with a real barbie doll on top wearing a pricess candy dress, for my third birthday it was a grass field with a house and 3 bear candles and the years after that I always had some fun cake. Later on my brother got the awesome cakes (kirby, mario..). So now (since last year) we bake him cakes and try to decorate them creatively. We just started out so we still suck but I think this one is another little success
My dads birthday was the same day we won with 2-1 from Brazil, and we didn’t want to show his age on the cake so we made the soccer field and the teams Like I said, we really suck (and Brazil didn’t play in yellow, and we didn’t have blue!), but I think my dad liked it anyway
Here’s my dad stabbing cake…:)
summer activities
Jun 27th
This is my third post this month.. what happened? I’m usually such an active blogger but I must say I’ve had to wait for this summer for a long time and I’m enjoying every bit of sun I can get. Thankfully someone sent a major heat-wave our way and our cold and windy little country has become a tropical paradise
But there’s more to tell than just how great the weather has been. There’s some major stuff going on First of all I’ve washed all my fleece and it’s dried and ready for some heavy carding action. Unfortunately as it’s still very hot I’m in no mood to start working on warm alpaca fleece right now, so the pretty clean fleeces are just going to have to wait.
The other thing on my mind right now, like most other people in the world, is the World Cup. I love soccer I was raised with a soccer fanatic father who used to play himself, so soccer was a big thing when I grew up. It still makes me happy to think that every four years the whole world is united for a few weeks because of their love for soccer (well… winning the world cup hehe).
Anyway, there’s not much time knitting while watching soccer, and no knitting means no blogging I’ve also already talked about my spinning wheel and my 5,5:1 ratio… this, unfortunately for me, means that I can’t spin while watching the game either.. so I just sit there and watch the game as my hands do nothing but relax (I do get the feeling my hands are enjoying the well-deserved rest too!).
Obviously it doesn’t mean I don’t knit anmymore at all! I’ve been working on some things, but the progress is very slow. Beside all of the above reasons for me not to knit there’s one other… I’ve already mentioned it here, but I guess I can say something more about it I just handled my first workshop and I’m really excited to do some more This blog is all about me stepping out of my comfort zone and trying to organize my life, and right now I’m doing exacty that.
On my internships I found out I value my personal time much more than I used to think I did. I thought I wouldn’t mind working full days, and I still don’t think I’d mind, but I will have to enjoy every moment of it. I don’t want to end up waking up feeling like working is a waste of my day, and starting to wish my days away so it can be weekend. I don’t want to waste my time and I don’t want to wish my life away like that. So now that I’m still a student and don’t have anything to lose this will be my first priority. I need to think about these things now before I end up being stuck in routine….
Sorry people the rant ends here…. From this point on it’s about showing you the progress of the past few weeks
Guess what.. I got a birthday present from my parents I noticed I tend not to knit in the summer (because it’s hot) and sewing skirts and dresses seems like the way to go. But tho I tried my best, the edgings never came out really professional.. and now I know why Lockmachines are the shit!
So obviously I bought the latest burda style and tried to make this pretty dress… So far it turned out to be a little more tricky than I anticipated, but I think I can handle it
Since I just got the machine and don’t fully understand it yet I tried it on some fabric I had lying around. My grandmother gave me this blue fabric with the large pink flowers on it. I really like it tho it’s a bit much
Before this ridiculous heat-wave it was rather rainy and cold, so I felt like knitting again.. unfortunately for me I did the cast-on a bit too tight so I need to restart this one, but I really like the pattern. It’s the lace capelet in malarbigo lace oceanos.
When I reached half of the 300 grams I got really bored and decided to n-ply the spun singles on the bobbin. So far I’m not even halfway I think but I’m happy with the way the colors are blending. I’m still not sure what it’ll become but I’m sure it’ll be fine
The singles weren’t all that even at some points but the plying evened it out so I’m pretty happy with the way this is working out. I must say that my ratio is really really annoying when it comes to plying. Spinning the singles is becoming a pain but the plying just downright sucks…. The end of the singles on the bobbin (where I started out plying) didn’t have enough twist at certain points because my hands would start to work faster than my feet.. even tho my feet were treadling pretty darn fast they still couldn’t keep it up. So I ended with a nice cramp in my foot and undertwisted singles……..
Tomorrow I’ll see if I can do something about it
updates…
Jun 15th
well.. you know how real life catches up with you and demands your attention by sitting on you with the weight of a fat sumo wrestler? I’ve spent some time working on schoolstuff and washing fleece besides hanging it out to dry in the sun.
It was my first time washing fleece and I must say I felt pretty overwhelmed by the smell… another thing that took me by surprise was the amount of washes and rinses needed to get the stink (and the goo) out.. I’ll have to re-wash the brown wensleydale but other than that it looks fine enough to me.
So today my cards came in the mail and I thought I’d give it a shot. The (HD; *drooooollll*) pics were made with my new phone (samsung wave; it’s totally awesome). Sorry for the short blog but there’s not much to show due to the slowness on my side.
no matter how much I spin it seems like I don’t get any farther
my cards ‘in action’, it’s not an action shot really I just wanted some fleece there
Two years ago I planted some strawberry plant seeds and they grew into a cute plant which gave strawberries, but before they turned a real reddish color the birds snatched them away (awww cuute… ). So the whole time the plant gave pretty fruits the birds were very happy (but we had no strawberries). It appears that now that we have cats the birds are scared to come close (they should… and I’ll show you why ) so we might taste some of these
See what happened? Our cats, like apparently many other cats, love to catch flies or.. well any living insect… one jump is all it took.. our poor pretty ikea lamp.. thank goodness they’re cheap
see the guilty face….. I KNOW it was you…. (I can’t prove it tho… I was just in time to see them both run… )
Birthdays are getting cooler :)
Jun 4th
Today I’m celebrating my 26th birthday (w00h00!) and there’s a few goals I’m hoping to reach. I hope, if everything works out, to finish my masters this year (not calender year), and I hope to learn to spin a lot of yarn really well (and fast hihi).
I hope to have a lot of fun with my new job on the side (I give workshops to groups of (2-8) women (men are allowed too ) on skincare and wellness. I’m trying to update the page so I’m hoping to be able to link to that page for more information. But if you’re living in the Netherlands (uhm… radius of 30km to Rotterdam ) and you’d like to hear more you can always leave a comment and I’ll contact you
(sorry for the sameless advertising on my own blog…. hehehe)
ahem… but back to the story about spinning… so today it’s my birthday and I’d like to say some appreciative things about The Man.
Later this month we’ll be celebrating our 7th anniversary and I’d like to tell you about why The Man’s so awesome.
- Even tho he gets up early in the morning to go to work he always makes me a coffee ^.^ (yes even when he’s late.. I hope his boss doesn’t read my blog… lol)
- He gives me space to be creative and doesn’t complain when I’m knitting/ sewing/ spinning (even tho it makes a lot of noise (not the knitting) and is overall very messy (not the spinning part).
- He’s okay with me being a dork which sais a lot.
- He likes my equally dorky brother (sorry shiwi you know I love you )
- He’s really funny (most of the times)
- He’s great at surprises (srsly great…. )
- He bought me a huge pile of fleece for my birthday… :|:| I still can’t get over it *droooolll*
The list is actually a lot shorter here because I didn’t want to make you all jealous, bore you to death so here’s the interesting part for a blog: the epic pictures of a birthday present
So how did this happen? Well I was browsing a (Dutch) topic on Rav, looking for places to buy fleece. So far I’ve only spun commercial roving and I was (still am) very curious to raw fleece and the whole process of ‘from-sheep-to-sweater’. So the only thing I haven’t experienced now is the shearing part, which is ok by me
So while looking at this thread I notice a lot of farms obviously where they sell fleece so I ask him: where’s Schijndel. And tell him about it. This was over a month ago… and guess what, he remembered hihi The whole package is from De Weidonk. Let me show you what was in it
About 200 +/- grams of creamy alpaca
About 200 +/- grams of warm brown alpaca
About 400 grams of BFL
About 500 grams of brown Wensleydale
And a huge sack of (my scale only goes up to 500 grams LOL) there’s a note that sais cross between Wensleydale and Gotland, an this a whole sheep I think..
For the fast and experienced spinners this might not be that much (I don’t know?) but let me show you how far I am with the 300 grams of Dandelion:
I’m nearly done with half of it…. I did a little calculating and one turn of the wheel gives me 5,5 turns of the whorl (?), but as you can see I only have one size. The wheel resembles a Louet S10 and I’ve come to the understanding that a 5,5:1 ratio is rather slow, so I’m hoping to be able to buy some other bobbins with different sized whorls… at the moment I’m trying to spin singles for a light fingering wheight yarn so my leg is getting rather annoyed by the low ratio…
I came to this conclusion while working on this side quest: what is the difference between cottonwool and cotton? The cottonwool you buy in the stores I mean. It sais 100% cotton so it should be natural right? so the question is: can I spin it?
I know spinning cottong is very difficult and I know now that a ratio of 5,5:1 will not make it any easier, but I had to try, you understand right?
I tried some of the cheapest stuff I could find: this stuff costs about a euro per 100 grams so why not right? Unfortunately this version is completely made up in layers and it doesn’t really spin very nice, but it does actually work:
I suck.. I know… I’ll get better
BFL Dandelion in action
May 24th
So here’s another double post today I’ve been sitting here on my chilling spot awesome outdoors office and been trying out my next spinning project. As I’ve already told you my goal in life (well…) is learning how to spin as many meters as a malabrigo hank (yes 3 ply) from the same weight. Once I can do this and have a nice consistent yarn I’ll have achieved my goal. The 100 grams of Merino gave me a nice 300 meters of 2 ply (which is nice but is 300m less than I needed for 3-ply… So since I’m still learning I don’t mind at all.. and I’m actually quite happy with the amount of yarn I managed to produce
With the merino I tried some different kinds of techniques (learned from the internets of course) and got some weird results which were nice and thin at some points but quite irregular and thick at others. This time I’m doing a combination between drafting and long-draw while pincing the yarn…. wtf right? I’m inventing stuffs as I go hahaha
I’ve read somewhere that there is no right or wrong when it comes to spinning so I just went ahead and tried out whatever seemed to work best which was pincing the yarn to stop the spin from moving up, draft a bit and let the spin move up and then long-draw.. a bit weird but it works quite consistently so far
This is what I look like while spinning… excuse the punk hair (no don’t excuse the messiness). I love The Man for putting up with this (he actually likes my spinning and treats it as of it’s actual yarn and he never complains about it yay!). The pile on the right of the wheel is a quarter of the predrafted Dandelion roving. I split it in two and then split one half in two again and that’s what I predrafted… so there’s a whole lot left.
This is what’s been spun up from half of the predrafted fibre. The green has become quite light but when it’s plied with the yellows I think it’ll look nice I wouldn’t want to have it to epxlosive
To document mostly for myself what I’ve been doing I added a close-up picture with my left index finger for a scale reference. There’s some inconsistency as to the thickness of the strands but overall it’s about the same I think (especially compared to the previous spinning project )
Besides spinning I’ve been doing some swatching for my evil plans for the Malabrigo sock yarn I’ve got lying around.
I’ve been intruiged by shadow/ illusion knitting for quite a while but I never really got to it…
I really love the subtle effect it has. This picture really sucks because IRL the heart is much more visible but it’s okay for now
Jaywalker wip
May 17th
Every now and then by doing things you usually don’t do you learn things about yourself you would never have learnt if you hadn’t done this particular thing… vague much?
As I might have said once or twice I’m doing my graduation project at the moment and need to spend much of my time reading on my subject. I also have some unfinished work I need to hand in these coming weeks, for which I need to read some other books as well…. So long story short: I’ll be reading like crazy for the coming 2 months…. So what does this have to do with my knitting you ask?
You may remember this post.. well.. let’s just say I noticed I tend to read better when my hands are busy.. I can’t stand reading because I feel I’m not doing anything, so when my hands are busy I read better because i do have little breaks and my mind keeps working.. one of the main problems I encountered while reading is when I’m reading the really interesting stuff about my field of study my mind tends to wander….. I’m reading about something and then – while reading! my eyes keep reading – my brain starts thinking of ways to use this information, or arguments in favor or against this information come up because of previous literature studies…. By the time I come out of this ‘trance’ I’ve actually read and flipped through tree or four pages of book but I can’t remember any of it……..
does anyone have this?? or does anyone know what this is..? it’s so weird…
So that’s why, tho I LOVE reading books for entertainment I despise reading books for education… but now that’s over I guess… sock knitting was the key!
So now I’m sitting in my lazy chair sucking up information but my mind is not able to wander as I’m already counting stitches in the background, thus keeping my focus on the information and not on what I could be doing with it! I guess I’ll be churning out a lot of socks now…….. the first one is always the hardest I think and now I’m on a roll and don’t need to hold the massive construction of two socks, two balls of yarn and a huge magic loop I can sit in my lazy chair and read/knit all I want
So yeah, this is basically what I’ve been doing *looks really proud* You might remember the yarn from this little FO and you just miiight recall how this catastrophe took place and therefore you might wonder why on earth I’m knitting my first real socks with untrustworthy, evil yarn like this… well the answer is quite simple, I don’t have other sockyarn I’m willing to sacrifice hehehe
I have a nice stash of malabrigo sock yarn in two shades but I will not be using that anytime soon, and definately not for socks as I’m brooding on other evilness for those pretty yarns. So since there’s nothing left there’s no other option than just to suck it up and use this yarn… I won’t be putting these in the washing machine I might add…
This is the second attempt as the first one was way too large, even with my smaller gauge. I cast on 28 stitches for the toe-up adapted version instead of 32 and now it fits like a charm. I’m not sure when to start the gusset yet but I think I still have a length of knitting to do before I get there
Besides knitting socks I opened up the roving and tried to give it back a little fluff as it had become a narrow strip after the dyeing, and made a nice braid. I want to use it in a nice project (though I’m not sure what it’ll be yet) and I want to get as many meters as possible so I just dyed it all in one piece. This is also because it was shipped by Bep in one piece (thank you!) so it was a lot of fun
The braiding was quite an experience because of the length but thankfully The Man lent me a hand and it was a lot of fun I love how you can see the structure in the braid
EDIT
I wanted to end this post with a particularly hilarious picture of Noodles sleeping.. My cats thend to sleep in the most ridiculous positions but this one tops them all (so far..) enjoy!
