Tour de Fleece Update II: The Plan, The Burn, and The Language

Hooray! I finally got the Intertron to work in my favor, and was able to force-feed some photos down its wiry gullet. Here's a shot of my Tour de Fleece spinning, at the end of Day 2 (I am still about three days behind on photos).



The colors are not that great in this photo, because I am working off a foreign laptop and at this point, I'm just happy I have photos at all to show you. Behind the drop spindle I have spread out roughly half of the yak locks, in a vague color order. I'm spinning darkest blue to lightest (grayest) blue, then the dark brown-ish ones, then increasingly light tan. I will either navajo or andean ply, based on whether I can get enough yardage from a 3-ply. My bet is that my singles won't stay as thin as they should, and I will end up doing a two-ply. If I get a two-ply, I'm not sure what I'll do about the color changes. We'll have to wait and see. But the goal is to spin fingering weight.

I've been spinning about two locks per day, mostly in the mornings right after breakfast while our traveling companions finish getting ready for the day, except for yesterday. Yesterday I spun in the evening with a glass of rose wine out on our hosts' tiny but incredibly charming balcony. This has become one of my must-haves for a living space. Right now the list includes easy parking, clothes washer/dryer (or at least hookups), dishwasher, and a balcony. Can you tell I live in a big city? :) Anyway, yesterday I didn't spin in the morning because we decided to go to the beach and wanted to get out there for the hottest part of the day, so the swimming would be nice. The Mediterannean was a gorgeous clear blue-green, and both of us got pretty sunburned. After I cleaned all the sand off and put on some aloe vera, the wine and spinning helped immensely to take my mind off the sunburn.

It's amazing how much French I'm remembering here, considering that it's been 9 years since I took any French classes. One of our hosts is French, and I think he was a bit impressed at how much I understood our waitress at dinner two nights ago. I shudder to think how much more I would have remembered a few years ago. But my understanding is still good enough that I can pick up tiny snippets of other peoples' conversations, like the dad at the beach asking his son what sound a horse makes. My German is nowhere near good enough for this, and I never realized how disconnected one can feel when you don't understand any of the random conversation around you. My trip is about three-fourths over, and while I'm enjoying myself, I'm interested to see what it will feel like when I get back home and hear people speaking American English everywhere. I wouldn't say I'm homesick yet, but it will be nice when communication takes a little less effort.

Very Quick Update from the Road

We are in France. I travelled through four five countries over the past two days (hint: Lichtenstein is indeed very very small) and I'm typing this post on a borrowed computer with what I think is a Swedish keyboard programmed to act like an English keyboard. I don't want to intrude on the very lovely people who are putting us up for the next few days here in Nîmes, and I'm doubtful about my abilities to upload photos from a strange computer, so I'll have to leave off the pictures for a bit. I was indeed able to spin while we were on the road, so I have a little bit of yak singles on the spindle to show you later.

I'm off in search of some breakfast. I hear they have some good food in this neck of the woods.

Altering the Leaf Kimono Part III: All Done!

It's done. I had all the pieces knit and blocked before we went to Berlin, but I left them at home so I wouldn't be tempted to try sewing everything together in such distracting conditions. Boy, what a good decision that was! Yesterday I spent about three hours sewing, pinning, and trying on the top in various stages. First the two front edges, then the back edges, then sleeve seams, and finally tacking on the ribbon. Here it is all put together:



And here it is on me:



Now, when I first tried it on, it felt a little floppy in the back. You can kind of see it in this photo:


Several other folks who've knit this and discussed the design on Ravelry had the same problem, and they mostly ended up re-knitting the back triangle with more frequent decreases. Then I remembered that I'd basically wet-blocked all the pieces separately before sewing them together, and that I should probably wash the entire thing once more before doing anything as drastic as ripping out two seams and four inches of knitting. So I soaked it in lukewarm water and tossed it in the dryer, and it came out perfect! The waist and arm seams snugged up just enough, some of the drastic blocking came out of the back triangle, and the sleeves sit better. The lace pattern isn't quite as well-defined as it was before, but it's still a identifiable as a regular pattern. Remember what I said about this top when I first blogged about it? I wore the top to dinner, and it was fabulous. Exactly what I imagined.

Incidentally, it took me for-freakin'-ever to get those photos of me in the top using the timer on the digital camera. For some reason, every other shot or so would be tremendously out of focus and/or overexposed. I couldn't figure out why, but I had to take about 20 photos to get three that I was pleased with.

In other news, now that I've finished both projects, it's time for some new stuff! I got caught up with all the goings-on at Ravelry, and discovered Le Tour de Fleece, and decided to join up. The idea is to set yourself a personal spinning challenge while following the Tour de France. You only spin on the days of the tour, rest on the days they rest, and if you meet your self-proclaimed challenge, you get a coveted Maillot Jaune. In the interests of keeping myself honest, I'm here to announce my intentions. My goals for the Tour de Fleece are to:

1. Spin a fiber I've never spun before. I will spin up my 2 ounces of Yak fiber from A Verb for Keeping Warm:



It is warm and squishy and I love to pet it, and after taking the exotic fiber tasting class at the Color Fiber Festival, I feel more confident spinning something like this.

2. Spin stashed fiber. I have been a bit of an instant-gratification-fiber-whore before I left for this trip, buying new stuff and spinning it right away while ignoring stuff I already have. I have lots of fiber in my stash, and I shouldn't get into the habit of buying stuff I won't spin. So this yak fiber is from December of last year, purchased about 6 months ago. I don't think I have any older fiber in my stash, except for some alpaca purchased at the same time as the yak.

3. Spin yarn for a specific pattern. I will be making Bronte's mitts, which require a fingering-weight yarn. It's been difficult for me to reproduce a fingering weight on my wheel, so perhaps going back to a drop spindle will help a bit. I'd like to become a more versatile spinner. Instead of just spinning the same yarn over and over and getting basically the same results, I'd like to be able to plan a project from fiber to garment, and this is a step in that direction. Gotta practice in order to get good, right?

Again, in the interests of full disclosure, these were all goals I had for this spinning project before I found out about the Tour de Fleece. But I think the fact that I will be journeying through France for the first 8 days of the Tour de France is a little too serendipitous for me to pass up this chance. Besides, I was so sad I missed the Knitting Olympics last time.

Oh yeah! And the new project. Here's a little taste:



Behold, the first four and a half repeats of Chart 1 of the Honeybee Stole. I've been drooling over this project for a long time, and I was a little astonished to see that the yarn had been marinating in my stash since November! I will say one thing about planning my knitting for this trip: I'm a bit stuck with what I have, but I haven't felt constrained. It's kinda nice.

Berlin

I think Berlin was my favorite city so far. When you live in a big city and spend a lot of time there, you can forget how exciting it really is to live there. Staying in and around Stuttgart has kind of toned things down for me, so when we emerged from our hotel on Saturday morning, fed and caffeinated, I got a bit of a rush.



We managed to cram a lot of the Berlin sights into two measly days, and then a friend and I spent Monday shopping since the significant other had to go back to work. On our first day we walked down the main shopping drag: Kurfürstendamm, abbreviated by locals as just Ku'damm. We emerged onto a plaza:



According to our guide, a genuine Berlin local, the church next to the Europa Center was extensively bombed during WWII. He told us that the top of the church has been restored in this particular manner, with the panels meeting at jagged angles, "to always remind us." Moving on, we entered Teirgarten and walked down Straße de 17 Juni towards the Brandenburger Tor. They were getting ready for the final game of the European 2008 cup:



Giant tv screens, port-a-poties, and food stands lined the street. We walked up to the Brandenburger Tor and crossed innocuously over the path of the former wall dividing the city in two. As we walked into the portion of the city formerly controlled by the DDR, the weather was appropriately gray and dreary.



There isn't much left of the wall standing in the original location, most of the remaining bits have been transported to different sites. This makes sense to me. I imagine most of the residents of Berlin don't want to keep such a powerful symbol of division preserved where they have to look at it every day on their way to work. Instead, you must seek the wall out. I thought of the hundreds of thousands of people crossing blithely back and forth across this line as they watched the final game on Sunday evening. I wonder how many of them think about the wall every day. I wondered how many of them would be too young to remember its existence. I wondered how many of them would be old enough to have known people who lived on the opposite side, and how many would be old enough to remember the time before it went up. The people in "my generation" often mark ourselves as the last set of people to remember the fall of the Berlin wall. I was barely aware of how television worked when the wall came down, and although our family's old globe had an East and West Germany, I didn't really understand the implications of German reunification until many many years later. I feel a little guilty identifying with an event that didn't have much impact on my formative years. I can't claim it as my own. I think I'd rather leave that to those who cared desperately about the wall and what it stood for. I am a westerner, and the wall is not really my symbol.

As we walked through former East Berlin, we approached the iconic TV Tower, another landmark immediately identifiable with the DDR, and the Berliner Dom.



This was all before lunch on Saturday, so there was lots of walking! In the afternoon we had to take a bit of a siesta and plan out the rest of our weekend. We went to see the Eastside Gallery, which is a bit of the former wall that has been graffitied to bits. Underneath the new art, there are works from East Berlin artists painted on the wall and set up as a public open-air museum. It's not original art from the wall (one would not have been allowed to write on the wall in the East), but the graffiti-on-top-of-more-graffiti aspect is interesting to contemplate.

On Sunday we saw the Gemäldegalerie, which has two fabulous Vermeer paintings, and a TON of Rembrandts. Very highly recommended. I've adored Vermeer since I read Girl with a Pearl Earring. I'll admit it,I'm a huge fangirl when it comes to art-related historical fiction. Perhaps seeing all of Vermeer's paintings should be a life-goal? Not sure. The Gemäldegalerie took more time than we were expecting, so one half of our little party went back to the hotel, and the other went to get seats for the final game. I was part of the boring half, but I felt no shame. We watched the game in an open-air cafe, the way God intended, and listened to the horns and singing. Germans love driving around honking their car horns so much that they kept it up until at least 1 AM, even though they didn't win the Euro cup. Way to keep up the national spirit! We lost one person to a flight home and another to work, so it was just us two girls on Monday. We did what any female would do in the capital of a European nation on a weekday with no sights to see: we shopped. I bought some clothes. We went into five (5) different locations of H&M, had a fabulous lunch, and drove back to Stuttgart.

I finished the Covelite Jaywalkers in the first hour of the return car trip. My driving companions asked if I would finish them before we got home. I had ten rounds left before the toe, and the drive would take about 6 hours, so I told them that I would certainly finish before we got home. I think they were a little shocked that it only took about an hour and a half to complete the sock and weave in all the ends.



We also got stuck in a truly epic traffic jam (the car was literally turned off on the Autobahn for about an hour) and we got a bit bored. Our friend, who was driving, asked to see the sock and he actually was impressed. I don't think he had too high an opinion of handknit socks when he saw them the first time, but I gave him one of the finished ones to feel, and you know what his response was? "These are really nice! My birthday is in April." We got so bored, I made a new knitter out of our other traveling companion. Once she got the hang of it, she hopped out of the car and knit while walking on the Autobahn.



I also started my new project on the car trip. I hope Stuttgart doesn't feel too boring after Berlin.

Motivation

I guess nothing lights a fire under my butt like having a knitting deadline! Also, what Wendy always says is very true. If you are monogamous with your knitting projects, they get done fast. The knitting on the Leaf Kimono is finished:



That's both sleeves blocking. Please excuse the photos, the color is way off there (for some reason they look too orange?) because I took them at night. I did pin everything together and tried the top on before blocking to make sure I had enough length on the sleeves, and everything looked peachy. The magic numbers for me turned out to be 16 chart repeats, and casting on 57 stitches. I essentially made the sleeves for the next size up, and will just ease the extra inch or so in when I'm sewing the sleeves on to the front of the body. In retrospect, I probably could have just made the 40-inch size and been just fine. I got a little nervous about how it would look, so I did a quick mock-up before the sleeves finished drying. No pins, just laying out the pieces to make sure everything would fit.



Here you can see the difference between the color of the wet sleeves and the dry body. It looks like a top! Hooray! Unfortunately, I'm going to have to leave this behind for the weekend. We set up things to go visit Berlin this weekend, and our college friend managed to get her flight extended to Monday so she could come with us. It will be another jam-packed weekend like our trip to Munich, and definitely not the right conditions for fiddly finishing work. The seaming will take careful attention, which will have to wait until Tuesday. So it's back to the sock for me, except that I'm past the heel turn and almost finished with the gusset decreases, so I'm nervous. If I finish the sock, I won't have anything to knit. Can't have that happening, so last night I wound some of this yarn into a ball. It's the "polar morn" colorway, which isn't on that page. We'll see if I end up needing it.

A Weekend on the Water

Oh man, this weekend was nutso-crazy-busy. We are having an old college friend to stay with us this week (her vacation) with us in Stuttgart, and I'm trying to cram a lot of different activities into our itinerary while she's here. We picked her up from the airport on Saturday morning, and since we were already fairly far north in Frankfurt, we decided to go to the Rhine Valley for the day. We parked the car in Bingen am Rhine, and took a boat trip up to St. Goar. It was inexpressively lovely.



Originally, I was a little skeptical that the boat cruises up and down the river would be worth it, but it was easily the best way to see all the sights if you don't have time to drive slowly up the river (which you could easily do for about 3 straight days!).



Every time the boat went around a corner, another charming town or imposing castle would come into view. I want to revisit this one, Bacharach:



After disembarking in St. Goar, we walked around the town for a little bit, got some ice cream, and headed back to Bingen via the train, a very pleasant 25-minute trip back along the river. Then we drove back to Stuttgart, and managed to not immediately crash before having some dinner. The only regret I have is not being able to spend more time in the valley, because it was stupid hot this weekend and being near the river helped tremendously. I would also like to try and go back for some wine tasting, but we'll see how things go.

On Sunday we took the train into Tübingen, a little college town south of Stuttgart. The air conditioning on our train was broken, so we were a little sticky by the time we got into town. It reminded me strongly of Berkeley, with its earnest college students striding purposefully down the streets, aging hippies drinking and hanging out in the parks, and imposing buildings (of both the old and really old varieties) sprinkled throughout the town.



We walked up and down the river and rented a canoe. I tried to micromanage the canoe steering, which was a problem because I was sitting in the middle of the canoe. Eventually I was delegated to camera duty.



90% of my photos of Tübingen are either of the Neckar river or views from our canoe while we were on the river. We had a leisurely train ride back into Stuttgart (air conditioning was working, thank goodness). I got to put in a lot of good solid knitting time on the sleeves for my leaf lace kimono. The sleeves really do go much faster than the body pieces, so now I'm more hopeful that I will actually complete this before Italy & France. Next time, more adventures around Stuttgart!

Altering the Leaf Kimono: Part II (Pins & Measuring Tape)

Yay! I finished knitting the body of the Leaf Kimono yesterday. I'd been kind of ignoring this project recently because it's not necessarily the best travel knitting ever. It's more of a movie-watching project. But we now have plans to drive around Northern Italy & Southern France in two weeks, and I would love to have this finished to wear while we're there. The weather has been fickle (to say the least) around here. At least yesterday was nice and sunny. Holy Crap. Two weeks. I just realized that I will probably not finish this in time... but oh well. I put the pedal to the metal this week, finished the front and back, and seamed them together.

Here it is blocking:



Before blocking the piece, I wanted to sort of try it on. So I put on a thin tank top and pinned the body about where I'd want it to sit. It was hard to judge where I really wanted it to sit, and even more difficult to get the back piece to stay exactly where I wanted it to. Basically, I wanted to be able to measure how long the sleeve rectangles need to be so that the bust seam falls below my bust. On tops with similar construction, I find that the bust seam will often cut straight across the fullest part of my bust, and I want to emphasize the thinnest part of my ribcage.

After reading some of the very helpful commentary from other knitters and the designer on Ravelry regarding this pattern, I have decided to make two alterations to the sleeves. A) I will add one inch in width to the sleeves and ease them in to the front a bit more. Hopefully this will help compensate for the fact that my chest is not very flat at all, and will allow the top to still have some looseness to it while it's on my body. B) I will knit the sleeves about two inches longer than stated, to lower the bust seam. Another knitter had her sleeve pieces grow in length by 4 inches (!) after blocking, and had to rip back three of those inches so it wouldn't sag too much. I'm thinking I'll take my first sleeve up to 18 inches, put the live stitches on a piece of scrap yarn, and pin the sleeve to the body to check the fit. Then I will be able to actually see the drape of the body better, since it will be hanging from the top of the sleeve the way it's meant to.

When I wrote the first post on this project, I had some strange ideas about making the sleeves wider in front than in back, but I've decided now to just stick with a straight rectangle. I have some stockinette patches on the sides of the body from making the waist shaping, and while they are neat, I think they do detract a bit from the lace pattern. Hopefully when it's on they won't be too obvious. Anyway, if I wanted to make the sleeves non-rectangular, I would end up with those same stockinette areas on the edges of the sleeves, which would look very weird. One edge of the sleeve is actually the neckline, so they'd be extremely obvious, too.

Ok! Wish me luck. Maybe I should try to go on a break with the jaywalker sock (which is hard, because I just turned the heel) so I can have an actual chance of finishing this top before leaving for France. We'll see. I also promised you pictures of my buttons and yarn from Munich. Here's the whole haul:



Three colors in what was only described as "Schafwolle, 100g" which translates in America-speak to Sheep's wool, 3.5 ounces. I think these will be good for two-color mittens (maybe another Adrian Bizilia design). I am particularly smitten with the heathered tan color. It kinda reminds me of Cascade 220, but it's much plumper, not quite as smooth, and only a two-ply. I don't know the yardage precisely, but I bet it's less than the 220. I was able to haltingly ask the lady at the counter if she knew the yardage, but she didn't know, and guessed between 100 and 150 meters (or at least I think that's what she said). If I get really really bored I'll untwist one of the hanks, break out my tape measure, and try to figure it out.



The buttons are a bit chunky, too, and I tried to get a set that were very similar in color and thickness. They're all 3/4" (2 cm) in diameter. The fronts are all pretty well matched, not so much with the backs. I have no idea what I will do with these, but hopefully they will go on a nice thick sweater next fall. Maybe I'll finally get up the nerve (and paycheck) to do a real traditional fair isle sweater...