Weekend fun times!

I had some pretty good knitting time over the last week. On Friday I finished the knitting for a pair of insanely cute slippers:



I know they don't look like slippers right now, but once they're sewn up and felted they'll hopefully look a little bit like this. The knitting goes super-fast on huge needles, and it's perfect if you have lots of worsted-weight yarn leftovers. These are so cute, I'm making more than one pair. But I can't justify having three pairs of felted slippers... helloooo, more gift knitting!



My knitting group and I all cast on for these together last week, and this week we're going to sew them up. But last weekend I finished Damson earlier than I thought I would. I was able to wear my cute new shawl on Sunday morning, but I'd expected that the project would last me until at least the day before our knit night. So in the meantime, I pulled out an old, sleepy, cobwebby (not really) project:





I think I've given up on the spreadsheet, the one I made about 1/3 of the way through the project as a way to keep track of how to maximize the number of miters I could eke out of each skein of yarn. It's getting down to the wire... at one point I optimistically thought I would make a 6x6 blanket (36 squares with 4 miters to each square), but now I'm thinking I may only get 5x6. If so, then I've done 75% of the knitting.

Oh, and we carved pumpkins on Saturday:



We carved two pumpkins, and saved one for eating. I've never cooked a pumpkin before (except for baking the seeds), so this will be an adventure!

Market Day

Sometimes you just need a nice accessory to wear to the farmer's market.



A little something to keep the chill off your shoulders while picking out produce,



and in a lovely green color that reminds you of winter squash and carrot tops and flower stems



I was amazed when I looked back at my notes on Ravelry and realized that this shawl only took me about 8 days to knit. The yarn is Dream in Color Smooshy, in the Happy Forest colorway. Also, I came really close to not having enough yarn, I was sweating a little while doing the bind-off row. The sock yarn blocks very nicely, and I love the contrast in texture between the garter and stockinette portions of the shawl. Anyway, Damson and I had a great time this morning. I got up early, trying to get to the market within an hour of opening time, knowing I'd be rewarded by $5 bouquets of dahlias. I snagged one several weeks ago but haven't seen them since, probably because they are A) gorgeous B) a steal and C) the significant other and I are rarely out and about before 11AM on a Sunday morning. My plan worked:





I also succumbed to the color on this guy:



It now feels like fall in our apartment.

Another FO to share

It's starting to feel like fall, and we got our first real rainfall of the year two days ago. Now everything is kind of gently steaming and humid, so it doesn't really feel autumnal, but I can pretend:



Another handspun hand-warming device, these are Eunny Jang's Endpaper Mitts, done in two colors of handspun Verb for Keeping Warm fiber. One is the green half of the Hollyhocks falklands, and the other is left over grey finn from these mittens I knit almost a year ago. I was very pleased to ultimately have used up all but a few yards of the grey, so much so that I might combine the pinks from both club shipments and do a second pair for spring. Here's a better shot of the color:



I really enjoy how the green fades in and out of being intensely vibrant, and the handspun is surprisingly dense. I've heard other knitters comment on how this is a good introduction to fair isle knitting, and I have to agree. I'd recommend this project to anyone who wants to try two-color knitting but has felt intimidated. It's a lovely return on a relatively small effort.

In the back of my head, I keep wondering how it is that I'm knitting all these little projects so quickly. I'm daydreaming about another sweater (especially with the frogged remains I recently acquired), but I will most likely wait until the temperatures drop a little more.

A Journey

That's what this has been.



So, right before Sock Summit my favorite enabler and fiber guru Kristine announced a contest on Ravelry. The challenge was to enter a mitten (or, later, a fingerless mitten) knit out of Verb yarn (at least 50%). This could either be a published pattern, or you could make up your own pattern.

I needed a challenge during the second part of summer before the semester began, so I jumped into the deep end of the pool without so much as a backwards glance. I was SO sure I knew EXACTLY what I would do! Two-color mittens, handspun fingering-weight yarn, reminiscent of an arts and crafts tile. It would be a small, practical piece of art.

First came several 8-hour days wasted on internet image research. Picture after picture after picture, flower after leaf after tree all flashed before me. Finally, I found something I loved, and that (seemingly) matched the color palette I had in mind: either Hollyhocks (scroll down a bit) or Lilies. Images bookmarked, it seemed a simple next step in my mind to transcribe the colors onto a multicolor mitten chart. When I sat down to actually do this, I realized that I wouldn't really be able to pull off the kind of design I had set my heart on with only two colors. Dark brown or black outlines and multiple shades of pink and green meant that, at best, I would be knitting five-color mittens, not two-color. Frustrating me further was the insistence of the pattern to use more than two colors on any one round.

The design languished, August ran away, and the end of September crept closer. The deadline for knitting the mittens is November 1, so I needed to get the design down on paper if I wanted to leave myself enough time to knit the darn things. After three weeks of not even looking at my mitten charts, I decided to chuck the whole idea and start fresh. In the meantime, I spun up my Hollyhocks fiber (Falklands wool):



And some corriedale in the colorway The Candle's Nimble Flame:



I didn't really have any intention of using the corriedale for the mittens. In my head, I was starting to doubt that it had been a good idea to sign myself up for yet another commitment at this time of the year. So I brought the handspun to my knitting circle, and we all talked about it.





I asked about what people liked in a mitten. Did they prefer a thumb that protrudes from inside the palm, or on the side? With or without a thumb gusset? And there, surrounded by like-minded fibery friends, the idea hit me. I needed a mitten I could knit pretty fast if I wanted (because at this rate, I'd probably have about 48 hours to do the actual knitting after figuring out the pattern). I had some chunky yarn spun so it would make subtle stripes, in a colorway with little variation in contrast and saturation. Cables would pop, but they also couldn't be too complex or they'd get lost in the color. On top of all this, I was keen to make my design something that I perceived as unique. I'd seen lots of cabled mittens where there's an awesome intricate pattern going up the back of the hand, leaving the palm smooth. I said: what about cables on the side?

That sounded interesting to enough people, and after a few really really bad ideas about mitten construction (hint: there is such a thing as too unique), I settled on a basic game plan. I'd knit one mitten and make it up as I went along, keeping notes. The first test of the pattern would occur while I knit the second mitten, using the notes as a guide and trying very sincerely to not just make the second one up as I went along too. Here's what that looked like:



It was EXCRUCIATING to knit so slowly! So tough to stop myself every few rounds and update the notes. You can't hold a pen and keep your yarn tensioned at the same time, did you know that? Well, at least I can't. And when knitting the second mitten, I went into a mini panic every time something didn't come out the way it should. This time, I couldn't just knit 2 together and forget about the extra stitch that popped up out of nowhere. I knew in the back of my head that I wanted to write up the pattern, and other people who knit these mittens would obsess over that extra stitch. Incidentally, I also learned how to correctly count rows/rounds. I still had plans for the Hollyhocks yarn, but it went on the back burner.

And now they're done. After getting washed, it took me another two weeks to get out on a sunny day for a photo shoot. This morning I had some fun in the park with my mittens and the timer on my camera. Here they are, my Snow Chains mittens.









It's a good thing I waited a while to take the photos, because I was pretty sick of the design when I first finished knitting the mittens. We needed a break from each other. I am now working on writing up the pattern, but I'm gonna be honest here, because it's my blog and I can. If you hate them, don't tell me. I won't force anyone else to knit them, I promise.

Stash Toss (and some old photos)

After getting through all the post-Tour de Fleece spinning, I realized that my stash had kind of grown in an odd way. I didn't anticipate it, but in retrospect I probably should have seen this coming. The growth necessitated some repotting, splitting what had become one huge plant into several smaller, more organized and easily tendable specimens. But in doing all this gardening-type work, I discovered is that the root structure of my stash is drastically different from what it looked like two years ago, let alone five years ago.

I first started knitting while in college (and thus while perpetually broke). A stash was not a luxury I could afford, and it wasn't until I started making projects that produced leftovers of more than a yard that my stash began. But even so, when I moved out of my college dorm room for the last time, my stash fit into one large wicker basket, along with all my needles and swatches and my drop spindle.

Grad school was a sort of back-and-forth with the stash. I starved it periodically, but thanks to my new teaching assistant income I was able to buy yarn for projects that would not go on the needles immediately. Here's a few pictures summing up my stash as of August '07, at the start of my final semester of grad school:



This is the main stash, and the basket it all lived in (sorry for the blurry picture, this was also my first foray into digital photography). It's still about 85% leftovers, along with these two little stashlets:



The ever-present mitered squares blanket stash. At this stage, I had about half the yarn and maybe a quarter of the squared knit.



And finally, my handspun stash. All four skeins of it, all done on drop spindles. The pink skein was actually also leftovers (I'll never know why I didn't just knit a longer scarf that time).

Having a real (i.e., non-student) income was what finally did it. I had real money to spend, and spend it I certainly did. My stash outgrew the basket, even after I moved all my knitting tools to another part of the apartment. The stash wasn't changing though, not really. It was just budding, sprouting little paper shopping bags with a sweater's worth or a few skeins of sock yarn. But I had begun to buy yarn with no project in mind or even a tentative idea of when I'd get around to knitting it. I managed to snag one of Mrs. B's fabulous Taste of Germany yarn packages. But it was still all yarn, and it mostly ended up in the same little stashlet bags, next to the big basket in the closet. Six months after I took those stash photos, everything changed.



With the arrival of my wheel (and subsequent ability to eat through spinning stash about a kajillion times faster than on my drop spindle), the stash began to evolve. It found a new light source, and started to move its tendril-y bits in the direction of that source. I should have seen it coming, because about a year ago I reorganized the living room so I could have a dedicated spinning corner, surrounded by my books, tools, fiber, and handspun yarn. Last week, I dug everything out for an overhaul and realized that my handspun stash now rivals what I used to think of as the "main" stash, the yarn in the basket. I don't have any pictures because it was a little embarrassing, but you can just about double the stash in the previous photos for the yarn & blanket bags, and then add one basket's worth of handspun as well. I have enough handspun to separate it into categories (dyer, project, leftovers vs. fresh)! I guess this was just another way for the universe to remind me of the law of stash conservation:

Spinning does not use up stash, it merely changes fiber stash into yarn stash.

13 out of my last 15 projects have been of handspun. What I'm curious about is whether I'm thick or if this is normal, the way the stash snuck up on me. Has anyone else (spinners or not) experienced a dramatic shift in their crafting habits, and not noticed until 18 months later? Inquiring minds would love to know.

Frog Party and an EZ kick

I am continuing to indulge the desire for simple, quick-ish projects. Enter the perfect remedy, Elizabeth Zimmerman's Snail Hat (Rav link):



First one is pink shetland/silk handspun. This yarn took several incarnations before I was able to figure out what it really wanted to be. I like the pattern a LOT (easy to memorize), but I was hoping it would turn out a little more pointy. So I did another one:



This one is commercial yarn, leftovers from another project. They're both adorable, and I already have plans for a third from some leftover Tour de Fleece yarn.



On top of all this, two of my local knitting circles got together last Sunday for a Frog Party.



We all brought in store-bought or hand knit sweaters and spent a few hours chatting, picking out seams, eating tasty pastries,



and winding the yarn into skeins. I'm very excited to get double the normal knitting enjoyment from this yarn!



I knit this grey cotton into a cropped bolero a few years ago, but never wore it because it was a size too big. I'm very excited to re-knit it into a better size.



Next up, dark grey Silky Wool that was originally knit into a sweater that was simply a poor design choice on my part. The garment never looked good on me, but I have a fair amount of yarn (it was long-sleeved and the bottom hem went past my hips) and several buttons. Perhaps this one?

Parade of FO's

Here's what happens when you have two and a half weeks off with no blogging:

Fingerless Gloves
Pattern: Toast
Yarn: Handspun Wool/Seawool/Milk Protein from Creatively Dyed


Another Cowl
Pattern: Loose Interpretation of Dolores Park Cowl
Yarn: "Night Sky" Hello Yarn Fiber Club handspun superwash BFL


Yet Another Cowl
Pattern: Same as above
Yarn: "Manka's Thicket" Verb Fiber Club handspun black BFL plied with purple silk hankies


Finish Line #1: Tour de Fleece


I didn't finish my Tour goals, but this is how far I got. I had a plying party when I got back from Vancouver, so the all the balls of singles are now finished skeins waiting for a soak. I did some more spinning over the last two weeks to bring myself up to my goal level. These are both Hello Yarn, the first one is "Five Plum Pie" Falklands and the second one is "Illuminated" Wensleydale.





And finally, Finish Line #2: the Halcyon


It's so close to being done I can almost taste it. The neckline needs a tubular bindoff, ends need weaving in, and then the whole thing gets a good dunk. I can hardly wait for fall so I can wear it!