I signed up for three workshops this year, which was a first — previously I’ve just gone for the shopping. On Friday, I took a class called “Intarsia without fear.” For you non-knitters, intarsia is when you knit with different colors of yarn to make patterns. It means that instead of knitting a sweater with one yarn, you have to wrestle a bunch of them. Each little block of color has its own yarn. If you’re knitting flowers, on a solid background, even each distinct area of the solid background has its own yarn, because you can’t just string the yarn around behind the flowers. So if you have six flowers, you’ll have at least five separate yarns for the background in between the flowers, on top of at least six yarns for the flowers. It’s… messy. I tried it once, on my own, then had a yarny mess and ran screaming. So, that’s why I signed up for that class, where she promised to teach us to knit intarsia but was up-front and admitted that she couldn’t teach us to love intarsia. I don’t think I do love intarsia, but the class was fun, and I learned a new technique, so I enjoyed it. There were still yarny messes happening, but I did, technically, successfully knit intarsia. Yay me! (See that flower? where the center bit is? There were five separate yarns in play there – one for each background piece, one for the middle, and two for each side of the flower around the middle. Look at the flower, then look at the whole pile of ends-of-yarn on the side. I told you it was messy!)

Saturday morning I took a class called “Drumcarding for Color and Texture.” This was a little bit of a letdown, because there was a fair amount of basic introductory drumcarding (here is where you oil it, this is how you peel the batt off), and I didn’t really expect that — I thought we were jumping right in and doing things like color theory, finding complementary colors to blend together, talking about how to choose fibers that play nicely together, different effects, etc. I guess I kind of figure that if you’re the kind of person who owns a drumcarder, a $500+ piece of specialized fiber processing equipment, you probably read the owner’s manual on your own. And that intro stuff ate a fair chunk of the 3 hour class. We really only explored one technique per se, which was creating a batt with three distinct colors by carding in layers. The rest of the info, honestly, I already had from either learning on my own, or from last year’s Camp Pluckyfluff Chicago. But I had fun playing around with the carder and seeing what other people came up with, so it wasn’t like it was a total waste of time.

These are the batts that I did in class:
1 – basic carding: one plain white Coopsworth wool batt predrafted and balled, and one plain white Coopsworth and grey mohair batt predrafted and balled. So boring I’m not even posting the picture.

2 – Seashore batt. This is a nice fat batt, probably at least 1.5 if not 2 oz, of wool in blues and greens that I blended up somewhat, then carded together with some copper-colored Coopsworth, a little white tussah silk, and some pink mohair. I really like how this one turned out, which is nice because it took me like 30 minutes to create it.

3 – Tri-color batt. This was the batt I made by layering carded turquoise, carded purple, and carded pink Coopsworth together, then pre-drafting it into a roving. The colors are a little bit 80s, but it could turn out interesting once I spin it.

4 – Chocolate brown alpaca with random bits of shocking red and deep slate blue mohair. This one I also really, really like, and am looking forward to seeing how it spins up (though the mohair was a little pinkier than it looked initially, rather than the red I was really shooting for).

And Saturday afternoon, I took Franklin Habit‘s lace edgings class. This was a particularly great class, and really enjoyable. He taught three methods for edging — sewn-on, knitted-on, and simultaneously knit. Since I am a reluctant sewer, the idea of knitting separate edgings has not been my favorite notion ever, but it was not so bad (at least, for the four inches of swatch and edging we did for class, ha). I really liked the project we did for the “simultaneous” edging, called the Stupid Little Snowflake: called so because it was a “shawl” with a center piece of about three stitches by six rows, with a point on each side and corner, so it was an eight-pointed star, sort of. The handout notes that it is suitable for gifting to “someone that you don’t care about very much.” Ha. It was basically an Orenburg technique, and it was definitely a little fiddly, but it wasn’t that hard, so I almost got my whole snowflake done in the half hour or so of class we had for it. This class really could have benefited from being more than three hours, just because there was way more that we could have done if only we’d had the time. (Whither my DeLorean!) So that class was well worth the price of admission, and I’d totally take another of his lace classes if I get a chance.

Of course I also went shopping, since that is the point of fiber fests, after all. I didn’t buy a whole lot of stuff, on account of my house still being full of plenty of fiber, but I did pick up a couple of extra bobbins for my Lendrum, and some fiber. By “some,” I mean slightly over two and a quarter pounds. Don’t judge me!

I picked up two 4 oz bags of raw alpaca fleece. It’s in good condition, but has a fair amount of VM (“vegetable matter” – straw, hay, etc) in it. I expect that’ll mostly come out when carding and spinning it, it’s not that much. The staple length is about two, two and a half inches or so. It is soft and cosy and if you were sleeping on a pile of it, I imagine it’d be like sleeping on a cloud. Alpaca from “Rosie,” left, and “Ariel,” right.

From Cloudlover, I got this 4.45 ounce merino/tencel top. The colorway is “Summer Orchard,” but it reminded me of strawberries. So it had to come home with me. Mmm, strawberries.

I also picked up two 4 oz 100% bamboo rovings from Fiberlady.com. Chocolate Cherries, left, and Fiesta (aka “ZOMG SHINY RAINBOW I NEED THIS NAO”), right:

Two hand-painted 4 oz rovings from Sheepish Creations. Rainbow polwarth, left, and swirl BFL, right.

And I picked up two 4-oz handpainted CVM Romney rovings from Sheepy Hollow Yarns, so I can probably make a pretty good sized project from this one:

I also picked up a grab-bag of what I’m calling “carder bait” — tiny bits of leftover wool roving in a whole bunch of different colors — from the Illinois Green Pastures Co-Op. No pics, though, because… well, because I’m lazy, mostly. You’ll see it sooner or later, when I card it up into more interesting things, though, so don’t fret. (Besides. A 7 gram piece of roving is not honestly all that interesting, even when you have 35 of them in one giant ziploc bag.)

Last I’ll just post this, which is a picture of the light tent I built a couple months ago, and used to take all these pictures:

It’s not all that impressive, but I like taking pictures of things on a white background. I need better lights, and I need to figure out how to use my camera — with it left on auto, sometimes it decided to use the flash and sometimes it decided not to, and there was a marked difference in the results. (Compare the two Sheepish Creations rovings above — nothing was different there except the actual rovings, but for the second, the camera’s flash went off, and for the first, it didn’t.) I think it was something like, the amount of artificial + natural (morning daylight) light in the room sometimes fooled the camera into thinking it didn’t need any more light, but it really did. On some of the photos, I had to edit them for temperature, exposure length, etc. after the fact. I am basically happy with the color reproduction in the final photos, but I would like to do without those dim, greyish backgrounds. Maybe if I had a colorcard for real white balance, and was doing my editing in Photoshop I could get even better results – but Snow Leopard broke my Photoshop and I’m too bitter to pay Adobe’s prices for a newer version, so cheezy iPhoto editing it is, for now, anyways. In a photo near the end of the shoot I was playing with the camera settings (i.e., I turned off ‘auto’ for the first time ever other than when the switch got bumped by accident) and I think I got a better result that way even with the lights as they were, so I just have to remember that for the future. But I was too lazy to go retake photos of all the stuff I’d already snapped, edited, and uploaded, so I’ll have to live with those greyish backgrounds forever. Or, you know, I could just spin the fiber and then take new shiny pretty photos for “after.” I think that is what I shall do!

Yes, it’s true; I wound the plied yarn up on a cardboard core from a roll of paper towels. I love those for yarn storage, but the only problem is, I avoid using paper towels and try and stick to nice washable rags, so I literally go through about a roll in a year. (Well, unless there are serious cat puke issues going on. My environmental friendliness has limits.) So now I’m committed… no new spinning stuff that has to get wound off for temporary storage, until I finish up that merino and wind it off that tube, or finish another roll of paper towels, which, gauging from the current state of the towel roll, it’s got at least half an inch of towels left on, which probably means November at the earliest. Hmf.

Also, I have been toying with the idea of selling my Louet. It has, to be honest, never been productive for me. I think I’ve spun one skein on it successfully, ever. The purple merino that I’m drop-spindling? Literally made me lock that wheel in a closet for about a year after trying to spin it on that thing — the take-up was so strong it wasn’t putting any twist in, it kept drifting apart, I kept wasting wool bits (and it was an expensive bit of wool), and besides, it was not only not fun but it was actively making me furious. Since then I’ve tried pretty regularly at least once every three or four months — maybe this time I’ll discover the trick! — and every three or four months, I wind up disappointed and pissed off. I’ll spin up half a bobbin with no trouble, then the fiber will drift apart and every attempt to re-join it will just break apart on the hooks, until I have ten thousand bits of used-to-be-perfectly-good-singles sitting on the arm of the chair next to me and I am furious again. I actually wasted a good ounce or two of one bag of Louet Northern Lights printed pencil roving because I spun up a good bit on the Louet and then it broke, and I could not find the end. After literally hours of poking and prodding it with tiny steel crochet hooks and pins, trying to dislodge wherever the end had crammed itself in, I gave up and started cutting. I wound the entire singles off that bobbin by hand in bits and pieces, trashed it, said “fuck this,” and spun the rest of of the roving up, quite happily and successfully, on my trusty Babe.

Anyways. So yeah, my Louet has never been reliable for me, unless by reliable you mean “reliably useless and frustrating.” So I was thinking of selling it, and putting the money aside for a new one, maybe a Lendrum Complete (with the lovely high speed flyer! in addition to the others it comes with! LACEWEIGHT, YOU WILL BE MINE.). I mean, I never use it since it hates me, so I might as well get the closet space back, if nothing else. But I felt guilty, because of course, it could just be me, so I thought I would give it a go with some wool I had gotten from Cheryl as a gift. I didn’t think it was really slippery or short-stapled, so figured it’d have as good a shot as anything would, to work for me on that wheel. And … shockingly, it actually has kinda worked. I’ve spun up about 25g or so (neglected to weigh the bump beforehand, and I’m using a high-speed bobbin of which I’ve only got one so I can’t tare my scale accurately, alas) with about 125g left. I want to do this up as a 2-ply so I guess I’ll spin up the rest of this half the bump on this bobbin, if all goes well, then wind it off onto one of the standard bobbins to hold it, then spin up the second half of the wool on the high-speed bobbin again, then ply them from there. We’ll see how it works out. I still assume I am heading for disappointment, here, but if I am, it won’t be the first time I’ve wound singles off that Louet’s bobbins onto one of my Babe bobbins to finish the project on it. (And people mocked my Babe for being cheesy and a bad spinner. Shows what you know, Wool Warp and Wheel snobs. You can take my Babe out of my cold dead hands, even if I do buy a shiny new Lendrum.) Anyways, here’s how it looks now… actually, how it looked a while ago; I’ve got a bunch more spun up now than I did when I took the photo:

Lastly, I continued work on my Scarlet Swallowtail shawl. Nearly done with the second ball of yarn, and into the 18th Budding Lace repeat — by now, it’s something like 230 stitches wide. The pattern is sufficiently easy that it doesn’t take long to go across, really, but I did get held up because I had to tink back a couple rows — a week ago or something I thought I’d knit on it, but I was flat-out exhausted, and I made some mistake that I didn’t discover for a while, and I couldn’t cope with fixing it then so I just put the knitting down and walked away. So yesterday I fixed that, and then continued forward for another few repeats. I only have to do 19 repeats before I start on the next chart, so I’m feeling pretty good, especially with school about to be out and all. No new photos of it, though, as it looks the same really — misshapen blob of shiny red wool.

That is really about all I did all weekend. I did a little reading, I ran some shopping errands, I cooked and cleaned and blew off doing the laundry (a fine Sunday tradition), listened to Jose Contreras doing his level best to be a crap pitcher, cruelly denied the cats food outside their regular mealtimes even though they were clearly staaaaaaaaarving, listened to some podcasts and radio plays, showed someone at Jewel how to pick out avocados, and hung out on my balcony for a little while watching the city at night and listening to the reverberations of Lollapalooza bounce around through the white noise of air conditioning equipment and the L.

All things considered, I think I did all right.

Ahem.

I am enjoying my other two classes, at least. One of them — Creators and Creativity (in which we are studying the nature of creativity and creators who have produced creative works — yes, we use the C word a lot) — I am enjoying actually a whole lot more than I thought I would, especially given the amount of reading there is. In fact I am blaming it for my own recent unstoppable torrent of inspiration, which I will discuss more in a few paragraphs….

My third class, Spanish 101, is a little bizarre due to being entirely online, which makes it sort of like taking Foreign Languages Taught For Slackers, By Slackers (except that it’s the only semester class, so it’s 16 weeks worth of material compressed into an 8 week summer term; unlike the two DePaul classes which are on the quarter system and so have 10 weeks of material in a 10-week term, this one is a little busy). But I am finding it pretty easy and enjoying it. I am grateful to have found out at last where Spanish put all the subject pronouns (answer: in a box full of unloved parts of speech shoved under the bed). And it’s an easy A, so hey, no complaints there (except for the bit where it probably won’t be worth any transfer credit because I’ve already basically filled out all my Humanities requirements and electives credits – alas).

Spanish class will be over in two weeks though, and that’s good — it’ll be a relief to have the time back. Also it’ll be nice to have less work to do as the DePaul quarter comes to a close, since I will have multiple term papers to be writing by then and won’t really want to spend hours in front of the computer practicing my Spanish pronunciation (which has improved dramatically, but that is like saying your mathematical abilities skyrocketed once you showed up to Kindergarten).

To celebrate the end of Spanish class (as though I have cleverly planned this, ha!), my weekend of 25-26 July will be spent over at Loopy, for Camp Pluckyfluff. (Do not laugh at the name! Spinning yarn is serious business!) Kim will be in town visiting just beforehand, too, stopping by before jaunting off to Knitting Camp for that same weekend. The scheduling is coincidental, yet pretty damn convenient, I have to say — as is the location at Loopy extremely convenient, since Kim will have my car in Wisconsin and I was a little bit concerned about how I was going to get my wheel out to camp, until they announced the location a couple weeks ago and it turned out to be, you know, across State street and half a block up from my house. So that was … well, pretty much as convenient as humanly possible.

And next weekend, before Spinning Camp, I have tickets to two Sox games… but I don’t see how I can possibly fit both in. (If one was an evening game, maybe, but they’re both afternoon games, which pretty much interrupts all my study/writing/home time and will be a massive break in concentration, so I just can’t see how I could do it.) No tengo el tiempo para béisbol porque tengo la tarea de mis tres clases, one might say. Not to mention that I want to drive up to Crystal Lake for a couple hours to visit the annual Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Fair for at least a couple hours (not counting the couple of hours of driving it’s going to take to get out there to the boonies and back). It’s not so much that I need new fiber… it’s that I want new fiber. Y’all know. That said.. it’s a long trip and it would sadden me to skip it but I might have to, if I run low on time…sigh.

Now back to what I previously promised: a bit about my own spate of creativity. I have been thinking for a while that what I want to do to earn some experiential arts credit towards my DeGree […ha. I totally typed that by accident, combining DePaul and degree…but I love it and I think I’ll keep it.] is to do something about knitting or spinning, maybe doing something like spinning up a laceweight yarn and knitting it into a lace shawl or something. I was not entirely sanguine about that idea, chiefly because I’m not honestly all that confident in my ability to spin sturdy laceweight, and a lace shawl is an awful lot of work to go to if you don’t think the yarn can actually stand up to it. But then I thought about designing a shawl myself instead, which I’ve never done, but which would certainly require a lot of research and planning and, y’know, being artistic and stuff. So I was noodling for a while on concepts, what sort of design theme would be in such a shawl. And the other day, maybe Wednesday, I had a little minor epiphany: a Chicago shawl, of course. (a) I love Chicago. (b) We have tons of history and cool things that could go into a design. (c) Chicago rules. (d) Also this lets me use the clever little name that Hubbit came up with: SHAWLCAGO. I mean. Dudes, how can I lose? So I pondered a few ideas and finally came up with a sketch, which will no doubt go through many iterations between now and $(faraway future point when I will have successfully designed a shawl), but is at least a starting point. And it will be awesome!

There are, let’s see — 6? elements in there that reference specific Chicago things. Also the border, which is not on the sketch, references a seventh. Feel free to hazard guesses about what they are in the comments … at least two of them are completely flipping obvious!

The only (ha) problem with this rather ambitious plan is that I have never actually designed a lace pattern before, or a stole, much less both of them at the same time. So I decided that it would be wise to work on a practice project first to sort of get my footing. I chose another subject, a large motif that I plan to put central in the shawl, surrounded by a simple lacy pattern for background. And I also plan to make it a triangle shawl, which will force me to learn how to do shaping and increases and borders and all kinds of mean nasty ugly things. I have chosen a stitch for the background and already managed to get messed up by decreasing too much (and having no idea where the stitches went because the yarnovers totally match up with the k2togs, so, wtf dude?) on my initial test swatch before I even got two full repeats in, so I declare this little experiment a success! (Um. Well. You have to admit at least I get credit for knowing I would need to practice a whole lot, rather than thinking “oh, how hard could it really be.”) That shawl’s theme is sort of a lark, though, so I’m keeping it super sekrit until (a) I figure out how the hell to design a shawl, (b) I figure out how the hell to publish a lace chart without just hand-writing it on graph paper and scanning it in, and (c) I actually have something more to show off than a sketch.

In the world of non-imaginary (so far!) knitting, though, I have gotten a fair amount accomplished this year (at least, given how much time I actually have to knit, I think it’s a lot). I have knit one Baudelaire sock, finished my (started in 2006 and mostly ignored since then) bouclé wrap, started a Swallowtail shawl, and all these other nifty things that I actually have recent photos of:

But now … I have spent a good hour or so composing this particular opus, and that is time I probably should have spent on la aforementioned tarea. ‘Cos I pretty much have “the entire rest of today” worth of homework to do, and I am just putting it off, which is simultaneously an elemental part of my nature (“school? but why? it is sunny out!”) and also not actually going to help me graduate, even a little bit, not even if I explain to the dean that it was really nice and sunny out today and that is why I couldn’t be arsed.

So that’s kind of cool. I can keep a couple of projects in the caddy, it has pockets on the side for accessories, and the tabletop is removable so I can still use it as a table. The caddy bit is removable and washable, and it still mostly folds up, if I don’t mind moving the tabletop separately, and all it cost me to make was a $5 hacksaw and a $2 dowel. Rock!

I also did some spinning. I can’t spin in the wintertime (which is deeply annoying) because the skin on my hands gets too dry to handle fiber (and there is no lotion that helps this, I’ve tried — climate changes help, actually, so travelling in January actually healed my hands up a bit), but I have gotten a bit done in the past couple weeks. I finished up spinning the last of an 8oz. hank of Frabjous Fibers Blue-Faced Leicester in the “Deep Space” colorway. I drafted the full width of the roving out to pencil roving (so I had nice long chunks of colors) and navajo-plied it to preserve the color changes and shade neatly from color to color — came away with 540 yds of slightly-more-than-worsted,-not-quite-chunky weight yarn. Here’s a hank. I have four hanks now and I just want to sit and pet them. My pretties!

This roving was, to be perfectly honest, TEH BEST EVAH. If it weren’t like $30 a hank or something, I’d run right out down the street to Loopy and get like a dozen more and spend the rest of my life in fuzzy, soft, blue-purple bliss. (P.S. It is extremely dangerous to a budget having Loopy Yarns a block away from your house. Especially on rainy days when someone emails you a new project idea and you raid the stash and come up empty handed, and you whisper those fateful words: “I’ll just be like ten minutes.” I am just saying. Danger!)

I’ve also been working on Johnny’s Guitar Hero scarf. I changed it from crochet (in the pattern) to a broken-rib stitch, and am about halfway done — no pix, though, it’s not very interesting yet. But Johnny’s in a Guitar Hero tourney in a month so I have to get it one before then!

I also bought — drum roll, please — a shiny new lovely — OH YES I DID — Strauch Petite drum carder. I’ve been messing around with it and carded up a few batts of some Brown Sheep mill end rovings I got a couple years ago from The Sheep Shed Studio, which I spun up yesterday into some neat zebra-y singles I hope to turn into a two-ply worsted-weight yarn. This was a huge purchase and I dithered over it quite a bit, but I’ve been wanting one for ages so I can try making more interesting yarns, and I had the money… since, to my MASSIVE irritation, my annual spring trip to Ohio for the Ohio-Kentuckiana Soapmakers Gathering got cancelled this year due to it being scheduled on the same day as an exam in my bio class that I cannot miss — and as this year’s Gathering is in Greenville, OH, home of the Kitchenaid Experience outlet store, I’d been saving up my money for ages to buy a Kitchenaid there, which I was no longer going to be able to do what with the not going and all. (Note to self: NO MORE Saturday classes!) Sure, I could have just gone to Macy’s and bought a Kitchenaid there but, srsly, it’s not the same. And I decided I would probably use the drum carder more than the Kitchenaid this year (since I really wanted it so I wouldn’t have to knead bread dough anymore and I discovered no-knead bread last year), so I used that money for a drum carder instead. Despite the fact that I’m pretty sure I soundly confused a couple of coworkers by going on and on about “I WANT MY DRUM CARDER!!!” for like two weeks while waiting for it to ship… Nonetheless, it is awesome. And now I am going through life wanting multicolored loose silk fiber to drop from the sky…

And, since I’ve been wearing the hell out of the last one I made, I went stash-diving for some soysilk laceweight I knew I had in there somewhere and cast on for a third Clapotis. It’s nice to have a little mindless-yet-interesting knitting in there you can default to. Even if the laceweight does move annoyingly slowly, on #4 needles. It’s turning out pretty nice, I think I’ll be pleased with it when it’s done.

Of course there’s also been all the usual stuff — work, school. School is going well enough that really, I’m just mad at myself for putting it off so long. If I stick to my schedule, I should hopefully be getting an AA from HWC after summer 2010, and then that just leaves finishing up — the current contender for that is DePaul. I’m sort of miffed at the U of I system for being completely useless — UIC’s evening program is, as always, deplorable. UIS offers an online program for a couple of courses of study, but the enrollment is extremely limited (20 students? Really?). UPenn have an online program, but, meh. The nice thing about DePaul is that their School for New Learning (cough: School for Adults who Took a While to Get Their Shit Together) offers (a) classroom- or online-based classes, (b) earned credit for experiential learning (present a portfolio of work and get school credit for it — wonder what they will give me for my massive background in Internet memes?), and (c) build-your-own programs so you can study what you are actually interested in, and/or a Bachelor of Arts in Computing, meaning I could get a degree in my field without having to take Remedial Discrete Math eighty times to pass. They’re not really cheap, but I think it’ll be doable. I’ve figured out about how much money it’s going to take me to do this, and I’ve decided I have to handle it basically like my credit card debt… I just have to treat it as immutable: I must pay this amount into savings, which is playing the role of Discover Card in this little show. That amount also includes a targeted amount for my “escape fund,” which is for covering visa application costs, cat importation costs, first+last+deposit on an apartment, expenses, etc. for relocating. It’s sort of an ugly amount to stare at; even more so when you do the calculations for how much you need to save to have $XX in Y years at a 1.76% interest rate and the interest is just laughable. On the bright side, that formula was taught to me by the math class I’m in this semester, so I suppose it is making itself useful already. On the extra bright side, I won’t be getting done with this degree and thinking I’m all ready to do this thing and then suddenly realize I am thousands of dollars short. So that’s something, I guess. (Even if it does severely impair my plot-since-I-was-21 to get a fancy-pants sports car for my 40th birthday: The plan was always to pay cash, so there’s no way I’m going to pay cash for a bachelor’s degree out of pocket, plus save thousands of dollars for a move overseas, plus save like a hundred grand for a shiny new 911, in … 9 years. Ain’t gonna happen. I loved you, though, Dreams of Potential Car. Always remember!)

So that’s the news from the south loop. But now: big bio test to study for, and batts to spin! Quick! To the bat-comfy chair!

first off, i finished my ripple afghan. this was my very first crochet project ever, i started working on it in may of 2007. i crocheted the entire thing out of Caron Simply Soft yarn, which is pretty squashy and nice to begin with, but i have to tell you, after i washed and dried the finished afghan the first time, it is absolutely to die for. (also, since it ate up 12 skeins of yarn, it’s nice that the yarn is only $3/skein.)

what started out as a learning exercise:

gradually became (over the course of nearly two years) a bedspread-sized afghan:

so that’s fun. i can now say i can double-crochet on complete, full-on autopilot.

then, i took a little time here and there to sew together the squares for my Lion Brand Crochet Sampler Afghan Crochet-Along stash-busting afghan, aka the stashghan. i decided to make it out of the dribs and drabs of leftover bits of red heart super saver i’d accumulated, but i did wind up running out of straight dribs and drabs and having to actually go out and buy more red heart super saver to finish it up with the same yarn, which sort of defeated the purpose of it being a stashbuster. also, for some weird reason, the RHSS yarn was seriously ALL OVER THE PLACE with regard to weight and texture. two of the ombres were new purchases for the stashghan, and they were almost a chunky cabled yarn weight and texture, as opposed to the regular old plied worsted stuff. also, the plied stuff varied between worsted and aran. the blocks wound up being completely differently sized with each yarn, so i had to keep adjusting on the fly for the number of chain stitches and number of repeats, to get them all in the same ballpark. and even then, after dutifully measuring each block multiple times while crocheting it up, some of them still ended up off a bit, so while putting the afghan together, i had to grab the hook and throw in a few extra rows here and there to fill it out. oh, and, on top of that, i assembled it wrong; my first row of squares i got right, but then for some reason the second set of blocks i grabbed was actually the set of blocks for the fourth row, not the second, and in fact the fourth row was the same as the first row, but i sewed it on backward so i didn’t notice it was the same, and so i didn’t realize it was all wrong until i went to figure out which set of blocks was for the third row. what was moderately frustrating about that particular snafu was, when i finished up all the blocks a couple of months ago, i took an hour or so of time to set them all out on the kitchen island and rearrange them all meticulously so they were all arranged just so — no two blocks of the same yarn in a row, vertically or horizontally, no similar blocks touching, etc., which was harder than it looks primarily because i chose which yarn to make which square in basically at random. so i put all that time into planning it and then bollixed it up immediately. oh well. i think it turned out alright anyways:

and i have to note that while the red heart was less than pleasant to work with — the coarser stuff, anyways (oddly, the fluffy cabled-like ombres were nice and soft and fuzzy) — after i finished it all up and popped it through the washer with hot water and the dryer with fabric softener, it did ease up a LOT. it’s actually pleasant to the touch now, although it still can’t compete with the caron simply soft.

also recently, i decided to start attacking the hibernating WIPs, chiefly because the basket was full and i was sick of looking at it.

this one i picked back up in january, and took it along to both london and las vegas, though mostly it got worked on on the vegas trip. it’s my Nelly, which i’ve named the Harlequin Nelly because of the colors — with the pattern and yarn from my SP9! i could never ever ever get it to knit up right, and i couldn’t figure out why i just couldn’t get such a simple pattern right, so i gave up in disgust. but — this was actually my first incursion into the hibernating WIPs basket — i decided this time i was going to do it. so i grabbed a new copy of the pattern PDF down — this time with some corrections for some missing stitches, huzzah! — and started it in some scrap sock yarn to practice, and got it just fine, so i decided to go back and proceed with the laceweight. of course i decided my gauge would be wonky from the few rows i had on the needles, so i ripped it back, rewound the ball of yarn for the Nth time, and cast on once more (seriously, this is at least like the 6th time for this yarn/pattern). happily, i have yet to make any serious mistakes with it this time, and i’m like 7 repeats in to the pattern at this point, so i’m feeling like i conquered whatever bad Nelly mojo was plaguing me. here’s where it’s at:

of course now that i’m not flying on airplanes around the world i don’t have quite so much time to just sit and bang out on that, and a couple hours on the weekend (while sufficient to finish the odd nearly-done, so-close-i-can-taste-it afghan) aren’t going to cut it for making serious progress on lace, so i don’t really know how long it’ll be before i get much more done on that. (and we can all just bid a fond adieu for now to my hopes for staring on the Juno Regina i really wanted to start, but oh well.)

today i was working on my bouclé wrap, which i started in (cough) summer 2006. it’s one of those projects that’s so easy and boring you don’t want to slog through it because it is, well, boring. but it’s been half done for years now and i’m kind of on a scarf kick now and so i figured i should just go finish it up. so i picked it up and have worked a bit on it. i haven’t taken a recent photo, but this is what it looked like in (cough) 2007 sometime:

oh, speaking of my scarf kick. back before i left for london, i cast on with some lorna’s laces shepherd sock in the Buck’s Bar colorway (which i hope is not discontinued, but loopy doesn’t have it anymore so i’m a little worried — it does look a bit odd in the skein but it works up so beautifully!) for a simple seafoam stitch scarf. i had hoped to get it done in the week before i left for london, but i didn’t, so i wound up mostly knitting on that on the way out, finishing the last few rows in town, and blocking it by using my shampoo on it in the hostel shower, and then draping it over the radiator in our room. (I AM ALL CLASS.) but it worked out pretty well and i do love how it turned out:

lastly, i’ll just mention the hat i made, also in london — although this one was finished on the return flight, boo — which is the very first thing i have knit out of my own handspun. it’s made from some plain natural grey shetland wool which i spun up on the drop spindle in my old wicker park apartment. it’s just a regular beret pattern, with the ribbing done on #4 DPNs and the body of the hat on #6s, though i think i might have been better served, chicago cold-ass winter-wise, to double-strand it on some fatter needles and get a thicker hat. still:

so that is what i have been producing lately. i do have at least a half dozen things i want to cast on for, though i’m hoping to confine myself to stash-diving for the bulk of the year, as i am (it should be said) pretty damn well stocked up, yarn-wise. i mean, at my current production rate, i’ve got probably 10 years’ worth of material in that closet, and that’s not even counting the stuff i have yet to spin into actual yarn. but i want to get through at least this bouclé wrap, and then see where to go from there — of my remaining WIPs, then, i think i’ll probably be down to my Nelly, and the red beret i have already knit twice (in sizes which necessitated ripping it out and starting over, so the third time will hopefully be the charm here, just in time for winter to be over), and an entrelac scarf i started two winters ago (ditto on the timing). i’ve also got my MS3 i started, and got far enough into to actually see pattern developing and be thrilled with, but to be honest, i didn’t really like the wing so i lost interest, and now i’ve completely lost where i’m at on it, so i’ll probably wind up just frogging it. which will mean i have yarn to start on something else with! maybe it’ll be around spring break time i have a little free time to actually do that…

in the meantime, i’m really looking forward to having tomorrow as a holiday from work. now that i’m burning every saturday in bio class (and it’s effectively an entire work day; i leave at 8 and get home around 3ish) it’ll be lovely to have a whole two-day weekend again. i don’t know what i’ll do tomorrow but i might even get so wild and crazy as to bust out the spinning wheel! you cannot stop the madness!

i went to baltimore again! fortunately this time was not like last time. saw friends. ate junk food. had impromptu (but fortunately non-critical) auto service performed when the check engine light came on on my car for the very first time ever. couldn’t find a yeungling to drink. :( but generally otherwise had a v. good time, although it was a little weird how the police kept raiding the outback steakhouse next door.

while there, worked on my ripple afghan, now in progress for going on two years.

at this rate i hope to finish before i turn 35. (though i have picked up the pace, and now i can do about a stripe and a half in an hour. so that’s good.)

also while i was there, the nice people at my vet discovered they couldn’t read their own handwriting, and rather than trimming a couple of mats out of tiger’s fur like i had asked — since he has to be boarded at the vet when i travel, for his medication — they did a full lion cut on him.

they didn’t make me pay for the grooming, but there was no way to refund poor tiger’s dignity. LOOK! HE’S WEARING LITTLE FUR BOOTIES!! AND A TAIL POOF! HAHAHAHAHA!

after i got home, i glared at my works-in-progress on ravelry a little bit and then decided to try and knock some things off the list. i picked up my 5-1/2 Hour Throw to work on it, which was great because i got about three rows in, ran out of green yarn, and therefore got to declare it done:

it is exceedingly ugly, and i am unimpressed with it. still, it’ll probably be nice and cosy to throw over my shoulders at work, or something.

and i even got some work done on my diamond fantasy shawl:

sadly, i planned badly on the yarn front, and it will wind up more of a scarf size than a shawl size. really it’s too bad, because it’s a great pattern and i’m just settling into it where i can zip along pretty readily, so if there was ever anything i was prepared to do 225 rows of lace on, it was this. i figure i’ll probably make it another 3 repeats or so and then have to bind it off. alas.

and finally, having finished one ugly afghan, i started another: an exercise in stashbusting, also known as the Lion Brand Crochet Sampler Afghan, which is part of a crochet-along:

i managed to get 4 squares done yesterday. there are 3 squares, each of which you must make 10, and then join them all. i can get in a square here and a square there and so i think i might actually get the squares done in something approaching good time, though it remains to be seen how long it will take to turn a pile of squares into an actual blanket.

and last (first, actually, this i did before baltimore): i spun a little. a very little.

berry-colored roving from Loopy Yarns, spun up into singles on the louet, with vague hopes of someday coming away from the bobbin with some actual usable yarn.

but after telling you all that, i must confess that i am feeling a little…

…like maybe i need a nap.

yes! despite my having been basically the anti-emailer, my SP had put a box in the mail for me. a box .. of DOOM^H^H^H^Hgoodies!

on the very top of the box was a bag tied up with a tiny scrap of roving, and with a Converse All-Stars tag hanging from its handles:

i thought, hey! that’s the same roving that kim gave me some of, when i was playing with her drumcarder! what a wacky coincidence! my SP must have seen the pictures of the yarn i made out of it and figured out where the roving came from and gotten some of it… cool!

then i looked over and there was a bag of white corriedale roving, with a tiny tag stuck to it:

after i opened it up and read the card, i couldn’t help but feel i was maybe being taunted a little bit:

hrmph!

alongside that there was a really gorgeous batt of fiber — a 70/30 angora/wool blend in a really pretty colorway. it might actually be too pretty to spin.

i opened up the blue roving bag and found inside… carded batts! carded batts that looked suspiciously like the ones that came off of kim’s drum carder! WHAT AN ASTOUNDING COINCIDENCE!

i put those rovings aside and just looked at everything that was underneath them…

let’s look at that one again in slow-motion:

i think you all know what i was thinking right about then. it started with ‘holy’ and ended with a four-letter word.

so there was this one item that seemed … out of place. i started to get a little suspicion in my head.

i picked up the phone and dialed.

“kim,” i says. “kim, have you got something you’d maybe like to tell me?”

“no,” she says, sweet as pie. “why do you ask?”

“oh, no reason,” says i. “been to your post office lately?”

i no longer recall which one of us started giggling first.

so yes, it’s true: out of about 450 or so people signed up for the Secret Pal 11 gift exchange, all around the whole world … one of my best friends in the entire world, my friend kim got my name. (i’d ask what are the odds, but evidently they’re 449:1.) and i, friends neighbors and countrymen, i had not a single idea in the world it was she until she brought out the Grady Sizemore cluebat. i had, in fact, sent off notes to kim during the gift exchange, like when i dyed some sock yarn to send to my downstream SP and the day after got a box from my upstream with sock yarn in a nearly exact colorway — i sent emails going “omg, you’re not going to believe this!” and i was plotting to maybe try and meet up with my SP (who lived in ohio, so close to kim, after all!) next time i headed out that way! jeeeeeez. i’d blame insufficient coffee, except for the part where it was like three months…

but, now, without further ado: let’s dive into the goodie box!

Knitpicks Alpaca Cloud laceweight yarn, in Stream – a beautiful heathery medium blue. and at 1300 yards’ worth, enough to knit up maybe the Spring Blossoms Scarf she sent me the pattern for, earlier!

A selection of yummy teas, which is great because we now have like 8 inches of snow on the ground and I’m not exactly breaking out the margaritas over here.

sock yarn! i am not convinced kim actually has any sock yarn left in her house. i think she migrated it all westward!

Interlacements Tiny Toes yarn in a cute colorway with deep purple, clematis, navy, pale slate purple, and maroon. maybe this yarn would be a better choice for a pair of Bellatrix socks than the sole Koigu i’ve got (which i got with Bellatrix in mind, but now i think the variegated dark colors might be better than the uneven red-violet of the KPPPM). well, assuming i ever finish a pair of socks again. interlude: here’s my current sock in progress, the first (still) of my Montana Wheat socks — also from a pattern and yarn from my not-so-secret-anymore SP!

and — remember how on Monday before i got the box from kim (waaaaay back at the beginning of this blog post?) i went to Joann’s for red heart yarn? here’s why:

i know it doesn’t look like much, but it’s an about halfway done Grown Up Chucks slipper. i cast on when i was watching last week’s house, wednesday night (i missed it because there was a special on PBS instead, and i neglected to realize that i was missing house to watch it, for i am a dumbass — so i had to wait 8 days for it to show up at fox.com, but it finally did, and i got to see (SPOILER) happen, so all is well). but anyways, back to the goodie box.

so here’s something new:

three balls of flax roving — for making linen yarn. i’ve played with it, over at Loopy with another spinner who brought it in to play with, but i’ve never seriously tried to spin it. i’m going to have to read up on how to spin it, because you have to have wet fingers when you do, and it’s probably trickier than wool. by ‘probably’ i mean ‘i was totally impressed with myself for spinning about 2 yards of it that one time, so yeah, it’s harder than wool.’ so that should be fun!

ensuring that i will never lack for anything to spin was clearly kim’s mission when putting this box together! four braids of roving here — one purple 80/20 merino/silk, one black 80/20 merino/silk, and two extraordinary white Fleece Artist braids of 65% wool/35% silk.

one thing i forgot to take a picture of was a pattern for Cornerstone Yarns’ Sideways Garter Stitch Gloves. i’ve seen kim post pictures of those that she’s made, previously, and i’m looking forward to giving them a shot!

and finally:

handwarmers/fingerless gloves to match the hat she sent me before!

all this is on top of the last thing she sent me, which arrived right before Thanksgiving, and which i was completely shocked by: two great hardback books!

the wednesda before thanksgiving – i literally stumbled over that package while i was running out carrying my cat in his carrier to the car, to drop him off at the vet and then hit the road for holiday travelling. so when i saw it was from my SP, i grabbed it and threw it in the car as well! i didn’t have a chance to open it up for a couple of days, what with the turkey-related food coma and all, but when i did, i was quite happy. i sat down and basically read the stitch dictionary cover to cover. (it’s way more fun than reading the actual dictionary cover to cover. there are pictures!)

oh, and, for the record, it took about two minutes for kiyoshi to discover the empty box, flip it on its side, and crawl inside:

cats and boxes, man. everybody gets a present!

well, i think it goes without saying that my SP went above and beyond the call of duty with this one! thank you, kim. you have spoiled me completely rotten. :-)

the ravelry description of the tutorial remarks that it is “masterful.”

my ass.

i cast on and knit the foundation triangles easily enough — i love doing short rows, so that’s fun, and plus i can knit backwards now so it’s not completely maddening. but on the second row — i knit the instructions all the way across, and came up with… triangles, not diamonds. ???

so i figured, oh, i obviously did it wrong, ripped back, went back, started again, got the same result, reread the instructions, thought it meant that maybe you make the triangle then you go back over those triangles and add more triangles on top (thus completing the rectangles), though that was not how it looked from the pictures, tried that, … got this:

so at that point, i threw up my hands and went back to Teh Intarwebs to find a better tutorial. one that perhaps lies less…. i still like the idea of entrelac for this scarf, so i just have to find better instructions. oh well. i was really hoping to make a start on this project tonight… dang. i found this tutorial, which seems clearer, so maybe i’ll give that a shot tomorrow.

(at least in the mean time, my newfound skill at knitting backwards may help me finally, finally finish the Boring Scarf.)

in other, more successful news, i spun up and then navajo-plied about half of that braid of red roving from my SP:

it turned out pretty well, i think! it is a DK-weight, and fairly even. it looks more purple than the roving did, but i like it a lot — it turned out as a slightly violet maroon. and this amount spun up to a little over 200 yards. i’m not sure what i’m going to do with it. we’ll see how much the rest comes out to, i guess.

my Montana Wheat sock, with yarn and pattern from my SP, is also coming along nicely:

the pattern is actually very easy — and it got easier once i stopped knitting with a deathly tight gauge. (the last things i knit, two pair of Dashing, are knit out of worsted weight yarn on slightly small needles, with a tight gauge. i had a death grip on the needles most of the time i was knitting those!) the yarn is, also, absolutely magnificent. it’s soft and fuzzy and the colors are mind-blowing. it’s a little too dark to see the pattern very well, especially with my camera, but i’m pleased with it. i’m about 4 rows from starting to turn the heel. it’s weird… i might actually finish a sock some point in the near future! i’m not sure how i feel about this…

the ripple continues apace:

and just to wrap up this three-day weekend, i dyed up some sock yarn:

gotta go hang that up to drip-dry over the bathtub before i go to bed, then hopefully i can wind it up into (regular-sized!) skeins in a few days after it all dries. then maybe someone out there should watch her mailbox because i think what she needs in her life is more sock yarn…. but that is all i am going to say on that!

pretty easy pattern so far (she says, all of two and a half inches in). i think the next real challenge will be trying to remember how many repeats i’ve done of the wheat head patterny bit, while knitting on this as a transit sock. man, the yarn is spectacular!

as modeled by my sun bear:

first, a pattern for Montana Wheat Socks and a wonderful skein of hand-dyed sock yarn from another indie dyer, Mountain Colors. the yarn is Bearfoot in Winter Sky, a beautiful blend of dark blues and purple, in superwash wool, mohair, and nylon.

next is a 50g sliver of Fleece Artist Blue Faced Leicester, in a bright undyed white, which — i know a bunch of you heathens are looking at me funny right about now — is a specific breed of sheep whose wool is legendary to spin. i’ve heard a lot about it but have not had the opportunity to try it myself, though i had wanted to — so now i can! i would no doubt have already broken it out of its braid were it not for…

third is a huge braid of 70/30 merino wool/silk roving (or top. i always get the two of them confused.), in a great reddish purple blend — the silk is undyed white and it is really luminous. i pretty much immediately plonked my butt down on the comfy chair with my louët and started spinning:

and finally, my SP knit me a really cute hat!!!

i don’t know what the pattern is (hey, you try googling “knit seed stitch hat” and see what you come up with!) but it’s really cute, and it’s knit out of the softest wool/alpaca blend. when i first got it (in between cuddling it — ask D.) i was initially a little sad because it wasn’t cold enough to wear it, but today i swear i saw snow in the headlights of an idling car while walking home from the L after work tonight, and i was certainly freezing my $%^& off wearing just my little black hoodie (which was FINE when i left for work in the 55°F morning, but not so much in the 38°F evening!), so you never know — it might get broken out a little earlier than i had thought!

and, even more belatedly — i seem to never have blogged about my last gift from my SP!!! (Sorry! :( ) i got a tiny box in the mail a little while ago, and opened it up to discover the most ridiculously cute stitch markers ever:

yes, it’s true: i have tiny cheese wedge stitch markers! they’re fantastic. and each wedge is smaller than a dime! so cute. i was honestly thinking about buying myself a second set just to have more of them. actually, these are part of what prompted me to pick my clapotis back up — an excuse to use my cute new stitch markers. and you know, that time, i finally finished it! so maybe they are the good luck stitch markers of project completion.

and there you have it! my SP is spoiling me rotten. :) i’ve really got to get finished with the Anti-Baudelaires so i can cast on one of these sock yarns! (i made a mistake on the A-B’s today, on the el on the way home from work — i got confused, or something, who knows really, but i twisted the cables two rows early. i haven’t even knitted back around yet, so i could go tink back and fix it, but … is it really the spirit of the Anti-Baudelaires to fix mistakes? i think it’s sort of anti-Anti-Baudelaires. and yet, a really short cable twist followed by a really long cable twist are going to look pretty dippy. i feel conflicted. i swore not to fix mistakes, but . . . that was really sort of predicated on not making any, you know what i mean? maybe i’ll put these aside temporarily and cast on another pair of socks anyways, just to go do something different for a little while. what do you think, O Humble Peanut Gallery?)