All About Handspun

It appears as though I have been falling in love with spinning/handspun lately.  In part I know it has to do with my trip to the Alpaca Expo and the three bags of fiber I bought there, but I also have a sneaking suspicion that it has to do with the changing seasons.  I never noticed until I got to thinking about it, but the spring and summer months tend to be my spinning months.  In fact, looking at my bin of handspun that I have made over the years, not a single skein was made during the winter.  I guess for me, winters are for knitting and summers are for spinning.  At least now I know.

Here in Minnesota, we've had a particularly slow start to our spring season.  This month alone we had snow storm after snow storm.  Here's a photo from April 19, just one week ago:

I have to tell you, working in a coffee shop where I interact with hundreds of other Minnesotans every day, it was clear that we were all using every ounce of our strength to stay sane and civil during these past few weeks.  In the fall, we mentally prepare for a long, dark, cold winter with the knowledge that on the other side will be spring.  We hunker down and get through it the best we can.  When March comes around, our longing becomes a little more desperate and with each snowfall, the complaints begin.  April hits and we know that the snow will soon be gone and we shed our emotional winter coats in place of a more hopeful, lighthearted demeanor.  So when April continues to dump inches upon inches of snow on our already fragile, now unprotected, winter-weakened emotional state, it is a little difficult to cope.  We get through winter knowing that spring is coming, but when we get to the other side to discover that there is only winter...  the anxiety, frustration, and desperation is palpable.

Thank god, then, for this weekend that has brought temperatures in the 70s, a clear blue sky, and the warm spring breeze that we have all been longing for these past six months.  And like clockwork, the changing of the seasons (and I really don't think it's supposed to happen this suddenly...) has brought me back to spinning.

Outside, even.  In fact, I was sitting at that very same picnic table that just a week ago was covered in half a foot of snow.  I never realized how relaxing it is to spin outside - I'll definitely be doing it more often.

It's well past time that I finished up this spinning project, which I started almost a year ago.  I'm very near to the finish line with only seven ounces (of 36) left to spin, resulting in the most amazing sweater yarn I have ever owned.  I am so excited to have this done, not because I'm sick of spinning it (which I am not.  I never tire of watching these colors flow through my fingers), but because it means I can move on to the next step of the process - knitting the sweater!

And it's not just the spinning wheel that has been seeing some action these days.  I even broke out one of my spindles again, which has been a lot of fun.

This particular spindle is a Kundert spindle and spins like a dream.  It is perfectly balanced and beautiful to look at and has very quickly become my new favorite.

And as if spinning wasn't enough, I've been knitting with my handspun, as well.

I showed you those wrist warmers back in February, and they're still not finished, but hopefully soon I'll have the second one done.  I'm also knitting up a lace shawl using some superwash BFL dyed and gifted to me by Anne at Wooly Wonka Fibers in her "Wood Duck" colorway.

I love the wonderful character that handspun is adding to this project.  The pattern is Miriam Felton's Mountain Peaks Shawl, which has been in my queue for years.  I think this pattern is a perfect balance of lace and simplicity to show off the yarn, which totally surprised me with its stripes.  We'll see if they continue throughout the whole project.

I've continued to submerge myself in spinning, reading what I can and watching several videos to improve my skills and understanding of the craft.  Does anybody have any recommendations for the best hand cards and combs?  And yes, I'm totally serious.  I want to take this spinning thing one step further and begin to prepare my own fiber.  I hope to at least get one Suri alpaca fleece from this year's shearing at the farm, but I'd love to prepare other fibers as well.  Any advice would be very helpful!

Until next time, stay warm and enjoy the sunshine!

Finding Greener Pastures

Well, I sure didn't last very long with my blogging resolutions, did I?  Let's do some bullet-point blogging before I get to the meat of this post.

• Not much has been happening since my last post.  The sweater is still unfinished.
• I started a lace shawl with some handspun, but I had to put that down pretty early in its development because
• I agreed to do some more sample/test knitting.  This means I can't show you what I'm working on.
• My LYS now carries BrooklynTweed yarn.  It takes every ounce of strength to not go there every day.
• Last week (two weeks ago?) I was working a later shift at the coffee shop than I normally do and discovered a secret knitting group comprised of young, hip knitters.
• They said they tend to intimidate new people because they're "serious" about their knitting.
• I said bring on the cables and leave the crying at home.
• I'm playing with a symphony again, but I still get paid more to knit than I do to play my clarinet.

Alright, now we're all caught up.  Wanna know what I did today?

I drove down to the Minnesota Alpaca Expo and hung out with these camelids!  I had seen a post on Ravelry a couple weeks back about this event and immediately took the day off of work so I could be there.  I had never gone to a fiber festival or anything of the sort and I thought it was high time I saw what all the hubbub was about.

Today the hubbub was all about alpacas.  The expo was less about fiber crafts and more about the animals themselves.  They had a halter competition (like a dog show) and there was a silent auction for live animals.  Alpaca farmers from all over the midwest showed up with their best show animals to compete for a blue ribbon.

I, however, simply showed up to see these cute faces.

As I wandered around taking an obnoxious amount of blurry pictures of alpacas looking away from me, one of the handlers asked me if I had any questions.  "No, I'm just looking..." I heard myself say.  "Wellllll, maybe just one question."  45 minutes later and I had met two local alpaca farmers and was walking away with plans to start volunteering at an alpaca farm starting next weekend!

You think wool fumes in a yarn shop are bad?  By the time I did one loop around this place I was ready to drop everything and start an alpaca farm of my own!  The next best thing to do, in my mind, is to volunteer at someone else's as much as possible.  The one I'll be visiting has 80 alpacas.  I'm so excited!

Did you know there are two different kinds of alpacas?  Huacaya alpacas are the ones I've been showing you above.  They're soft and fluffy and have shorter fibers than the second type.  Huacayas also make up 97% of the world's population of alpacas.

And just look at all the different natural colors they come in!  Be still, my beating heart.  (Full disclosure: I walked away with 8oz each of black, gray, and white fiber.  I couldn't resist.)

The second type of alpacas, the 3% that's left, are the Suri alpacas.  They have a very long staple length (the length of their fiber), which naturally forms into beautiful dreadlocks.

I apparently didn't do a very good job taking pictures of Suris.  You can see that when there are children present, the alpacas won't even give you the time of day.

Suris make up 17% of the US population of alpacas, but even so, there are less than 20,000 of them in the country and they're no longer being imported.  I'll be sure to get better pictures for you later because the farm that I plan on volunteering at?  All Suri alpacas.  I have to admit, I think they're less photogenic and look a little nerdy, but that's what makes me like them so much.

All together now:  Awwwwwwww!

Cozy

I don't have an incredible amount to share today, but I would like to show you the progress I have been making on my Staccato sweater.

See that?  It's totally almost done.  Somehow I managed to knit both sleeves and the hood over the past week and a half.  Before I had done the sleeves, I thought this sweater was going to be way too huge for me and at one point I almost scrapped it.  But now that all the pieces are done, I'm loving how comfortably roomy it is.  It's exactly what I wanted.  This is the sweater version of the baggy sweatshirts that I love so much.  (Yes, I realize I'm not the most fashionable individual out there.)

I can't wait for it to be completely finished so I can begin wearing it (although, truth be told, I've been wearing it as is all day and it is wonderful.)  I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that it will be going into hibernation again for quite a while.  I've never been very keen on all of the finishing a large piece like this demands, and there are still hundreds of ends to weave in, hems to tack down, a zipper facing to knit in, and a zipper to install.  Perhaps this sweater will be ready for next winter.  Wouldn't that be great?

My Precious

I've discovered lately that the only knitting that I have managed to do over the past few months has been very basic.  Garter stitch, stockinette, ribbing...  I think I just don't have the mental energy to focus on a project that involves colorwork, cables, or lace.  Lately I've been rediscovering the comforts of mindless knitting and today I have something truly luxurious to show you.

This, my dear readers, is the softest, most decadent knitted piece I own.  Some people may scoff and say, "Seven feet of 3x3 ribbing?  I'd rather stew in a bath of leeches than commit myself to such a project!"  I pity those people because those people will never experience the instant comfort, the true bliss that this scarf brings to one's life.

It's obviously not the pattern that makes this scarf so special - it's the yarn.  My sister and I happened upon this yarn while visiting Bella Lana in December.  In the ball this yarn didn't seem like anything special.  Sure, the colors were nice and the yarn was soft enough, but I didn't think it was anything to warrant the cost.  The samples, however, told a different story.  It was hard to believe that the scarves, hats, and fingerless mitts I was petting came from the same yarn that was wound in those balls.  Clearly the samples had gone through some magical transformation and when the shop owner bestowed upon us the secret to these scarves, my sister and I both scooped up enough to make one of our own.

The secret, if you can believe it, is to throw the entire scarf in the washing machine when you are done knitting it.  Scary, right?  Yes, it is.  60% of this yarn is merino and nowhere on the ball band does the word "superwash" ever appear.  I didn't trust my washing machine, so I decided to hand wash the scarf with a touch more agitation than usual.  I then laid it out to dry and waited for the magic to happen.  It didn't.  Nothing changed.  I waited another day.  It remained the same.

I should tell you, the shop owner did not say, "put this scarf in the washing machine on the gentle cycle with no agitation."  No, she said, "put this scarf in with a regular load of laundry.  I washed mine with jeans."  And so I did.  I put the scarf in a pillow case, tied the end shut, and threw it in the laundry with a bunch of other stuff.  Regular cycle, warm water.  I then chewed my fingernails for half an hour while the cycle ran.  Folks, that shop owner did not steer me wrong.  What I pulled out of that pillow case barely resembled what I had put in, in the best possible way.  What I pulled out was a soft, fluffy, warm scarf with a halo to die for.  A halo made up of short, soft, brown fibers that gave the color a depth that one can only dream of.  I tried to take a photo showing you the difference of an unwashed scarf (left) and washed scarf (right) to demonstrate how significant this change is.  You can't truly see how incredible the difference is, but it's a start.

Are you ready to hear what the other 40% of that fiber was?  The 40% that lent this scarf its warmth, softness, fluffiness, and depth of color?

Possum.

I made my friend a skinnier version of the same scarf and she wrapped it around her neck and praised its beauty, only to tear it off and throw it on the floor as soon as she discovered what it was made of.  She has since embraced the possum.

The yarn is Zealana Kia Ora Rimu DK and it comes from New Zealand.

I know that many of you living in North America, when I said "possum," envisioned the American Opossum and got a chill down your spine at the thought of wrapping something like that around your neck.  Just so we're on the same page, this is the American Opossum:

Photo courtesy of AndrewKantor on Flickr

I don't want to be near one of those, dead or alive, any more than you do.  The possum fiber in the Zealana yarn does not come from the American Opossum, but rather the Australian Possum, which is in no way related.  They are both marsupials, but that's about all they have in common.  This is the Australian Possum:

Photo courtesy of kooky on Flickr

See?  Not nearly as terrifying.  If you're ok with your fiber coming from a sheep, you should have no problem embracing the possum.  I can't say that I will be indulging in much more of this yarn as the carbon footprint must be gargantuan to get the yarn to the US and I don't think the animals are sheared like sheep if you catch my drift (they're invasive to New Zealand and dealt with in much the same way as brown rats may be treated in NYC), but the scarf sure is nice to have and I'm glad that something useful and beautiful was able to come from the possum.  I've said my thanks and consider this scarf an homage of sorts, providing warmth and comfort as a legacy through which the possum may live.

Thank you, dear possums, you won't be forgotten.

Declaring a Holiday

I have to say, I'm impressing even myself by blogging today.  I don't even have a day off until Saturday, but I felt compelled to write a bit today, so here I am.

While at work this morning, I wrote today's date on a few papers.  Every time I wrote it, "2-20", I thought to myself, "Why does that sound so familiar?"  I couldn't figure out if I had something scheduled for today that I was forgetting about or if 2-20 was some sort of code for something.  And then it hit me - 220.  As in Cascade 220.  And then I came up with an idea.

I am henceforth declaring today, February 20, in the life of Peter as "Knit With Cascade 220 Day".  And it just so happens that I already have a project in the works with that very yarn.  This is one of those projects that I was really not knitting.  I packed it up when I moved from Pittsburgh back in July and hadn't taken it out since.  Perhaps it's time to get back to it.

I searched far and wide for all of those colors, collecting them over the span of two years until I had them all.  I just couldn't find a single LYS that carried all of them (and I looked in yarn shops in 4 different states).  Of course, I finally found the last one right before I moved to Pittsburgh, where I quickly discovered that my LYS there carried every color of 220.

I was collecting all of those colors to make a Staccato sweater by Kirsten Kapur.  Being unadventurous and completely in love with the one in the photos, I sought to recreate it by using all the same colors.  I won't mention the fact that 4 or 5 of the colors aren't ones that I would have chosen on my own - I was just too smitten with the idea that once I finished this sweater, I too would be able to stand in a foggy field drinking my morning coffee from a ceramic mug.  And also I would have curly black hair like her son.  Knitting is transformative and I was eager to find a farm on which to wear my sweater.  And I got pretty far before I had to pack it up for moving, too.

It's not the most flattering thing on my body as it's an oversized shapeless rectangle, but I adore sweaters/sweatshirts that zip up the front and have hoods and I think this one would get a lot of use.  I think that's why I don't wear any of my handknit sweaters - they're pullovers.  I think maybe I don't like pullovers.

Of course, before I can use this one, I have to finish it.  That involves knitting two sleeves, a hood, a zipper facing, and then weaving in the 32,000 ends from all those stripes that will be on the body, sleeves, and hood.  And then I also have to install the zipper.  So there's still a lot of work ahead of me, but it won't actually be difficult to accomplish.  It'll just take time.

I'm thinking tonight when I'm done practicing I'll settle down with an audiobook and this sweater to get started on a sleeve.  That sounds like a nice evening.  Are you coincidentally knitting anything with Cascade 220 today?

Knitting Nothing

I find it a bit ironic that in my last post (back in December) I talked about how I had finished all of my deadline knitting and then I said this: 

"In a strange way, it almost makes me want to knit nothing, just because I can."

I had meant that as a joke when I wrote it, but it turns out that knitting nothing is exactly what I did.  Sure, I've done a stitch here and a row there, but when it comes to finishing a project, I've been rather unproductive.  I've fallen into a bit of a slump with my knitting and when it comes to my daily routine, knitting has been thrown by the wayside.

Knitting, for me, has never been an on-the-go hobby or something that I do when I have 5 spare minutes.  For me, it is a hunker down on the couch with a mug of tea and a good movie for two hours kind of hobby.  There are several problems with this kind of hobby in my life right now.  The first is that if I hunker down on the couch for any longer than 10 minutes, I will fall asleep.  Guaranteed.  I am not a morning person, and no amount of rest will ever change the fact that working a job that starts at 5am every day leaves me exhausted for the remaining hours.  The second problem is that I'm still auditioning for clarinet jobs, which means that any significant amount of free time I spend doing something leisurely such as, say, watching a movie while knitting, very quickly crushes me with so much guilt about not practicing that I have to put the needles down.  The third problem is that most of my free time is at night and I'm always aware that every minute I spend knitting is one less minute I get to sleep (I'm obsessed with sleeping these days), so rather than spending an hour knitting in the evening, I will most likely choose to read for 15 minutes before turning off the lights.

I think about this blog as an extension of my knitting, which means that if I'm not knitting anything, I'm not blogging either.  Yesterday I came up with a two-step plan to rectify this situation.

Step 1: Knit things.  This one seems obvious, but I think it's crucial so I wrote it down.  I haven't yet come up with a plan for how to carry this out, but in theory it sounds doable.

Step 2: Blog on my days off.  I don't know why I hadn't thought of this one before.  I always have at least one day off a week, which means that I should be able to post on a weekly basis, and blogging on my days off should also allow me a bit of daylight in which to take pictures.  Of course we all know that days off are really days to do every single errand and chore that you don't have time to do while you're at work, so we'll see how well this one works out.  Lucky for me, usually my days off are also laundry days, and therefore stay-at-home-in-your-pajama days, which in turn should buy me some blogging time.  Today is my day off this week.  I am also blogging.  So far, so good.

So to start things off because I haven't yet implemented step 1, I thought I would show you the things that I'm not knitting.  To be more specific, these are the things that I'm actively not knitting, as opposed to those works in progress that I'm not even pretending to be knitting.  These are the projects that I look at when I think I may sit down and knit.  The ones tripping me as I walk out the door, poised with needles ready and yarn wound.  The other ones, the ones that I'm really not knitting don't even see the light of day.

The first project that I'm not knitting is another pair of fingerless gloves for myself.  I'm using some of my handspun for this project.  The pattern is the fairly popular and relatively straightforward Ragtop by Susan Lawrence.

I like them.  The one I have finished (minus the thumb) is very warm and soft.  I wish there were two of them.  The reason there aren't two of them (and you'll find that each of the projects I'm showing you has at least one reason for why it's not yet done) is because I repurposed the remaining yarn.  It's still useable for this project, but for the time being it's serving another purpose, which I had forgotten about until I went looking for it today to take a picture.  It seemed like a brilliant solution to an annoying problem at 3am.

The annoying problem being that when it's windy outside, the storm window next to my bed rattles so loudly that it keeps me up at night.  When I had finally had enough one particularly gusty evening, I grabbed the first thing I saw and shoved it between the two panes of glass to stop the window from shaking.  It has been working well for the past two months.

The other reason there's only one mitt is that I took the needles away to start the next project that I'm currently not working on.

It's exactly what it looks like, which is a big ol' mess.  It will one day become a Chameleon, which is fitting because only a huge transformation will help this project.  I put it down because I have no desire to kitchener 125 stitches along the tail using Kureyon while simultaneously stuffing it.  That is definitely not on my list of things to do when I have 15 minutes of free time.

The most incomplete project that I'm not knitting is a scarf, shown below:

That's as far as I've gotten, and I got there several weeks ago.  It's the Green Honey Man-Scarf and I'm knitting it (well, actively not knitting it) using Eco Wool to replace a scarf for my brother that mysteriously disappeared when he and his ex broke up.

The last project that I'm not knitting is a pair of mittens that I started 10 months ago.  I'm not at all surprised that I haven't started them because they're stranded knitting, and every time I make something using colorwork that requires two items to be the same size, such as mittens, I take an enormous break between the first and second one.  This break has a 100% success rate of guaranteeing that at least one of the items will not fit and that when laid next to each other, one always looks like an older sibling rather than a twin.

Of course, in the case of these mittens, I don't really care because the first one didn't fit anyway.  It still makes me a little sad, though, because I'm sure someone could benefit from having mittens knit with gorgeous Brooklyn Tweed LOFT and the pattern is one that I've always loved looking at.

So there you have it, the projects that I haven't been knitting lately.  Is there anything that you aren't knitting?

Because I Can

I first have to thank you all for the kind birthday wishes and warm welcome back into the blogging world.  It's nice to know that you are all still reading after so long.

I don't know why I ever try to make a plan for something as unpredictable as knitting, but I really did intend for all of my sample knitting to have been finished several weeks ago.  I ran into a bit of a complication with the final sweater and didn't finish it until yesterday, but that still means that all of my sample knitting is done!  I can't tell you how liberating it feels to know that I can knit anything I want, at whatever pace I want.  In a strange way, it almost makes me want to knit nothing, just because I can.

But of course that would be ridiculous, so I immediately cast on for a pair of fingerless mitts.  You see, I don't own any.  I can't tell you how many pairs I have given away, but for some reason I don't own any myself.  What makes this so absurd is that I have longed for a pair for years and have never made it happen.  Every fall when my hands start getting cold, I think about how great it would be to own a pair of fingerless mitts.  I plan them in my head, I think about what they would look like, what yarn I would use, but in all the free time I have had over the years, I have never found the time to knit myself a pair.

Until now.  I finished my final sample sweater last night, cast on a pair of fingerless gloves, and by noon today they were finished.  It turns out it doesn't take very long to knit two small tubes.  Now I'm kicking myself for spending all those chilly evenings suffering with cold hands for no reason.

I was weaving in the ends when my little sister asked me to take her sledding, so I bundled up, shoved the mitts in my pocket along with my camera, and we headed out for an afternoon of sledding, fort building, snowball throwing, snow eating, and hot chocolate drinking.  It was a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

I made the mitts out of a partial skein of Shelter I had leftover from a hat I made a year or two ago (which I also wore today.  I don't think I've ever blogged about it, though.)  I used the Camp Out Fingerless Mitts pattern and modified it rather severely to fit my hands and work with the yardage I had.  They worked out perfectly, if I do say so myself.

They look exceptionally fetching in handspun, so I have a feeling I'm going to be knitting another pair or two before I've exhausted this pattern.  I'm sure they'll be nice to have around.

I'm off to grab a mug of tea and enjoy the rest of my day off sitting by the fire and knitting whatever I want, because I can.  They're predicting 8-15" of snow before this storm is over and I'm quite content to surround myself with wool to wait it out.