Emily’s Knits

A second balanced skein! It’s not nearly as tightly plied as the first, and I (somewhat) succeeded at making a thicker yarn. I’ll wrap it to get a better measurement of weight when it’s finished drying. For now I’m pretty pleased with myself. Maybe soon I’ll get practiced enough to spin something aran weight -grin-.

I’m glad leaving this merino in hot water for a while doesn’t seem to injure it. I put the skein in a pot of hot water to finish and accidentally left it there on ’2′ for at least two episodes. Oops! I suppose I should get myself a kitchen timer and start using it.

The Baby Surprise Jacket isn’t going quite as well. I’m having some issues with counts and can’t seem to figure out what went wrong. Increases should be 4 every other row, and I’m off count by two stitches. In addition, the increases keep trying to get done on the wrong side of the work. I’ve put it away for tonight – I think when I pick it back up I’m going to have to rip out at least 6 or 8 rows before I can get back on track and I’m a little too sleepy to do that tonight.

Good night!

Stale singles are definitely a common occurrence in my world.  I get halfway through something, stop for a day or two, finish it up, wait a day or two, and then ply.  Even worse, sometimes I don’t wait the second day or two and then half my single is fresh and the other half is two days on the spindle.  Either way, my approach to finding balance in plying has up to this point been haphazard.  I’ve had very few balanced skeins, but hadn’t taken the time to fully understand why.

Why did the first spindle-full work out just fine but the second looks terrible and stringy?  Why do they *always* twist slightly to the right?

And answers, in order: Because the first one you plied directly after spinning and the second sat on the spindle for a week – and you used the ‘it twists slightly left’ method of balancing both times!  Because you’ve underplied slightly, likely because of twist loss during the winding, unwinding, and skeining.

For now I’ve decided that the ‘make a sample by letting a fresh single ply back on itself and compare to that while plying’ method is probably good enough.  I’ve been working with fibres and at weights that don’t lend themselves nicely to the ‘make sure the fibres all align straight down the yarn’ method, but I’ll give that a go when/if I have something appropriate.

I’m also looking forward to seeing if this is easier with a wheel than a drop spindle.  Theoretically in that case I will be able to count treadles to keep a constant plying twist throughout the skein.  I won’t be able to give it a try this weekend (I should try to be polite and avoid boring the friend who’s visiting), but I’d like to soon!

In non-fibre news, it’s been a pretty good day.  I tried visiting a chiropractor for the first time to see if he had anything to say about the chronic pain in my hands or the tightness in the top of my neck – an interesting experience, and I think altogether a positive one.  I lunched in the park with a close friend who’s currently living out of town while we listened to some beautiful live music.  At work I was placed in charge for Q4 of a project I find really interesting.  And finally I ended the day with dinner at the same friend’s house with her dad and a number of mutual friends, followed by singing.  I could definitely handle more days like this!

P.S.  Still having issues getting WordPress to upload my photos.  So I’ve been faithfully taking ones that I’ll have to edit back into their respective posts later.

I just couldn’t help myself and bought this new spindle from (you guessed it) Dragoncraft Spindles last week.  As with the previous four it is delightful both to look at and to spin with.  The whorl on this one is a bit thicker than the other two I have, but it’s still under two ounces.

It also came with a delightfully soft bumblebee fibre, which the spindle is shown sitting on above, and which is much, much prettier than my camera decided to show.  The fibre on the spindle is a mill end sample sent by carly*original with the Enchantress roving I purchased.

I tend to purchase my fibres in big batches, so for now I think I’ll showcase them as I use them rather than when they arrive.

I just finished my second spindle of Fairy Wings singles.  The last one was ~81 yards when plied and I expect this to be around the same.  We’ll find out tomorrow.

We seem to have matching colours at the moment!

We’re working on Missy being able to control the entire drop spindle by herself without having the weight of the yarn changing so much.  She’s getting there, and we’re both having lots of fun :)  It seems the biggest rough spot left is grafting on a new piece of fibre.  Today she learned to wind an Andean Bracelet, and then did the second two all on her own perfectly.  She’s still stopping the spindle to draft, but I think she’ll get it all working together soon.

Missy is using the Royal Gem spindle I bought her from Dragoncraft.  In these pictures she’s spinning SarasTextureCrafts‘ merino/tussah mix in the Dawn colourway.  It’s beautiful to work with, though perhaps not the easiest thing to have started with.

Today was also a siblings-lunch-out after her orientation program ended.  I’m around so little (which definitely makes me sad) that I treasure all my time with my family.  It can be very tempting to move back to the east coast just to be closer to everyone.  Well, all except my friends, who are steadily immigrating to the Bay Area.

After my long nap this morning to recover from a mostly-sleepless overnight flight cross-country, we had a nice afternoon.  My little sister and I played with drop spindles for a while – turns out an elementary school teacher of hers is a knitter and had brought in some spindles and wool to show them earlier this year – and she made great progress.

Then most of the house headed out to a local deli to pick up subs (they were delicious, I’ve missed them) and eat them in the park behind the library, where a group of local college students was performing Shakespeare’s As You Like It.  We showed up a little late so luckily I already knew some of the plot…  They did a great job, though the littlest one was frustrated by her lack of ability to understand them and headed into the library to read.

Even if she’s not into Shakespeare yet having a little sister who wants to read all the time still makes me tremendously proud.  She’s headed into 6th grade, and read over 150 pages during my video conference with work this afternoon!

They say you learn things every day and I’ve always found that to be true. Some days I learn more interesting things than others. Somedays I learn things that are more applicable than others.

Today one of the things that I have learned is ‘when spinning variegated fibre don’t spin one dark section, one light section, and then a second dark section, 2-ply with an Andean Bracelet, and then expect it all to be roughly evenly coloured!’  Next time I will remember to try to setup my single so that I ply light with dark most of the way along it, rather than dark with dark and light with light.

I’m currently working with a Merino/Tencel blend called Fairy Wings from Spincerely‘s etsy store.  Doesn’t it look just luscious?  It feels that way too!  I love the feel of the drop spindles I’ve been using recently, from Dragoncraft.  They’re about an ounce and a quarter – just the right weight for me.  This one they made just for me!

[ravelry link]

The plan is for this yarn to be made into a Beach Glass shawl for my little sister.  At the moment I probably have 1/3 of the yarn I need.