Emily’s Knits

I’ve been working hard on my Christmas knitting for the past few weeks. Christmas has passed you say? Well, I had a few people who I wasn’t going to see until New Years – and then there was just the general running late.

Here are a few projects for you to peruse:

Shawl/Blanket for Grandma Jean

Natalya Gloves for Sarah

Natalya Gloves for Kate

My January Phat Fiber box arrived yesterday.  I was having a pretty cranky evening and it cheered me right up.  I know it’s hard to believe, but I think this might be the softest, prettiest, nicest Phat Fiber (or any collection) box I’ve ever seen.  Apparently ‘books’ was a great inspiration!

We’re off to watch the 10pm Avatar showing after work tonight so probably no spinning for me today.  But now I’m busy trying to plan my weekend to fit some in :)  This might involve taking my spinning wheel on Caltrain to my boyfriends house…but I’m not sure how well that would go over.

I’m sure it sounds silly. I’ve got this strange issue with my spinning – I can only spin thin yarns.

I’ve thought of many reasons for this problem: I’m a perfectionist and I can only make very very skinny yarns be as consistent as I want. I’ve done too much work in the last two years with lace and fingering weight yarns and nothing else feels normal to my hands. Or maybe the fibres I’ve been buying are the wrong sort for spinning thicker yarns.

I really don’t know. But I do know that the ‘thicker than usual’ skein from two days ago comes in at a good solid ‘almost DK’ weight. Still pretty tiny.

One of my goals for the next few weeks is to continue getting gradually thicker with the singles I spin. The rule is that they need to keep being consistent. None of this ‘art yarn’ stuff. I’m not fooling myself – it would be beginner yarn, not art yarn. I need to work on making my output consistent and what I was trying to do before I can make it funky!

Do you have any goals in your crafty-life? What are they?

I tried plying today with more attention to balance and it turned out wonderfully! I’ve got a small skein (<10 yds) that looks to be perfectly balanced.

I spun up my merino top, let the very end ply back on itself while fresh, and then snipped that bit off before winding up my andean bracelet. Since the first half of the single was fresh and the second was at least a day old, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do this by eye (nevermind all the places that twist creeps out after the plying process). So instead I paid close attention to making the plying twist look exactly as twisty as the small sample I’d made. I also had the good luck of having colours melded together in the transitions so I could use those to try to check if the fibres were ‘straight’ again.

Voila! It worked!

Tomorrow I’ll be working up a longer, thicker single from the same merino to see if I can spin something thicker *and* with less twist and still have it turn out alright. We’ll have to wait and see :)

Nothing particularly interesting to report on the fibre arts front today. I’ve got great reasons though – two good friends in town for the weekend! One of them is staying with me and ran the first session of a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign for us this afternoon.

Yes, I’m a geek. If you didn’t already know that :)

I love the numbers. I love the strategies. I love the storytelling. And I really, really love the problem solving. Plus there’s something really nice about sitting around with a group of close friends on a Saturday afternoon enjoying Teddy Grahams and grapes and rolling dice with lots of sides. I’ve spent a lot of my social time recently running around doing things out of the house. It was great to get some sit-down time.

I didn’t get any photos this time, but here’s a somewhat silly one from a game we played way back in July. We use pencil topper sized Devil Ducks to represent the players since they’re just the perfect size and come in six different colours.

I made my own monsters from SculpeyIII before a one-shot I ran in the middle of August. If I run out of fodder in the next few weeks I’ll take some photos of those to show off.

A quick update on the projects I’ve currently got underway.  Well, the somewhat active ones at least.

First a few things for a coworker whose wife will have a baby boy in January.

Baby Boy 5-Hour Jacket
Yarn/Yardage: Paton’s Decor, just over one ball
Needles: US7
Progress: Just have the ends left to weave in.

Baby Surprise Jacket
Yarn/Yardage: Bernat’s Baby Jaquard in blue and green
Needles: US2
Progress: Still working on the sleeves. I’ve got a way to go still but this is fun!

Sjaarte’s Booties
Yarn/Yardage: KnitPicks Felici in Aquarium
Progress: Need to weave in the ends and attach buttons.

(Can you see a theme of what I haven’t gotten around to doing yet?)

And soon I’d also like to get my Melusine finished, followed by the much-overdue Atlantis shawl for mom.

It’s going to be a busy weekend – San Francisco has lots of events going on plus I have two close friends in town. When interesting things rain they pour!

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.

Tonight I fly back to the East Coast to see my family for a week and a half.  Some time off work sounds just about right right now.  I’ve been missing them a lot – 2 weeks a year isn’t nearly enough vacation with my family all the way cross-country.  I look forward to a great trip.

I also forsee a trip to Halcyon Yarns on our drive from Boston to Maine (not that I don’t already have plenty of yarn and fibre…).  I’ve had my eye on a weaving kit I saw there last time.  I think it might help answer the question of what to do with all the yarn I’m spinning but not yet knitting.  If only I could get the hang of enjoying less glitzy/fancy fibres so that it were easier to make mundane items out of the results…

No pictures again, but I promise some of the new spindles and their recipients when I get home.

I wonder what the flight attendants would make of me spinning on the plane.  I do have an aisle seat this time.

Wow, there’s so much to update that I don’t know where to start. So tonight we’ll just keep it simple and over the next few days I’ll work on noting down all my recent fibre accomplishments and lessons.

Part of the reason for the looooong gap was that my web host company moved my hosting account to a nice new server (quite sweet of them), but along the way managed to get the contents of the account nearly FUBAR’ed. At first I thought they’d just deleted all my data. I didn’t have time to look into it for a few weeks, so the knowledge that all of it was potentially gone just sat there festering in the back of my mind. Tonight I finally got a few hours to poke around, and seem to have unravelled the issues (many) and gotten this one segment back up. I’ll have to take the time to fix my wiki and a few other sections in the near future.

I’ve got a long and exciting weekend ahead of me, including my birthday, so this will have to do for tonight. It’s to bed for me, and tomorrow I try to pack in 5 or 6 days worth of things I need to do into the single day. Should be exciting :)