Trenchwork

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  It’s February, and I’ve been off the radar since November.  I know, I know.  But there were reasons . . . Really.

Although, doggone it, none of them are particularly good.

However, since friends and family are starting to wonder whether I’m still alive since the blog has been silent, and they’re threatening to send Vito to give me an attitude adjustment, I’m working on mending my ways by updating the blog. 

The last two months have been a bit of a challenge, and there’s been as much illness going around here as everywhere else, but we’re finally nearly back to normal.  I’m personally thinking of it as a sort of cosmic investment:  if you spend the first month of the year ill, that meets the quota for the next 11 months and you shouldn’t have to worry about anything more than a common cold until next year, right?

Things caved in a little over the past two months, but I’m catching up, and 2013 is going to be a good year, barring the unexpected catastrophic disaster.  (You have to allow for those, you know.  Like planning a dinner.  You cook for the ones you know will be there, but make a little extra in case Cousin Stinky shows up out of the blue.)

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions.  I do try and think about what I’d like to accomplish during the year and set a few goals, but they’re more tasks on my schedule than anything else.

This semester is largely my own, for the first time in a long time:  it’s a research semester and I’m looking at actually having time to do some proper research and writing, but I’m also looking back and breathing a huge sigh of relief that I survived the past semester . . . . and didn’t throttle anyone in the process.  My first goal, then, was just to breathe, and when you’re sick, there’s not much else you can do—which means that I’ve accomplished this one nicely.

Next on my list of tasks is a game plan for the rest of the year in terms of academic production.  I’m working on it.

On non-academic fronts, I need to get the current MSP workbook off my desk; it’s been lingering there for the past 2 years while I was buried in other things.  I’m working on that as well, although I had to put it down for the past month since I couldn’t knit my way out of a paper sack.  The goal is to finish it in the coming month.

For the rest of 2013, I’d like to:
* continue to spin down my fibery stash, keeping myself on a fiber diet for just a bit longer, then
* make a dent in knitting up or gifting away the resulting yarn, including completing the current WIPs.  About 125-150# would be a nice percentage of fiber stash reduction.
* restore the exercise routine.  I’ll never get back to my military weight/fitness, but it’s time to eliminate the stress effects of the past couple of years.
* play a bit.  Have fun with the things I’m working on, give myself permission to chase rabbits, explore ideas, investigate things that interest me, pick up things I’d set aside because of other demands, participate in pleasant nonsense now and then, and do all that with no other necessary justification than that they’re fun.  Play.

That’s my “plan” for 2013.  It’s nebulous, rather unformed and a bit messy, and I’m totally fine with that.  For now.  And I give myself permission to revise along the way.

I think that permission is important.  I suspect that we go into long-term objectives with a sort of cold-turkey approach, then give up if we don’t match the goal 100%.  That ends up being counterproductive.  Working toward something and modifying that objective as we go—as we find we can or cannot do something, that we hadn’t thought about a factor we need to figure in, that something else is actually more important–at least gives us a fighting chance of accomplishing something.  And, the goal we accomplish may well not be the one we were aiming for—and that may be A Good Thing.

On a fibery front . . .

There’s this.

Fiber:  Tussah silk, “Night at Niagara” colorway, July 2012 Enchanted Knoll Farm club fiber.
WPI/TPI:  20wpi, ca 14tpi
Yardage/Weight: 872 yards, 105g

The color doesn’t show well here, but it’s a wonderful deep purple with dark and subtle highlights.  It was spun specifically for a lovely gal I work with and who is leaving us in a week or so.  I’d intended to turn it into a scarf for her, but I’m not an instinctive knitter; I have to see and be able to think about what I’m doing, and until the past week, that wasn’t happening.  There simply were no functioning grey cells to speak of; they were all out sick.  After ripping the scarf back half a dozen times—and I’d deliberately picked an easy lace with the hope of getting it done in time—I realized it simply wasn’t in the cards.  But, she’s a knitter, so it and a few other yarns were bundled up into a gift BoY (now, now: BoY = Box of Yarn), and I’m hoping she thinks it was a satisfactory solution.

Then there was this:

Fiber:  my own blend of Tussah, alpaca, and a superfine Merino.
WPI/TPI: 20wpi, ca 10tpi
Yardage: 890 yards

This is a blend for a friend and colleague—and doggone it, but the Longest Thread spinning seems to have me stuck in laceweight mode!  I forgot to take a pic of it before I wound it off, but the yarn is soft, silky, and will have a lovely drape.  But it’s laceweight.  Again!  Sheesh.

See, the problem is that I’d intended to do a soft cable fabric.  But after swatching, I realized that wasn’t a good choice; I’m a loose knitter, and I couldn’t get a solid enough fabric for the cables and surrounding material to look anything other than sloppy.  I finally found that I could do a crossed brioche stitch on 2mm needles . . .

without it looking too lacy.  I’m hoping that when I dye the fabric and full it a little, it’ll plump up a bit, but this seems to be the best I can do without blending and then spinning another batch and knitting double.  And I don’t trust that I’d get the same grist given that there have been a couple of yarns spun since then—and why, no, no I didn’t think to make a control card.  Because I hadn’t actually thought about the yarn weight I was spinning.  Clever, eh?

I think it’ll be fine, but it’s taking me a small eternity to knit.  Laceweight on 2mm needles isn’t exactly a speed exercise, is it?  In any event, I’m hoping it’ll be done in the coming week.  Then we’ll see.

And finally, there was this . . .

Fiber: Fine superwash Merino (lambkins), “Common Grackle” colorway, November 2012 Enchanted Knoll Farm club fiber.
WPI/TPI: variable 10-20wpi, but mostly around 14; ca 10tpi
Yardage/Weight: 1130 yards, 270g

This yarn was on the wheel for the past three months, but not being able to knit meant that I could at least do a little spinning.  The intermittent nature of that spinning is also the reason for the uneven grist, but it turned into a soft, smushy yarn which will knit up into something seriously wonderful and cushy.  Ya gotta love those kinds of yarns, and Josette is brilliant when it comes to colors.  I’m typically not a fan of barberpoling, but the black base here is perfect for the darker tones of color, and the sparkle is just enough muted that the colors work much more subtly than you’d expect.  It’s a rich and rather wonderful colorway.

And if you’re wondering about the framing in that picture?  Yeah . . .  Right now things are a bit dark, and the only place I could get halfway decent lighting was here:

That’s the back porch.  And yep, it’s still winter.

It’s hard to believe, but we’ve already had a few days of hard frost and having to scrape the windows. The hills just an hour away are already covered in snow–even if it’s hard to see against the grey clouds . . . which were, incidentally, supposed to be clear blue skies. Ya gotta love how wrong weather forecasters can be.

It’s been a busy month, but I’m learning a few things. First, look at this:

The Bothwell Spin-In sponsors the Longest Thread competition. The idea is to spin as long a 2-ply thread as you can from 10 grams of washed and prepped fleece. The record? It’s over 1200 meters for a wheel-spun yarn, and over 1400 for a spindle-spun yarn. And that yarn above? It’s not even close.

Bothwell has historically not allowed electric wheels, but thanks to a lovely spinner by the name of Lucinda, they’ve added them as of this year. And, since I wrote in to support that inclusion, I feel compelled to spin a yarn on Jeeves. The problem is that the WooLee Winder has a fair amount of pull, and spinning a fine thread with that kind of tension really takes practice. And I haven’t quite nailed it yet, even when I cross-lace the flyer and take off the brake. The fleece is a 14-micron Merino, and the singles have around 14-20 individual hairs. I need to reduce to half that.

There is a trick to doing this. It’s a balancing act between the amount of twist, the amount of ply, what you need to have the yarn hold together, and when that enough is enough.

I’ll give it one more try, and then send in whatever I accomplish. It won’t be competitive, but it’ll support the inclusion of the electric wheels, and a simple personal best. That’s enough.

But, working through that single–and then plying and finding I’d underplied that yarn–is reminding me that while we all know we need more twist when we spin thinner singles, we may be so focused on that fact that we may be overthinking how much we need. Too much twist and the single becomes brittle and breaks. Too little and it drifts apart and won’t hold. I rarely spin this thin a single, but I need to work on giving it less twist than I have been, and then see what happens.

It’s an experiment, you see.

In the meantime, this yarn finished:

A colleague has asked for a scarf from handspun in a dark burgundy/wine color, so I cannibalized a few remaining ounces of superwash Merino from Enchanted Knoll Farm in the “Hot Blood” colorway as the base, and added equal portions of kettle-dyed mulberry silk in pure scarlet, and black alpaca. There are 150 grams in a 3-ply, 18wpi, 558 yards with 131 in chain ply. And this is where that lesson about the reduced twist in very thin singles becomes reality, because the yarn is crisper than I’d like. It softened up a little in a swatch, and the fabric has lovely drape and a silky handle. It works out beautifully in a fabric, but given what it was intended for, I really did want it a bit softer. He gave me two color alternatives, so this is another thing we’re going to try again. Those thin singles . . . I’m going to get them the way I want them. Soon.

A Review: Nancy’s Knit Knacks Jumbo Katie-a-Go Go
The bobbins for the Hansen are too large for the Majacraft lazy kate, so I got this one. It has an advantage in that it will hold pretty much any bobbin. In order from large to small, the photo shows the WooLee Winder bobbin for the Hansen, the normal Majacraft bobbin, and the bobbin for the high-speed head. They all fit. The bit of string around the peg on the front works as a tensioning band so the bobbins don’t spin out of control, and the base has little rubber feet that keep it from slipping around on a surface. The entire kate dismantles and slips into the denim pouch, so becomes incredibly portable.

But it has a flaw. See the loop on the dowel in the middle? That loop is intended to work as a yarn guide; the singles or yarns from the bobbins run through the eye of the loop, and therein lies the flaw. The guide keeps the singles too close to each other, which means that they catch on each other if they’re at all fuzzy, and then you’re stuck trying to unhook them from one another in order to continue the plying. Ideally, the singles are kept as far apart from one another as possible until they reach your control point–usually your hand or plying diz–but that doesn’t have a chance to happen here; they’re streamed together too soon. If the brace were rectangular on the outside edge of the kate and was as wide as the kate, it would work better. But, that would be a rather clunky design, and I’ll be honest and say that I don’t think it would be any better than the current arrangement.

The solution? Just don’t use the loop. Other than that, I find that I like a kate where the bobbins are horizontal rather than vertical. If the bobbin is vertical, the single has to turn the entire weight of the bobbin with its burden of yarn. If the bobbin is horizontal, it turns more easily, and that in turn places less stress on the single pulling the bobbin.

The portability of the kate is brilliant, and it will work for much of what I want to do. That’s enough. For now.

Completion
And finally, the Favorite Flannel yarn in the last post? It’s now a simple version of the Haruni Shawl.

Since the shawl was intended as a prayer shawl, I replaced the central lace pattern with a simple stockinette. I did one extra set of rows and started the edging with 389 stitches, but I should have done one more repeat of those last 10 stockinette increase rows. The pattern notes that chart B should use about half the total yarn, but that changes if you do the center in stockinette and increase the center size. As a result, I ended up with 80 grams/227meters leftover, which is a bit of a shame, but I’ll give away the rest of the yarn with the shawl and perhaps she can find a use for the extra. I could have ripped back and added, but today–the day the shawl is finished–was the deadline. So, even if it’s a little smaller than planned, it’s done, and gifted away to its recipient.

I blocked pretty aggressively and the final size is 30” deep and 35” wide, so a nice little size for a shoulder shawl.

Now let’s see if I can spin some thread.