Trenchwork

My mother is a crafty woman. Literally, there is little she cannot do once she conceives the idea, and those ideas have included everything from baking to catering, sewing to woodworking, painting to crochet. She would say that she lacks talent in those things, and does none of them terribly well, but that perhaps most significantly, she is not afraid to try. She would be right about that last point (and I would debate the first). While she lacks the self-confidence I wish she had and has a tendency to demean her accomplishment as being “merely mundane,” the simple fact is that the woman is, in many ways, fearless.

It is a characteristic I value greatly, and perhaps one of the most important inheritances she could have given us.

Not long ago, I told a friend that I knit my first lace shawl out of mohair not because I knew I could, but because I did not know I couldn’t. And thanks to someone who’d never quailed in the face of a first attempt, I also saw no reason I should not try. I learned that a first foray into a complex knitting genre should be done with a yarn which releases and forgives mistakes—not with one which clings to every moment in the process of its existence and relinquishes a mistake with all the eagerness and painlessness of a waterproof bandage on a hairy forearm. It unravels grudgingly, leaving behind fragments of itself as if to spite you for making the mistake in the first place. Eventually, however, given enough sheer stubborn determination, it must—and does—give and reshape itself to the knitter’s wishes. It’s just a matter of being fearless. It’s a matter of recognizing that something may not be perfect and effortless right out of the gate, but that the process has worth in and of itself, and that doing—and not being afraid to try—is equally valuable.

This latest spinning project is an exercise in trying, and in trying, I’ve learned—and I’d like to think I’ve grown.

The goal for this particular lesson was to spin a beaded yarn.

Voila!—a beaded yarn.

The Stats

Fiber: BFL, hand dyed (Hibiscus), from Spunky Eclectic.
Starting Weight: 8 ounces
Yardage: ca 364; 2-ply
WPI: 13-15
Twist: 14
Spun on: Rose
Beads: ca 1200 4 (?) mm beads; clear glass with colored core

The Lessons

It’s definitely far from perfect. I actually bought a spool of silk thread, intending to string the beads and use the beaded silk as a core for the fiber, but I wasn’t comfortable with the thinness. I had images of the thread breaking during the first few knitted stitches, leaving a trail of tiny glass seed beads in the knitter’s wake.

Rather than risk it, I opted to thread the beads directly onto one single, which turned out to be no problem; well-prepared BFL readily accepts multiple breaks and re-joins. I made a couple of mistakes, though.

First, I seriously underestimated how much yardage I’d get from the fiber. I split the 8 ounces in half, intending to spin a beaded single and then a plain single, and ply them together. I spaced five or six beads at semi-regular intervals (seriously, I totally suck at measuring distance), and ran out of beads long before I ran out of single. Adding the extra beads to the end of the finished single wasn’t a problem, but it DID slow down the plying considerably; you can only go so fast when you’re constantly pushing 600 beads forward.

Second, I neglected to clip a sample of the single, and as a result, the two singles have much more variation than I like. In reality, I think I panicked a bit and kept spinning the beaded single thinner for fear that the beads wouldn’t fit. When the time came to spin the non-beaded single, I’d lost track of what the thickness *should* have been.

Third, the beads themselves match too closely, I think. They’re clear glass with a colored inner core, and that inner core is nearly precisely the color of the single except in those places where the single shifts to the paler side of the range. The result is that they blend far too well, I think. They show better in real life than they do in the photo, but they’re subtle, and remind me of dew drops on a velvet petal.

In line with that, I think the fourth mistake is that the yarn is better in a thinner weight. Were the singles thinner (er, consistently thinner), then I think the beads would show better.

Nevertheless, I do like the effect. I have a feeling this would be a lovely plain lace shawl. The yarn itself—as is usual with BFL—is soft and squishy. The beads fall about every 13-18 inches, and knitted in a simple K2tog, YO type of pattern, would give a nice glint (oooooh! shiny!) without attracting every magpie in the neighborhood.

I have beads for another attempt with another yarn. DH’s sweater spinning comes first, but let’s see what happens with that one.

In the meantime . . . Beads? Do you KNOW how much of a variety there is out there? And given that the local shop doesn’t mark either size or quantity on their packages of seed beads, is it any surprise that I’m picking Karen’s brain about those shiny little suckers? Seriously. When was the last time you looked at Fire Mountain Gems or Shipwreck Beads? Talk about overwhelming! If you thought you had Magpie Syndrome before or, as Margaret accurately noted (this writer admits ruefully), a bad case of hobby ADHD, then those are NOT the places for you.

But gee . . . Ain’t they cool?