][ Up from the depths

Hi, blawgh. Remember me?

I'm that chick that used to spin and knit and stuff sometimes. And sometimes I used to talk about it. And then I stopped, oops.

SO, superquick catch-up time.

Not too long after the last post-- February 2012, yikes!-- I went to Maryland Sheep & Wool again, where I bought way too much fiber and...

An Ashford kiwi spinning wheel. w00t!

I went in intending something completely different-- in spite of the allure of a classic spinning wheel, I wanted to try a Road Bug because they're so small and cute and portable, but I could not for the life of me get it to go the right direction and it wasn't comfortable and then. And then. The shop owner shook his head, put a Kiwi in front of me, and I started making yarn.

Oh, yarn.

Anyway, that was May 2012, and later that summer I had the good fortune to get myself hired... which significantly cut down on my free time for messing about with crafting, though I did do a good spate of knitting early this year. And, you know, the occasional bit and piece before that. I finally finished my scarf, which is a million years old but eminently satisfying.

SKIPPING AHEAD to May 2013 when I... didn't go to Maryland S&W, which is probably for the best. But I did go to the Long Island Fleece and Fiber Festival out in Riverhead. Which should be another post of its own, because it was awesome, but suffice it to say I bought too much fiber again, and realized I better start clearing a little of the backlog.

So I pulled the wheel out of my closet-o'-yarn, and sat down to sweet talk it.


also pictured: giant storage bag of gorgeous fiber, edge of laundry hamper, sock drawer. So sue me.
And there I went, remembering the five minutes or so they spent showing me how to use it, doing my best to replicate those motions, and googling as necessary. The bobbin on there was already pretty full of random yarn that had been spun by people trying the wheel all day, so I just used it as a leader and started spinning the cheapish green roving from my last post.


Not pictured: my ridiculous heart-pounding excitement when it started coming out even.
It was rough at first, but then it all started going right. I settled into the rhythm of it and soon enough I was getting a fairly even twist. It's a bit tighter than it should be, and especially on the early end of things there are some big fluctuations.

But, wow. Once I finally came back to my senses-- it's shockingly easy to fall into a trance, breathing in and out as you pedal, even and quick-- I could not for the life of me believe I hadn't started out with this sooner. Spinning on a wheel felt much more intuitive and natural than drop spindle work for me; not having to worry about the whorl running out of steam and starting to spin back was a relief, and taking care of the twist with my feet meant I could devote more attention to drafting.

I also tried spinning from the fold, in spite of the fact that it went against every gut instinct I had about fiber. I can't really explain how it works or why it was easier for me but damn it felt good.

Anyway, soon I decided I'd gotten a good start and wanted to set up to ply so I popped in a fresh bobbin.

Well, no, actually. I looked at my wheel, realized I had less than no idea how to change the bobbin, googled it, tried it, panicked when I couldn't get the whorl off the assembly, experienced brief but impassioned buyer's remorse, kept at it, and finally managed to get it off, changed the bobbin, reassembled it wrong, took it back apart and fixed it and then I was ready to spin.


Look at that. JUST LOOK AT IT.
The second chunk of roving went well, and once I judged them to be about even I plied them. And totally neglected to take pictures.


shut up, it was exciting.
From there it's business as usual-- off the bobbin, onto the niddy-noddy, dump it in a sink, hang it to dry. Wheee! It didn't even need a weight, it didn't curl up on itself after I blotted the worst of the water out.



Glamorous bathroom shots
I also split and plied the leftover scrap yarn on the bobbin-- waste not, want not. I actually think I did a reasonably good job of judging an equal quantity-- I did have to split the leftover on one bobbin to finish it off, but it was only some ~20 yards, which considering a total lack of ever doing this before seems like a good bet-- and I set those too.

The grayish yarn is oddly pretty, but it smells like the fleece was treated with some kind of chemical... I don't know what it is, but I'm not a fan. I don't know if I will ever use it for anything but, well, there it was.


closeup!
The color's a little washed out because I can never camera, blah blah blah. BUT YEAH. It's damned satisfying.

I still have a good length of the very fine, gorgeous yarn on the second bobbin, and I'm not one hundred percent sure what to do with it. Right now I am leaning toward trying to spin a roughly equivalent length on another bobbin, then splitting the rest of the roving as evenly as possible and hoping for the best when it comes to plying. I could also set this as a single and split the remainder and hope for the best, but I don't think there's enough to use for anything.

After this? Might play a little with hemp-- I hated spinning hemp on a spindle but I think the wheel might be a better fit for me. I also have a ton of wool, a nice length of hot pink bamboo top, and several other new and exciting fibers, but I don't know if I'm ready to tackle the stuff I am really looking forward to knitting up just yet.

I'm also thinking I... should get a book, or take a class, or something. I feel like I've done fantastically well thus far, but I have no idea what I'll do when I inevitably hit a snag of some sort. I'd also like to pick up a few more bobbins, because I know I'm notoriously indecisive and I'll be happier if I can switch up what I'm doing without having to do it in chunks.

Still, looking at my hank of wool, I feel pretty awesome.

Awww yeah.

UPDATE: not enough to warrant a new post of course, but I thought the finished result was worth seeing:


There's 44 yd of the grey, 28 of the green, and 10 of the brown. I was actually surprised by how much that adds up to. No idea what I can ever make but whoooo yarn!

Also, the weird chemical sent of the gray stuff seems to have faded out as it dries, now it smells like clean wool. (Mmm, clean wool.) Huzzah!

][ Fighting hemp fiber

I left off my last post with a minor moral crisis: what to spin next? 

Ultimately, I decided it was worth the effort to try something a little tougher, so I steeled myself and start spinning the hemp.  It was tough, and not always fun, but I made a deal with myself: if I finished the little puff of roving I'd been playing with ages ago I could stop and try something else. 




 And boy, did I fight.  My resolution to spin fifteen minutes every day became every weekday, then for a time each week equal to fifteen minutes every weekday, then finally, well at least i can work on my knitting.  Aside from the fact that spinning is just hard for me to keep up with, the hemp didn't want to cooperate. 

But it wasn't without its upshots and epiphanies!  Within a couple of days (and some frantic googling, trying to figure out why it was going so badly,) I did start to get a feel for it.  I realized a few important things:

★ Hemp needs a lot of twist-- much more than the wool did-- not to fall apart.  However, once it gets that twist, it stays together really well. 
★ Using my smallest, lightest spindle might have been a mistake.  Actually I think that spindle is just a poor fit for me-- it never seems to spin enough.  I think I might just be more comfortable with ones that have a larger (in diameter) whorl.

★ Though it's harder to control, rolling the spindle off my thigh is a lot more effective-- the hard spin keeps it going longer, where doing it by hand I had to be really careful to catch it before it started spinning the other way.

★ Thin doesn't mean weak-- in fact I suspect the thinner parts of this hank are actually the strongest spots, since the twist is higher.  When I realized this and started just twisting harder when I felt the yarn slipping, instead of trying to even or thicken the fiber, I saw a lot less breakage!

★ Carrying around a bag of this roving allows you to make a lot of inappropriate and hilarious jokes.

That said it takes a lot of attention-- not good T.V.-watching occupation-- so I let it languish a lot.

But then today happened.




I said to myself, you have to get this stupid stuff spun, or else.  So I sat down to do it.  And suddenly-- I don't even know how-- I was on a roll.  Seriously, it went so well, I hope I can replicate that next time I sit down to spin. 

I think the difference was actually doing less pre-drafting of the fiber-- and by rolling off the thigh instead of with my fingers, I was able to keep both hands on the roving to shape and stretch it as needed.  Still not perfect-- keeping it even is so difficult!-- but it went much better, and I swear I blew through the rest of the roving so fast it made my head spin.  Which is good, because I'm sick of looking at it right now. 




Looking at it is kind of funny-- I can see how at the beginning, making it fatter seemed like the only option, but by the end I was being much more daring and stretching it as thin as I could.  Anyway, I wet it down and it's hanging now-- I've read that's less necessary with non-wool fibers, but it seemed like it might help even out the kinks a bit-- and we'll see how it looks when it's dry and done.  Next up is... either more cheap-o wool, or maybe (if i feel brave) some silk hankies. 

The next few posts, though, will probably be about my knitting; I have been working more on that lately. 

][ More spinning stuff

 While I'm not doing a great job of sticking to my "SPIN EVERY SINGLE DAY!" plan, I am definitely being better overall-- so I wanted to share a little of my progress! 

For starters, I took the green wool I was working on, blocked it, and wound it up into a little ball.  I don't have a nostepinne (though it's on my shopping list for this year, assuming I make it to MS&W again,) so I made my own simple ball-winder out of a scrap of tightly-wound wrapping paper.  It's not nearly as satisfyingly pretty but it'll do!





 The ball band is a little scrap of wrapping paper, it happened to be at hand and I think it's cute.  I'm tentatively going to call all my work "Hannah's Hopeless Handspun" because I like alliteration and self-deprecating humor.  Really I think it's going better every time I pick the spindle up, so I can't complain. 

Anyway, of course I did realize after I'd used a bunch of my nice roving that I had some slightly less fancy stuff lying around from Sheep & Wool 2010, so rather than keep making a mess of the gorgeous merino I decided to have some fun with the little bits, figuring I'd feel less awful if I wrecked those.  So I picked up the little purplish 'tail' here, which I think cost me a dollar, maybe two....



And then I split the piece, because my understanding is that with wool dyed this way, that's how you get some repeats of the color changes.  Also it made it much easier to work with!  I think all told I split it into five sections, maybe?  And spun each one in turn, joining it to the end of the last. 




It was a great success!  Though there are still some thin spots and some thick spots, overall it's much more consistent than the other stuff I've been doing and I love how the color came out.  Interestingly there's not much white to it-- even though there was a lot of seemingly undyed roving, the color spread out quite a bit, though it is still quite variegated.  I didn't try too hard to make it a consistent pattern in spite of having split the roving,  I just wanted it to have more color changing than I thought it would if I spun it out as it was.  So it's pretty cool! 

The pictures don't quite capture the color-- there's more red to it in places than my camera really acknowledges-- but I think it's gorgeous.  I just wish I had more, I don't know what I can make with such a darling little skein!






Next up... well, it's a tough call.  I've got the big green coil of wool in the first picture here (cheaper than the nice green stuff from last post,) which I think should produce a reasonably big skein and keep me occupied for a while.  Or I could push myself and try one of the trickier fibers-- I've got two bags of silk hankies I'm a bit nervous about starting with, or a big bag of hemp fiber which I don't mind messing up, but which is really tough to spin, as I remember from  previous attempts.  I'm leaving the nice merino and the gorgeous silk roving in reserve until I feel like I won't totally destroy it. 

I guess we'll see how I feel!

][ So much for regular updates...

Life has been busy, and sadly knitting fell to the wayside with all my other hobbies... so the fact that I haven't updated since last summer doesn't mean you've missed too much.  However, today I did a thing that was so cool I had to share it somewhere.

The other day I decided it was time to get back into spinning, but I'm so out of practice (and I was never very experienced to begin with) that all I can make are short bits of practice yarn.  I realized I was running out of places to stow these scraps, which aren't very good but could be useful, so I decided to make them into tiny skeins and set them so they'd be less delicate.  But, as anyone who's ever had to wind yarn knows, it is an annoying task.  Trying to do it neatly so it doesn't tangle or become uneven is tough-- and doing it on a small scale is even trickier since you can't really use chair legs.  (My grandmother always used my grandfather's feet, but even that would be tricky for these lengths.  My own feet, I mean, not my grandfather's.)

So I did the only logical thing: I took a pair of take-out chopsticks and built myself a tiny Niddy-Noddy.





As Niddy-Noddies go it's not terribly useful-- far too small for a real length of yarn, and not measured to give a length per wrap-- but for my purposes it's just perfect.  And I think the fact that I threw it together in less than half an hour with some sandpaper and hot glue is kind of neat, okay?

I figured I might as well use the rest of the second chopstick, so I smoothed it down and made a crochet hook for kicks.  It's a bit crude but I think it's smooth enough that I could use it to fish up dropped stitches or help cast off, which is all I do with them anyway since I don't really know how to crochet.





And that's been my morning!  Fun stuff.  One of these days I'm going to have to start making my own spindles to round it all off...

][ and now for something completely different

SUP INTERNET??!?  Meet my new friend: 



So I was trying to figure out something I could use to block and hold hats that would be a little bit more head-shaped than the big can I've been using to take pictures.  In  my usual aimless browsing of the web, I came across a cool tutorial on making duct-tape dress dummies for fitted bodysuit costumes, and it seemed like the perfect solution.  So, I bought a roll of (super cool) duct tape, and informed my roommate I was going to mummify her head: 


Believe it or not there's a person under there.
Ideally of course I'd like one shaped after my head, but this will definitely help!  Cutting and re-sticking it was a little tricksy, but it turned out pretty well:




Rather lacking in detail, but much better suited to holding and shaping hats than anything else I had on hand. 

Also, it has flames on it.  How can you not love it?

][ reality knits

I've been working on this scarf a long while now, and it's not... really even close to being done, to be honest.  But that's okay!

I started it because I was really taken with a particular shirt on an actor, in a movie, and I thought to myself, there's no way I will ever find a shirt like a random shirt in a fifteen year old movie.  But, I can definitely knit myself something like it.  (And, as a side note-- since I started this I have seen brown/blue self-striping yarn combinations everywhere.  I'm clearly a trendestter.)

This was my second real attempt at color work, after putting the W onto that doll scarf.  A nice, gradual increase in difficulty.  It's also the first time I've done short rows (to compensate for any change in the gauge; I wanted to make sure the edging didn't pull,) and now that I've finally learned how they work, I'm in love with them. 

For once in my life I at least did some swatches before I got started:



My cat helped.





Satisfied that I could manage the color changes, I decided to complicate things by starting it with a provisional cast-on, so the brown border could be added last, to keep the gauge even-- the last time I tried to mix garter and stockinette like this, the edging hadn't quite worked out evenly.






This turned out to be a disastrously bad idea.  Which sucked, because I really liked how it was going...



I twisted after every stitch, like you would with Tvåändsstickning-- I didn't want big swags on the back that would catch on buttons and such.  It's a little thicker and warmer because of it, and I think it looks pretty cool!


The cat is still helping, of course.


Somewhere around that time I decided I'd better pick out the cast-on and add the border, just in case it didn't work out.

It didn't work out.  So I frogged the whole damn thing and started over from the beginning.



It broke my heart to do it-- I'd accomplished so much!-- but it was the right decision, and though there are still some imperfections, I'm much happier with the new take on it.   I have no idea when I'll finish it, but eventually I'm sure I will.  And then I will wear it everywhere, baby. 

][ doll stuff

A year or two ago, I was inspired to dig out my old American Girl dolls and make some stuff for 'em.  It led to a brief but intense frenzy of sewing, and a passionate interest in doll customization that went nowhere.  Thankfully, I didn't spend too much money on it.  Mostly. 

The one custom doll I put together wasn't an actual brand-name AG, but instead a craft-store knockoff... and true to my dorky ways I decided to turn her into a character from one of my favorite movies.  Knitting an awesome little wardrobe followed suit, of course. 

So here is my doll version of Neil Perry from Dead Poets Society, with a few knit pieces: his green sweater, his school uniform sweater, and a school scarf I designed for kicks. 






The body of these sweaters is knit in one piece, then seamed down the sides when the sleeves are added in. The back is split halfway down to allow it to fit over the head, and a hook-and-eye is stitched in on the top.  I’ve been knitting my sleeves two at a time lately (like one would do with socks,) so assuming you can take the utter BOREDOM of stockinette forever, these come together pretty quick!






The bordering and contrast color in the collar of the grey one is picked up off the edges.  I've also knit a blue round-neck, and a school sweatervest that aren't pictured.  These take... gosh, less than a quarter of a skein I'd say. 

The scarf isn't accurate to the film, but I wanted to make it anyway.  Actually, this was my first piece of colorwork-- not that it's much!-- so I am kind of weirdly proud of it.   Before this, the best I'd done was striped scarves.  Otherwise, it's just a tube, with fringe knotted onto the ends.







And that's my doll knitting.  :D