January was both fast and slow. It's a long month, and yet I sometimes find myself wondering where all that time went. As always, lots happened, and the keeping the to-do list under control is an adventure, to say the least. 

First, here's what I managed to cross off the January list:

• Complete finishing of the BFL spinning project - plied and twist set. I still have a few knitting projects on the go, so the yarn is going into the stash for now. 
• Three skeins of handspun yarn for a fractal program I did for my spinning group. PLUS, one skein was knit into a scarf, and the other was woven into a scarf to show the differences between knitting with the yarn and weaving it, AND a video to try to break down the process. If we're going to be honest, this project took up a huge chunk of my time this month. Really it was four projects (spinning, weaving, knitting, and video), and I only gave myself credit for it as one project. But it was fun!
• I finished reading a stack of Vav magazines lent to me last year by a friend. Just reading the magazine isn't really enough for me, though. I had to take (and type notes). Vav is always inspiring and insightful, but I'm glad to cross it off my mental to-do list.
• Lots of hand-dyed yarn and fiber, including some research/samples on a new set of colorways. My electric skeinwinder hasn't materialized (yet), and that slowed me down, since I didn't want to wind skeins and kept hoping the skeinwinder was around the corner. Lesson learned.
• I cut the rug warp off the loom. It's been on there since July, and it was time to say goodbye. I had hoped to get one or two more things woven on it, but the super low humidity of winter meant the linen warp wanted to do nothing but break, and nothing was going quite right. 
• A program (with a machine knitted sample) for my guild on the history and techniques of machine knitting. 
• I tried a tapestry weaving project, just to scratch the itch. Last summer I bought a small tapestry loom, but never really took to it. Again, I'm not quite getting the hang of it. So, I decided to sign up for a class in April, and will let the tapestry loom await its future until then. 
• A pair of socks. Almost totally undocumented, except for this. 
• A rigid heddle scarf, with some stash yarn and some hand-dyed yarn of my own. (Wasn't originally on the list.)

So, with all that done, here's what's on the list for February:

Knitting

• The stashbuster sweater. I had a big burst of progress, and thought it was all finished, and then it wasn't. I'm taking a trip to Denver by train (!) and plan to work on it then. Fingers crossed that it will be done at the end of February.
• A simple pair of helical stripe socks, to use up some oddball bits of sock yarn. No deadline.
• There's been some progress on the knitting machine front, and I hope to make more. The rest of the parts/accessories for it arrived mid-January, and I have to admit they are still strewn around my basement. It's a lot to take in. Really this is two projects:
  • Set everything up/organize the space.
  • Practice making things on the machine.

Spinning

• My parents gave me a ball of Finnsheep wool for Christmas - a whole pound. I'm currently on the fourth bobbin, and maybe halfway through spinning it. I want to finish this month.
• I've unintentionally been more or less keeping to the #spin15aday challenge, even though I haven't posted about it (at all). Does anyone else get frustrated when they spot an exciting Instagram challenge but they can't find the originator? Then you do find out who it is, and they're lovely, and you feel it's too late to jump on the bandwagon? Anyways, the idea is to spin 15 minutes a day. It's based on an idea of Ghandi's, that if everyone spun yarn for at least 15 minutes a day we'd have world peace. All of this is to say, I'm spinning a bit more than I had been, and assuming that I finish the Finn wool, I'll be spinning something else later in the month.

Weaving

• I'm challenging myself to think about weaving a lot more over the coming month(s). I have a personal challenge to myself to post on Instagram every day, and I've set myself a bunch of prompts, all about weaving. So that's a big item, and will probably spur a handful of other projects.
• With the rug warp off the big loom, I'm looking for something new to put on it. I've decided to give another go to weaving yardage for a shirt or two. This is going to be pretty involved, and I'm hoping to get the loom warped by the end of the month.
  • Wind 1,000 or so warp ends.
  • Dye the warp chain. (I'm leaning towards an ikat effect...)
  • Warp the loom
  • Weave.
• I'm also working on an idea for a ruana on the table loom. I tend to really love plain weave on the table loom, and those projects go quickly, so that should be doable. Again, though, it's three projects:
  • Dye the yarn (colorways are already 90% identified)
  • Warp the loom
  • Weave

Sewing

• I made zero progress on the sewing front in January. All I managed to do was get the log cabin blanket out of its box and marvel at  how close I am to finishing. I do hope to finish it before the weather gets warm so it doesn't languish for a whole 'nother year.

I noticed that the projects I got done in January were mostly for my guild and the blog, and that I didn't do as much on the dyeing front as I would have liked. I'm hoping to course correct for that in February. Luckily, I'm not in charge of putting on any programs this month, so that should help out a bunch, especially since I tend to overprepare!

When I was a new knitter, I would have gasped if you told me to cut apart my knitting. No way, no ma'am.

I distinctly remember a red Aran sweater my mother had - full of bobbles, cables, and knit at such a tight gauge it makes my fingers hurt just thinking about it. But she never wore it because it was too big on her. So she cut it apart and incorporated parts of the sweater into a lovely fitted jacket. 

I was shocked. Won't it unravel? Who would cut into a knitted garment that someone had clearly spent so much time on?

The truth is, that while knitting does unravel, there are lots of ways to cut knitted fabric. Steeking is perhaps my favorite and most-used method, and this sweater does indeed have a steek running down the front. 

Some design and fit issues left me less than thrilled with the finished product. That's the thing about experiments - they don't always work. My problems with this sweater were:

1. I didn't like the circular yoke. I'd originally envisioned set-in sleeves or a saddle shoulder construction, a la my Scrappy Sweater. But I did a circular yoke because it seemed like a good idea at the time. As soon as I went down that path, I regretted it, but as I so often do, forged ahead anyways. Whoops.
2. I was prepared to live with the circular yoke - after all, this is just an experiment in stashbusting and design - but it was too shallow. And, as circular yokes often do, it didn't come up high enough on my back neck, despite working short rows to compensate.
3. The sleeves were too tight. Combined with the yoke depth being too shallow, this made the sweater uncomfortable. 

I'd already woven in lots of ends, which makes unraveling difficult. Plus, the yarns (mostly handspun Icelandic thel and Shetland Spindrift) don't unravel so easily. Which makes them great for steeking, but not for correcting my mistakes.

So I decided to try something I haven't tried before. I cut the yoke right off, and picked up the live stitches onto my knitting needles, and the sweater is ready for yoke attempt #2. It was easier than I could have imagined.

Some tips: 

1. Cut as straight a line as possible. This will minimize waste. It was easy on this sweater because the colorwork clearly delineated separation between rows.
2. Make sure you're only cutting through one layer at a time. Sounds obvious, I know, but there was a point while cutting that I had a panicky moment. After that, I laid the sweater out flat and all was well.
3. Unravel the cut stitches, and pick up the live ones. That's really all there is to it.

This sweater was knit from the bottom up, so it's super easy to cut and pick up the stitches to continue working the yoke as if nothing had happened. 

It's also possible to do it the other way - say I had knit the sweater top-down and wanted to replace only the yoke. I'd cut just like I did, but then I'd need to graft the new yoke to the old one. This sometimes leaves a bit of a line, but it's definitely doable. 

I'd hoped that the end of January would mean that I have a new sweater to wear, but ultimately I want a sweater that is actually wearable, and that I like, so I'm willing to have it take more time.

xx,

​Pamela

Four years ago, I lost this shawl. This is the last picture I have of me wearing it. I suspect I lost it getting off a tour bus somewhere in Tuscany.

I've been trying to replace it ever since. 

It was my first experience in charted lace, and it was a lesson in how much lace expands when you block it. It was huge, and I loved it.

Of course, being the overachiever I am, I want it to be the same but different. Mostly, I want the same colors, a blend of browns, greens, and aqua that reads as mostly dark green. 

When I started spinning, I decided I just HAD to handspin the replacement yarn. I started with this yarn, loving the colors in the braid but thinking the colors were just too light in the finished yarn. Then I tried again, plying a darker green with a merino/silk combination. It was darker, but I had long bright green stripes popping up all over the place, even though I tried to blend the colors together while spinning. It just wasn't what I was going for.

This time, I decided to try something different. 

I took ten one-ounce braids of combed BFL top and blended the colors together. The colorways are "Mallard" and "Outlaw" from Greenwood Fiber Works and purchased at two different fiber festivals over the last year. After I bought Mallard, I did some sampling with "confetti" spinning and realized I would be getting much more color differentiation than I wanted. Later I bought Outlaw, and decided to comb the two colors together.

I used my wool combs because I find them faster than hand cards. Even though I usually spin with a woolen draw, I love spinning combed top because it's so smooth. I made sure to leave the combing waste at the back of the combs - maybe it will be incorporated into another project, but not this one. And, of course, I pulled the top through my very favorite Sheepy Diz.

Since that bright green was the offending color in my second attempt to make this yarn, I paid close attention to what it was doing as I combed the colors together. Ultimately, I chose to use about half of the bright green, so that it stands out much less in the final yarn. Plus, as I was spinning, if I came across a section of the bright green that I determined to be too big, I pulled out a big section of it. 

Spinning took me several months and lots of bobbins. When each bobbin was about half full, the wheel started to protest. I was using my fastest whorl on my Ashford Traveller, and when a bobbin starts to get heavy, it takes a lot more effort to turn. So I wound onto storage bobbins (with the wonderful help of electricity!).

I had been hinting and hoping for an electric wheel to help me with plying, but one has not materialized in my house yet. Wanting to cross another project off the list, I decided to face the music and just do it the old-fashioned way. 

And here it is - 9 skeins, 7.5 ounces, and roughly 2,000 yards. 

Maybe I should have knitted a swatch before I spun so much to see if I'd like the final yarn, but I do think this is much closer to what I had in mind than any of my previous attempts. There's only one way to tell. On to knitting!

Ravelry page here

xx,

​Pamela

Happy New Year! A progress report on what's going on at chez Fiber Sprite. 
​
First, here's what I managed to finish from the December list:

• Socks (as of this writing, they still need to be cast off and ends woven in, but that is imminent)
• Spinning the BFL singles (still need plying)
• Plying and steaming the cashmere. Woo-hoo!
• Three runs of cloth for handwoven bags (two on the table loom, and one on the rigid heddle)
• Sewing up of 8 handwoven bags
• Looped pile washcloths
• Lots of hand-dyed yarn and fiber

And fiber-related, but not on the original list:

• A whole new website, from scratch, for the Mesa Fiber Arts Guild
• A 2018 fiber calendar, just for me
• Hemming some handwoven coasters that had been sitting around forever, waiting for that one last step.

Sewing

• If I do get more bag weaves done, sewing them up will be at the top of the list.
• I'm drooling over the Fringe and Friends Knitalong, which is kicking off today and features log-cabin knitting. But in the spirit of getting things done, I'm reviving the log cabin blanket that has been in progress for years now. The knitting is done, and all that needs doing is hand-quilting the knitting to a woven backing. It went on pause when spring turned to summer and the AC broke, but it's plenty cold now, and I can work on it and keep warm while I do it. I probably won't be eligible for any prizes, but it will be fun to join in the log-cabin frenzy. 

Dyeing

• The goal is to dye a little every day. DH is working on an electric skeinwinder, which should help with some of the muscle fatigue. 

There's plenty more on the want-to-do list, and I'm doing everything I can to resist the startitis in favor of reducing overwhelm. What do you have going on?

xx,

​Pamela