Out of the mouths of babes

I had occasion to have dinner the other night alone with Younger Daughter while Rick and Older Daughter were at soccer practice. As we discussed our plans for the rest of the evening, I mentioned that I was going to finish plying the batt I'd started spinning. She commented, apropos of nothing that I seem to have a lot of yarn, to which I replied that yes, I did have some yarn stashed away. She then asked, "But Mama, what are you going to do with all of that yarn when you can't knit anymore?" As if such a thing were imminent. I said, "Why wouldn't I knit anymore?", and she said, "You know, when you get old." Again, as if such a thing were imminent.

Hmmm... I thought about it for a moment, and then pointed out to her that I'd only been really knitting for about six or seven years, and that I could easily knit another thirty years, and still not be as old as Memere is now. (Sorry, mom, but I think you'll see where I'm going with this in a moment.) She looked utterly enlightened, and not a little surprised, because it's pretty clear that her Memere still has plenty of life left in her, even at thirty years older than her aged mother. Memere could probably even summon up the energy to knit! It occurs to me that, from her perspective, Mom and I are both just Older, and Adults, and probably more alike to her in our adulthood relative to her feeling of non-adulthood than we are different from one another because of our ages. Maybe kids just don't see generations like we do. In any case, she seemed reassured that I wasn't going to fall by the knitterly wayside with a roomful of yarn left unknit.

Especially not this yarn.
Isn't it lovely? That's the angora/pollworth batt that I mentioned last time. This is a pretty close representation of its actual color, which is "pesto". I love it truly, madly, deeply.
This, plus more, is destined to become a pair of hats for my mother and me. I'll probably cast on for the first one tonight.

I think I also mentioned a couple of additional fallings-down from last weekend's fiber adventure. Both of them happened at the Carolina Homespun booth, which was amazing, not only for what it contained (an insane amount of wonderful stuff), but also because that's where I ran into Beverly, who'd mentioned in the comments that she'd be at Lambtown, and that she might say hi if she recognized me and it didn't seem too stalker-y. Well, I (serendipitously and entirely accidentally) saved her from that by accosting her as a complete stranger over the spindles to ask what she thought of them (apparently I have no shame when it comes to figuring out how someone could spin on those spindles that look more like nostepinnes to me than spindles). I should mention here that Beverly is a class-A enabler, too; as I dithered over the silk that I showed off in the last post, she stuck her head in that booth to tell me she'd bought one of their batts and that it was really wonderful. I committed to the silk very soon thereafter. It was nice to meet you, Beverly!

So, at Carolina Homespun, I bought myself this:
Silk/cashmere, in the colorway Persimmon. I kept walking up to it and picking it up, so I figured I should probably just commit. Doesn't it just scream "fall"? This may be the next thing to go on my wheel (although I confess that it feels too decadent to spin for some reason; I need to get over that feeling that I'm not good enough of a spinner for things like this).

The other purchase was one that my mom made. I have long been considering getting one of these "for the girls". Recognizing that "for the girls" really meant "for me and the girls", I have held off (no new fiber sports, right?). I showed it to mom and told her that I'd thought about getting them one for Christmas, and she said maybe she could do that. We chatted back and forth about it, until one of the weavers from the sheep to shawl competition heard us and told us how much she loves rigid heddle looms, that that's all she uses, and that this little one is a great one to start with and to do small projects with. That plus pointing out a few of the beautiful woven (as opposed to knit) scarves running around the fair pretty much did it. When I checked out with the fiber, mom checked out with the loom. (Thanks, mom!) I'm about halfway through warping it for the first time, and will probably finish that job this weekend and set the girls loose on it. Meanwhile, I'm contemplating what fiber in my stash might do well for weaving...

Best-laid plans

Remember how I said I wasn't going to come home with a fleece?


Oops.

Now, to be absolutely, 100% fair, it's not my fault.

Point in my defense the first: This is alpaca fiber, not wool, and I'm going to contend that perhaps I didn't therefore come home with a fleece by the strictest definition. This may seem spurious until I tell you what won me over: because of the lack of lanolin, there's a lot more leeway (the word "indefinitely" came up) in terms of getting alpaca clean before it rots than there is with wool.

Point in my defense the second: I was surrounded by enablers. I had Older Daughter telling me that it really wasn't that expensive, and that seriously, mom, you should buy it. (Come to find out later she adores this particular fiber and has designs upon all products resulting from its spinning and knitting.) And my mother kept saying things like, you know, you'd spend that much going out to dinner. Seriously, how could I not haul out my checkbook then and there? (Credit where credit is due: this fleece is from Valhalla Farms Alpacas.)

I came home with a few more things, many of which I am entirely responsible for, although a few others, not so much. On this list of "not my fault" is also the gorgeous 2.4 oz batt of angora/polworth from Bungalow Farm Angora in the most stunning clear spring greens that my mother bought for me (see? born enabler). That is destined to become matching tams for me and her. (We live 500 miles away from one another, so that's not as dorky as it sounds.) I just could not get the colors to photograph well, so I'll post pictures of the yarn once it's spun.

I got a couple of little bags of gorgeous suri alpaca top to spin from Sterling Alpacas; they were the folks who were nice enough to talk to me about how to store and wash alpaca fiber. This may make mitts for Rick.

I also got some fiber to spin into socks: Blue-Faced Leicester (superwash) from Sincere Sheep.
That, too, isn't photographing very well; it's more pale green than pale blue. I'm looking forward to spinning this without killing it the way I did the last sock yarn I tried to spin. (I am still mourning the Wensleydale.)

And then I got some luxury fibers (I realize that I forgot to take pictures of one of the gorgeous bits of cashmere/silk that I got - another time). Look at these:
That in front is bombyx silk, and in back a merino/bombyx/tussah blend, all dyed using natural dyes from Dreamy Goat Design Studio. They had the most absolutely stunning fibers there; I had a really hard time choosing, but I finally decided that these would be beautiful plied together and then knitted into something lacey, so that is what I am going to do.

The festival itself was really fun, with good food, and friendly people and alpacas, live music and entertainment, and (as you can see) a wonderful hall full of vendors. There was a sheep-to-shawl competition, with three teams competing; I'd never seen one before, so that was really fun, too - we kept checking in during the day. I think I have a few pictures of that on my phone that I'll post later. Along with one more confession of a fiber-sport nature (also not my fault). (I feel like John Belushi.)

In the meantime, I am knitting. I have begun Eve's Ribs, and I'll show some pictures of that next time. It's going to be a real squeaker in terms of yarn/fit; my LYS was one skein short of the yarn in the colorway I fell in love with to knit the medium size, which was probably a touch on the larger size for me, so I bought the yarn and am knitting the small, which may be a touch on the small size for me. This one may be a twice-knit sweater; only time will tell.

And it IS a sweater!

What a week. I spent all day on Wednesday (and by all day, I mean from 9:30-5:30) in meetings. I did manage to find time for a bathroom break between two of the meetings (small blessings), and I got lucky at another meeting and ate a sandwich, but it was quite a day. (I should mention that my reward at the end of the day was to go to knit night; that really helped.) That wouldn't have been so bad, except that every other day this week has also included a meeting or two (not usually in my calendar) squeezed in between classes, or between other meetings and office hours, or... Some weeks are like that. All the meetings come at once.

The upshot is twofold:
a) I have had lots of knitting time (and many envious looks from non-knitters who have also been attending all of these meetings this week and just have to sit); and
b) I have had no blogging time to share the results of my knitting time (nor have I had any daylight hours to take pictures).

Tuesday's meetings gave me time to finish the neckline on the handspun sweater. I thought for sure I'd get home and be able to weave in the ends and call it done, but when I tried it on, I decided that I really didn't like the rolled bottom after all (very Jetsons; so Jetsons, in fact, that when I said I felt like someone from the Jetsons to Rick, he didn't say, "What do you mean?", he just started whistling the theme song instead), so I took out the cast-off edge and knitted a small seed-stitch border. I ended up having not only enough yarn for that, but even after adding the extra inch, I have a small bit left over in case I need to make any repairs or anything. So the sweater ended up taking under 1,000 yards of (heavy) worsted-weight yarn.

The pictures are just quick, non-daylight, shots. I'll work on some better ones when the weather is cooler and when I'm actually home during the day.
It seems to fit pretty well, and it blocked out nicely. It's soft enough that it didn't bother me to wear it over short sleeves (until I got too hot; we've had summer thunderstorms over the last day or so; it feels very East coast out here right now).
So there it is! This is definitely a casual sweater, rough-and-tumble, warm and, I hope, rugged. I think I'll get a lot of use out of this at soccer games and hiking and going to the mountains in the winter. But it's light enough (between the lace sleeves and the scoop neck) that I'll be able to wear it around here, which is good.

I also finished the Noro socks, and am very happy with my mismatched pair.
Alas, it has not been cool enough to wear either of the above out and about. Soon, I hope...

I spent most of Wednesday's meetings working on the Bermuda shawl, so maybe there will be pictures of that soon, too.

Meanwhile, today the girls and I head up to Sacramento to take my dad out for his 75th birthday, and to drag my mom and the girls to Lambtown. (Yes, Beverly, you guessed right, and please do come say hi to me if you see me! I'd love to get to meet you.) I'm really looking forward to it, both because there are events there that I haven't seen before (like a sheep-to-shawl competition), and because there are vendors there that I love (and I just got paid! my first non-furlough paycheck in a year! shopping!!), so I may treat myself to a few things (not a fleece, not a fleece, not a fleece; MUST spin the first fleece first).

And it's looking like a sweater...

How do the weeks go by so quickly? I wish I knew...

I know where some of this past week went, at least. Last Sunday, we went apple picking in Julian with some dear friends and their three kids. We came home with bags of apples (the Jonathans are particularly delicious right now), having had a wonderful time. It was my first time apple picking (I know, I know), and it was so much fun to try all the different varieties as we wandered around, picking first from this tree, then from that, adding to our bags as we pleased.
I knitted away on the handspun sweater all the way there and back, but that was the last of the knitting for several days. What was I doing instead, you may ask?

In a word: grading.

My first pile of essays came in from one of my classes, and it took me nearly 12 solid hours (yes, that's hours) to grade 36 essays (I should point out that these essays ranged from 2-5 pages). I'm not talking about one and a half work days, with time off for coffee and lunch and checking email and peeing. Nope, I'm talking the time I spent sitting with my butt in a chair and a pen in my hand. It was painful (on a lot of levels; my back is killing me). It's astonishing to me how few people actually even re-read their papers before turning them in, let alone actually editing them. (This in spite of the fact that on the assignment I clearly stated that by the end they must have proven to me a number of things, including the fact that they re-read their papers.) We'll see how the second essay goes when I get it in a few more weeks.

I finished that grading late on Wednesday night, so when I got home on Thursday, I settled down to a well-deserved couple of hours of knitting while watching Bones and Fringe (new seasons, yay!). And I finished the body on the handspun sweater. I'd already ripped out what you saw in the last pictures and started again because the body looked too big for me, so I was really hoping that I'd hit it on the money this time. I actually think I may have gotten this one right.
What do you think? It seems to fit exactly the way I want it to, and I am still truly loving the way the colors are coming out (that picture is pretty accurate).
I picked up the stitches for the first sleeve and got that started on Thursday and worked more on it yesterday, thinking the whole time that it really did look too big (I apparently think I am a much more imposing person, physically, than I actually am). I tried it on this morning, and yes, it was way too big. So I ripped that all out, picked up stitches again (40 fewer stitches this time, and it's still not too small, that's how way too big it was), and I think this is going to work much better. It will also mean (I hope) that I have a much better shot at finishing this without running out of yarn. All I have left are the two sleeves, and then I pick up and knit a rolled neckline, which I'll just do with whatever yarn I have left after the sleeves. I'm still thinking this is going to be a bit of a race to the finish with the yardage I have, but I'm feeling more sanguine now that I've finished the body using the yarn I'd allocated for it.

And that's all there is to report. I knitted on my Noro sock yesterday while watching The Town with some friends (I liked it), and I only stopped because I think I'm at the point where I need to start the ribbing, but I have to compare it to the other sock first. So those may be done soon, too. I am nurturing this little hope that I'll finish the sweater in time to wear next weekend, when we go to Sacramento to visit my dad for his birthday, and to drag my mom to a local fiber festival at the same time. Of course, it might not be cold enough for wool; we have finally gotten a summer down here, and after months of weather where the highs hovered in the mid-70s, we're hitting the 90s today. That's fall in SoCal for you!

It knits like yarn

So, I swatched with the handspun I posted pictures of last time, and it seems to be acting like, well, not to put too fine a point on it - yarn. I made yarn! Yarn that can be knitted! Into a garment! (I hope. Still keeping my fingers crossed that I've calculated my yardages correctly, or the sleeves on this will be "bracelet length"; read: I didn't have enough yarn for the usual length.)
That appears to be knitting, doesn't it? I can get even closer, and it still looks like knitting.
Yup, lumpy and bumpy a bit, but I am still very happy. What this means, of course, is that I am absurdly proud of a feat that, two hundred years ago, could have been accomplished by a seven-year-old. Nevertheless.
The way this sweater works is that I knit the shoulder straps, then picked up stitches and am now knitting down the back for a bit; I will do the same for the front for the same length, then join them together and knit in the round until the body is finished. This is a lot of stockinette, so I'd planned to save it for knitting in meetings. That may not work, as I'm having a lot of fun with this thing. On the other hand, there may be other distractions on the horizon.

This brings me to a request I've been meaning to make. Could all y'all please, really just please, stop finding beautiful things to knit? You're killing me here. The latest distraction came from Lori. I've already bought the pattern and am in the process of assessing the stash (do you think Briar Rose alpaca laceweight held double would work? I really want it to...).

I beg of you, no more!

As promised

Spinning!!

As I've mentioned, I've been working my way through 15 lovely ounces of Blue-Faced Leicester (BFL) from Briar Rose. This fiber spins like a dream, and it has the gorgeous longwool luster that I adore. When I was in Ohio looking at fiber in the Briar Rose booth, I kept finding myself reaching for those lustrous bumps of wool, and every single time it was BFL; I feel the same way about some of the other longwools, there's just something about them that looks like silk. They are definitely not as soft as wools like Merino (nor as soft as silk, for that matter), and I think that if I were to try to spin them worsted, as my spinning preference lies, they wouldn't be as gorgeous as they could be. But this experiment of spinning this fiber woollen has worked out beautifully, I think. For non-spinners, it basically means that instead of getting a tighly-spun yarn with very little air in it (the kind of yarn that's perfect for socks), I ended up with a bouncy two-ply yarn with lots of air and loft in it. I am so glad that I didn't keep saving it "for best", because now I have five skeins of lovely yarn; I haven't counted just how much yardage I have exactly, but I think it's about 220 yards per skein, so, if I'm calculating correctly, that's a sweater's worth. Hooray!


Chris is truly an artist with color. I never cease to be blown away by the things she can do with dye; her colorways are so organic, every one of them tells me a story about something that I love. The colors in this wool remind me of the blues and browns and grays of Sierra granite, perhaps my favorite rock on earth, up to and including the big rounded river rocks that make me so happy. (Am I the only person who has a favorite rock? Maybe it has to do with all of my early childhood memories of playing on huge boulders in the mountains or in Yosemite, with that particular feel of decomposed granite and pine needles under my feet, and the smell of cold pine and campfire in the air, the way that smell changes as the sun begins to warm the trees and the rocks, the sound of a creek nearby, the rough stone under my hands when I climbed, and the give of the earth when I jumped off and landed... There's nothing like a good granite boulder.)

My woollen spinning still isn't even, which means that the resulting yarn isn't even, so I'm not sure how this will knit up. It seems to range between a heavy sport and a worsted weight yarn, and one skein (in spite of mixing up the bobbins as I plied) feels like it's a lighter yarn that the others, so I may have to mix that in as I knit to keep it from being too obvious.
You can see the changing weights there. Does anyone who is more experienced at knitting their handspun into sweaters have a sense of whether I'm in trouble here?

I am thinking that I have finally spun the yarn that I need to knit Cloisters, a sweater I saw in Spin-Off ages ago, and that I've been wanting to knit ever since. (There's a better picture of it here; it's the green sweater fifth from the left in the top row.) I think that the plain stockinette body will show off the colors nicely, and the lace pattern is simple enough not to be too obscured by the vagaries of handspun yarn. I also think it'll be a simple enough knit that it will be soothing during this busy time of the semester, and one of those really wearable sweaters, like a sweatshirt, but uniquely mine.

I will leave you with some granite to consider.

A contest worth visiting, plus new vocab

If only because the photo is so great, it's just begging for a caption: Check out this contest.

(Thanks to Yarnerinas for the link!)

P.S. I've been spinning like a madwoman; three bobbins full of a gorgeous two-ply and more to come tonight. Pictures soon.

P.P.S. And how much did I need this word today at work? Thanks, Fuzzarelly, for that link. I can tell this word is going to get a lot of use in my world (especially the way I drive and shop for groceries)...