an ent knits

fresh yarn

green hand-dyed, originally uploaded by enting.

I don't have a picture of last week's yarn all plied, but here's what I've been working on this week.  (It started out as the green stuff here, and became this as an intermediate stage.)

It's a little more thick-and-thin than I'd really like, but I was working on spinning fluffy, and I did achieve some of that.

(I still have no computer.  It's supposed to arrive later this week.  I'm getting incredibly impatient...it's been nearly a month.)

yarn candy saturday

yarn in the sun, originally uploaded by enting.

Still no computer.  I'm starting to go (more) nuts.  But I spent a couple hours this morning spinning up the rest of the wool/mohair locks I picked up at Maryland a year and a half ago, and then I plied them (after this picture was taken).  *This* is why I (finally) have a ballwinder.

Oooh, other knitting-related tidbit--I saw the Mountain Goats [indie rock band] play last Saturday, and I _actually didn't knit through the concert_.  It was that good.  (Also crowded, but really, really good.)

stripey two-ply

I finished the spinning of that yellow/green/blue wool blend that I dyed a couple of weeks ago.  (Second from left in the first picture here.)

I predrafted the second (longitudinally split) half all at once, the way I did for the first half, spun it, and then plied the two together.  I wound up misjudging somewhere, as one bobbin had enough excess yardage that I wound it off and spliced it to the end of the other, but I'm pretty happy with this as an experiment.

 

This is about 110 yards. 

Quick knitting update: everything that's genuinely active/in progress (the wool-mohair toe-hat, the garter-stitch scarf of purpley handspun, the peacock feather shawl) has grown a bit.  Pictures soon.

fresh yarn is hard to resist

I've already started knitting with my onion-dyed wool:

It's a multi-directional scarf--I've knit the first bit and started the first short-row section.

I've also done some more comfort spinning--this is about 45 yards of random fluff.  I may overdye it; I don't really like the color, but part of the reason I put most of this stuff into blends was because I didn't like the starting material.  Eh, it was fun to spin.

comfort spinning

As I said last week, I've been doing some comfort spinning to try to deal with some of the unpleasantness of life.  Here's the wool I dyed with onion skins, all spun up:

Some of it is wound into a ball because I didn't secure the skein very well before finishing.  I'd like to think I've learned my lesson...but we'll see.  It's not especially even, but I don't really care.  It was fun to spin, and it'll still be great for the project I have in mind.

And here's a fellow spinner whom I found in my kitchen the other day. 

On a semi-related note, I think a bunch of people I know will appreciate this felted insect pattern booklet.  I found it through Ravelry.  (Such a dangerous time-suck, but such fun!)

success!

Although my camera still insisted that the memory card with 43 pictures on it was unformatted, I was able to borrow a card-reader that had no such problem.  Here, then, are a couple of pictures of stuff I've finished lately.

This is a garter-stitch scarf on 8s, knit from the alien yarn that I finished spinning a while ago.  I don't really know how much it took, except that it's approximately fingering-weight singles and was probably about two or three ounces.  It's a loose knit, but there's a pretty good halo.  This is going to be for my dad, for Fathers' Day, in part because the hat I knit for his birthday (this yarn, held double and striped on a base of black cascade 220) didn't turn out as well as I'd thought.  That is, the reason it's done already is partly guilt; since this yarn perfectly matches a wool jacket of his, it was going to be something for him anyway.

The teensy skein in the back was a tuft of sample fiber from Morro Fleece Works, a composite of grey Targhee and brown alpaca; I really like the Targhee, and I like the alternation between brown and grey, but it's not incredibly exciting.  On the left is the rest of the Hidden merino, about 130 yards from just under half of the 4oz bundle.  The beautiful, cheery pile on the right is Amy Boogie's tussah silk in Walking On the Sun, spun more finely than last time and left as singles.  I think I'll be making an orangey, lacey scarf at some point.

I expect to update you about the freeform blanket later this week, but I don't have any new pictures of it yet.

maryland: the new technique

One of the best things about MDSW, as I have said, is/was the opportunity to spend a lot of time with knitting/spinning friends.  The confluence of new fiber and spindle-spinning and hanging out with other spinners led to my actually figuring out (being retaught) how to chain-ply, a skill which had eluded me. 

I seem to have misplaced the yarn that I chain-plied in front of our campfire (all...five yards of it?), but I spun and chain-plied a bit of the osage orange/indigo dyed wool soon after I got home.  This is about twelve yards--not much, but a confirmation that I can chain-ply without Sarah sitting next to me.

(I wasn't planning on posting this by itself, but I don't really have anything else fibery to talk about right now.  I've been either working late or doing other things (like hanging out with my parents, who've been in town) that preclude much knitting or spinning.)

green, green, and more green

In answering Mim's questions last week (yes, still working on outgoing questions, sorry), I realized that I haven't shown any pictures of the green freeform blanket that I've been working on since late September/early October. 

(My apologies for the blurry picture.)  I'm going to approximate its current size as about 15"x18".  As you can probably tell, I started out with really small blocks of each color and then realized both how long that would take and how many ends it would generate, so I started knitting larger chunks.  I have been weaving in some of the ends as I go, but I'm waiting until a block is entirely surrounded to weave in its ends.  I'm trying to make it reversible and not add too much textural complexity on top of the color variation, so I've been knitting a lot of garter stitch and simple ribbing...  It's not an extremely portable project, as I'm still trying to change yarns fairly frequently, but it's really fun to work on (says she who hasn't added to it in weeks).  Still, since so much of the yarn I started with was/is either Manos or Malabrigo, I've been coopting pretty much all of the green handspun/proto-handspun (aka fiber) that isn't firmly associated with another project, aiming for thicker-than-fingering-and-thinner-than-heavy-worsted for the grist.

Here are the most recent additions to the green-yarn pile:

The larger skein is ~180yds (maybe 2.5oz?  a little more than half a 4oz unit) of Amy Boogie's superwash merino in "Hidden"; the small skein is a bit more of the merino/silk blend I bought at NEFA soon after I started spinning.  I'm really happy with the superwash merino--it's really soft, and most of it is exactly the grist I wanted.  I feel a little silly using it for this blanket rather than something I might actually want to machine wash, but not silly enough to change my plans.  Mmm, green.

quick peek

(All of this yarn is stuff that I finished over the weekend.  Of course, some of it was started quite a while ago.)

Clockwise, from the top:

• alpaca/wool plied with peony Boogie merino
• purple/brown/blue mixed wools that I carded a couple of weeks ago
• cormo plus a smidgen of blue Boogie merino
• cormo that I dyed with food coloring
• mixed fluff sent by Jen of garriber.org

leftovers & bits

I've been on a bit of a kick of using up leftover singles and spinning up the small batches of fiber sitting around.  I think it's related to excitement over Maryland coming up soon, along with the fact that I know I don't have enough spinning time to finish a big project (3-ply for a sweater, for example) in anything resembling a reasonable timeframe. 

This is what was left of my Boogie wool in Poppy plied with some natural brown alpaca/wool I bought from Delly's Delights at Maryland last year.  It's a little rough from being overspun/plied, but it's pretty.  So now I have 20 yards of chocolate-cherry-ish fingering-weight yarn.

This is the rest of that merino/llama from Indigo Moon Farms.  I was making a concerted effort to spin fluffier yarn, so it's much less even than I'd like...but it's still soft, at least.  (This roving was relatively difficult to spin, because H. had had it sitting around for quite a while--it was felted together in bits, which made drafting tricky in places.)

And this is a further attempt to spin fluffy yarn, from the pink rolags from Sunday.  I really felt like I was starting to get the hang of spinning woolen-style, and I could see how long-draw could work.  I'm definitely not there yet, but progress is reassuring.  (Especially since work is progressing so slowly these days.)  This mini-skein is only about 15 yards, but it's a nice dk-worsted.  (Amazing!)  Still more uneven than I'd like, but evenness wasn't the focus of this experiment.  I gave it to my Crafty Labmate, thinking it was a color that suited her, and she said immediately that she had a project in mind for it.  (Which is good, 'cause I wouldn't've come up with anything other than yet another stripy Dulaan something.)