Click!

Bulky yarn experiment with some La Lana Wools batts in Pastorale (see the little blue bits? I love them! It's some shiny blue mohair.)
~~*~~

When I announced it was time to go up to bed, Noel said in a singsongy voice, "Good night spinning wheel! I see you in da mornin'!" He also picked up the Woolery catalog that came with the wheel and asked if he could take it to read in bed.

He was paging through the catalog when I came in to say goodnight. He pointed to a wheel and said, "Mommy, you want dis wheel for Christmas?" (sure!) "What about this one too?" (Okay!) Apparently, his favorite wheel is a Timbertops Beaver. (He says, "Dat one's mine Mommy--you pick another one.")

When my dad came to visit, Noel ran to him and said, "Come see da spinning wheel, Grandad!"

Cross your fingers that he will become my star spinner.

I tried making my own version of those felted bowls from Spin-Off. Instead of using unspun roving, I just used some of my first singles handspun. I'd spun this up last year using some batts from La Lana Wools. (It's a romney and mohair blend colored with natural dyes.) It seemed like it would make some mighty good felt.

And it did! It's a little wonky, but heck, you should see my first bowl. I pulled it out of the washer and called it a hat (so it's a hat)

My main objective was to make a little basket bowl to hang on my new spinning wheel to hold odds and ends.

Here's my first singles spun on the new wheel. It's the crockpot roving I dyed last week under Claudia's long-distance tutelage. (thanks again Claudia!)

This weekend we went to an orchard in Unionville, Pa to pick out pumpkins and apples, pies and apple cider doughnuts. We go every year at this time and were all ready to take the kids on their first hayride through the orchards too.

This year, we almost drove right past the orchard's barn store because they had sold the adjoining orchards and the grounds are now being levelled for more suburban sprawl.

Bye bye beautiful orchards. Bye bye beautiful horse farm.

Hello really big houses with hollow core doors.

I filled up 2 bobbins with singles using my handdyed corriedale or leicester roving (who can remember) and then plied them last night. My cats, Mitya and Lucie, served as the tensioning parts of my shoebox-and-knitting-needles lazy kate (sorry no pix of that one). They kept pouncing on the spinning bobbins and were having a grand old time. I had no hands free and was too busy trying to keep the singles from twisting up on themselves while yelling "git!" over my shoulder. (Which, you probably all know, doesn't even phase 'em.)

So, towards the end of my skein, in a hurry to finish, I stopped counting my treadles and the result is yarn with a very loose ply. Ah well. Next time I'll just lock 'em in the basement.

Last Friday was when I left for Rhinebeck. I left around 12:30, still pondering a last minute decision to take the train or not. Somewhere on I-95 around Newark, NJ, I decided I'd chosen poorly. The train would have been fabulous! I could have knitted and not worried about whether I wanted to go to exit 18 E or 18 W off the NJ turnpike (a critical decision apparently because one leads to the Lincoln Tunnel and the other to the George Washington Bridge. Feel free to correct me on this since I was buzzin past the signs pretty quickly and not committing the exact details to memory.)

So, I successfully navigate around NYC to get far enough into New York state to start to relax and enjoy the scenery. At one point I was driving around a corner and then all of a sudden I see mountains and mist and the sun is low. Beautiful. By the side of the Taconic Parkway, I see people sitting on horses while they graze. Farther along I see bunches of deer just standing around by the woods; and finally when I take the exit, two little white ducks just come waddling down the road. How different from the suburbia I woke up in that morning.

I managed to get to Rhinebeck! Then I lost my focus and got lost in the middle of nowhere--just spooky mountainous lakey foresty areas. Driving down dark uninhabited roads. SPOOKY! No cell phone service!

What lengths won't I go to for some good knitting and spinning stuff?

Tune in tomorrow for more on Rhinebeck....(I gotta knit sometime!)

Okay, I promised Claudia some pix of my dyeing progress so far...sorry about the lighting (I'll get a better shot tomorrow--the pix doesn't do it justice)

Click!

And that's not all!

The zipper for ribby cardie arrived just in time. On Tuesday, I opened the door and--finally!--there was a zipper.

It took me a few tries to get the zipper pinned in place, then I did little overcast stitches up the backside of the crocheted facings like this.*

By the way, what do you do with that inch or so of zipper tape at the top? I assume, in sewing, it has on official way of being hidden, but here, with knitting, what to do? I ended up just folding it over. For a minute I considered cutting it and then taking a match to it to melt it (so it wouldn't fray), but that seemed too risky.

After sewing the tapes to the inside, I did little applique-like stitches down the front edges, right next to the zipper teeth. In case you were wondering, that's 104 inches of tiny stitches (26 inches up the back and 26 inches down the front X 2).

All done!

-----------------------
*thinking of Laura Ingalls Wilder's sewing at the time (Little Town on the Prairie anyone?)

In late March, I put Cromarty down because it was painstaking. It was taking me 30 minutes to do one row of the Back. My hands ached all the time, but I just thought it me and all those cables....and maybe the needle.

Then in June or July, I knitted a swatch for Becky for Kerrie's wedding present. I used some Freedom cotton dk and Chart C's cable. No struggling with the yarn or the needles. Easy. Enjoyable. And I started to wonder...maybe it's the yarn.....

Last night, I took out Cromarty and cast on for a sleeve because I didn't want to figure out where I left off on all the charts at 11 pm at night. I figured I would just cast on and do a row of the sleeve so everything could be official and proper.

But it was such a pain. It's insane to knit this yarn on a 2.5 mm needle. What to do? I have about 1/3 of the back done and I love the yarn and it is to gauge. But....should I find a thinner yarn and restart? The original pattern called for Rowan Designer DK, which, according to some website with discontinued Rowan yarn info, gets 24/sts to 4 inches (115 m/125 yd to 50 gm). The gauge in the pattern over the cables is 25 stitches & 31 rows to 4 inches (using 4.5 mm needles!) so I'm having trouble finding an appropriate substitute since all the gauges online are based on stockinette.

Does anyone know of a good substitute? Should I be looking at a lightweight dk or a sport weight yarn? Random advice? I have never seen rowan's DDK so I haven't a clue.

I spent about 3 hours spinning today trying to learn how to be more consistent. A hard thing for a random person such as myself.

I take an intuitive approach to grist and twist and all that. ("oh, it looks pretty twisted enough there and there and there.") Is that okay? Am I breaking the rules? Am I supposed to be counting something?

As I spin I was thinking of what kinds and colors of fiber I might want to look for in Rhinebeck. It would be fun to ply some red, pink and orange singles together.

I decided to stop while I had something I could actually use. The shawl is lovely, but I'm a casual girl, so it would not have gotten much use. I have a whole quilt stand full of shawls just hanging around lookin' pretty.

A scarf I can use. A lowly accessory? I think not!

The other 2 skeins of Kidsilk Haze will become more scarves using some patterns from Heirloom Knitting...or perhaps they will become the funky little flower pillow in the latest Rowan.

Click if you dare.