See Eunny Knit!

I've been spinning, too.

This is hand dyed Wensleydale top from the astonishingly talented Lisa Souza in the "Petroglyph" colorway, spun as a 2-ply at about a DK weight. This stuff is fun. It's my first time spinning a long wool, and let me tell you - it's so much faster, so much easier to spin than the short, slippery Merinos I've been working with. And oh! The color! It's wonderful.

Eventually, I want to become a versatile spinner, a thoughtful spinner who really knows her stuff and generally makes smart decisions about yarn design based on the inherent qualities of the fiber and the intended use. This seems to me to be an important building block - to understand why this is, and why that isn't, and to know what to do with that information; the whole "walk before you run" thing as applied to spinning. To that end, I'm trying to settle down from magpie spinning and branch out a little - trying new fibers, new weights, and then actually knitting with them to see how they behave. This Wensleydale is a Good Experiment, I think - I've learned a lot just from the mistakes I made spinning this first bump. It needs a softer spin, for sure - though the plied yarn is balanced, it feels pretty harsh (longer staple = less twist needed? Someone help me out here); I was treadling like a madwoman, trying to get all those little hairs to lie smooth. Better to just accept a hairy yarn, I think, and spin softer - a squishy-but-structured yarn should be pretty easy to achieve with this stuff. I have another 3/4 lb to spin, and I'll be focusing on making each skein better than the last.

The color changes are subtle enough that I just might actually wear something knit out of this - it's much coarser than a fine wool, of course, so it should be something jacket-like or otherwise outerwear-y. Something to show off the colors - I'm thinking short rows, I'm thinking panels, I'm thinking bias fabrics (not all at once, of course!). We'll see.

In other news -

(this is the first 250 yards, about 1/4 the total, of the Platinum Merino/Tencel from Mama-E at Cloverhill Yarn Shop; I couldn't wait until I'd spun all the singles to start plying. Cool and brilliant and gleaming - did you ever see anything so like a stream of living metal?)

Posted by Eunny at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (55)

Fits and starts, starts and fits.

This is a 3-ply worsted-spun light fingering weight, from Amy Boogie's Almost Solid Merino top in Hyacinth. It feels wonderful, wonderful - I spun three very fine, very firm plies, set them up on storage bobbins, and plied them together with quite a bit more twist than I thought I needed (about 3/4 of the single twist) to get this wonderfully sproingy, squishy, not-at-all-wiry, and yet strong and knittable yarn. Seriously, I wish they'd hurry up and invent squeeze-o-vision already - I want everyone to give it a pinch.

Weight: 110 grams
Yardage: 460 yards/ 420 meters (~ light fingering)
Single WPI: ~45
Plied WPI: ~19
Single TPI: ~20 (unless I'm not figuring this out right - two revolutions of the 15:1 whorl for every 1.5-2" of drafted fiber)
Plied TPI: ~13
Other specs: Worsted-spun three-ply, singles spun from random sections

It took a couple weeks to spin just that four ounces - very busy, losing my mind, yadda yadda yadda - but I suddenly started sampling up a storm, spinning tiny little 7 or 8 gram skeins of everything, just to see:

Clockwise from top left: A sad attempt at a worsted-weight 2-ply Almost Solid Merino in Poppies; sock-weight 3-plys in Handpainted Yarn roving in (from left) Polar, Azul and Sunset; that delicious Blows Smoke from Hello Yarn, in a distressingly bumpy fingering-ish 2-ply; and some more Almost Solid in Juniper Berry, in 2- and 3-ply versions.

For subtly tonal fibers (and purely from a color standpoint), I really like 3-plys. Not Navajo-plied yarns, mind you - they're well and good, of course, but aren't what I'm going for with these - but three separate threads all spun from random sections of fiber. The shades are distributed better, and in the case of something like the Juniper Berry (truly almost-solid), the subtly different tones work a wonderful kind of alchemy and produce a really lively, energetic yarn. Interesting just to look at and to process; demanding a closer look, and then one closer still. Good stuff.

Posted by Eunny at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (42)

I take it all back. I adore it, I'm besotted with it, I can't stop looking at it.

Gratuitous close-up:

Vaguely exploitative closer-up:

Delicious melony goodness. Thank you all, lyrical commenters and insightful fiber-people you are, for pointing out that the colors were great as-is: when in doubt, I tend to fall back on a position that if it's not grey or black, it's "too bright". I love that the first impression when looking at the skein is of a vivid, lively color - but a closer look shows that that electric shade is actually made up of many others of subtler hue, blending and shifting. Greater than the sum of the parts, all that.

Fiber: Handpainted Merino Top from Mama-E's C*eye*ber Fiber Shop, in color "Blood Orange"
Weight: 95 grams
Yardage: 405 yards/370 meters (~ light fingering)
Other specs: Two-ply, singles spun from sections of varying thickness.

I used Koigu KPM as a standard - I love that a two-ply can be so round and soft and squishy. I decided that the singles are (relatively) softly spun, then plied tightly to get those wonderfully puffy individual plies in a stable yarn. My yarn is fell pretty far short of the mark - it isn't plied tightly enough, and it's lighter overall, and it's terribly inconsistent, of course - but I think I got closer to what I had in mind than I ever have before. I think I understand the process of making design choices about a yarn a little better, too, the way the whole twist/untwist thing happens during spinning and plying, and how to plan for it.

Anyways. This yarn calls for socks, of course - Aran socks, specifically. Something about the idea of heavy textures meant for a chilly island being reproduced in tropical colors, at a ridiculously fine gauge, makes me smile.

I'm patterning this like the "traditional" Aran sweater - mirrored front and back, central panel flanked by narrow cables. The side patterns - 6-stitch gull wing - will split at the gusset to form a new pattern down the sides of the foot. Cute, eh, if a little precious?

Now, then, I have this:

The top three lovely things are Merino Almost-Solids from Amy Boogie in Juniper Berry, Poppies, and Hyacinth, and the bottom braid is some gorgeous Merino from Hello Yarn in Blows Smoke. Tasty, tasty stuff, friends.

The Almost-Solids I'll spin up very simply like the Blood Orange, possibly for someday colorwork. The Blows Smoke, I'm thinking of spinning so a mostly-blue yarn will have occasional bright spots of electric green - nice for a scarf, maybe, or more socks (MORE SOCKS?!) The question is, which one should I sink my sticky mitts into first?

Posted by Eunny at 07:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (49)

That's some peach!

If you'll remember, the unspun top was a delicate affair of blushes and pallors and rosy cheeks. I called it peach-like . . . peach slurpees, maybe. Pretty, still, but a little more, ah, intense than what I was anticipating. Not engaging so much as electric.

I actually planned a method and a procedure this time for the much-coveted subtly changing marl: I split the bundle lengthwise into two halves, and then split each piece lengthwise again into several strips of varying thicknesses. The idea was that pieces of differing thicknesses would create color runs of varying lengths in the singles, and ensure an interesting plied yarn composed of randomly matched and mismatched plies. All this is well and good, but damn, yo.

I'm thinking now of plying the whole length with some soft, tweedy brown wool top I have - that might be kind of sophisticated and lovely. Or maybe I will just go ahead and ply it with itself, and see if it tones down any - or see if I love it the way it is, in all its who-needs-heliotropism-when-you're-brighter-than-the-freaking-sun-anyway glory. We'll see.

Laceweight

Thanks, everyone, for the nice comments on the Ocean Mist. I have an idea for a sinuous kind of lace rattling around in my brain - something fairly simple that uses half-dropped symmetry and some judiciously placed decreases to create flowing, undulating clustered fingers. I'm thinking a simple rectangular stole right now, clean and spare - seagrass stirred by a current, like. Unfussy.

Charting and swatching tonight, if I get a spare moment. Hopefully, I'll have something to show tomorrow, if only to prove that I don't just spin nowadays - I still do knit, really!

Posted by Eunny at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (42)

And I was worried about the colors.

Closer...

Closest

I couldn't be more thrilled. It's exactly what I wanted - quiet, subtle marls that shift from color to color, with vivid spots here and there where the singles happen to match. The eye perceives a gentle neutral from a distance, but intimacy reveals a discreetly complex kind of energy, a whole secret life of hue and tone and shade. I love it.

Thank you to all those who provided suggestions on how to ply it in the last couple posts. I think I didn't quite express what I wanted - what I didn't want was long, unbroken sections of color that would stripe or pool when knitted. The sections of disparate colors in the singles were rather lengthy, and Navajo plying would certainly have produced a yarn composed mostly of solid sections. Instead, I just went for broke with a simple two-ply (crossing fingers and toes), and lucked out, I suppose. With the color, anyway - the spinning itself is terribly flawed, obviously an inconsistent novice's painful effort to make a first project work. The weight moves from cobweb to lace to fingering and back, there are slubs and bumps and odd tangly spots, some bits are weak and others are wiry and hard while overall both singles and finished yarn don't have as much twist as they should.

In spite of all those things, because of all those things, this hank feels very precious and dear. I can hardly wait for it to dry to knit with it - I'm planning lace, of course (I like two-plys for lace, imagining that their flatness and lack of density allow for more thorough dressing and consequently lovelier drape and cling on the body). Something special before the summer dies: self-indulgent me feels tides and sails and lazy, lingering sun in these colors, and a reminder of those things, a whiff of salt and sunburn, will be welcome when winter seems endless.

Fiber: Handpainted Merino Top from Mama-E's C*eye*ber Fiber Shop, in color "Ocean Mist"
Weight: 80 grams
Yardage: 930 yards/850 meters (~laceweight)
Other specs: Two-ply, singles spun from randomly selected sections.

Posted by Eunny at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (56)

I think I have mentioned before that I don't stash yarn. Circumstances don't allow - I don't really have the room for unassigned yarn in my cramped office, much less spare cash for picking it up in the first place. Then, too, it's very often a yarn itself that suggests a project to me - the idea behind a new sweater grows out of some little nuance of color, of feel, of luster, some specific characteristic of a specific boughten yarn. Traffic doesn't seem to flow the other way in my brain, so it's not worth it to buy anything I don't have plans for right that minute.

So why am I binging on fiber? And I mean binging. More stuff than I can possibly spin in the near future, more stuff than I can possibly dream up ideas for.

There are also, I think, six or seven other things winging their way to my house as we speak from Amy Boogie's Almost Solid Series, Hello Yarn, and Handpainted Yarn. This is a somewhat troubling trend. It feels a little...decadent, you know?

The pictured tops are more things from Erin, purchased at last night's spinning group. The bottom picture is the Flame colorway (superwash Merino), and the upper is Merino in Blood Orange. It actually reminds me more of peaches - not real live eating peaches, precisely, but the vivid, heavenly boksung-ah of Korean folktales. You know, the kind of mysteriously medicinal peach that's always being presented by some beautiful immortal broad on a cloud to a poor-but-noble peasant boy full of filial devotion to his ailing father. Something like that.

Most of my recent purchases (excepting yesterday's stuff, obviously) have been the same sort of thing, melting tones within one color, or within one closely-related color family - I think between all my purchases, I've hit most of the color wheel. Right now, I am most interested in producing the kind of yarn shown here, by the wondrously talented Cara - randomly shifting barberpoles of almost-solid color. I love the way it looks in the hank and knitted up, love the interactivity it forces: it requires a sort of active engagement from the viewer, just to see and process the way the colors move and match and mismatch. Lovely, really beautiful stuff. I could see, for example, spinning two highly contrasting yarns in this way, and then using them in a simple two-color stranded pattern - the finished work would have the same kind of energy to it, would be complex and interesting and wonderful to look at and think about. In, say, browns and greys for knee socks with a simple Faroese-style geometric pattern...or rusty reds and golds in a modern lusekoft for October bike rides?

Erm...maybe I can justify it after all. I probably shouldn't have worried.

Posted by Eunny at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

Remember that I, uh, bought a spinning wheel? Yeah, I'd forgotten too.

Almost, that is.

Last night, I sat down and spun for the first time in a couple weeks, thinking - Oh, I'll just spin for a minute or two. I've been busy with other things, I've been stressed-out and crazy, it'll be nice just to sit and go blank and make a little yarn.

Of course, I ended up staying rooted to the stool until the wee hours. I'm using this lovely stuff:

It's handpainted Merino top from Mama-E's c*eye*ber fiber warehouse, by way of Cloverhill Yarn (full disclosure: Erin is also a friend of mine), in the Ocean Mist colorway. I bought a braid at the last convening of our spinning group, back in July - the colors were so arresting, so exactly my speed. The first go-round, I spun straight from the only-slightly-attenuated wad, and ended up with a somewhat muddy, sort of disappointing heather, when I'd been looking for subdued-but-distinctly-colored singles to make a plied yarn with shifting marled colors. Depressing.

Last night, I did it the right way - split the top lengthwise into skinny sections, pre-drafted each section carefully, took my time with the spinning - and was rendered breathless by the resulting yarn.

Here's the stuff I'd imagined, only better. The tawny sections have run into copper and fawn and even a little bit of sagey green, punctuated here and there by sections of brilliantly deep, deeply brilliant blue. It reminds me of ponds and river mouths along the Bay, of that peculiar kind of deceptively flat water that changes hugely in character with every tide, that never quite decides on freshwater or salt. Endlessly interesting, to me at least.

It's thin, too (not precisely by design), oh my good gracious it's thin: I think might make something just a little thicker than Merino Oro or Skacel Lace at a 2-ply (those yarns are about 1350 meters to 100 grams). My question is, at that grist, will I lose those lovely colors with plying? I'm not talking about a stripey finished yarn that more or less matches up color changes between singles - I want a randomly shifting barberpole, where colors between plies will occasionally match to create short runs of vivid color in a mostly heathery background. I'm planning on lace, obviously, an oceany stole, and I'm comfortable with the eye assuming a solid color from a distance. I kind of like the idea, though, that the yarn will reveal secrets of color and hue at intimate removes - the Chuck Close of yarn, if you will, which you might not, but hopefully you'll indulge me - but everything's more or less the same in value, and I'm worried that these lovely colors won't do that at all, that they'll in fact be wasted in a poorly-designed yarn that doesn't suit them at all. (I'm also worried that I'm becoming the queen of run-on sentences. But that's for a different day).

Thoughts? Experiences?

Arrowhead Pullover

I'm completely bowled over by the wonderful response to such an unassuming little sweater. I think it'll get a lot of wear this fall - clean, simple and sweet. Lace without fussiness - just my style.

Some questions:

Evelyn asked: Do you have any advice on seaming lacy items? Do you plan out a few extra selvedge stitches?

I did use one plain stitch at the edge, but could have used two - one for the selvedge, and one to create a neat straight edge along the seam. A second stitch would have given some support to the edge during seaming - lace fabric is, of course, open and floppy, and it's a nightmare to sew alongside YOs and decreases and keep the seam puckerless and yet without gaps.

Then again, that plain stitch on the right side might have created an ugly inturruption to the lace pattern, and to the new patterns created wherever partial repeats meet at the seams. Food for thought.

Maureen asked: Did you block it?

I did indeed, in pieces. The lace was ugly, of course, before a thorough soaking and pinning (crumply and bubbly and nipply, as unblocked lace usually is), and it would have been awful to sew in that state, anyway. After assembly, I pressed the seams flat as well - and steamed the collar to encourage the ribbing to open up a little.

Knitting, Speed of and Hours for

There seems to be a persistent belief that I have hours upon hours to do nothing but knit :) It always cracks me up a little when people say that - I work full-time on non-knitting stuff, I go to class, I cook, I clean, I work out, I hang out, I go to ballgames, I kill kegs. In other words, like every knitblogger, I wish I had uninterrupted hours to knit.

Although I do suppose I knit all day long in a way - I always have whatever I'm working on with me, in my purse or on my desk or in my laptop bag. I'm not one of those people you see knitting during lectures or in nice restaurants or at parties (I've never understood feeling like you MUST KNIT EVERY! POSSIBLE! SECOND!), but I am that girl knitting a row waiting at the crosswalk, doing research, waiting for coals to ash over. I hardly ever "just knit" - the only times I do, really, are at knit night twice a month - but I do like to snatch appropriate moments, and multi-task whenever I can. Reading? I'm knitting, for sure. Watching TV? I'm knitting. And so on. I guess the thing is that I don't relegate only totable things for those moments: I work on everything, any chance I get, so a lot of progress is made in not a lot of time. I suppose I do knit at a pretty good pace (about 75-80 stitches a minute in plain stockinette - knock a little off for stranded colorwork, knock a lot off for cables or lace or intarsia), but I really think the secret is in being able to pick up your knitting and work a row, a few stitches, without spending precious minutes finding your place. I talked a little bit about this a few months ago: check it out.

All this is not to say, of course, that I don't spend hours upon hours thinking about knitting. If only!

Posted by Eunny at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (46)

Things I have learned in the very recent past:

1) It is possible to plan and knit a Fair Isle sweater on in five days when up against a deadline. It isn't much fun (in fact, it bears a marked resemblance to Sisyphean torture), but it is possible.

2) Life goes on in those five days - after all, there's the office to go to, dinner to be cooked, laundry to be done. Necessities of money and food and habiliment can be managed, somehow, but all the rest falls away. Thoughts, worries, itchy niggling descisions about the sweater - not the sweater, The Sweater - loom ever-present during all daily activities. As a result, those five days are only remembered as a blur, a sort of black hole of knitting, forever collapsing inwards. No real recollection survives.

3) Because The Sweater takes on such disproportionate importance, little things are magnified and distorted, as though reflected in a spoon or viewed through a fish-eye lens. Steeks become a thing of monstrous prettiness, too lovely to cut:

And successful wrangling with the problems of bulkless, hemmed slit cuffs and passably matched sleeve cap stripes cause tears of relief.

No, I haven't gone off the deep end - but it's definitely a strange thing for a piece of knitting to become so...well...consuming. It's a sweet, modern Fair Isle in an allover brocade pattern for the winter Interweave - the antithesis of bulky, droopy, baggy Fair Isles (wondrously beautiful though they may be). It would look great with a trumpet skirt and riding boots, tweedy trousers and loafers, a denim skirt and ballet flats. I can't wait for it to come out and for you to see the whole thing - I'm really proud of it.

Back to real life now - back to a mountain of email and backed-up projects and patterns. Sisyphean, too, in its own way, but at least it's familiar.

Spinning

I've been spinning a little, here and there - I tried out Jacquard dyes on some glorious Bombyx top:

I was going for a sort of subtly tonal effect, but I think my dyebath was way too acidic - I poured the dye on, and the silk drank it up right away where it struck, leaving none to disperse through the water. It's spinning up prettily, though:

So far, I'm just trying to get a feel for it - I bought it for an absolutely phenomenal price, and don't feel bad about waste. Silk is hard to spin - the pre-drafted top is so fluffy it catches on wrinkles and callouses I didn't know I had, no matter how much talcum powder I rub my hands with, but leaving it in its compact state makes it impossible to spin. Then, too, it takes a lot more twist than I expected it to - the high-speed whorls and bobbins I ordered haven't come in yet, so I've got the braking on the bobbin so light it barely turns, and I'm treadling so fast I feel like I'll take off. And it still feels undertwisted. It's such a pleasure to handle and admire, though - the luster of the silk shows beautifully in the places that did get enough twist - it's a soothing sort of challenge.

I've been working slowly on some Merino/Tussah top I bought at Sheep and Wool, too:

It was originally a shockingly pink color, streaked with the white of the bleached silk - I overdyed it with blue, which left it a more muted blend of purples running to deep raspberries. Nice for lace, maybe, someday.

And then, the wonderful Amie gave me the most wonderful present a beginning spinner could hope for - samples of all kinds of delicious things.

There's Ashland Bay and Polworth wools, linen and cotton, Suri Alpaca, Quiviut, and a fluffy ball of wispy angora. Thank you!

Posted by Eunny at 04:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (145)

The weekend's project: 500 yards of Shetland laceweight-ish 2-ply. My first "big" spinning project - the last of the Shaela grey Shetland top from Sheep & Wool, dyed in diffuse emeralds and violets and spun quickly, hungrily. The colors in the plied yarn are deep and cool, overwhelmingly green at first glance but slipping here and there into the gloomy purple shade seen in an old-growth forest. It makes me think of kelp forests stretching towards the far-away sun, floating nori nets, dulse and wrack clinging to wet rocks - in honor of the last, I think this will become large-gauge lace in a very open, geometric pattern loosely evoking seaweed and waves, maybe with some more yarn spun for a deep, luxurious fringe. You know, the sort of thing a wistful selkie might wrap herself in to walk along the water, dreaming of going home.

As top:

And as singles:

I love the way the singles look, though I felt they were a little bright for use on their own.

Knitting

Don't worry - I still knit, really.

I adore this little swatch with my whole heart - I love heavy texture and fine detail. I was fooling around with linen stitch (with linen yarn, of course, yuk yuk), and came up with this faux-herringbone variation. It creates a slightly stiff fabric with a wonderfully crisp hand, that still manages to be quite light and airy on the right size needles - perfect for a seriously tailored, seriously flirty summer jacket.

I've been a little obsessed with stand-up collars lately, particularly those that aren't an applied neckband but rather are extensions of the front pieces. They flare gently away from a low closure - somewhere just above the bust - and stand a little away from the skin to frame the throat in the prettiest way. This fabric, finished with a wide rolled hem, will be absolutely perfect in a sunny, wear-me-with-shorts sort of way. I have needles, I have hanks of Euroflax pre-washed and dried, I have these wonderful antique leather-covered buttons - ready, set, go!

Almost Argyles

I'm proofing the pattern tonight - glad there's been such an interest!

Posted by Eunny at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (57)

I feel a little intoxicated. I am making yarn.

Adventures in 2-ply:

and 3:

I have absolutely no use, of course, for hideous red-and-grey or brown-and-pink jumperweight, but it was helpful in seeing just how this whole twist-untwist thing happens to the single as plying happens. The 2-ply was plied with no tenstion on the singles at all, and no adjustments to the wheel - I used my fingers to spread the threads, and they just ran through freely as the wheel did all the work. The result is soft and squishy, and very well balanced - of course, it's also very uneven because of the imperfect singles.

I don't stash yarn, ever, but I see, all too clearly, how fiber stashing could happen very, very quickly. I'm living in this sweet delirium of roving and top, drunk on possibilities of blending and mixing, wanting a boxful - a roomful - a houseful - to pick and choose from and play with. I want to pull brightly contrasting colors together off a comb for a chunky striped top; to ply three very subtly different shades of the same color together; to make tweedy yarn (how do you do that? Quick, someone tell me!); to try wool from every breed of sheep under the big blessed sun. And then there's dyeing - I want to try making roving with subtle color progressions and see what happens when you ply several singles of it together, I want to hot-pour for deep, diffuse highs and lows of color in lustrous silk, I want to dye almost-solid rovings and bright rainbow ones. I want to do all these things, and a million more, right this second.

Maybe feverish is the right word.

Two (almost) argyle socks:

If you're into subtlety and tiny little details, you'll appreciate these - the way the lines outlining diamonds and lines within diamonds never cross except in a very specific pattern, the way the moss stitch is worked out to lie centered inside even-numbered areas, the careful plotting to make the lines flow organically out of ribbing and into the heel:

After all, neatness counts.

Pattern closeups

Moss stitch diamonds, unstretched and on the foot:

Twisted rib diamonds, unstretched and on the foot:

Patterns: My own (coming this week!)
Yarn: Koigu Premium Merino, in colors1500 (teal) and 2343 (avocado)
Yardage: less than one 50 gram ball for each (about 150 yards per)
Yarn Source: Woolwinders
Needles: 2.75mm (US 2) Brittany birch DPNs
Gauge: 8 st/inch over stockinette stitch
Modifications: --

Posted by Eunny at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (111)

Through the stunned afternoon, when it's too hot to think
and the muse of this inland ocean still waits for a name,
and from the salt, dark room, the tight horizon line
catches nothing, I wait. Chairs sweat. paper crumples the floor.
A lizard gasps on the wall. The sea glares like zinc.
Then, in the door light: not Nike loosening her sandal,
but a girl slapping sand from her foot, one hand on the frame.

Walcott, Midsummer XXV

In the right mood, the prosaic looms mythic and immense.

Spinning is good for me, I think. The breathing, the rhythm, the tiny adjustments of hands or feet to maintain consistency, the ability to see with the fingers - improvement at these things seems to me to come from deep intimacy between producer and process and product, from long experience, from plain old practice. Less room for scholarship and pedantry; more for doing. I'm absolutely forbidding myself to go about this in the way I do everything else - no excessive treadle-counting or twist angle-checking for me - and instead, to try any and everything I can, avoiding freaking out about waste or imperfections and learning from the mistakes. Monumental, in its way.

When I first started thinking about buying a wheel (which happened with rather alarming speed after my very first encounter with a spindle), I decided that portability and versatility were my biggest priorities. As I did some research, though, it became clear that true portability necessarily comes at the expense of drive wheel size and, hence, versatility. At Maryland Sheep and Wool, at Spinning Day at The Mannings, I tried all kinds of wheels - nearly all the Ashfords, the adorable Merlin Hitchhiker, Louets, and lots of others. The Lendrum was high on my list for a long time - pretty portable, lots of ratios - but then I sat down at the Schacht.

I'm happy that it'll do everything I'll ever want to do, of course, but my reaction to it was a lot more visceral, more intuitive, than I expected. Everything about it is immensely appealing to me, on a level I can't quite explain - the sturdiness of the build, the heft of the wood, the way the flyer assembles, the responsiveness to the smallest adjustments. It feels precise, know what I mean? There's nothing crude about it - and on top of everything else, I think it's a great-looking piece of furniture.

So now, it's here, and I couldn't be more pleased (June, Amie, and Chris at Clover Hill all gave hugely valuable advice in this - thank you so much!).

I guess I'm not much used to extravagance - it must have gone to my head, since I went kind of crazy at the store today. I've got:

More bedtime reading than you can shake a stick at;

Luscious alpaca in a warm, naturally tweedy brown;

The most lustruous, softest, daintiest silk top you ever saw - I'm thinking of dyeing this in deep, tonal shades of blue and green for a shawl pattern I've been dreaming about;

And some Euroflax in this delicious melony color (curiously named terra cotta - not in my world, it isn't) for a pattern I'm anxious to start working out. Sketching and swatching tonight...that is, if I can tear myself away from the wheel for two or three minutes altogether.

Knitting

There has been a little knitting around here - just a very little though, in the form of (gasp!) socks. Test-knitting, in fact, for a charming little set of patterns coming this week.

Administrivia

For the third time in as many weeks, some enterprising spammer has cleverly put my email into the "reply to" field of his messages. This spells annoyance for lots of people, I'm sure - not least for me, having gotten thousands of returned emails from bad addresses in the space of a few hours each time. If you've sent me an actual email in the past few days, it may very well have been thrown out with the mass junk deletions I've had to do - please do try again!

Posted by Eunny at 05:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (47)

My very first substantial length of finished handspun yarn, a little less than half an ounce that measures at 43 yards. More or less right for a light fingering weight of ~190 yards/50 grams, right?

The spun color is quite different from the deep clear garnet of the top - the yarn is almost rusty, a lot warmer than the cool unspun tone. The recipe? 2 envelopes of Tropical Punch Kool-Aid, plus a little more, for about 2 ounces of shaela (silvery grey) Shetland top.

Posted by Eunny at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

It's sort of amazing - we had a gloomy forecast for the whole of the weekend, but the weather was absolutely glorious for both days of Sheep & Wool. At 6pm on Sunday, just as the doors closed on the festival, the sky promptly started spitting cold drizzle. I'm taking this as a sign that the yarn gods were well pleased.

The weekend was wonderfully educational, as out-of-the-ordinary exciting as a field trip and as pleasantly overwhelming. There's so much to learn, know, watch, wonder about sheep and sheepbreeding and fiber and spinning and weaving and dyeing! I really think my chiefest pleasure in the weekend was catching snippets of conversation between vendors - knowledgeable people talking, debating, confiding about what they love to do.

We saw all kinds of great-looking animals -

For someone who comes purely from a knitting background, a consumer background, it's immensely exciting to see the animals themselves. I loved seeing the bulky Bluefaced Leicesters, the hairy-faced, wrinkly Merinos, the dreadlocked Cotswolds, the short, stubby Shetlands with their ruff of silky neck wool. And like true city girls, we stood stock-still, fascinated, and watched the sheep being given a final brushing and clipping before show - baaaing at the indignity of it all - and the tiny lambs stumbling about their shaded pens (though, now, it's kind of troubling me that I apparantly don't have any sort of mental conflict between "What beautiful, perfect examples of Nature's deft hand!" and "Mmmm, delicious.")

I picked up Stephanie on Friday night, and the rest of the weekend went by in kind of a blur. I didn't take nearly as many pictures as I should have, but we tried wheels with Amie, stopped by Cara's sprawling, enormous meetup, drank beers and ate burgers and shouted over the music at Clyde's with Erin and Coleen and Eileen, and ogled and fondled miles and miles of yarn betweentimes. Brooks Farm was the most wonderful new-to-me discovery of the weekend:

I somehow managed to restrain myself here, but Stephanie walked away with a hank of Merino/Mohair in some really extraordinary shades of lavender and sage and old gold. I made only a couple purchases all weekend - a couple hanks of sock yarn from Spirit Trail, and some spinning supplies.

My interest in spinning is end-use based - wheel or no wheel, I'd like to eventually be able to spin a good, strong 2-ply cobweb weight, and 2-ply jumperweight Shetland. How wonderful would it be to be able to spin my own Fair Isle wools, maybe even learn to dye? For experimenting with motifs and coming up with new garment patterns, it'd be invaluable to be able to make just a few grams of yarn in perfectly realized color schemes. And, of course, I'd love to make my own cozy, bloomy yarns for shawls and stoles - threadlike-singles to ply together for Shetland lace, and to ply with mill-spun silk for Orenburg shawls. Intoxicating possibilities! To that end, I bought some beautifully prepared Shetland top, and a very wee, very lovely Golding spindle, on which I've been spinning up a storm of damn consistent and tolerably skinny laceweight.

Though I was worried the light weight of the spindle (scarcely three-quarters of an ounce) would mean a very short spin, it's a wonderfully balanced, suprisingly fast-spinning little thing. I tend to roll the shaft off my thigh, which gets it turning quickly enough - and for long enough - that I can do something approximating a long-draw. While spinning very thin singles, the spindle will spin, without losing speed and without a wobble, for a couple minutes straight. We are very pleased.

I also bought some Merino/Tussah silk top in a bright pink shot through with white, peppermint-like:

along with some pink no-name roving, in almost the same color, for practicing with when The Theoretical Wheel becomes The Actual Wheel. All in all, almost a pound and a half of delicious wooly goodness.

The one great tragedy of the weekend is that I ate very little at the actual festival. I am a connoisseur of fair food - the worst kind of fair food, the deep-fried, the cheese-slathered, the pit-roasted, the sugar-frosted, the oil-drenched. There were ribbon chips with sour cream and chives and cheese calling my name; funnel cakes and fried Twinkies begging me to eat them; lonely kernels of kettle corn beseeching me as I walked past, but I ate only one lamb gyro. What a gyro it was, though - properly horrible and delicious, a good tablespoon of orange grease showing in the empty cone of tinfoil after wolfing the sandwich down. I got to live vicariously through Stephanie, though:

The picture is horribly back-lit (proof of the good weather!), but you may be able to see her grinning and holding up the world's quickest-melting peanut-butter-dipped chocolate soft-serve.

Good times, good times.

Columbia Knit-Night

We're holding an impromptu knit-night tonight, at the Panera on Dobbin! If you can make it, we'll be there starting from 6:30. Hope to see you there!

Advice Column

Thanks for all the great suggestions- really clever, one and all. I really like "Unraveling" - I think Sumitra was the first person to suggest it (email me, and let me know the colorway of the Koigu PPPM you'd like). I have a really good, meaty question already for tomorrow - keep 'em coming, to unraveling@eunnyjang.com. I'll use your name and link to you when I quote the question - if you'd like me to do otherwise, just sign an advice column-style psuedonym, and I'll take it as a sign to leave you totally anonymous.

Posted by Eunny at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

I do believe it could be called real yarn.

It's curious - I like to measure progress in things like narrowing a range of movement; shaving unnecessary seconds off the execution of a technique; understanding why each thing happens and how improving one will improve the other. . . but spinning defies those standards. I'm starting to think that improvement in spinning just sort of . . . happens. I can see, yes, that I'm starting to learn the approximate amount of overtwist I want in a single, but I'll be damned if I can explain how I think I know when it's just right. Likewise with pulling out the same amount of yarn with every drafting motion, with knowing just how much to twist during plying . . . the things that feel right often are. Some shadowy, cobwebbed corner of my brain is immensely satisfied by this.

Too bad knitting isn't the same. The neckline hem is almost done on my basketweave shell:

Which is all well and good, except, um:

I somehow completely forgot to drop one of the cable-flanking stitches. 10 nearly 300-stitch rows of hem will need to be pulled out, the shoulder picked open, and the neck shaping ripped to free it. Gah!

Posted by Eunny at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (34)

Can you guess what this is made of? It's slubby and bumpy and generally ugly, but I am unabashedly proud of it - sort of like admiring your baby's spit-up, I'd imagine.

The lovely Amie (check out her article for Knitter's Review - wonderfully written and a must-read for anyone traveling to Sheep & Wool this weekend) came armed with tasty things last night: a drop spindle, her own excellent instruction, and more than enough fiber for me to spin happily, clumsily, obliviously, until it was suddenly much later at night than anyone had planned on.

From left to right: a little Dorset roving, a little Merino top, and an attempt at some mohair. Not pictured: the snarled, slubbly, broken, knotted, and tangled bits and gibbles my office is littered with.

What a wonderfully thoughtful gift (I've been meaning to learn to spin for months) - what a frighteningly effective way to lose hours! It's gratifying to know that you're making progress, of course, but to actually see that each attempt is a little better, drafting a little easier, thickness a little more even, plied yarn balanced a bit better? Completely addicting. The possibility of a wheel, of laceweight, of shawls knit in my own cobwebby yarn? Intoxicating. Thank you, Amie!

Summer sweater

The breather from last week is...still breathing. I knit hardly at all over the weekend, but I'm getting back to it - a light summer shell in Hempathy. The hand is quite soft, but the patterning is nice and crisp.

It'll have a high, very wide boatneck - demure and sweet over a camisole, except -

The back is cut to the curve of the spine. Worn the right way - over a backless, nude-colored bustier, with a businesslike pencil skirt and Serious Slingbacks - it will be incendiary.

Posted by Eunny at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (50)