Come with me, my love, to the sea, the sea of love.

Most of my knitting attention over the last month and a half has been devoted to one project, the honeybee stole by Anne Hanson. I've had my traveling socks of course and I do have another pair cast on and I also have a complicated sock barely started but mostly, it's been this.

I had several false starts. The needle size was all wrong.

Because the pattern was written for laceweight yarn and I was knitting with a somewhat variable fingering weight, I needed to upsize obviously but it took me a few tries because of my inexperience with lace to determine where exactly I should be in terms of gauge etc. So three different starts until I settled on size 8 needles.

Then there were the mistakes. Thankfully I did not have to rip back to ground zero with any of them but I did have to tink back almost 20 rows once, in the car, while we were on vacation. (the vacation itself may be another post but basically we went to Pigeon Forge TN to see my younger daughter. It was an adventure.)



So things were going well. I had a few scares when I picked up the center stitches to continue from the middle to the other side but after agonizing over it for a few days and much careful laying out and aligning and looking I determined it'd be ok after blocking. Not in a delusional "oh, that giant glaring mistake will block out" way but in a realistic way.

This shawl has three sections. You knit all three sections twice. You start in the middle, do the honeycomb bit, do the swarm bit, do the hive bit, do the edging and cast off, then pick up the middle from your provisional cast-on and repeat.





I was on the last 2 (out of 10) repeats on the last section on the second side when I decided to take the stole to a spin night at a local yarn store for show and tell.

I guess there's really something wrong with my eyes, or the light in my living room, because I had several opportunities to see where the problem was, and I did not see it. Can you see it?



No? How about now?


Now?






That really needs a dramatic "DUN DUN DUN" sound effect.



All I can figure is I did a lot of this knitting during hockey games and I simply did not see it at the time. Plus, we use CFL bulbs and maybe I didn't have quite enough light when I was knitting.



How did it get into the yarn? Well, one of my bobbins had one ply of the pink and orange sock yarn I spun not long ago and I guess I just went ahead and plied that off with the new yarn without noticing at the time. You think I'd at least notice the texture of merino vs border leicester, but no.



So I considered my options, but I knew what was going to happen. Dyeing it might work but I would always know. Ignoring it was not a good idea because, seriously? A big pink stripe? No. I came home from work last night, stuck a long circular needle into the section just below the second swarm section, and frogged it. (there were some knitting errors in the first repeat of the second swarm section that I could have ignored, but I figured in for a penny, in for a pound etc.) I picked up the stitches without further drama and got the offending pink yarn out and got moving on it. I got a repeat done last night while listening to "My Dinner with Andre" which was a movie for which I was definitely not in the mood.

I just didn't want it to suck. And hopefully, now it won't.

It was really embarrasing, though, to pull that out of my knitting bag at the LYS and have everyone going OOH and AAH and then seeing that stripe and the EWW and the UGH (not from them, from me) and the feeling of utter FAIL that happened at that moment.

I hope to start blogging again more but who knows. I'm chairing the Mensa gathering here again and I think I'm going to be pretty busy with that as well as work wearing me out what with this new project I'm on etc. So I can't make any promises.

In the meantime, here's some flowers.

Straw into gold

I belong to a casual online spinning guild via yahoo groups. The current project is spinning flax, and the process plus my personal wonderment at the historical development of the whole idea of getting fiber then yarn then clothing from this very unlikely looking plant is something I find fascinating, so I went for it.



So I got some of both kinds of flax, because I wanted to try both.

Flax comes in, basically, two preparations. Tow flax or roving, which is the shorter fibers of flax that have been combed away from the long fibers, and the long fibers, line flax or strick. The long fibers are very long indeed. I'm not ready to try that kind yet. I spun up about five and a half ounces of the flax roving last week, though, and was pleased with the results.



That's the roving, and you can see why blonde children are called "towheads". It looks like a child's blonde hair. The strick looks like a long, stick-straight blonde ponytail.

There's a step in the processing that causes the color to be either silver-grey or blonde, so depending on what color your flax fiber is, you can tell something about how it's been processed. One of the steps in flax processing is "retting" or rotting, letting the woody stems rot away from the long fibers inside. If the flax plants are simply laid in the dewy grass for a week or two to ret them, the fiber comes up silver-grey. If they're laid in a stream or pond (or child's swimming pool as is common in backyard flax processing) then they come out blonde. The blonde is more common these days.

At any rate, flax must be spun wet and it takes a bit of a different technique than spinning a protein based fiber or cotton. I liked it much better than cotton.



The fibers are longer than cotton, and you wet the fingers of the hand controlling the twist as you spin. In the olden days, they often did this by wetting a thumb with saliva, but I used a shot glass with water in it. I didn't want to get the fibers in my mouth, and frankly the thought of spitting all over my yarn kinda grossed me out a little.



My Mazurka handled it nicely. I used the larger setting on the smaller whorl, spun it double drive but slowly with a lot of control and not a lot of pull-in. You have to go slowly, as it's a lot harder to go back and even it out with the flax. Much easier with wool or alpaca or even cotton. Once that fiber sticks together, it's stuck. I did spin it with z twist in the singles.



It looks twiny as you spin it, and it's very hard to the touch because the water activates a coating on the fibers that causes it to bond together and be nice and smooth. It doesn't have to be plied, but it can be. I didn't trust my spinning technique enough to leave it unplied so I made a two-ply yarn from it. I switched over to the larger whorl but left it on double drive since my single drive band is broken and I was feeling too lazy to try to recreate it, plus I wanted to see if it was even possible to get the double band on the larger whorl. It was, but barely, and I don't think I want to do that very much as I'll end up either losing the band or breaking something on the wheel.

I ended up with almost 320 yards. It's hard to tell what weight the yarn is, I think it's between a DK and a sportweight.



There's my trusty shot glass of water.



It's very shiny and pretty. It's a bit hard, but is supposed to soften after being washed a time or two. I will probably use it to make washcloths for holiday gifts or face scrubbers or something along those lines.



There isn't any kind of rush though.

I'm anxious to try the strick soon, but need to do more research on preparing it for spinning. Apparently, if you do it wrong, you end up with a snarly mess and I don't want to waste such beautiful fiber.

I also finally, after a year and a half of having this camera, started to read the owner's manual. So with any luck the quality of my photographs will finally start to come up. Here's some more of the flax, which made an excellent "what's THIS button do?" model and which may now properly be called "Linen".








Until next time...

But I don't listen to her 'cause my head is like a sieve.

This week has been a tremendous week of FAIL.



I managed to go to work on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, then the earache became too much. I could not get an appointment with my regular doctor until Friday, so I stayed home Thursday and Friday because it just hurt too much and I was right on the edge of being dizzy the whole time. (I say WAS but I actually still AM.) The prognosis was ear infection, and I left with many prescriptions. Antibiotics, vicodin, and nasonex. And a refill on my giant ibuprofen, which I can take along with the vicodin. The pain is really extreme. Dr. F explained that-apparently the nerve that controls the whole side of the face and head and into the neck goes right through the ear canal, and my ear canal is very inflamed so it feels like my teeth are falling out, my cheekbone is bulging, my neck is about to implode, and my ear itself about to ex-plode in a gory gush of goo. It's good to know it only feels that way, and there's actually nothing going on beyond an ear infection. Except being unable to sleep because the FIERY SPIKES IN MY HEAD start up again about every four hours.
It's better today, but not gone by any means.

So I've been spinning a lot while I've been off. I am not motivated to knit at all. Poor Bob. His sweater languishes in a project bag while I merrily dance about in heaps of yummy blue-faced leicester and falkland. I spun up Cosy's falkland fiber that I got a couple of weeks ago.



It did not feel that soft while I was spinning it, but holy cats, it is as soft as could be. A smooshy, squishy kind of soft, not a silky kind. Hard to explain, but amazing.



133 yards of a 3 ply aran weight. Will make a nice hat for someone. Maybe one of my kids. I don't know. I can't think beyond the wool right now, and that is different for me.

In an effort to spin a MEGASKEIN of sock yarn, I started with almost six ounces of fiber. The Fire Lizard fiber I got at the knit expo.



Here are two of the three plies-the top bobbin is the merino/tencel blend and the bottom one is the BFL. Nice full bobbins. I expected a nice yardage of yarn.



Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans. I ended up with about 340 yards of three ply sportweight. I don't get it. But it's some dense, compact yarn with amazing sheen. I think the BFL is a more "compact" fiber than other kinds, at least that's what I read on a ravelry forum.





Pretty, isn't it?

I'm currently spinning the six ounces of multicolored BFL that I got at the same place. I'm going for thin, and I did some experimenting with the way I'm splitting up the colors so we'll see how that turns out. I think it's probably a good thing that I'm a process spinner. I enjoy the act of spinning more than the finished yarn most of the time. Anyway, hopefully there will be photos of that soon.

Got a new phone today-it is very confusing and makes me feel impossibly old and unable to handle technology. I might actually take it back to the sprint store. It's over my head. But I'll wait a couple days and see if I can get the hang of it.

Other than that, I'm just trying to heal up and rest as much as possible. The house is a mess and needs to be vacuumed. The laundry isn't done. I've been doing a good deal of interesting cooking and I think Bob appreciates that. Hopefully I'll make it to work at some point this week. Fortunately, my caseload is pretty well under control, except for the filing and that's just a matter of finding time to do it.

Well, off to get that laundry finished, and hopefully get a good night's sleep tonight. That's half the trouble, I think, is that I'm just not sleeping well.

I like to sing-a, about the moon-a and the June-a

So, we're at Karaoke on Saturday night, which we do on a semi-regular basis. We'd each done two songs, had a third in, it was about 1130. A guy gets up to do a song and before he starts, the KJ, Joanie, (who is usually very awesome) starts talking about how if you're on south beach or atkins or weight watchers if you eat nothing but green beans you can have extra beer. Most of my readers understand my stance on dieting, but I was ok with this much, yeah, funny, whatever, moving on. She continued, however, with how she wanted to look good in a bathing suit and how she didn't want to gross anyone out, and how she'd surely gross people out if she went out in a bathing suit now. This woman is about five ten, probably wears a US 12. Not gross, and even if so, so what? So that started bothering me. Then the guy who was about to do his song piped up about how he and his wife went to Punta Cana where there are nude beaches and Europeans go around in bathing suits with all their fat hanging out and ew. I started steaming. Then he started in on this one guy "who must have been about 280 pounds! he was about six feet tall! ew! he was wearing a speedo! ew!" and how his stomach was hanging over the front of his bathing suit and how gross it was etc etc etc. He must have said "280!!!!!" about six times.

Bear in mind this was karaoke night. All this was taking place on microphones.

Bob was a little worried about me because of the steam coming out of my ears, so when I said "can we please leave" he did not argue. I was very sorry to disappoint him but I was furious. And sad.

Why sad? Because Karaoke Night was one thing I really enjoyed. I felt like the crowd of mostly regulars were okay with me, that I was appreciated as a singer, and that I wasn't grossing anyone out with my horrible fat fattiness. I wonder what arbitrary number they associate with me? I now no longer feel safe, accepted, or welcome at Karaoke Night. I feel judged. And that pisses me off, and makes me sad. I don't know how I'm going to feel next time we go back, if we go back. I love to sing. I love having that outlet. But I fucking hate thinking that when I'm up there singing, people are guessing how much I weigh and thinking how gross I'd look in a bathing suit.

Also, news flash, people mostly put on bathing suits to go swimming, not to appeal to anyone's aesthetics, so fuck you, punta cana-going asshole.

Enough of that. Over the weekend, it wasn't all bad. I made bread.



Nummylicious homemade italian bread NOT done in the bread machine, all done by hand. It was GOOD. And PRETTY.



Here's Bob's sweater in progress. I promise it's a sweater. It will be, anyway.



The yarn is a cotton/wool blend that I got from a ravelry destash. Nice stuff.

Broke away from knitting for a couple of days to get some spinning in.



If this looks familiar, it should. It's the other half of the "london fog" roving for our matching socks. I did not get the same yardage, though, so it must be thicker than the other skein. It's 284 yards.

Finally got around to photographing this.


It was supposed to be sock yarn. It's more a sport/dk weight. It's going to be socks anyway. This was a weird spinning experience. I started with a batt, broke it up into thirds, and spun randomly into three plies. While I was doing the singles, I was not liking the yarn much. When plying it, I started liking it more. Then, I loved it when I wound it off the bobbin. Then, when I washed and hung it, I didn't like it again. Now that I've split it off into cakes, I like it a bit better. I was originally going to do something seasonal, socks or fingerless gloves with peppermint candy or candy cane cables or eyelets or something but I think it'll be too confused looking with the colors.



So I think I'll go with something textured and simple. This will be a sock for size 3 needles so it'll go fast, and yes, it'll be for me too.

The green socks are moving along, I didn't photograph them but I'm up to the ankle on the first one, and moving fast. I'm happy with them. Maybe I'll get some photos later but frankly, it's been a busy week and it's not going to slow down any time soon.

More later in the week probably. Any input into the karaoke situation will be appreciated!

another one rides the bus

I’m a transit knitter, always working on a sock. I carry my little sock bag (courtesy of Messie Craftie) inside my purse and pull it out once I get situated and knit until I’m almost downtown. The first thing I saw when I got on the bus today was another knitter, also working on a sock.
Instead of falling over in excitement, I smiled and tried not to geek out too much. I got out my sock and quipped that they’d have to rename this bus the knitting bus, haha, feeling like a total dork. I asked what she was working on and what the yarn was. She said it was a sock, and I was like, “I know, I have a sock too, hahahaha”. (it was “Online” self patterning in a plain stockinette pattern on DPNs, looked like size 1s.) She wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic as I was about seeing another sock knitter on the same bus, so I shut up and just knitted the rest of the way into town. It was pretty awkward.
Really, it’s very tough for me to talk to strangers especially since my appearance is so bizarre lately what with the crutch and the being a fat lady who dresses for comfort (not for speed, hahaha) and the comfy shoes with the bright hand-knitted socks. When I got off the bus, I said good bye and happy knitting, and tried not to be too embarrassed that I’d even said anything in the first place.
It’d be different if there were as many knitters on the bus as, say, MP3 listeners or phone-talkers or readers but this is literally the first time I’ve ever seen anyone knitting on a bus in Pittsburgh besides me and it was really, really cool. So, anonymous sock-knitting lady, I’m sorry if I alarmed you or made you uncomfortable, I was just happy to see someone else knitting a sock!

Here's some photos of my awesome sock bag-it's reversible, very simple, no fancy pockets or anything inside or outside but it was inexpensive, it's washable, and it won't break my heart six ways if something were to happen to it. It does the job.

Blue side...


And flowery side.


My current travel sock is “daughtersocks Mark II”, the red Beaded Rib. I’m using a suspected Trekking Handart (got in a destash very cheaply with no ballband). It was advertised as XXL but the colors match a Handart colorway called Feuerland. It feels a lot like the Handart I used to make my Hederas so I’m about 90% sure that’s what it is.

I don’t know why I can’t seem to make myself finish the damned Koi socks. I did get the heel done and worked a repeat down the foot when we went to the OTB for the Breeders Cup Races last week but I haven’t picked it up since. Got about another two repeats on the Woodland Shawl done too and nothing further. The wheel takes all my attention lately.

In other crafty news, I’ve finished the first braid of London Fog merino. 350 yards of a heavy fingering/light sport. It needs to be washed and hung out to dry before I get a WPI but it looks pretty good. I’m trying to make this into matching skeins to make Bob and I matching socks. It’s my first attempt at double-drive on the Kromski and I have to say, the yarn is very consistent. I also got into the chapter in Alden Amos about plying, which is really making me rethink the amount of thought I give to the process. To me it’s always been plyplyply as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the frenzy-ply wo-man! Well, plying this one, I slowed down, gave more distance between kate and me, and between me and wheel, and am being more mindful. It’s frustrating, but it’s going to be well worth the effort as the yarn is a lot more consistent and no snarls or overspun bits. This skein is the best yarn I've spun yet, except for the end bits that I chain-plied and I just don't like the way that looks but I didn't know what else to do with the leftovers. But the attention to plying paid off in a big way overall. Dammit, Alden, why must you make so much sense?! I’m actually trying to figure out a way to make a bobbin-winder and invest in some storage bobbins, which only cost a buck each or something.
Here's some photos of THAT.
The freshly-plied yarn on the Babe. The outer layers are chain-plied leftovers so you're not getting a very good look at the yarn itself here.

Here it is hanked up with the roving for the other skein and a partial kitty who would NOT move.

And here it is all by itself.




I have to admit, I'm a little bit in love with this yarn.


I bit on another Ravelry destash too. I’ve been wanting to try spinning some cotton for a while and now I have a wheel that can actually do that. (Dunno if I can do it, but the wheel should be capable.) I got three cotton roving braids for five bucks each, plus some bamboo fiber to play with, and a gorgeous set of mixed-fiber batts. The destasher was also sweet enough to enclose an extra mini-batt that looks like that ribbon candy-it’s totally adorable and all of the batts look like they’ll be fabulous spinning. I’ll try to get pictures of the new fiber up soon. Hopefully I won’t be lamenting my inability to spin cotton. The bamboo shouldn’t be an issue; it has a similar staple to silk and doesn’t need the speed that cotton does. I doubt I’ll be getting much bamboo fiber, though, because the process to make it is rather resource-intensive and perhaps not so environmentally wise. Cotton is also resource-intensive and damaging to the environment unless it’s organic cotton and I don’t think this stuff I got is organic, but I’m rationalizing that I didn’t buy it from a vendor, I got it from someone who is destashing so it won’t increase demand. Plus, this way I can see if I can and will spin cotton on a regular basis before spending more money on organic cotton fiber which is quite a bit more expensive. I can rationalize anything, then go on in the next paragraph to whine about money. It’s a problem, I know.

Anyway, I spun up the first ply of one of the cotton braids. Took a while to get the hang of it, as it is a very different feel with the short staple length but once I got going it wasn't too bad. Mostly it just feels weird and tiring on the hands. I think the trick is drafting short and fast and keeping the spin consistent with very little uptake. I did have to go back to scotch tension to control the pull-in, I could not get that figured out with the double-drive. Hmm. Must give that some thought and do some research.
Here's the first of it.

Obviously I need practice but all in all it's satisfactory.

I’ve been doing nothing but spinning, much to my shame. Well, not really. I got a new tool, of course I’m going to use it. But the dread holiday gift-giving season doth approach, and I have a minimum of 2.5 more pairs of socks to make, plus a wine-bottle cozy for one aunt/uncle set, plus something for another aunt/uncle set and another aunt. Plus I have to come up with a gift for my mother and the girls, but probably not all crafted except for the socks. I have ideas for the kids, but not sure where the money’s going to come from. I should get something small for elder daughter’s boyfriend, he looks like he’s going to be a keeper. (after two years) My mom, I have no idea. I guess it depends on how well she takes to spindling. I’d love to get her a nice spindle and give her a pack of fiber samples to try. I think I’m going to talk to Bob about maybe us not getting each other anything major this year. It’s silly. We don’t have the money. Maybe we can just fill up each other’s stockings and call it good. STRESS. ARGH.

A bit of good news, I sold my very first sock pattern. Some kind soul on Ravelry bought a copy of Cucumber Falls. I was unreasonably excited. I also managed to get all of my free patterns converted to PDF and uploaded to Ravelry for download as well, so if you’re over there, feel free to stop by my shop and get a copy.

I’m actually penning this (pixeling this?) at work on an 18 – minute break, of which I get two daily. And now it’s time to go back to work, so I’m going to close and maybe get some actual work done today at some point.
ETA-Now with added pictures!