Divergent Threads

Looking back

I'm always tickled that Janus, the Roman god after whom January was named, had two faces, so he could look forward and backward, and thus became the god of beginnings and ending (and also of door hinges).  But I digress...

January seems an appropriate time to look back at the projects that actually got finished in 2006 (or at least the ones that didn't make the blog yet), so hang onto your double points!

The astute reader will recognize the colors from  the dyed sock blanks in the previous post.  I went for a plain vanilla sock pattern to show off the colors in all their polychromatic glory (which is just a bit brighter in real life).  I was delighted to find that Nancy Roberts and I must be heel sisters, as the amount of yarn her blanks designate for the heel matched my heel-stitched half-handkerchief heel almost exactly.  (You can get your own sock blanks here and have endless fun with color.)

A quickie project, made for a couple in my biochemistry class who have a nine month old baby -- every time I thought I was busy, I thought about them.  Mission Falls 1824 wool, so it's machine washable.  At one point, I had a pattern from Peace Fleece for a hat like this, but you don't really need one.  Cast on enough for the head in question, knit around and around to where you'd normally start decreases, but stretch them out as long as you like.  I gave one of my brothers a hat like this one Christmas, finished length about 4 and a half feet.  When it's really cold, he wraps the end around his neck for a scarf he can't lose.

I may have knit this a little tightly for the yarn, as it also like to stand up on its own....  Do notice the jogless stripes -- I was very proud of them.

These are the Jaywalker socks, which took me forever to finish, and I'm not sure why.  The pattern was fine, I loved everything about the Cherry Tree Hill Supersock yarn -- they were just one of those projects that stay around in the knitting bag for months.  They have been well-worn, and warm me up just looking at them, which has been important in Colorado lately.  (Don't go looking for the color on their website, though -- they were an oddball skein, though Sugar Maple is probably closest.  Most of the Supersock color repeats seem shorter than the ones in this skein, too, but I love the twist and the feel of the yarn no matter what color it is.)  Their original photo disappeared, so this is how they look after probably eight trips through the washer and dryer. 

My sons have appeared and are clamoring for the computer, so one more photo.  Remember the snarled mess my puppy made?  Ta-da!

The mess on the right is the part I gave up on, but all the rest wound up fairly painlessly.  Eleven episodes of Pinky and the Brain later, the yarn is ready for a warp once again.  Someone asked if I loved the yarn -- well, not particularly.  It was a mill end slubbed cotton, and the entire cone probably cost five bucks, but it was the principle of the thing.  I had already done the math for its project, after all. 

Starting the New Year off right

Has this ever happened to you?
All the snarled pile on the counter was once neatly wrapped on the cone on the right.  Before we left on vacation, I'd taken a few cones of yarn off the shelves to get an idea of grists and plan out a weaving project for the new year.  Apparently, this was the cone I spent the most time holding, as it was the cone Plato proceeded to carry around with him and lay on for the next two weeks.  Look closely and you'll see a liberal sprinkling of bristly tan terrier hair, adding to the general dishevelment.  Yes, I knew he had separation anxiety, but he's never gone for coned yarn before.  I'm taking votes on whether I should scrap it now or spend a few hours trying to salvage it first, as a more lasting reminder of why we never leave anything in this dog's reach.  On the plus side, he didn't eat a couch this trip.

Updates soon on the knitting front, I promise.  At least till classes start again Tuesday, I've got time on my hands!

For the third time in a row...

...it's all about the color.  Outside my window, everything is white and gray right now, but inside I still have these:
A few weeks ago,  Christy had a dye day again.  This was probably one of the quietest ones I can remember, with no indigo on the ceiling, no mad spatterings, and we only shorted out the entire house's electrical system once.  But we got some lovely colors nonetheless, and some formerly lily-white hands are now covered with dyes, so it was, as usual, a smashing success.

These are a pair of sock blanks, which were a birthday present for me, and started the day off pristine white.  I believe Christy ordered a bunch directly from Nancy Roberts, who conveniently has an artcle in the latest issue of Spin-Off on the process.  I just know they're great fun to fingerpaint -- okay, not literally, but I did consider it.  I made them messy on purpose (no, really), and love the way they're knitting up, though I'd love to see how Linda's ever-so-neat ones will turn out. 

(I started out calling these Fraternal Socks, but my children have dictated that they are really Pippi Longstocking socks.  So be it.)

Next, on the right, in a photo taken before the world turned white, two skeins of Brown Sheep sock yarn, painted with a bunch of different dyes, then steamed and washed.  I say Brown Sheep sock yarn, but they're actually each a 4 oz. skeins of seconds, so each hank will more than make a pair of socks.  I'm still not sure the colors are bright enough.  I am a major fan of intense color for my feet.  I'm convinced they stay warmer that way.

And one more:

I have no clue what red this is, or what combination of blues -- as usual at Christy's, I wait till the end and make stone soup out of whatever's left lying around.  The brown is Caramel, though, because it's fast becoming my favorite brown, and I wanted to show Christy why she needed to go out and buy some yesterday (because, after all, she doesn't really have enough dyestuffs).

I'm spindle spinning this on campus, as I walk from class to class, and am becoming slightly notorious as the spinning lady, which is fine by me.  My one regret is that, even spindle spinning, it's going way too fast, and I should have dyed more.  Of everything. 

Ah, well.  There's always next time.

Why I love Wyoming

Friday, September 22nd.  I was up and hit the ground running, at least after the caffeine kicked in.  Mr. Debbie and I had bought tickets ages ago for a Sheryl Crow/John Mayer concert the previous Monday night, which I ended up missing because of an ecology exam Tuesday morning.  The night before, eldest daughter had taken my ticket to a Barenaked Ladies concert because I'd been up till all hours studying for the organic and biochem exams instead of hearing how the group could play banjos again.  Coming in from his morning run, Mr. Debbie looked solemn.  "You're too frazzled," he tells me.

What can you say to a comment like that?  I keep on packing lunches, pouring more coffee. 

He hands me a shopping bag, empty.  "What's this for?" I ask.

"You need a break.  Go pack for Wyoming."

I start to make a mental list of why this is impossible: homework, housework, clinic on Sunday, I haven't baked Carl's cake, I already told Carol I couldn't make it, I have nothing to dye... and decide instead he's right.  I toss a change of clothes and a toothpaste into the bag, put my wheel and a random bin of fiber into the back of the truck, and head off for my exams smiling.

After my exams, I go and (sacrilege!) buy a cake, then head north to Encampment, home of Carol and Carl Lee, two of my favorite people in the world.  For years now, Carol has hosted a Gathering in September at the Academy of Spinsters for fiber folks from all over.  This year, we covered at least three continents.  We eat very well, as folks potluck and make it a point of honor to have way more food than we could possibly eat, and we dye almost everything in sight, mostly with natural dyes.  I was unprepared, and thus not up to my usual manic standards (one year I dyed nearly 12 pounds of handspun Churro rug yarn in a day), but ended up with some lovely skeins anyway.

Left to right:  2 skeins indigo (no mordant), brazilwood on alum, black walnut (no mordant), and the original yarn (mordanted with alum but not dyed -- yet).

This was the first time I'd worked with the instant indigo, and it was definitely simpler than the method I've used before, but I'm not sure the color is quite the same.  Part of the difference may be due to the water, though.  Most years we're still using creek water at the end of September, but the town had anticipated an early frost so we were on town (treated) water instead.

I also tried some cochineal, which had problems, and will no doubt be overdyed at some point.  Everything was washed out and muddy and pale, quite unlike the usual vivid cochineal colors. 

The company was full of familiar friendly faces, and I was glad to get caught up with Shirley and Cindy and Peggy from Brown Sheep and all the rest.  I returned home to the usual mess and too much homework, but was ready and eager to enter the fray, and really, what more can you ask from a 24 hour escape? 

Summertime

...and the dyeing was easy.  It was a long, hot summer, great for washing fleece and solar dyeing, which I did when I was not driving kids or visiting relatives, or both.  I even have photographic evidence of some of it.
Before:                                                             During:

and after ...

I didn't accomplish half of what I'd intended this summer, and couldn't get near the computer four days out of five. But school's back in session, the kids are in school, and now.... well, now I'm back in school too, full time at CSU, which seems to leave even less time for fiber, and has the added effect of increasing my weekly time behind the wheel. 

If I got paid for every mile, I could retire already.

I'm trying to sneak in as much fiber as possible in between organic chem, biochem, ecology and physiology.  I did manage half a sock in the past week, so all is not lost.  Tune in tomorrow for the latest in the ongoing saga...

Sheep to Shawl 2006

It's been a week, and I still haven't posted anything about this year's Sheep to Shawl contest.  With the kids home from school for the summer and Mr. Debbie globetrotting again, I've barely touched the computer all week.  But I've finally evicted the offspring, downloaded the photos, and have almost forty minutes before my next chauffeuring task, so here goes.

Here's Team Chutzpah early in the morning, listening to opening remarks from Debi Dodge, this year's judge, and Jill Klawonn, the superintendent.  You can tell it's still early because everyone is smiling.  From left to right, Nancy (hiding behind her hair), Rebecca, Dianne, and Judy.  Above you can just see the past year's shawls, hanging from the tent support pole.  You can barely see the loom in the back corner.  The idea was to minimize interruptions for the weaver (me), as the 8 shaft twill I was weaving has a long pattern sequence, and it's difficult to see the mistakes from the top.  It was a good plan, but it didn't really work, and it wouldn't be Sheep to Shawl without passers-by asking questions.  I think a better plan is to have a simpler treadling sequence in the first place (yes, team, that is a hint!).

Our intrepid alternate, Marta, was there bright and early, bearing doughnuts to boot.  She was itching to spin along with the team, but will have to wait till next year.

We had a little excitement before the contest started.  When we were loading the Baby Wolf in the truck, one of my sons must have placed the reed peg into its hole, and during the ride up to Estes, somehow that peg got bent.  What this meant was, once the loom was set up, the reed was immobile, as the peg was bent in place at a 90 degree angle.  After a frantic search for some tools, Carl Lee lent us a pair of pliers and a wrench, and Nancy muscled the peg out so I could weave.  Good thing we had that chocolate bourbon cake along to pay for the tool rental.

At the stroke of 9, the fun began.  As I had no yarn to weave with (yet), I got to take some pictures.  Don't they look busy?

Yes, they're all spinning on Schacht Matchless spinning wheels, and I was weaving on a Schacht loom as well, but it was entirely coincidental.  It was suggested by some of the visitors that we seek out corporate sponsorship next year...

Fast forward five and a half hours, as once the yarn starts coming in, there's no rest for the weaver (except the mandatory half hour lunch break).  Once the second end was hemstitched, and the shawl cut off the loom, everyone started looking for errors and loose ends.  The gray warp and white weft were fairly close in color, so the pattern is very subtle, but the bottom of the photo shows it off fairly well.

There were three mistakes in the treadling sequence that we found, so I had a busy few minutes needle weaving a repair row over the long floats on the reverse.  Then into the bucket of hot water it went.   After some brisk toweling, a fringe trim, and a final check for dangling threads, we handed it over, the last of the three teams to finish. 

The judge got all three shawls before the 2:30 deadline, and headed off for the hard task of judging them all.  We expected her back between 3 and 3:30, and the cheering sections started gathering around 3, so we were all getting quite concerned that she and our shawls had headed off into the sunset when they finally reappeared at 3:48 pm.

First place went to Sheep Thrills, a team from Denver and Iowa.  Their brown and white houndstooth check used a gorgeous dark chocolate fleece, really consistent spinning by the team, a fun narrow border at each end, and was beautifully finished. As Nancy said, there's no shame in losing to a shawl like this.               

 

Our braided twill ended up placing second.  You can see the great drape in this photo, even though the shawl was still damp.  I think some more interest, maybe a border or mix of patterns, might have garnered some more design points.

  And our worthy opponents at the Laramie Fiber Guild took third place with their network twill shawl.  The needlefelted flowers (forget-me-nots, not pansies) at both ends added some lovely color to the contest, which only allows natural colored fiber for the fleece.                                                                                                   

One final photo of the team with shawl (and a ribbon!), where you can get a peek at the pattern on the other side.  Will we be back next year?  Well, I think the shawl was still being judged when the first person said, "I think, for next year, we should..."

 

Puzzle Books

From the online class I'm taking this month, a plethora of puzzle books.

Each of these is made from a single sheet of 8.5 by 11" paper, folded and cut to give you a connected book.  Think of it as origami with a knife.  Lots of fun to make, though I'm still not sure what I'd do with them, but that's okay.  My 10 year old has enough ideas for both of us. 

(From left to right, a basic puzzle book, single cut variation, triple cut, T-cut, and T with serif cut.)

Trying to get caught up as school ends, and the Estes Park Wool Market looms...

Log Cabin and Shadow Weave

For this week's weaving class, we got to play around with Log Cabin and Shadow Weave, and I was not looking forward to it.  Years ago, as a new weaver, I warped up some ungodly amount of cotton which was to be a set of log cabin towels for my mother.  Log cabin was easy, I was told.  It's just plain weave, after all.  What could be so hard?  I wove two of the towels, which took me weeks.  I kept inadvertently switching shuttles, skipping threads, my selvedges looked like they were following the path of the Mississippi, and I was not a happy weaver.  The rest of the warp was woven off with a single weft, and hidden away somewhere.  Never again, I vowed.

So when Judy said, it's log cabin, it's basically plain weave, it's easy, I groaned inwardly, but took careful notes, came home, warped up a tiny 2" wide warp for bookmarks, and started weaving while holding my breath, waiting for the headaches to start.

I'm still waiting. 

I'm not sure if it's all the weaving I've done in the meantime, using a different loom, not trying to make everything square up perfectly, a better understanding of why it works, or just the universe biding its time, but I really enjoyed the log cabin, and have a number of ideas for projects using it now.  I went a little wild playing with the wefts to see what might happen, but it was fun. 

Warp: 10/2 cotton in black and natural, sett at 24 epi.
Wefts: 10/2 mercerized cotton, 5/2 cotton, cotton boucle and tape, Zephyr wool/silk, and whatever else was in the loom bench at the time.

Shadow weave was described as log cabin grown up, with many of the same characteristics: alternating colors in the warp, a two shuttle weft.  Every shadow weave project I've ever seen has been with smooth yarns at a fine gauge, usually with closely related colors, so I decided to go to the other end of the spectrum.  I warped up two bumpy cottons, a white textured and a navy slub, at 12 epi in a Swedish Rosepath twill.  The three mug rugs in the center are the result (so far -- there's more warp on the loom, but those are all I finished in time for class).

Shadow weave is intriguing.  Many of my classmates, being much better weavers, did more traditional type shadow weave projects, much subtler than mine.  You don't always get what you might expect from the parent pattern.  Drawdowns can be a headache, which is why I skipped them and trusted that the rosepath would undoubtedly provide me with something I could learn from.  You do have to pay much more attention to your weaving than with log cabin, as every pattern throw needs its corresponding shadow, but it isn't too bad.  I wrote out throw by throw directions for the first two, then just worked directly from the twill pattern for the third.  I may even improvise for the next one.  After all, if worst comes to worst, they can always join that first pathetic log cabin project in the closet.

How to weave really slowly

If you want to weave really slowly, I heartily recommend using this as weft:

(No, not the cat.)

This is a failed warp that got cut off the loom a while ago.  While the 100% alpaca is pretty strong, and didn't snap when tested, the slipperiness of the fibers meant, no matter what I did, the warp kept sliding apart.  So I cut the remainder off the loom and chained it, putting it aside.  It was too nice to throw away, so now I'm using it as weft in another scarf version of the braided twill Sheep to Shawl pattern.

Because the lengths are just over 2 yards long, and the scarf is 6" wide, I stop every 12 or 14 passes to untangle another strand from the former warp, butterfly it, and start weaving again.  I think it'll work out fine in the end.  In the meantime, it's an exercise in patience.  Sort of like raising teenagers.

(Of course, it could be worse.  I could be weaving infinitesimal silk for yards and yards and yards like some people. Or I could have even more teenagers.)

I've got a log cabin and a shadow weave sample to finish up before class on Wednesday, so the plan is to get home from work tomorrow and do nothing but weave.  It won't happen, of course, but that's the plan.

The garden is calling to me, insistently, two of the three roses I thought were killed are coming back to life after all, and then there are these:

The East Boulder County Artists are having their annual studio tours this weekend, and I stopped by the Old Firehouse Art Center  for a preview.  There were some incredible hand bound books by a local artist, Jeff Becker, and I was inspired to head for home and pull out a tiny bookbinding kit I'd gotten as a gift a few years ago.  An hour later, I had the two small bound books at the right, and was heading out the door to look for paper, coverstock, an awl, and a few other goodies to play some more.  The envelope book happened next, and I've got images of a shelf full of books with handwoven cloth covers dancing through my brain.  Just what I needed -- more projects. 

May flowers

The April showers are steadfastly refusing to acknowledge that it's not April anymore, and we've been having one rainy day after another.  (Mind you, these are Colorado rainy days, so total accumulated rainfall is something like 0.4" for the month, but that's really wet for these parts.  I miss the sun.)  My garden had a rough winter -- for the first time in years, I lost roses to the weather.  Three, to be exact.  And once again the squirrels have eaten the bulbs, so there's a definite deficiency in the May flowers department.  So I knit some.

Small flower pattern courtesy of Saartje, from some coned fingering weight wools on size 2 (2.75 mm) needles.  The pattern was flawless, though I only decreased down to 6 stitches for the stem so they would fit over the pens.

Tulip pattern from Rineke, same yarn and needles.  I changed this one a little as I went, moving the increases so that the beginning of the round didn't move, and tried different decreases, but the end result is the same, I think. 

Yesterday was Flower Day at my son's school, so the whole woolen bouquet went off with him in the morning, to get handed out to his math teacher, reading teacher, homeroom teacher, and classroom aide.  Hope they don't mind too much.

(Oh, the pens?  Just these, as they've got a smooth barrel and a small price tag.  Pencils would work just as well, though you'd have to be cautious as you approach the pencil sharpener...)