Swatchless

Have you ever started knitting something on a whim, not really anticipating how it will turn out, how much yarn is required, or the amount of time it will require? I usually have a good sense about gauging what is required, specially for something that I have made before, like socks.

This project is something that just caught me off guard for some reason. It started last Friday night, with an incredible urge to knit a pair of socks for a new friend. This is where the weird begins…I usually only knit socks for myself, or for other knitters who will appreciate the thought and the time invested in the gift. Perhaps this new friend will need a knitting lesson in the near future.

The next weird was that I could only find one set of double pointed sock needles, and they were in use. I had half a sock (a second sock), that had slowed as I got into the ribbing at the cuff end. I know that I have more needles, but they were not to be found. So, with great haste, I finished knitting the first pair of socks, because that seemed to be the sensible thing to do.

These socks are knit from the March instalment of the Spunky Eclectic fibre club. The roving was 4 oz of Romney wool in the colourway “Lightning Strike”.

Once these were off the needles, in the wee hours of Saturday morning, I cast on for the next pair of socks that I felt driven to make. The next weird was that I started to knit, from small balls of leftover yarn, which added up to way less than 50 g. I knit and knit, and ran out of yarn, so then I unraveled another sock experiment that was less than satisfactory. I rarely unravel old projects! This gave me enough yarn to knit up the long leg of one sock, and the toe of the second, in absolute record time might I add, this is a very tall knee sock that was completed by Sunday evening!

I hadn’t really been concerned with the second sock, or finding more yarn…I was just intent on the knitting. This pattern involved a new technique, slipped stitches to add vertical ridges to the pattern.

Unfortunately, I did run out of yarn, so I headed out on Monday afternoon, with a small sample, to KnitTrader’s of Kingston, my local yarn store, from which I must have bought the yarn originally. I didn’t have the ball band, but I deduced, by feel, that the yarn I was searching for was Sisu. Unfortunately, the colour was no longer in stock locally. I bought another colour of blue that was close but not quite right.

I thought it would be close enough, but in daylight, it’s really not close at all.

Then I started to search online for the right colour. I found that Sisu yarn is stocked by Wool Tyme in Ottawa, so on Monday night I ordered 2 balls of, what I hoped was, the right colour blue. Since shipping was equivalent to the yarn price, I decided it made more sense to buy more yarn to balance it out a bit…for some reason paying $9 for shipping on 7 balls of yarn is much more palatable than paying $9 for shipping on $10 of yarn. And sock yarn is always useful….right?

So yesterday the package arrived (only 4 days since it was ordered!) and I’ve already joined up the next ball of yarn. I’m debating the merits of knitting this evening instead of doing the work that I really should be doing. Maybe I’ll just get the heel turned and save the rest for later…but these socks seem to have a mind of their own…they warp time and space!

The good thing is that the socks are turning out exactly as planned. Their full awesomeness can’t be revealed yet, in case the pictures get leaked to the recipient. Does anyone out there recognize the pattern?

It seems like my fibre club packages arrive at the perfect time. The last one came on a snow day when I could spend a good length of time at my wheel enjoying the great colours and trying to figure out how to spin long draw. Today marks the start of the 4 day Easter weekend, and my mailbox was full again!

The fibre this time is Romney, and the colourway is called Lightning Strike. I am thinking that I need socks rather than mitts at this time of year, so my plan for spinning will take that into consideration.

I’m going to divide the roving in half lengthwise, one half for each sock. I’m going to try to make matching socks by using the fractal spinning method. The colours appear to be a pretty brownish purplish orange. I hope that the individual shades can stand out well.

Today I finished my pair of socks that I’ve been working on for the last two months. They started off as the 100 g of Cotswald fleece expertly dyed and distributed by the good folk at Spunky Eclectic.
The yarn is thick and dense, perfect for the kind of socks that can keep you warm when wearing rubber boots. These are the most fun and classiest rubber boot socks that I’ve ever had.

I knit the socks on 2mm needles, toe up, with an after thought heel. Toes heels and ribbing were worked in black to contrast with the peacock tones of the body of the sock.

I am glad to be done this project, because I will soon be getting another package of fleece in the mail!

This past week was March Break.  While most people take vacations and take time to relax, I was excited to go to work on a farm for a day!  I took part in a sheep sheering day on Amherst Island at Foot Flats Farm.

This farm has around 1600 sheep, and the plan was to shear half of them and keep them inside the barn until it gets warmer.  It was a very cold day on Thursday, and the wind stripped the heat out of us and out of the barn we were working in.

This was the first time that I had really paid attention to the process of shearing, and what happens to the fleece afterwards.  I got to try most of the jobs (not the shearing itself though…that’s a job for true professionals!).

The sheep were led in from outside, and were kept in pens waiting for their turn. There were three shearers who kept up a quick pace, shearing 452 sheep over the course of the day.

I am impressed with how well the shearers calmed the sheep down and kept them still while artfully removing the fleece and keeping it all in one piece.  Their shearing follows a rhythm…belly fleece goes first into a separate pile because it is really dirty.  Then the fleece comes off the back and finally the hind legs.  After the fleece is removed from the sheep, one of the other workers picks it up and spreads it out like a blanket on the skirting table.  This is done by the very skilled, by holding on to the fleece that had come off the rear legs, one leg in each hand, and unfurling the fleece with a quick arm movement.

Here’s Noa, a teenager who has been helping out her family with shearing days since she was little.  She guided me through the day, teaching me a lot along the way.If done correctly, it will spread out completely.  Who knew that sheep were so big!?  I tossed one or two fleeces but never did it perfectly.The next jobs that happen require less skill, and I got to be pretty good at them!  This is where dirty pieces get pulled off, and the fleece gets inspected to see if there are coloured fibers in the mix.  It takes fairly good eyesight to distinguish whether a discolouration is due to dirt or coloured fibers.  The fleece is then folded over and rolled just like a sleeping bag.  The far end gets twisted and then tucked in to keep the fleece in a tight compact roll.The roll is then tossed up to a person waiting by the 7 foot tall burlap sack.  The fleeces are compacted in the bag by someone jumping up and down on them.  I don’t like heights, so I was not keen to take on this job.After the bag is full (40 fleeces or so I was told), it gets stitched up with twine, and then heaved onto a pile of other bags.  I am not sure how much they weighed, but it took 3 people to maneuver into place. Sometimes there are runaway sheep that need to be wrangled back into a different pen.  This is also a job for those who know lots about sheep.  Noa’s a natural!

Not only did I learn a great deal, and make memories and new friends, but I also got fed delicious meals (including their very own lamb) and ended up being given a fleece of my very own!  I’m waiting until it is warmer out, and then I’ll wash it, and hang it out to dry.

Thanks very much to Cherry and Mark for the hospitality, and to Noa for teaching me so much!

Yesterday the weather was bad–it was a storm that lived up to the bus cancellations and media hype.  I watched the storm get worse all day while at work, and we were finally sent home at 2pm.  The drive was a short one, but rather scary, as the roads had not yet been plowed, and many others had been sent home early from work at the same time.  I had to shovel waist deep snow to get myself dug IN to my parking space once I got home.  (pic taken much later, about 9pm when cars and buses were stuck in the snowbanks)

To my surprise and delight the mail had been delivered–thanks postal workers for working through all kinds of miserable conditions–my Spunky Eclectic Fiber Club had arrived.  This is the first time that I’ve joined a club like this, and I think mail order fluff once every 2 months sounds like a great way to get experience spinning new kinds of fiber, and to experiment with colour choices that I wouldn’t be able to dream up.

This first shipment is Cotswold, and the colourway is Eye of the Peacock. I spun late into the night, watching and waiting for the snow to let up and for the plows to get to the smaller streets.  This morning I got up early and enjoyed the warmth of the February sun and the brightness of all the snow outside.  I plied my two bobbins of singles together.Then I took pics on my fresh balcony snow.   I’m thinking this might make some pretty interesting socks.   Hope everyone else has been safe and warm for their snow day!

Santa gave me wool combs this year to add to my collection of wool processing implements.  Combs are different from carders because they keep the fibers aligned and the roving is smoother and I find it much easier to spin it consistently.  Combs are also weapons!  Be careful not to hurt yourself on them.  When you use them, pay attention to where your hands are, where your lap is, and who is near you.

My combs are from Paradise Fibers.  I had a lesson a while back from Teira, and more recently I had been checking out youtube videos about wool combing.  I have convinced myself that my spinning would be so much nicer if I combed my fleece rather than carding it with my rather rugged drum carder.  I’m sure my spinning would also be a lot more consistent (and my stash of fleece would be decreasing nicely) if I sat down at my wheel more often and worked on improving my skills.

This is fleece that I got from Topsy Farms on their shearing day a few years ago.  It has been washed (to get rid of sheep waste and foliage) and dried, and now the clean locks are ready to be separated.  The locks are like hair that is on its way to becoming dreads–its tangled and a bit knotted together, but with a little bit of work the tangles can be brushed out.

I loaded one comb with locks, and then used the other comb (perpendicularly to the first) to comb through the locks.  The combed locks will then be transferred to the second comb.  The small amount of fleece remaining on the first comb gets discarded because it is mostly the short pieces and felted bits that will not spin smoothly anyway.  Sometimes it takes a few passed through the combs to get the fleece tangle free.

The next step is to turn the combed fleece into roving.  I don’t have a diz (a small object with a hole in it meant for turning fleece into roving), but I do have a button that works just as well.  I carefully pulled the combed fleece through a button hole to create soft fluffy roving.I wound up the roving into balls, ready to spin.  I did all that combing over the span of 2 or 3 evenings!  I look forward to spinning it into yarn.  Right now it’s not about the finished project.  It’s all about the process, the learning, and the experimenting.

Welcome to 2013!!

Owen, my brother and sister in law’s cat, ringing in the new year in style!

Some projects seem to just fly off the needles, as if the yarn has been sitting and waiting to be turned into something useful.  This pair of socks that I’ve just finished is one such project.  I started the first sock 2 days ago while waiting for my freshly dyed fleece to dry.  Craving the variagation and uniqueness of handspun yarn, I knitted up some of my stash handspun with Kroy yarn.  I was feeling rather smart when I divided up the handspun into two equal portions before I started.  It worked out really well!  I really like how the stripes break up the handspun’s long and unpredictable colour changes.  The blue also join the pair nicely together by virtue of the contrast presented.For me, socks, and particularly striped socks hold a particular memory for when and where they were knit.  I will be able to recall with each change of colour what was going on at the time, who I was with, and those memories stay lovingly locked away in those stitches.

These particular socks have wrapped up the last moments of 2012, and the first of 2013.  They knit together moments spent with friends and family; moments spent listening, and helping, celebrating and being together.  These moments of connection will be cherished as I wear these cheery socks through the cold winter days.

Here’s my recipe (as much for my own reference as for anyone else)

These are toe up socks, Toe: I started with a figure of 8 cast on 20 stitches in blue, increase on alternating rows to 60 sts.

Foot: 7 rows handspun, 4 rows blue.  I did not do any heel gusset increases.

My feet are pretty big, so I worked 6 stripes of handspun before the heel.

Heel Placement: knit 2 rows of blue (of the 4 rows expected), knit 30 sts in waste yarn for an afterthought heel, knit remaining 2 rows of blue.

Leg: I continued the striped pattern until my handspun ran out, the socks are a bit shorter than I’d like, but that’s ok.  I worked 2.5 inches of K2P2 ribbing and cast off loosely.

Afterthought Heel: Carefully take out the waste yarn, keeping the 60 sts on 3 needles.  Knit a toe (decrease 4 sts every 2 rounds to a total of 20 sts, graft with kitchener st)

So….I was looking at some interesting blogs to get inspiration for some spinning and knitting to do now that the Christmas gifts are all done.  Of course, inspiration hits close to midnight, and next thing I know I’m experimenting!  This is my first try dyeing with Wilton food dyes.  I got lots of helpful advice from this site.It turns out that blue is a bit of a tricky colour, so I added some yellow to make green, which seems to be pretty potent!  The big trick is to add acid to the water (I used vinegar).  I don’t know how much I used, but I think it’s enough, since the colour stuck to the fleece! I also read that the temperature of the dye pot is important.  I used my candy thermometer to make sure that the temp got up to 180 F.  This yarn was once dyed (rather unsuccessfully) using black beans.  I’ve re-dyed it with a LOT of food colouring, making it a combination of reds and oranges. I rinsed everything and now it is drying in my bathtub.  I’m looking forward to making some interesting things out of this!

While sitting indoors fighting off my cold, in the hazy days that follow Christmas and Boxing Day festivities, I finished off these two lovely hats.  I’m quite taken with the Red Light Special Pattern.  I love how different it looks with each new colourway I’ve tried.The blue one was started on Christmas day, but not quite finished in time to be under a tree.  It has already been delivered to my sister in law, and the orange one will be given in the near future to a very big fan of orange who needs a bit of extra warmth and encouragement this winter, specially since we’re finally getting lots of snow.

Here’s a closer look at the pattern.  I bet you can’t make just one!

This past week has been an exciting one!  We had a secret santa exchange in our class, and one girl, a young rower, had asked for her secret santa to get her Will Crothers for Christmas.  Will is one of Team Canada’s men’s 8 rowing team that won the silver medal at the London Olympics. [youtube]

Photo courtesy of Will Crothers

He’s a local guy, and a distant cousin of mine, so I sent a few emails and was thrilled when Will agreed to come and visit and sign a picture for my student.  She was incredibly surprised, and giddy all day after his visit.  My students enjoyed the opportunity to touch a real silver medal, and to talk to an Olympian.

To thank him for going above and beyond, and making a young rower’s Christmas wish come true, I gave him a hat that I’d knit this fall.  It is the Red Light Special hat, one of my favourites.  He told me that he’d wear it often.  My students offered me a very big complement: they didn’t believe that I’d knit it.  They were sure I had bought it.

Thanks Will for making this a very memorable week!