Tag: yarn

What I Did At The Weekend

Paul's Birthday Cupcakes

I know it’s Wednesday already, but I had a few days off work at the end of last week and the beginning of this one, so it all blurred into one lovely long weekend where I basically did nothing. Well, I was ill for a couple of days, which is what really prompted me to think that Doing Nothing for a while would be a really good idea. And it was.

During these days off, Paul had a birthday. While he was out I thought I’d try a little experiment, and I baked a batch of cupcakes! To be perfectly honest, they didn’t turn out that well. They didn’t really rise, and the chocolate didn’t really melt, so they looked a bit funny, and they weren’t light and fluffy so much as dense and a bit strange. But, they tasted nice, and several people have eaten them without complaining of a stomach ache, so perhaps they weren’t as bad as all that! Still, I think I’ll stick to sewing.

Poole Twintone Dinner Service

After a lovely birthday lunch with Paul’s parents, we brought back with us several boxes of crockery which used to belong to Paul’s Nan. She couldn’t take all of this with her when she moved into residential care, so we are now the very excited owners (well, let’s be honest, I’m a lot more excited than Paul is!) of a Poole Twintone dinner service! We must be missing a box though, as none of the coffee pots have their lids, and we have one rectangular lid with nothing to sit on. The set is so extensive because it was added to over many years, received as gifts, and picked up at antique shops and car boot sales. That explains the seventeen (seventeen!) tea cups…

yarma

While all of this nothing was going on, I managed to make myself a Very Bright hat. The picture above is from Yarma, a $0.99 app that allows you to upload photos to Ravelry straight from your phone. It does have filters built into it, but the hat really is that bright!

yarma

The yarns are all hand dyed. The pink background is a cochineal-dyed cashmere from Elisabeth Beverley at Plant Dyed Wool, and the stripes are hand-spun Blue-faced Leicester mini-skeins by The Outside. (I wrote about them over here.)

The hat was going really well, until I reached the very last decrease row. Somehow I managed to pull one of the circular needles out of the stitches, and because the row below was also full of decreases I couldn’t figure out how to get all of the stitches back onto the needles again in the right order. (Hence the mess you can see in the Yarma photo above.) Thankfully the stripes gave me an excellent place to rip back to, so I very carefully picked up the last row of orange stitches and worked the decrease section again. Phew! The pattern is Wurm, which I’ve knitted I think three times now.

I still don’t quite know how I ended up with a hat though. I’ve been spending weeks walking to the bus stop in the cold thinking, “I must knit myself a pair of gloves or mittens, these fingerless ones are too cold”. I had every intention of working up a pair of lovely rainbow-striped gloves that would keep my fingers warm on the way to the bus stop. But then I would have needed to divide all of the little skeins in half… and work out how many rows to knit in each colour, so that all the stripes were the same size… and the next thing I knew, there was a nice, simple hat flying off the needles.

I do have a little bit of yarn left over though, in all eight colours. Just enough to knit yet another pair of fingerless mittens, knowing my luck!

Shopping Spree: Skulls, Skeins and a Spindle

Handmade polymer & gemstone earrings from Honey & Ollie

Look what arrived today – my lovely new earrings from Honey and Ollie! They arrived super quick, all the way from California. So quick that I wasn’t expecting them for about another week! As a recovering goth, I’m still irresistibly drawn to Things With Skulls, and these were so pretty that I couldn’t resist.

Handmade polymer & gemstone earrings from Honey & Ollie

The skulls and flowers are made from polymer clay, with sparkly little gemstones dangling at the top. The findings (all hand made) are copper, which complements the stones beautifully. The hooks are a really lovely shape too, and they stay in place very securely. Despite being quite big, they’re really light to wear, and I’m definitely going to be adding more Honey and Ollie pieces to my wish list.

Handspun and hand dyed yarn from The Outside, with hand carved drop spindle

This is my little haul from the Museum of English Rural Life‘s Traditional Craft Fair.

All from The Outside, on top is a hand-carved drop spindle. It’s made from yew, and it’s a bottom-whorl style. Excuse the red acrylic leader, I was so keen to try it out that I grabbed the first thing I could find! Once I’d figured out how to do a half-hitch to hold the yarn in place, I grabbed some fluff and started to spin straight away. It’s a lovely spindle, and I’m really happy to have one of my own instead of having to borrow from work. Now I can practice at home, and make as much wobbly, lumpy yarn as I like!

Handspun and hand dyed yarn from The Outside

Speaking of yarn… this is neither wobbly, nor lumpy. It’s handspun from blue faced leicester wool, and it’s lovely and soft. The vibrant colours are all from natural dyes, and this should be just enough to make a pair of rainbow-striped mittens.

The colours, from left to right, are:
1) Weld & madder
2) Weld
3) Weld & woad
4) Weld & woad dipped in madder
5) Woad & weld
6) Woad
7) Cochineal (orange oxidised to blue)

I had a lovely chat with Romilly about dyeing, including planting up a dye garden and not being afraid of mordants. There is definitely going to be some experimentation with colour and fluff in my future! For now though, I need to practice my spinning, and think about the perfect pattern for my new rainbow-coloured mittens.

My first handspun yarn!

Plied handspun yarn

Well, it took me long enough, but today I took my singles off the drop spindle, and turned it into yarn! I wound it off onto a plastic bottle which took the place of a nostepinne. I was then able to use both ends of the same yarn, and ply them together with the spindle.

My first handspun!

And here it is – my very first ball of handspun yarn. A whole ten grams of thick-and-thin, funny-coloured, badly spun, badly plied hand made yarn!

Little Mikey's Monstrous Scarf

I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to knit with such a little amount of yarn. (I wasn’t able to spin any more because the spindle needed to be emptied before the spinning workshop that’s running next week.) It turned out that Little Mikey was in need of a scarf, so I thought my monstrous handspun would be the perfect yarn! I used my Simplest Scarf in the World tutorial, with two 5mm needles and one 12mm. It came out just long enough, and I’ve saved the last couple of inches of yarn as a memento.

I have to say that ticking the “my handspun” box on Ravelry was very satisfying. I hope I’m able to make a lot more!

Neat and tidy

Almost tidy stash...

Last month I took a weekend off work, to celebrate my birthday. I’d decided to have a picnic, but in case the weather was bad, we had to be able to move everybody indoors if necessary. This involved tidying the house to within an inch of its life. The main thing making the living room look untidy was my yarn stash, so the next day we bit the bullet and did something about it.

The wooden box is actually a toy chest, from Argos. I’d have liked something larger, a proper blanket box, but this was the biggest piece of furniture that we could fit into the space and still open the door. All of my yarn has now been sealed into freezer bags (to prevent moths) and squished inside. As you can see, not all of it fits, but I’m knitting as fast as I can!

The paper bags at the front house the projects I’m currently working on*, plus some yarn that absolutely wouldn’t fit in the box. The decorated chest on top of the box contains, yes, you’ve guessed it, more yarn. The little bag on top of that is for my current sock-in-progress.

Tidy needles!

I have a long orange plastic box that holds most of my straight knitting needles. I inherited it from my Aunty Val. The ones that are too big for the box are stuffed decoratively into a glass pasta jar. This work of organisational genius however, is the brainchild of Lettice. All of my double-pointed and circular needles are now neatly sorted into DL size plastic wallets, courtesy of WHSmith. These fit sideways inside a CD storage box, alongside my needle sizing gadget. All I need to do now is label the wallets with the sizes of the needles inside. Perfect!

The stripy tin holds all the little gubbins that don’t fit anywhere else – scissors, stitch markers, tape measures, cable needles, that kind of thing.

There is one more box of yarn, a canvas one that zips closed, bought a very long time ago from Muji. That houses knitted things that are waiting to be unravelled, and some extremely chunky wool that I don’t really like to knit with any more but is too nice to get rid of. And then there are the four balls of yarn that Paul brought back from Canada for me, which won’t fit into the toy box or the treasure chest. Or the canvas box. Oops.

Best get knitting then, I suppose!

 

*By “currently working on” I mean “haven’t finished yet”. Including a little cardigan that I started knitting in 2007. I’m hoping that being able to see these projects all the time will encourage me to actually finish knitting the damn things.

My husband went to Canada…

Untitled

…and came back with some slightly confusing yarn.

I’d asked Paul not to bring me any chocolate home from his business trip (having recently received a mountain of very fine choccies for my birthday) and suggested that yarn would be an appropriate substitute.

As everybody* knows, souvenir yarn doesn’t count towards your stash, so it’s an excellent gift. But in order to make a good souvenir, it should ideally be something that you can’t just walk into a yarn shop and buy locally. So I sent Paul yarn shopping in Canada, with these criteria in mind, plus a couple of Canadian brand names in case of emergency.

So, you may be wondering why the yarn in the top picture is very clearly labelled “Zealana” and “Kiwi”. Apparently New Zealand’s in Canada now. Perhaps the lady in the Ottowa yarn shop, who sold this to my poor unsuspecting husband after he’d explained that he wanted specifically Canadian yarn, is in need of a little geography lesson.

But, it is a yarn I’ve never seen locally, it’s super-soft, and it has the exciting new-to-me ingredient of possum, so it definitely works as an excellent souvenir!

Untitled

Bless him, once Paul had realised that the first yarn was definitely not Canadian, he went yarn shopping again!

This, which is done absolutely no justice by the photo (the purple yarn is much more of an aubergine colour), is the softest yarn on earth. This is by no means an exaggeration, I spent a good half hour last night just stroking it. It’s Illimani Royal 1, and it’s made IN CANADA, from the finest 1% of the fleece from Bolivian alpaca. The colours above are hot pink (of course!) and eggplant.

Softest. Yarn. Ever.

It’s crying out to be some kind of scarf or cowl I think, so I can snuggle my face into it as often as possible. Or I might just leave it sitting on the arm of the sofa, so I can stroke it like a soft little pet. (What? The knitters know what I mean.)

I don’t know yet what I’ll make with the Zealana. I was thinking originally of socks, but the cotton content (organic cotton, no less!) gives it such a nice drape, I’m thinking that maybe a little lacy shawl might be in order.

I do need to catch up with a few knitting photos though, as I have managed to find the time to actually finish a few things lately! This is good, as all the things I’ve finished are intended to be Christmas gifts. This has the added bonus of getting some of the yarn out of my house and into other people’s, which I’m sure Paul will be really pleased about!

 

* By “everybody” I clearly mean “knitters who are looking to acquire more yarn without the attendant guilt of purchasing it for themselves when they already have a cupboard full at home”. By which I mean all of them.

Learning to spin

Spinning!

Look! I made yarn! I started with fluff, and now I have yarn!

Yes, I am exactly as excited as that made me sound, if not more so. Yarn!!

So, yes, anyway. I borrowed the drop  spindle from work, months and months ago, along with a bit of leftover fibre from the felting sessions. I thought it might be handy if I could teach myself to spin, given that there were a bunch of spindles right there not being used. I found a couple of books, read a couple of magazines, and gave it a try. But it didn’t seem to make sense, I wasn’t able to make yarn, and I got a bit cross and shoved it all in a  bag and pretended I wasn’t sulking about it.

Fast forward to last night, and I went along to a local knitting group where Felix very kindly taught me how to spin! It turned out that what I needed was a person to demonstrate the principles, and then it turned out to be really easy!

Of course, the little bit of yarn I’ve made so far is terrible. It’s inconsistent in thickness, lumpy in places, disastrously over-spun, and almost certainly useless. However, I am assured that this is widely considered to be Art Yarn, and that I should make as much of it as I like until I start to get the hang of consistency. Usually I would be upset at the prospect of making an increasing amount of crappy yarn. Thankfully I’m so excited about having learnt this new-to-me ancient method of transforming fluff that I want to make as much of it as I possibly can!

As you might expect, I’m already coveting new fibres and new tools. I’m currently using a cheap MDF spindle, and spinning merino tops. That’s great, I’m making yarn… but trying out Felix’s lovely little walnut spindle with a little bit of fluffy Estonian wool was something of a revelation. Felix also suggested that I might want to look up Hilltop Katie on Etsy, and now I’m having a really hard time trying not to buy one of everything. Her beginners’ kits look like a great place to start.

I can’t go back to the knitting group next week, I’ll be at work. But the week after, I’d love to be able to go back and show them a whole  spindle full of Very Artistic Yarn!

O W L hugs…

Sirdar Hug

I popped into town the other day, and while I was waiting for a bus I decided to nip into Jacksons. I’m glad I did, because they just happened to have a great big basket of Sirdar Hug for just £1.20 a ball! This means that for just £14.40, I now have enough wool to knit a whole jumper, and I’m thinking of O W L S.

So, I went and looked at the pattern on Ravelry, and looked at all the different O W L S that other people have knitted and, having coveted the pattern ever since I first saw it, I came to a difficult conclusion.

I do want owls, but I don’t want O W L S.

I’d like my jumper to be longer, but I don’t know how far the yarn will go, so I’d like to knit something from the top down rather than from the bottom up. I don’t really like knitting in the round – the constant knitting without the variation of the purl rows makes my wrists ache. I think that big jumpers need seams to give them a certain amount of structural integrity, especially at the shoulders, to stop them from stretching and twisting all over the place. (I don’t know whether that’s actually true, or whether I just think that way because I’m a dressmaker, where everything has seams.) Also, I might need to do a bit of swatching. The yarn band recommends using 8mm needles, but it looks much better for 6½s to me.

If a swatch on 6½mm needles comes out with a nice fabric that isn’t too stiff, I might take the easy option and replicate my favourite pirate jumper, (here’s a non-Ravelry link) only with owls instead of skulls.

I’ll knit the front and back from the armscye to the neck from the bottom up, incorporating a purl ridge for the row of owls to sit on. Then, once I’ve knitted the sleeves, I can divide the remaining yarn into two, pick up the stitches, and knit downwards until the jumper is as long as the yarn will allow. The purl ridge will neatly disguise the join. I might even add a bit of a chunky leaf lace motif to the sleeves and hem, inspired by Teva Durham’s Lace Leaf Pullover. Although I sold the book with that pattern in it because I didn’t get on with wrangling such heavily process-driven knitting. Still, I’m sure I can make something up.

Hang on… didn’t I just say somewhere that this would be the “easy” option?

Hmm.

Feather and Fan.

Feather & Fan sock yarn

I have no idea what this is going to be, I plan to just keep knitting it until it’s finished.

I was reading the third issue of The Knitter, and there was an article about hand knit scarves, with a recipe for feather and fan stitch. It looked pretty. I had some silk yarn left over from knitting socks. A plan came together.

I’ve been feeling inspired by lacy neck warmers lately, to fill in the gap left by the enormous neckline of my flamingo coat. But I’m not much good at knitting lace, so I figured a simple feather and fan stitch would be an excellent place to start.

I haven’t got all that much yarn (about 35 grams, I think) so this piece is going to be pretty short. I’m thinking I might make buttonholes when I get to the other end, to make a little polo neck without the jumper. Pretty!