Definitely the Year of the Hat

I didn't really plan for 2021 to be Year of the Hat, but that is how it's shaping up so far. After finishing Daedalus, from Woolly Wormhead's Imperceptions collection, I rested my hands for 12 whole days. 

12 days of no knitting at all - it was so disconcerting!!! 

I decided it wasn't making my hands better, so I broke my fast by casting on another design in the series. Meet Circe:

I picked these colors from my sock yarn stash. They remind me of moss or lichen on rock, one of Mother Nature's perfect and beautiful combinations. The greenish-gold yarn is leftover from a pair of fingerless mitts, and I broke into an unused skein for the gray yarn.

This design was a little more complicated than Daedalus. First, note the braid between the ribbing and the main part of the hat. Also, the gorgeous labyrinthine design is achieved by moving the start-of-round on almost every round (just by one stitch). It's really ingenious and I love the result. Plus, I busted a bit more stash!

This kind of stranded colorwork REALLY benefits from a nice, long soak in wool wash. Here is the hat after finishing but before blocking - definitely lumpier and bumpier than the finished version:

Circe doesn't have a home yet. I'm sure its owner will reveal themself to me.

Partway through knitting Circe, I realized that I really wanted my ebook to be a physical book. The ebook collection contains a lot of reference material on techniques (like the lateral braid) that would be handy to have in print. I don't like swiping through a pdf on my tablet while knitting. I decided to have my campus shop print and bind the Imperceptions ebook along with another Woolly Wormhead collection called Elemental into one handy, spiral-bound book for personal use. The print shop did a great job. (Local folks, they take personal jobs and their work is great!) 

While I plan to return to the remaining designs in Imperceptions, I knew it was time to begin an Elemental hat. These are completely different. They are worked flat and knit side-to-side; there will be grafting in the end. The organic shapes are created with German short rows. The specified yarn is DK weight. DK is not a weight I typically buy, so I splurged a little and bought some Buoy DK on sale from Hipstrings in Pittsburgh. They are known for their interesting fiber blends - this wool blend is 37.5% Blue Faced Leicester, 37.5% Shetland, and 25% Manx Loaghtan. I'm making the Toph hat. Here's what it looks like after one pattern repeat:

You can see the provisional cast-on in blue yarn at the bottom. I will work this pattern eight times before grafting. The top of the hat is on the left, the brim is on the right. It's fun to make something so different. I will have enough red yarn left over to be the contrast color on another hat, and I have a full skein of a bluish-green to pair it with on another design in the book. Hats for 2021, who saw that coming?!??

I will leave you with something hat-adjacent that is making me very happy right now. I bought one of those shoe organizers that you hang on a closet door and put it inside the coat closet by the front door. This is where all our winter accessories now live - scarves, hats, mittens and gloves. I am so pleased by how easy it is to see everything and grab just the right piece. I can't believe it took over 20 years of living in this house to make this improvement.

I got an organizer made out of fabric rather than plastic, as plastic always get brittle and breaks, leaving sharp edges that would threaten our knitwear. I LOVE IT.

Tomorrow the calendar turns over to March, the month we all started staying home last year. I'm definitely feeling the encroaching anniversary. I'm happy to report that my parents have received both of their vaccination doses.

Weaving and learning

I first took weaving classes with Liz Gipson at the 2019 Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival (which, now that I think about it, was the last time it was held in person... and 2021 will also be virtual). I've considered myself to be her student ever since. She has an excellent online school for rigid heddle weaving, the Yarnworker School of Weaving. And she hosts quarterly Weave-Alongs those who want to expand their skills. 

The Winter 2021 Weave-Along just kicked into gear, and it's a big one. The project is a Ruana (kind of like a poncho with a split front) and the skills are doubleweave and colorwork. I ordered the yarn in late December to make sure it would arrive in time - this is Brown Sheep Prairie Spun DK, and American yarn from Nebraska.

Liz recommended choosing 3 neutrals with good value contrast (mine are Half and Half, Parchment, and Owl Grey) and 2 accent colors (mine are Lost Lake and Misty Mountain). I wound my yarn, printed my pattern, and patiently awaited the video support for warping week!

Doubleweave is two layers of fabric, so it's a lot of warp threads. I weighed down my loom with these trusty old textbooks from college.

You might notice some pieces of blue tape on the floor. These were extra insurance so that I would notice if the loom moved. I didn't want the length of my warp threads to change during the process. HOWEVER, the surface I had my pegs clamped to on the other end of the warp moved, so my warp was "foreshortened" on one side despite the influence of Shakespeare and Chaucer. This general diagonal slant on the ends should not be there!

Also, I missed up on one warp thread and passed it across the back of the heddle rather than the back apron rod. I re-threaded it and hung it with a weight (an S-hook), which you can see dangling down the back. I threaded all my slots and holes according to the pattern, and then I was ready to tie onto the front apron rod. So many ends! I worked really hard to keep my tension even as I worked across the warp. Little did I realize that I was pulling the yarns quite tightly, and they were rubbing against my pinkie fingers in a bad way. It seems unbelievable that I didn't feel this while it was happening, but I really didn't. This is what I did to myself - a true weaving injury:

Here's the loom all tied up and ready to weave:

Friends, I do not recommend scraping the skin off the inside of a knuckle joint. The healing process is very slow, because bending the finger reopens the scabs many times a day. Drying one's hands after washing them is agony, which is why I had damp hands for a while... and that just leads to extremely dry skin in this weather. Luckily I only needed to use hand sanitizer a few times this past week; it was (predictably) very painful. Here is how my fingers look one full week after the injury - definitely better but most definitely not completely healed. I'm sure this is partly due to constant hand use, but also partly due to age (I know skin takes longer to heal as we get older).

But yet, I am weaving. Here you can see the beginning of the striped section that will form the front of the Ruana.

The fold of the doubled cloth is on the left side of the loom:

And the two layers are separate on the right side of the loom:

This is definitely a skill-builder for me. I've only done doubleweave once before (in this bag), but the project was so small I hardly had time to lock in the concepts. This one is a lot bigger. I'm here for the learning.

Herdwick and Black Welsh Mountain - Breed School 2.0

I recently finished the January fiber for Breed School 2.0, and realized I hadn't shared the December fiber yet. Can I blame it on pandemic time?

Both breeds were new-to-me, which is so fun and exactly why you join a breed club. December was Herdwick, which is the sheep that Beatrix Potter raised in the chilly, wet hills of the Lake District. Herdwick have multi-coated fleeces that contain different types of fiber: a soft undercoat, guard hairs, and "heterotypic hairs" which actually change consistency with the season. They can be wooley or hairy, depending on the time of year. And there's also kemp! None of these like to be separated from the others, so I didn't even try (nor did the mill that processed the fleece). 

Another fun fact about Herdwick sheep is that they are "hefted" to the land where they are born. They don't leave. They won't leave. They don't need fences to stay where they are. When farms in this part of England are sold, the sheep stay with them. They are called "landlord flocks." The more you know!

I made four samples, and decided to spin the rest long draw from the fold on a larger pulley (7:1). I had to concentrate on slowing down my drawback rate so that the fiber wouldn't fall apart. This was good to practice. I think I used some of the same moves I learned on the Gotland fiber last year.

One thing that was very clear from the start is that this fiber likes to fall apart. It shed SO much while spinning that I had to vacuum my wheel area every second spinning session. (I meant to take a photo of the mess, but forgot.) And the morning after I wet finished my yarn (which included some "thwacking" of the skein against the counter), there were Herdwick hairs all over the kitchen. One even made its way into the cake stand, under the dome. At least I knew what it was when I saw a stiff white hair in the chocolate cake!

My finished, 2-ply skein weighs 98 grams and is 232 yards. The WPI is 9, which I could characterize as an aran weight yarn. You can really see the white and black hairs in this close-up photo. They will not be tamed!

The yarn is quite rough, thanks to several of the coats. It would be suitable for a rug. I think I'll weave some "mug rugs" on my Cricket loom come summer. I'll wait until summer, because I think this would be a good project to work on outdoors (because of all the shedding). The yarn should shed less than the fiber, but still.

The January fiber is Black Welsh Mountain, which is one of several breeds in the Welsh Mountain family (and reportedly the softest one). Sasha characterized it as "down-like," which might explain why I liked it so much. I am developing a real soft spot for the down breeds. It was a very deep brown (this is undyed, like all the Breed School fiber), with a 2-4" staple length, and kind of slippery. I only made 3 samples this time:

To my complete surprise, my favorite was #2: short forward draft with twist in the drafting zone. I have never chosen this approach before - ever! (Never say never, right?) Perhaps it worked this time because I was using a slower pulley than usual (10.5:1), and it happened to work just right with this staple length. So my final skein is SFD w twist, 2-ply. My yardage on the skein winder was 294 (I didn’t re-measure after finishing to see if the circumference changed) and the skein is a plump 131 grams with 10 WPI... so worsted weight. Here are the singles as I was working on them:

The only thing I would do differently next time has to do with the wet finishing. I did my usual soak with Eucalan and the water was really dirty, so I did a second round. The water was still quite dirty, so I pulled out the Unicorn Power Scour and washed it again. I fear this took things too far. I could hear a difference in the fiber when I dried it in a towel and snapped it before hanging it up. So I gave it ANOTHER soak a few days later with Unicorn Fiber Rinse (basically fabric softener), which helped it recover a bit. My finished skein is pretty darn nice, if I do say so myself:

So to review, here are the fibers that have been part of Sheepspot's Breed School 2.0 club which started last July:

• July 2020 - Targhee
• August 2020 - Gotland
• September 2020 - Whitefaced Woodland
  
• October 2020 - Southdown
• November 2020 - Perendale
• December 2020 - Herdwick
• January 2021 - Black Welsh Mountain
  
• February 2021 - today is the 15th, which is breed reveal day - and it's Rambouillet! I haven't received mine in the mail yet.

So far, the new-to-me breeds are: Gotland, Herdwick, and Black Welsh Mountain. Sheep are endlessly fascinating...

2021 - Year of the Hat?

So far this year, the only thing that seems to fall off my knitting needles is hats. As the end of the previous presidential administration hurtled toward a dramatic and impossibly stressful close, I found myself uninterested in anything complicated. So after finishing a reversible Felici hat, I simply cast on another. I used the Meridian colorway on both sides, but worked helix stripes with other Felici leftovers. I picked blue-ish for one side and red-ish for the other. Here is the result (remember, this is one hat with a double thickness of fabric):

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I made this hat a little bigger than the previous one - the CO number is 144. It looks great! This hat hasn't quite found its owner yet. 

By the time January 23 rolled around (post-inauguration), I felt I was ready for something slightly more zippy. I purchased the Imperceptions (Ravelry link) hat pattern collection a few months ago, and I was itching to try one of these designs. Woolly Wormhead is known for her clever hat designs, and this is no exception. There are 5 patterns in the collection, each with a different type of labyrinthine design.

The pattern calls for fingering or light sport weight yarn. I started swatching with some leftover Elsbeth Lavold Silky Wool, but it wasn't quite right. So I went to the sock yarn cabinet and picked out two shades of blue with high contrast. The bright blue is left over from Dave's sheep socks (it was the sky), and the dark blue was used in my On the Spice Market shawl. I loved working with these yarns again.

I made Daedalus, which seems to be the first pattern in the collection (but I'm not 100% sure about that). The design is worked with stranded colorwork, and you can see that often there are as many as 15 stitches of the same color in a round. This means one has to catch the floats on the reverse so you don't end up with big loops that catch on things on the inside of the hat. Woolly includes instructions for catching floats without twisting the yarns. I'm pretty sure this is a technique I've learned in a class before, but I didn't use it enough to lock it in. This project really helped me lock it in! 

One alarming thing happened while I was knitting: I found some telltale breaks and gnawed spots in the dark blue yarn. This is a sign of the DREADED CARPET BEETLE. 

I found no carcasses or actual bugs, though. Also, I didn't pay attention to which ziploc bag the yarn came out of, so I have no idea which yarns to treat with extra suspicion in the future. As soon as I finished the hat (which only took 6 days), I put it - and the remaining yarn - in the freezer for a few days. 

I'm not truly worried about an outbreak, but coming across one of these breaks is so disappointing. I think that from now on, whenever I use a ball of sock yarn that is already wound into a cake, I will re-wind it prior to working with it. This will help me gauge whether there has been insect activity. 

I really enjoyed this project and intend to make others in the collection. Daedalus only took about a third of a skein in each color, and I used leftovers - I can do that again. The only thing holding me back is a little experiment I've been doing. This is going to come as a shock so sit down.

Friends, I have not knit a single stitch in the last 8 days.

I've been having more pain in my right arm, and I decided to take a break to see if it helped. I know that mousing at my computer is the real problem, but knitting uses the same muscles. I can't quit computing as it's a huge part of my job, but I can take a break from knitting. Has it worked? So far, no - but I've also shoveled snow several times during the past week, which strains the same muscles. So I don't know if this will have any healing effect or not.

In the meantime, I've been spinning every day - but not to excess. I've been gathering materials for the Yarnworker Winter WAL, including printing and reading the pattern and winding my yarn (warping begins on 2/11!). I've been reading a lot. And sometimes, I just watch TV... without doing anything with my hands at the same time. This is really unusual and it has taken me some time to get used to it.