Two hats, no fruit

Today we take a break from our regularly scheduled programming of socks, sock yarns, and spinning sock yarn.  Last week’s knitting was very hat-focused.  Currently I have two hats on my to-do list.

First off, every fall I knit a child’s hat to donate as part of my registration fee for Knitters’ Day Out.  The hats go to Caps for Kids (a Craft Yarn Council program).  I peeked into my stash and came up with this:

My mom bought me this yarn at a market in Santa Fe.  It’s a heavy worsted weight, but she thought it was sock yarn (to be fair, she asked if it was sock yarn and the seller said “sure!” – not so good).  I know a little girl would like these colors (because when I started knitting this at a social gathering, little girls flocked to me), so I knit a plain old basic hat.  It came out a little big for a child, though, so I think I will full it a bit before sewing on the pom pom.  It’s not quite done, but it’s close.

The second hat is another donation, this time to the annual auction for an organization that is near and dear to my heart: Strawberry Hill Nature Preserve.  Sadly, I won’t be able to attend the auction this year due to a scheduling conflict.  I decided to donate something instead.  I’ve never done this before!  I’m going to recreate the Warm Portland Hat I made for my friend Ed last year:  I have enough yarn left over from the first hat.  I thought that a nature lover might appreciate this.  It’s made with Malabrigo Worsted, and the single-ply merino is soooooooo soft.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this hat is great for a bald man! I’m using an Estonian patent stitch technique that I learned at last year’s Knitters’ Day Out.  I love how it creates a very thick (but airy and lofty), reversible pattern: That’s what’s up with hats.  Next time, we will return to our regular sock knitting content.

Two pears, two pairs

Aren’t these pears adorable?  I should have put something in the field for scale – they are about the size of kiwi fruits.  Pears are coming into full season where I live.  Yum!

Somehow I haven’t reported much on the progress of two pairs of socks, but I finished them both this week.  First off: Orange Vanilla Socks, so named because they are mostly orange but the pattern is “plain vanilla.”  I started these on my way out of town and they made for great knitting while chatting with family. The yarn is Lana Grossa Meilenweit 100 Fantasy, one of those sturdy self-patterning German sock yarns.  I picked this ball up at Hill Country Weavers in Austin, TX, on a visit a few years ago.  These will be happy socks to reach for on cold grey days this winter.  I have a generous 26 g left from my 100 g ball.  I’m actually thinking of making little socks for my dining table chairs, like this:

(I saw those on the Juniper Moon blog.)  We have a hard floor under our dining table, which means lots of scraping chairs.  I put those adhesive chair pads on the legs, but they are always coming off.  So why not try some chair socks? 

I also finished the Jacob Cauchy Socks, which will be perfect with boots: The yarn is a Jacob/nylon blend I got at MDSW earlier this spring.  It is a 2-ply yarn, which meant it was pretty hard on my hands.  I knit it on a 2.25 needle (a little bigger than normal), but it was still painful.  The fabric is dense and I’m sure it will wear like iron, so these are socks for the ages, but I’m not eager to knit another pair out of this particular yarn.

I had to modify the pattern because this yarn is a little thicker than typical sock yarn.  I also made the socks longer than the pattern called for, since I had a very generous cake of yarn.  I didn’t knit the picot cuff the pattern called for, either, and fudged some ribbing instead.  I did the ribbing different on the 2nd sock than the first – can you see the difference in this photo? I learned that decreases disappear better if you put them in the purl columns instead of the knit columns!  (There are 55 stitches at the cast-on edge, and they reduce to 50 after about 4 inches.)

Next I need to turn my attention to a couple of hat projects.  But I’ll return to socks again soon.  Pam has picked a pattern for her socks – more on that later!

Daily Dose of Fiber – DC edition

Yesterday Kris and I steered the minivan south and went to Our Nation’s Capital (nod to Jeff) to visit our Friend in Fiber (and many other subjects), DAVE.  Dave graduated from Gettysburg a year ago May and has been teaching high school biology in Teach for America this past year.  We had a perfectly lovely day – quick trip to the local farmer’s market, jaunt to LYS#1 (A Tangled Skein in Hyattsville, MD), fabulous Eithiopian lunch at Dukem with a knitter-friend of Dave’s, LYS#2 (Looped in Dupont Circle), a swing by Teaism for Salty Oat cookies, then back to Dave’s for a coffee/cookie/knitting session on his roof with a killer view of the city.  It was so nice to catch up with him and find out how life is going for a recent graduate who took on one of the most challenging jobs possible.  Thanks for hosting us and showing us such a great time, Dave!  We’ll be back -perhaps for the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef display at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History later this fall?!

Miraculously, I didn’t buy any yarn.  I looked long and hard at the sock yarns at A Tangled Skein and found many yarns I almost bought, but none of them were available in a color that made me swoon, so I resisted.  I also spent a bit of time looking through two interesting books I’ve read about but haven’t yet seen in person:

• Around the World in Knitted Socks – I was especially intrigued by the Italian socks (Rav link), which feature the cuff edge and toe knit the typical way, but the rest of the sock is knit flat and long-wise in a wavy pattern.  Could be a good project for my beloved Felici yarn.  I was also taken with the English pattern, It’s Tea Time (Rav link).  Look at the detail around the gusset decrease.  Pretty!

 

• New England Knits – There has been a ton of blog chatter about this book, and with good reason.  I want to make the sweater on the cover one day.  There are many other enticing patterns in the book, too.  This is such a FALL knitting book – good timing for its publication!

 

Looped just opened two weeks ago and they are still getting yarn in.  They only had 3 types of sock yarn: Koigu (nope, can’t knit socks with that anymore – way too weak), Berroco Sock (nice basic yarn), and Alpaca Sox (I could have bought a skein if I’d been a little more in love with a color).  But we had a great time looking at many other Berroco and Rowan yarns we hadn’t seen in person before.  They had a fair bit of Malabrigo (including the new Twist variety).  Dave bought some Malabrigo for a hat project and some Soak samples to try.  I got a big bottle of Citrus Soak (I’m almost out).  Here are our purchases:

The Salty Oat cookies were really, really good.  Think “kettle corn concept applied to cookie format” and you’re halfway there.  I understand that knockoff recipes are online, and I just might have to try one.  I recommend swinging by Teaism for a bag of these if you’re in the neighborhood.

Great company, great day.  Thanks, Dave and Kris!

Polworth, Plied

Last weekend I got excited about my new sock yarn spinning project.  But as I thought ahead, I realized that I needed to clear some bobbins before proceeding much further.  I only have 4 bobbins for my Ladybug (someone asked me why I don’t just buy more – I may someday, but they are $36 each…).  The first singles for the new sock yarn were on one bobbin.  Another had the first half of the golden Polworth I spun on the spindle (I had to clear the spindle to spin the other half).  Another had some leftover singles from the purple 2-ply merino silk.  And the final bobbin was empty.

But… I need singles on 3 bobbins and a 4th empty bobbin on which to ply. 

So I returned my attention to the gold stuff.  I finished spinning it on the spindle at Knit Night on Wednesday.  Then I quickly ran it through the wheel (not adding too much twist, I hope) to get it onto a bobbin so I can ply it on the wheel.  I used this fancy shoe box contraption to hold the spindle: Then I realized…OOPS!  I just used my last empty bobbin. 

So I ended up hand winding the purple singles onto a short length of PVC pipe that I use as part of my homemade niddy noddy (boosted from my kids’ box of PVC fun – they build things out of it – think Tinker Toys).  Then I slid the PVC pipe onto my kate, and reminded myself how to Navajo ply.  Thank goodness for YouTube!  This time I used this video, which is very clear and just what I needed.  (Navajo ply is a chain ply technique that allows you to make a 3-ply yarn from singles on one bobbin – great way to use up those leftover bits of singles because you can use every last inch.)

I got another 33.5 yards of this pretty merino-silk and cleared my bobbin. I love how round the 3-ply yarn is compared to the 2-ply.  See the difference? 3-ply is on the left; 2-ply is on the right.  I might have to use this technique for an entire batch of singles sometime soon.  (But not the new 3-ply sock yarn, because I understand that the chain ply doesn’t work so well with certain long and/or wiry fibers, and mohair is one of them.)

Once I cleared that bobbin, I plied the gold stuff into this 2-ply yarn.  I go 259 yards out of 101 g: I had a tiny bit of singles left on one bobbin, which I promptly navajo-plied, and got so little it wasn’t even worth winding up.

Now I can proceed with the sock yarn.

I’m not unhappy with the gold stuff, but it’s somehow different from the yarn I spin entirely on the wheel.  Maybe the twist on my spindle-spun singles was less consistent?  I’m not sure.  The Polworth top was sooooo buttery and the yarn is less so.  It’s not rough and rustic, exactly, but nor is it buttery soft.  Learning curve is still on the way up, I guess!  (Spinners, speak up if you have wisdom on this, please.)

Circles

Earlier this week, I hastily employed a random number generator to select winners of the “thanks for voting for my socks” contest – but I haven’t had time to tell you all about them until now.  PAM (#3) wins the socks and HEIDI (#16) wins the jam!  I’ve been musing on how appropriate it is that they both got prizes, as we share many connections through yarn, knitting, Gettysburg, and libraries.  Will you indulge me as I stroll down memory lane?

I first met Pam when she started working at my library.  She moved to Gettysburg from somewhere in Maryland that was very near the Howard County Fairgrounds, which is how she knew about the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival.  When she and Dave became friends with Sweetie and me, they took us to the next Fest.  I’m pretty sure this was in 2001.  I was instantly smitten.  Sweetie caught me in a booth (which I now recognize as The Yarn Barn booth in the main exhibit hall) clutching a book about teaching kids to knit and some needles (wonder what size they were?).  She laughed and said I wasn’t going to learn to knit.  I wasn’t sure, so I put everything back.  Maybe it was just the wool fumes getting to me.  Anyway, something was triggered inside that day and before the next Fest rolled around, I took a beginning knitting class at The Mannings in nearby East Berlin.  The class was definitely in early 2002 – I was hugely pregnant with Boy 1 and developed an unconventional knitting technique based on resting the end of one needle on my big belly.  We went to the Fest again in 2002 (weeks before Boy 1 was born) but I honestly don’t remember if I bought any yarn.  My scrapbook doesn’t reveal any serious Fest activity until 2003, when Pam and Dave (who had since moved to Cleveland) returned for a visit over MDSW weekend.  Here is one of my scrapbook pages from that visit, when Boy 1 was almost 12 months old:That’s Pam in the red fleece jacket.  The scrapbook also says that I bought some Tess yarn to make Boy 1 a sweater (which turned out to be this one.   (Of course, I gave up scrapbooking at some point in order to devote full attention to knitting and spinning!)

Who knows how I would have made my way to knitting if it weren’t for Pam and Dave?

Heidi is someone I met through my local knitting group.  A mutual friend brought her along once.  She got awfully busy with her kids and homeschooling and stopped coming to group, so I sort of lost track of her.  For a while, I saw more of her husband, who was on the local public library board at the same time I was (actually, he’s now the president!).  Time passed.  Then one day, I saw her in my campus dining hall, and it turns out she started working part-time at Gettysburg College.  Instant reconnect!  We now have lunch regularly and talk about knitting, among many other things.  Here’s Heidi looking pretty excited about her jar of jam (she chose blackberry-peach).  And where is she?  In Musselman Library. Libraries, knitting, yarn, Gettysburg, Pam, and Heidi… these are a few of my favorite things!

Thanks again to everyone who voted for Socks 12 in the Summer of Color contest.  I’ll keep you posted on what type of socks Pam picks and how they come along.  I plan to have them done by Christmas at the latest and hopefully sooner.  First, I need to whip out a hat for Knitters’ Day Out (donating a hat is part of the registration fee), and I can’t lose sight of a pair of Christmas socks for my mom, either.  I might reprise the Pansy design with another yarn.

Skinny enough?

…so I’m still trying to handspin a true sock yarn.  Here’s what I’m looking for:

• 3 plies
• fingering weight
• some nylon or mohair (aka “nature’s nylon”) content for strength

I’m using the 75/25 BFL (Bluefaced Leicester)/Mohair blend I got in Bedford:

BFL is a longwool breed (the staple length is 5-12”).  Clara Parkes’ The Knitter’s Book of Wool says:

Bluefaced Leicester fiber represents an ideal compromise among longwools: just the right amount of length, a crimp with open but smaller curls, a fine fiber diameter, and a silky demiluster with exquisite drape.  This means you can use Bluefaced Leicester for just about anything, from socks and sweaters to beautifully draping lace shawls.  The fiber also takes dye brilliantly – a good thing, because Bluefaced Leicester yarn has recently become a staple of many handdyers’ yarn offerings. (p.62)

The longer fibers + the addition of mohair should make this yarn super strong, a good thing for socks that have to live inside our humid shoes and endure endless friction.

In order to make a 3-ply fingering weight yarn, one has to spin the singles pretty darn fine.  I’m using the smallest groove on my new whorl for the first time – the ratio is 16:1.  (That means the flyer rotates 16 times for every revolution of the drive wheel.)  Here’s what it looks like on the wheel: I am being very studious and working from a sample card for this project (the card really is pink).  Here you can see the singles yarn (far right) and what a 2-ply from these singles would look like (created by letting the singles double back on itself – in the middle)).  The green yarn on the left is Shelridge Farm Soft Touch Heather in color Willow, which I had out to swatch for the Treetop Socks I intend to start one of these days.  The green yarn is the size I’m aiming for. I’m definitely closer than I’ve ever been.  Now I need to spin spin spin to see where this ends up!

The votes are in and it’s a win!

While I have been traveling to Kansas (there’s no place like home…), swamped at work, and not posting on my blog, many of you have been VOTING - and for that I sincerely thank you.  My Fjordland socks won the Summer of Color contest!  Check out Allison’s post to see all the winners! I really have my mother to thank for this win.  While in Kansas, I mentioned to her that I entered this contest and wanted her to vote for me.  She said “oh, email me the info and I’ll have the members of my quilting group vote. Lots of them admire the socks you knit for me.”  I’m not sure if she contacted just quilters or the whole Fabric & Fiber crowd at Sun City Texas….but I think every single one of them voted – plus a few bridge and bunko players, to boot.  If only my father was a big emailer, we could have engaged the golf contingent, too!  In fact, when it became clear to me how many votes Mom was rustling up, I got off my duff and emailed everyone who might possibly be not annoyed by an email asking for a vote.  It was pretty fun, actually.So fun, in fact, that I’m moved to sponsor my own contest.  If you voted for Socks 12 in the Summer of Color contest (be honest, folks, you know who you are!), leave a comment on this post to enter to win a pair of socks handknit by me for you.  I’ll conduct a sock interview (putting my reference librarian skills to use) and we’ll come up with a yarn/pattern combo that is to your liking.  Enter by midnight on Tuesday, August 17 – I’ll use a random number generator to pick a winner.  Make sure your comment leaves me enough info so I know how to reach you (shoutout to Sun City)!

In other knitting news, I think I doubled the length of the butternut scarf (this was my airplane knitting).  This isn’t a great photo because it’s hard to take good photos of scarves in progress, but here it is:I also started a new plain vanilla sock in a self-striping yarn, suitable for knitting while chatting with family.  I made it to the heel by the time I arrived home (it’s almost done now but I have no visual documentation!): I also scored a beautiful skein of sock yarn at Wildflower Yarns in Manhattan – this is Berroco Ultra Alpaca Fine (50% wool, 20% alpaca, 30% nylon) in color 1275, which has the most wonderful name: Pea Soup Mix.  I haven’t worked with Ultra Alpaca Fine before: I hardly knit a stitch this past weekend, though, because it’s berry season (my favorite farm).  When berries are in, you pick:  And when the berries are picked, you make jam: I branched out some this year.  In addition to the usual raspberry-blackberry jam, I also did a blackberry-peach combo (with cinnamon and lime) and something called Peach Melba jam (which is 4 parts peach to 1 part raspberry and results in the most amazing pinkish orange color).  The peaches this year are so good, one of the few benefits of a too-dry summer (my favorite peach place).  I got on a roll on Sunday and finished about 3 dozen jars.  Mmmmmm.

And that’s enough for today!  Now, I’m going to settle in with my Simply Sock Yarn colorcards and think about which 4 colors might work best in the Mad for Plaid socks.

Thanks again to the 114 people who voted for Socks 12.  If I ever run for public office, I’m hiring my mom to be my campaign manager!