Category Archives: Knitting, Spinning, & Weaving

How Is It December?

This year has flashed by. I’m not panicking about it, just feeling slightly sad. Owlet’s post for last month is still in draft form, and her next one is due tomorrow (ah ha ha, that’s not going to happen). For all the time I’m spending at the computer, not much of it has been writing in any form.

I’ve been tangled in horrible paycheque luck these past three months. The most recent snafu is that accounting has recently discovered that no, Canadians can not in fact be paid via direct deposit, which is a complete contradiction to what they said when I checked with them in early October. The direct deposit option was being promoted as a quicker way to be paid, and after the really, really, really late payment earlier this fall, it had sounded like a good idea. Everyone is horrified and apologetic, and I’m waiting to be paid. The accounting department is swamped because two of their full-time employees retired this summer, and the new employees are making mistakes and working more slowly. There’s not much I can do except wait. Which is stressful on its own, of course, because not only can I no longer schedule an expected payment date into my agenda and work out a household budget with any confidence as I used to (it used to be four and a half weeks from the Friday of the week my invoice was sent through, like clockwork), but I can’t even expect the payment process to be flawless (other than slow). I’m sure it will get better… eventually.

I’ve been prebooked to copyedit another book on math, which is great; not only do I already have a stylesheet for the other book in the series, but my December work schedule is taken care of. I’m also slowly working through a private editing project of picture books, which is fun but challenging on how to schedule it into my other work, as well as how to think about it/approach it and put my thoughts down on paper for the author.

I recently applied for a copyediting position with a quarterly magazine incredibly relevant to my interests. The editing sample they asked for consisted of working over a five-page article, which took me a day and a half because it needed a lot more work than the example they’d provided as a guideline, and I was constantly referring to the house stylesheet and making decisions in a bit of a murky situation. However, a zillion other people also applied (many non-professionals as well as professionals). Yesterday they announced the position had been filled (by a professional), and that they’d been spoiled for choice with a lot of perfect people, but they could only choose one. I am moving forward, disappointed but not devastated, assuming I am one of the perfect people who didn’t get hired. It would have been more lucrative than my ongoing freelance job with the publisher, and the work would have come at four predictable, reliable times per year, so I could have organized my schedule around them. But it wasn’t to be.

Our fall concert went well last Saturday. We brought Owlet, and it was her first non-Canada Day concert. As always, I wish I’d done better, and hoped the people sitting closest to me weren’t hearing the sludgy mess I made of quick finger-twisting bits. Our next concert is in March and we’ll be doing Beethoven’s seventh, which is very exciting for the celli and bass. Up next for me is our Christmas studio recital, which is a bit later than usual this year, on December 21. I’m working on a transcription of Wagner’s “Song to the Evening Star” from Tannhäuser which is asking a lot of me in the letting-go department.

The furnace went on the fritz a couple of weeks ago, necessitating repair. We had the money, but it meant that the optometrist appointment and new glasses I was planning on didn’t happen, and isn’t going to for a while. (See above re. unreliable payment schedule.)

I think that’s about it. Knitting is at a standstill, because the shawl I’m working on is now at the 400+ stitches per row point, and there is always something else that has to be done instead of knitting a row. I’ve spun a couple of yarns, but I’ll save those for another post.

Spinning October 2014

Spinzilla kind of tripped me up. I’ve been production spinning, and it took me a little while to get back into the spinning for fun groove.

The Mazurka prototype is chugging along. It’s a delightful little wheel. I ordered the upgrade parts for it, so now I have an unfinished Minstrel/standard flyer plus the Minstrel front maiden. HRH and I just need to figure out how to kitbash those into the current mother-of-all setup. The MOA may even be long enough, which means it wouldn’t need a cap or extension! It turns out the new flyer will fit into the hole in the existing back maiden (woohoo! I was concerned about the clearance for the flyer arms!), but the height of the new Minstrel front maiden doesn’t correspond. And the new maiden has a metal bolt through it all for inserting through the MOA bar; it’s not a peg, the way the existing front maiden on the Mazurka prototype seems to be, so we can’t just cut it down to size. We need to mull it over.

I’m still spinning the same blue/green rolags on it, the last 2 oz to the 2 oz I spun during Spinzilla. I think I have just about 10 grams left to go. (Pardon the uneven loading of the bobbin; I was watching a movie with Sparky this weekend and lost track of switching hooks.)

Last week I wanted to spin something on my big Symphony, too, so I pulled out a lovely braid of Merino from Daybreak Dyeworks. I won this on the Daybreak Dyeworks team during Tour de Fleece this past summer. I rarely spin Merino, actually, and I’m having a lot of fun spinning longdraw from the end of this top. This particular Merino is really spongy and crimpy, so longdraw is pretty much effortless. I’m planning to chain-ply it when it’s done. It’s going to poof up beautifully for some very snuggly worsted weight, I expect.

That looks awfully lemon-lime, I know. There’s blue in the braid as well, it’s just not visible in this layer of singles:

And last but not least, what could this be, that has just arrived via our terribly nice parcel postman?

Oh, just a truly lovely Texasjeans Tibetan-style support spindle, whorl in maple burl with a curly maple shaft, weighing 22 grams and measuring 10 inches. I scored it in a destash last week. I’ve been wanting to try support spindling for ages, since drop spindling tires me out very quickly (thanks so much for that, fibro). I also have a Russian-style support spindle by Miss Lucy P in lingum vitae coming my way, also scored in a destash. All things come to those who wait! I’m still rather stunned that I scored both of these at a time when I actually had the money to do it. The only reason I sent “yes I want to buy this is it still available” queries for both was because I thought for sure I’d lose out on one, if not each. However, the beauty of the fibre community is that if I don’t like them (weight, balance, spin speed, whatever) I can simply offer them up for sale in the same forums these were offered in originally, to pass them along to the next person. I may do that with one of my two drop spindles, actually, since I rarely use them.

My Spinzilla 2014 Experience

(This blog post has been reconstructed, thanks to a server failure that lost a week of uploads and updates.)

I mentioned that I signed up for Spinzilla a couple of months ago. This year it ran from 12:01 of 6 October through 11:59 of 12 October. Things went well for the first few days; I spun and plied almost twice as much beaded yarn that I needed to make up the shortfall I’d discovered at the end of the Tour de Fleece this past July. It garnered me 1125 yards for Team Kromski (score yardage is the length of each single in the ply, plus the plied length, because yarn has passed through your wheel/spindle that many times. It maxes out at 3 plies, though.) Then I had a crazy couple of days of packing and finishing a work project six days ahead of schedule, because it was due the night we got back. I took my new-to-me Mazurka prototype and a 4-oz box of rolags along on our trip to southern Ontario, so I could get some spinning done there. (The Mazurka fits beautifully on its back in the trunk, along with all our family trip paraphernalia.)

I spun two ounces the Friday evening and Saturday. The Mazurka prototype only has one bobbin, so I wound the singles off into a centre-pull ball with my ball winder, and plied from that centre-pull ball on Sunday evening. (There was a mental disconnect for a while regarding that plying step; I was stuck in the ‘spin all the singles’ mentality, so was planning to spin the second single next, but I finally realised that plying that one single back on itself would net me more score yardage, because I could spin the second single afterward anyway and add that yardage as well, as a kind of bonus.) I had to wait till I was home to measure it, though, because I had neither my niddy-noddy nor my skeinwinder with me. I wound the plied yarn off into another centre-pull ball for storage, and started spinning a second single that I could add to the total spun yardage. In my timezone, Spinzilla ended Sunday night at 23:59; nothing done after that counted. I spun till ten o’clock Sunday evening, then went to bed, figuring that what was done was done, and there wasn’t much else I could do, especially since we had to be up bright and early and mostly coherent for the drive home the next day.

For posterity:

Spinzilla final yarns, 14 October 2014
Spinzilla yarn #1: 2 oz pewter beaded merino/bamboo, 2-ply, 28 wpi, 375 yards = 1125 Spinzilla yards
Spinzilla yarn #2: 2 oz blue and green woolen-spun Corriedale/silk, 2-ply, approx. 10 wpi, 214 yards = 642 Spinzilla yards
extra: 25 yards of singles, spun from the second half of the rolags
TOTAL = 1792 yards (!!!)

Am I happy with my Spinzilla performance? Not completely. I’m impressed by how much I did manage to get done, fitting it in around work that had to be delivered ahead of deadline, doctor appointments and medical tests, and travelling. I wanted to do a whole lot more, but my final yardage managed to break the mile mark (!!!), totalling 1792 yards. (A mile is 1760 yards, in case you were curious.) So while I’m proud and astonished by that feat, which I was fairly sure wasn’t going to happen, I’d have been happier with more. I am happy on two particular counts, though: I have enough of my beaded yarn to knit the Swinging Triangles shawl, and I’ve proven that the Mazurka can travel with me. We’re still in a rocky relationship regarding double drive, improvised scotch tension, and draw-in — I’m satisfied by my singles, but the plying seems very loose no matter what adjustments I make — but practice will make perfect.

Meet the Mazurka

Among the work, and the starting school, and the work, and the preschool stuff, and the work…

I got a new wheel.

But you just SOLD one! I hear some of you cry. Yes, I did. I sold the Baynes castle wheel I got in May 2013 to Cats this past Easter. And then I discovered that I really missed having a small upright I could move around with me. This was painfully obvious in August when I had the kids home full-time and had to be downstairs with Owlet if she was watching a movie and Sparky didn’t want to. I have to be doing something with my hands, apparently, and knitting doesn’t fully work in that respect because I need undivided attention to knit. And this summer also demonstrated to me that spindles are nice, but frustrating in their slowness and their physical requirements. (I’m looking into supported spindles to combat that latter issue; we’ll see what happens.)

This summer my fellow spinners and I in the Kromski group at Ravelry got into discussing the very first spinning wheel produced by Kromski, pre-1999. We tend to call it the Mazurka prototype, because the design was overhauled and then presented as their first mass-production spinning wheel, the Mazurka. It’s a single-treadle, double-drive castle wheel. The prototype has a different flyer and bobbin, but it’s fully operational. You just can’t use the modern bobbins. (FWIW, the redesigned Mazurka was retired in 2011 and is out of production.)

We were trying to problem solve for a spinner who owned one, and whose flyer had broken in two. Now, it’s not generally a good idea to repair a broken flyer; a repaired wooden unit revolving at high speed under tension runs the risk of becoming a dangerous high-speed projectile (with pointy hooks made from nails sticking out!). We started trying to figure out the differences between the old and the new Mazurkas, and got measurements of the new flyers, trying to figure out if they’d fit on the prototype’s mother-of-all (for reference, if you’re a collector looking to upgrade your prototype: they won’t fit at all; the new flyers are almost two inches longer than the prototype’s flyer, and the clearance between the shaft and the arms is different, too. Also, modern whorls won’t fit because the threaded part on the prototype’s shaft is too short to allow the modern double whorls to screw fully on. You’re welcome.) And as we asked questions of one another, someone in the Netherlands popped up and said she had a prototype, and didn’t use it; she was willing to sell it, and at a ridiculously low price.

Well, yes, of course I was interested. I gave someone in the UK first rights of refusal, and then started negotiating. We were both busy, and I was waiting on one of the freelance cheques for a crazy project I’d done in late spring. She was worried I’d balk at the cost of shipping, but as others in the group agreed, her price for the wheel was so low that even taking international shipping of a spinning-wheel-shaped object into account, it was an awesome deal.

So then my cheque was late, and the safest and cheapest way to pay her was by bank transfer so I did an international money transfer via my bank to her bank, and then there was no news about the transfer resolving at the other end, and there were health issues… but it all worked out. Then I got to track my parcel from NL to CAN, which was very exciting. And then, a day or two before I expected it, my friendly parcel guy rang my doorbell at ten in the morning and gave me this:

I couldn’t let myself open it right away, because I had so much work to do that day! I let myself open it half an hour before I had to go get the kids. So I unpacked and assembled it into this:

The first couple of days were frustrating. A couple of the hooks are a bit rough and the single would break on them. It only runs in double drive, and the difference in circumference between the bobbin groove and the whorl/pulley isn’t very big, so the take-up/draw-in wasn’t as strong as I like for the spinning I do. On a double-drive wheel, that’s adjusted via raising or lowering the entire MOA assembly to put more tension on the doubled drive band, and even moving it incrementally I couldn’t get a setting I liked. I rigged a weighted line scotch brake to run over the bobbin groove to spin in single drive/scotch tension, but even that ended up being frustrating. I finally changed the drive band from the fuzzy hemp to the nice waxed cotton I bought to replace the drive band on my Symphony, and everything clicked.

She doesn’t have a maker’s mark, which is a bit disappointing, but not unexpected; in the five-ish wheels from our discussion board sample, only one does. She has a distaff, which is exciting; I’ve never had a wheel with a distaff before. I was excited for one afternoon, after which I took it off, since it was in the way of replacing drive and brake bands and going up and down stairs with it. And it’s so light! I can carry it around with a couple of fingers of one hand! The Baynes was much heavier.

Now, having been deep in discussion about other people’s Mazurka prototypes, I was already in the right headspace to carry on thinking about updating this one so that I could switch bobbins between the two Kromski wheels. HRH took a good look at the mother of all, and comparing my modern flyer from the Symphony with it, we could see that it would be too short. So I’ve ordered a modern unfinished flyer and front maiden, and HRH is working on a cap for the current MOA to extend it. It would be difficult to replace it entirely, because the MOA has a threaded hole at the back for the wooden tension screw that raises or lowers it. Reproducing that threaded wooden hole to match the screw would be harder to do, and HRH doesn’t have the tools to do it. And since it will accept the new double flyer whorls, I can use my extra Symphony ones. I’ll put in some eye hooks for a proper scotch tension brake, too.

She is quite charming, and I like her very much, even before the upgrade. I’m currently spinning dark green Corriedale top on her to make a worsted yarn to knit Sparky a Link hat.

General Update

Let’s use a numbered list! Those are fun!

1. We are settling in nicely with the Cruze. It is still red. HRH drove it to Pennsylvania and back last weekend for Clan Camping, and apparently it handled like a dream. We’re getting insanely good gas mileage. I think, apart from the trip to PA (where they also filled up a lot less than expected), we have put gas in the car all of twice, neither a full tank.

2. I am currently copyediting a 600-page, 300-recipe French cookbook. This has had three major effects so far: One, I want to slow cook everything (as I said the other day to Daphne and Ceri, “mijoter TOUTES LES VIANDES!”); two, my desire to drink wine has increased proportionally to the direction to pour wine in every second recipe; and three, my desire to cook everything in butter has also increased. It is a pretty tight schedule, since it’s about twice the length of a standard manuscript but I have the same timeframe in which to complete it. HRH is back at work so my daytime work hours are reduced with both kids home, which doesn’t help with the stress levels. But I am in the home stretch, with less than 100 pages to go before my deadline this week.

3. I registered for this year’s Spinzilla, spinning for Team Kromski. This is a week-long event hosted by the TNNA (AKA The National Needlearts Association, specifically the Spinning and Weaving Group) designed “to motivate spinners to learn new skills, take risks, and spin their hearts out. It is also a fundraiser for the NeedleArts Mentoring Program (NAMP). NAMP connects adult mentors with school age children to teach the needle arts — spinning, weaving, knitting, crochet, and stitching.” The basic goal is for teams try to spin as much combined length as they can. Plied yarns count for the length of the singles used to make them. In other words, if you end up with a 300-yard three-ply yarn, it counts for 900 yards of spinning. (Turns out the plied length counts, too, because you ran it through the wheel to ply it! So a 300-yard three-ply yarn would count for 1200 yards!) This is mildly insane because Canadian Thanksgiving happens during that week, but we shall see what kind of game plan I can draw up.

4. I read The Apprentices by Maile Meloy, which is the sequel to The Apothecary. It wasn’t as good, unfortunately. I also recently read Indexing by Seanan McGuire, which was fantastic. I got my copy of Beth Smith’s Spinner’s Book of Fleece book last week, and when this project is handed in I intend to sit down and enjoy it from cover to cover.

5. I will also enjoy trying out my new hand cards after this project is done!

I got paid for a crazy project I did a month and a half ago (recently it has been all huge or crazy projects, which is good for the bank account, not so good for the stress levels) and I took some of that money and bought a pair from Colette at her spinning studio. I also picked up some pink and purple Corriedale that Owlet fell in love with, so I shall practice carding by blending some Tencel with each of them and knitting her wee socks and mittens.

6. I forgot to mention that HRH painted the bathroom at the end of July. I came home from a week with my parents and the shabbiness of it finally made me snap. He scraped off the white paint on the wall soap dish (who paints a soap dish?), replaced the soggy MDF shelf above the sink, and painted the dark grey walls a lovely spring green. I love it so much more.

7. I bought a new computer monitor on sale a week or so ago. It’s a 20″, and it is astonishing. I can easily have three or four documents open on my screen and flip through all of them easily. I have no idea how I survived with a 15″ for so long.

That’s life in a nutshell right about now.

Thoughts on Handspun and Socks

My friend Stephanie recently pinned a lovely photo of half-finished socks knit with handspun and added a note saying, “I really want to knit socks with my handspun. What is stopping me?”

I am still a baby sock knitter. As in new to it, not a knitter of socks for babies, although Owlet found a bag of pink Corriedale at “the knitting”, which is what she calls the spinning and weaving studio we go to, and decided she wanted socks made from it. “Socks, and mittens!” she added enthusiastically. There was another nice icy lavender beside it, so I think we will make a striped yarn and go that route.

But yes, I am still new to socks, having knit only seven of them. (Yes, that’s an odd number, I know. There was that lone Gryffindor striped sock for Sparky that was a just-fit, so I knit two of a bigger size.) And while I love the idea of using my handspun for socks, I’m moderately terrified. What if I don’t have enough? (That’s pretty much a given, actually, unless I plan to do heels and toes in a contrast yarn, which, having written it out, sounds perfectly reasonable.) Handspun is precious, right? It’s handmade, and something you want to keep and use for an item that will last a long time, like scarves or shawls or mittens. And socks wear out quickly, especially ones made with soft handspun with no nylon or bamboo or Tencel in it to provide some resistance to abrasion. And then there’s the fact that tightly plied handspun is best for socks, again to better withstand abrasion. My handspun is rarely plied tightly enough for ideal sock yarn. Finally, a three-ply structure, either traditional or chain-plied, is best, and most of my handspun is two-ply.

Oh, so many reasons to not use my handspun. So I should spin yarn especially for socks, right? With the ideal fibre blend and ideal plying structure.

I’ll start by blending Owlet’s pink and lavender fibre with some Tencel I have in my stash, and knit those for her. Baby steps, right?

Tour de Fleece 2014

The Tour de Fleece is a fun spinning thing that takes place concurrently with the Tour de France. The goal is to challenge yourself as a spinner.

While we have a cosy little spinning thread within my online mums group, I’m most active in the Kromski TdF team on Ravelry, as my wheel is a Kromski Symphony. And I (possibly foolishly) volunteered to co-captain this year, which consisted mostly of cheerleading, helping keep track of members, and prizes. We had over a hundred spinners on this team, and the photos being posted of in-progress work were so inspiring!

This year, my main goal was to try beaded yarn. My secondary goal was to try a 60/40 wool/flax blend, as I’d never spun flax in any form before. (This ended up being on a spindle, so it was even more of a challenge than I’d originally set for myself.)

I’d intended to finish the ‘Maid in Bedlam’ merino/silk before the TdF to free up my bobbins, but two back-to-back crazy projects for work meant I wasn’t even through the first half of it when the Tour began. (Worsted tends to be a more time-consuming technique; just for comparison, I spun the last two ounces of my merino/bamboo yarn below in less than a day.) So that became my first project, and I joined the very cheerful Daybreak Dyeworks team as well (the fibre had come from Daybreak Dyeworks, as part of their one-off Sip’n’Spin tea and fibre event). There’s no limit to the number of teams you can join, but each team might have different rules. For example, a dyer-hosted group may stipulate that only fibre produced by that dyer qualifies for a Tour project within their group. Team Kromski stipulates that your primary equipment for the Tour must be your Kromski wheel and that you must have fun, but other than that anything goes. So my Maid in Bedlam yarn qualified for both the Daybreak Dyeworks group and Team Kromski.

I finished the Maid in Bedlam fibre a week into the Tour. It felt like it was going to take forever, and with good reason: plied, it was about 20 WPI, or laceweight, and winding it off took a couple of evenings because it was about 680 yards long!

I know it looks like a gradient, but it isn’t! It just worked out that way. I separated the fiber halfway down and just spun each half across the top as it came. The plying did the rest. My friend Stephanie suggested that I knit the Bella Botanica shawl with it, and that sounds like a good idea. The pattern is charted, which is slightly eek-inducing for me, but the first part of the shawl is both written and charted to ease a first-timer into it.

In theory, up next was my attempt at beaded yarn, but I couldn’t face a second silky laceweight yarn; I needed a palate cleanser. So I brought out a braid of my friend Jenn’s alpaca and decided to do a fluffy three-ply yarn.

This was her ‘Nebula’ colourway (how could I pass that up?) and rather than being three solid strands of fibre braided together, each strand was actually made up of smaller pencil roving. The brown strand was all brown, the blue strand had minor variegation, and the multicolour strand was blues and purples and greens and creams and oranges. I ended up doing a bit of each separate colour at a time so there were a lot of colour changes instead of one long strip of yellow, one long strip of lavender, and so forth. I think how Jenn assembled it is really cool; it’s something I never would have thought of doing, and it challenged my colour sense. I decided to spin each one as its own single then ply them together for a three-ply yarn, because I really liked the effect in the braid and I wanted to preserve it. While plying, I ran out of brown single, quickly spun up some more from a brown alpaca sample I had buried in my stash from somewhere else, then ran out of it *again*. I chain-plied the last bit of blue then the multicolour single.

I ended up with 204 yards of three-ply yarn, plus 12 yards of chain-plied leftovers. All so soft! I want fingerless gloves made out of this.

Just before the Tour began I dyed some merino/bamboo fibre in a pretty pewter/pearly silver colour:

I also picked up some beads from Michael’s, and a beading needle. I wanted to actually spin the beads into the singles, not string them on a thread and ply the beads on. (That sounds a bit like cheating to me.) In the mornings before taking Owlet to daycare I’d make little tufts of merino/bamboo and thread tiny clear beads onto them. I wanted a pile at hand so I could grab one, lay it over the single I was spinning, and spin the tuft and the bead right into the single. I also made fauxlags (rolags made from commercial top instead of hand cards), because I wanted as lofty a yarn as possible. I am aiming for about a DK weight or slightly lighter, with an eye to having the yarn for Swinging Triangles shawl.

It all went splendidly for the first bobbin, which is where I had to stop before our trip to Ontario. The tiny beads are clear and don’t show up in photos very well, which is a bit disappointing. But it’s also good, because I wanted to overall effect to be subtle in the final yarn and the shawl it will be knit from.

I’m a little cross that you can’t see the beads, but as I chose clear ones to be really subtle in the final yarn, and ultimately in the shawl when it’s knitted, well… I guess this means it worked?

As a challenge, I took my Kundert spindle and two ounces of 60/40 wool/flax blend on our trip. I’m rather meh about the blend. I couldn’t quite get a handle on it, which is probably the flax, but is very possibly my paucity of spindle experience. When I got home I plied what I had on the spindle and ended up with 22 yards of yarn. It improved considerably the more I handled it, which is in line (heh, see what I did there? no? never mind) with what I know of flax.

I also got to spin the second half of the merino/bamboo with beads, then ply the two bobbins together. Ta-da! 501 yards of beautifully soft and silky beaded yarn! I am short about 150 yards for the shawl I want to knit with it, but the beauty of dyeing my own is that I can just make more.

I am very, very happy with my performance this Tour.