Daily Archives: October 15, 2009

Yay!

Look what’s all spun up:

Now the burning question: Do I two-ply it, or chain/Navajo-ply it? (The sensible answer is to try both. And because even though I weighed it before spinning it up [I swear, I did] there’s more on the second bobbin than there is on the first, so I can try chain-plying from that one.)

(Hmph. Not sure why the picture isn’t displaying vertically like it’s supposed to. Tilt your head to the left.)

ETA @ 16:50: Oh my gods. Navajo plying with a thread-thin single of my own spinning. I may weep with joy. It’s so smooth.

ETA @ 17:25: Wow. So very different.

This is the Navajo/cable-plied yarn:

This is the two-ply yarn:

Here they are side by side:

To touch, the cable-plied feels more solid. I want to say harsh, except it’s still soft, just less lofty than the two-ply. Oddly, I think the colours are a bit muddier in the cable-ply than the two-ply. I expected the opposite, since cable-ply is touted as a great way to preserve colour changes. Maybe on a coloured single that changes less frequently than this stuff.

Now I get to wash both, dry them, and knit a sample in the stitch and pattern I’m going to be using it for to see how each sample handles, and how the colours are best shown. I’m kind of excited about swatching with them.

I suspect that I’m going to need Ceri’s in-person input on the samples this Saurday when I swing by her place to pick up my new ball winder and needles.

In Which She Natters About Everything For A Bit

Oh, Mr. Mailman, you do love me. I was beginning to think you didn’t care. I know I don’t order stuff any more — I’m not writing a contracted book and so I’m not ordering used books I can’t get through the library, and I don’t have the money to buy fun stuff. But today you brought me a little freelance cheque. This was a pleasant thing to offset no mail at all this week so far. That was sad. Although no mail means no bills, so there is an up side to it all.

My current freelance assignment is going swimmingly. It all flows and mostly lacks spelling and grammar errors. It’s refreshing to be able to read a story that hangs together with well-written characters and dialogue. The last little sixty-page one that was supposed to be easy after the four-hundred page disaster ended up being just as much of a disaster, as it wasn’t even an outline. It’s really, really hard to supportively review something that essentially isn’t there.

Because work was going so well yesterday I had the opportunity to knit the boy a hat. This was supposed to be a Yule gift, but we discovered yesterday morning that he has no hats that fit him beyond his ball caps, so it got a bit more critical. I knitted the whole thing before he got home, tried it on him to size and place (somewhat, er, freeform) earflaps, and he fell in love with it. He kept thanking me and running to look at himself in the mirror. What I haven’t told him is that I found an excellent web site that turns pictures into knitting charts, and I had planned to double-stitch the Autobot symbol on the front for him before I gave it to him. As he has absconded with the thing, I shall stitch it Friday night after he’s in bed, and leave it for him to find Saturday morning.

Orchestra was good last night. At least, it sucked less that it had for the past three weeks, so things must be better. I still need to work on some of the Beethoven trouble spots. Some I have down, others I don’t (which is an incredibly helpful statement, I know). We got to play the Schubert, which was nice because I could play it with no trouble even without practice, and we sight-read the first movement of the second Weber clarinet concerto (well, it shouldn’t have been sight-reading, because I’ve had it for two weeks) and that wasn’t as much of a disaster as it could have been once I remembered that we were in E flat major. It always sounds so wrong until you hear everyone else playing.

Today is laundry and bread-baking (both already on; the freelance work-at-home life is such a glamorous one), and then when I’ve polished my report on this latest ms. I’m going to finish spinning the singles for the wrap. I have about a half-ounce of fibre left, and I’m so close to being done. Of course then I get to ply it, which is another kettle of fish entirely. I discovered last week that I need a second swift, because having a skeinwinder is all well and good, but once you’ve washed a skein you need to unwind it and wind it on again to measure the length properly. The good news is I can build one with jumbo TinkerToys, so I don’t need to buy one. (Now we just need to find the TinkerToys and convince the boy it’s Not To Play With once it’s built; he can have the bits I don’t use. Or, you know, I could ask the husband to knock one together in his copious spare time at work. Along with those extra bobbins.)

Actually, I’ve been wondering if I can’t use the old textile mill quill-style pirn bobbins for storage of singles and plying, assuming I can get a bunch of the inexpensively at flea markets or some such place. I know the holes don’t go very deep, but HRH could drill them a bit deeper. The trick would be winding the singles onto the quill bobbins, but if one located an old manual bobbin-winder, one could do it. Theoretically. (Oh, look, they make new ones, but good grief they’re expensive, even the manual ones. Wow. And new storage bobbins, too, but those are much less fun. )

Which brings me to the discovery that the great wheel my mum owned for years and recently placed in Ceri’s sunroom was retrofitted to be a bobbin-winder. The spindle doesn’t extend out to spin off the tip; it’s been hacked so that it lifts out of the brackets to enable a bobbin to be slipped on, and the drive band runs the spindle/bobbin combo to wind yarn on. Apparently it isn’t uncommon for great/walking wheels to be kitbashed in this way. Gods, I love the Internet. People can share so much information.

Right. On to that work thing. After another load of laundry and punching down the bread.