Crafty Winds

The humidity has arrived here in Spring Creek and it is feeling steamy outside! We had a really comfortable June without much humidity and highs hovering around the mid-70s; it was just perfect. Now by the afternoon it feels like a sauna is blowing in through the open windows and we have finally given in to the air conditioning to prevent everything from feeling so sticky inside. The humidity stayed away until the end of my sister’s visit a few weeks ago, so we got to enjoy a week of comfortable, mostly sunny weather while she was here. The smoke from the wildfires in Canada made everything extra hazy all week, though.

We have more of Kyle’s family coming to visit at the beginning of August – I hope the weather isn’t insufferable while they’re here!

As usual, crafting continues apace, though I feel like it has been rather scattered lately. Between visitors and the many “opportunities” I am dealing with at work right now (that’s corporate speak for challenges), I haven’t had very much time or mental capacity to focus on hobbies, but I am determined to get back into it. Kyle was very sweet and supportive when I told him that I really need this weekend to just be time at home to relax and do my thing to recover and reset.

While my sister was here, we attended my friend Katie’s son’s 7th birthday party. It was Harry Potter-themed and Katie had tipped me off that he was interested in working on his hand sewing. I made this little zippered pouch for him and filled it with sewing notions so he would have his own kit to pull out when inspiration struck. I have to admit, it turned out really cute! I am tempted to make one for myself, too. Mine, of course, would have to be Hufflepuff fabric.

I suppose I could have spent a little (or any) time focusing on centering the pattern before cutting the fabric, but a) I don’t think a 7-year-old cares and b) Katie is encouraging me to be more free and less rigid! (Remind me to tell you about how she ambushed me with natural dyeing the other day.) That carefree attitude is what allowed me to make this pouch in the first place, even though I have never installed a zipper into anything before. I just thought “eh, it won’t be perfect but it will be fine.” And fine it is!

Speaking of not perfect, here is something that was so not perfect that it wasn’t fine and I had to start over again completely. I am knitting myself a vest and I have had this pattern bookmarked for 5 years now. I have even had the yarn for several years, and I finally sat down and swatched to make sure I was getting the right gauge and all. Then I went to purchase the pattern only to discover that it’s not actually for sale, so really for five years I have just been looking at a picture of a vest that someone made but isn’t readily available for others to reproduce. That’s all well and good. I mean, I chose this project specifically because I wanted something mindless and didn’t want to have to do any real work before getting started, but instead here I am deciding that I’ll just take the photo and reverse-engineer the whole thing and design my own vest instead and then, after all that is done, I can get started and the project will be mindless.

Most of the vest really is mindless – stockinette in the round in a single color until I get up to the armholes, at which point I will do some Norwegian-inspired colorwork up to the shoulders. that bit I haven’t quite sorted out yet, but I figured I could just save that as a problem for Future Peter to deal with, and in the meantime I would have what I needed; an easy project to knit round and round with little mental effort. And I really did put in such a small amount of mental effort that I ended up only casting on 198 stitches instead of 298. After an inch of knitting I thought “well this looks rather small.” After two inches, I told myself that it’s just the ribbing that is pulling in. At three inches, once I started the stockinette, I said “I just need more fabric before it really opens up to the full circumference.” And at four inches I realized that I was struggling to get it to fit around a 32″ circular needle, even though the fabric was supposed to be 44″ around. And so after four inches and an entire skein of yarn, I decided to count my stitches and finally discovered my mistake. I was tempted at this point to just banish the project to the back of the closet and forget about it, but before that could become a reality I made myself rip it all out and start again. And now I’m cruising right along with the right number of stitches and getting closer and closer to the armholes, at which point I will have to pause, pull out some graph paper, and figure out what I want to do. I am knitting this with Brooklyn Tweed Peerie, which I recently learned is now discontinued. That throws a bit of a wrench in my plans because I am not convinced I have enough of the main color to make the whole vest and I thought “well that’s no problem because I can just order an extra skein if I need it.” No, I cannot. So when I get to the underarms I will assess how much yarn I have left and work that into my plans for the rest of the vest to make it a success. I am just as eager as you to see how this all ends. I will keep you updated.

While we’re on the topic of knitting, I finally remembered to get Kyle to model his new pair of socks that I finished back in May. I knit these using Ryan Yarn Twist Sock in the Autumn Spice colorway. I think the little flecks of color gave the fabric a lot of interest without completely obscuring the stitch pattern.

The stitch pattern came from Sensational Knitted Socks which was my very first sock knitting book and it was fun to flip through the pages again for inspiration. I mentioned this as one of my “non-goals” at the beginning of the year, but I really do need to reach for my bookshelf more often when planning knitting projects!

the loom is empty at the moment, but I did make a run of towels in May to celebrate Pride Month. I put a very long, 15-yard warp on the loom and wove as many towels as I could. I ended up with 14 towels and before I knew it I had given them all away to friends and family to celebrate! I had thought I would have 4 or 5 left to list in the shop, but I really wanted to share them with friends in the community and some really great allies.

I really had fun designing these towels, and I have never used so many colors in one project before! These towels used 11 colors total and are made with Maurice Brassard 8/2 cotton. this was a 9-shaft twill pattern set at 24 ends per inch. I forgot to measure the finished dimensions of these towels, but I aim to make my towels about 25″ wide on the loom and 30-ish” long, minus the hems.

I have my next set of towels planned and designed, but haven’t begun winding the warp yet. I keep being drawn to spinning these days and am giving in to whatever direction the crafty winds are blowing at any given time rather than placing any sort of obligation on my free time.

My drop spindle project has been slow going, mostly because I keep forgetting about it and turning to my e-spinner instead. This was a project I had planned to try out four new drop spindles I recently purchased. I took a 4oz. braid of polwarth/silk and split it into pieces so that I could spin one ounce on each spindle, then I will ply them together to make a 4-ply yarn. I have only finished the first half of the first ounce so far, but I love how this spindle looks and it’s fun to spin on. It’s my Kyle spindle to celebrate my mushroom-loving husband. I am looking forward to trying out the next one in line, too.

On my e-spinner I currently have a project going with 4oz of BFL/silk, which has been an effortless spin. The colors are beautiful, and change frequently enough that it keeps my interest because I am always curious to see how the next one is going to blend into the current one.

I have about 1.5oz left to spin on this project and then I plan to chain-ply this to create a 3-ply yarn, preserving the individual colors to make a really colorful and distinct skein.

My next spinning project is going to be a stark contrast to what I have on the wheel now. I have been processing some of the Shetland fleece a friend gave me several months back, raised on the mountain behind my house, and I finally have some fiber ready to spin in all its natural-colored glory.

I love, love, love the natural colors of wool and this is the first time I have processed enough fleece to spin into a project. I scoured 7 or 8 fleeces earlier this year before putting them into storage, but held back several handfuls of wool to play around with. This is from a few different fleeces, which I mixed together while processing, which is why you see so much color variation. I had thought I was going to card this fiber to make rolags for woolen spinning, but there was so much vegetable matter and debris in the fleece that carding was just going to mix that all together and make it impossible to get out. On a whim, I thought I would try combing a handful instead just to see how it would turn out, and it was really beautiful! Combing really helps to remove the vegetable matter, shorter fibers, weak fibers, and any tangles that may be in the fiber and leaves you with really beautiful results for spinning. It does create quite a bit of waste fiber in the process as well, which is what you see at the top of the photo. I ended up with about 88g of combed fiber, and 91g of waste that I pulled off the combs throughout the process. I have read that 50-55% loss is to be expected when processing Shetland, so I am right in that ballpark. The waste is often used as seconds to either be combed again for another projects, or carded into rolags. However for my needs, and considering how much VM and tangled fiber was in that waste, mine will be making its way to the compost pile instead.

I am going to comb a bit more fiber to give myself an even 100g for spinning, and then I can get started on this project from raw fleece to finished yarn! I can’t wait to show you what that will look like.