Aeolian- ready for its closeup

At some point while knitting the Aeolian, I realized that I'm not really a shawl kind of girl. I like scarves, but I had never picked up a shawl and found it wearable. I wish I had this kind of insight when I decided to knit a poncho. I mean, really. Why would I knit a poncho when I wouldn't be caught dead in one?

Well, I have changed my mind. I am a shawl kind of girl after all.











I feel a little Stevie Nicks-ish, or like I might cast a spell on some unsuspecting children on a whim, but it's wearable and absolutely lovely. It's my most complex project to date. While not difficult, it required a whole lot of concentration.

The beads magically disappeared- you can't really see them at all unless you look close. If i did it again I would have chosen darker beads.



I did the 9-stitch nupps since the 7-stitch ones just looked like a glitch.

The bind off ate up a ton of yardage and took most of a day to do, but it's totally worth it. It makes the shawl.

The specs: I used about 5 oz of BFL in natural oatmeal color. 2 ply, I got about 22 WPI. I spun 560 yards total and knitted on a size us5 needle. I used approximately 600 beads.

This was all the yarn I had left:



I'm now debating casting on for the Swallowtail shawl, or maybe the Icarus.

Blocking a Lace Shawl

The knitting on the Aeolian is done! And yet...it was not finished.



Time for blocking!

This is the part of lace knitting that makes or breaks the project, but no worries! You can always block again if you didn't get it right the first time.

I'm not a big fan of single-use tools. Apartment living makes you really think hard about purchases. While I think investing in a blocking board is a great idea, especially if you need them a lot, and blocking wires are helpful, you don't NEED them. I do most of my blocking on bath towels or on the bed.

The first thing I did was take a long length of scrap sock yarn that wasn't going to bleed all over the place. I used a darning needle to thread it through the top of the shawl, or whatever you want to be a straight line. Leave yourself some nice long ends.

Then I soak the entire shawl in hot water and Eucalan. I love that stuff- it smells great and you don't have to rinse. While you don't have to wash, I do. My knitting goes with me everywhere. By the time I've got a FO on my hands, chances are I have dropped said project and yarn on New York City Public Transit more times then I care to think back on. Everything I knit gets washed.

After 20 minutes of soak, I gently pick it up and squeeze out the excess water. I'll take this chance to yell at you if you wring out your woolies. NEVER WRING WOOL! Wool is super fragile when it is wet, and wringing it will damage and destroy it! Squeeze gently, and be patient.

Next, I put the wet object on a towel, roll it up and smoosh it down. You want the object damp but not dripping since you're going to be tying up your bed for the next few hours. You don't want to be spending days airing out your mattress as well.

Take it out of the towel and lay it out on the bed. You've previously stripped it of all blankets and pillows, and it has a clean sheet that you don't care too much about.

A word about pins: I use T pins that you can get at office supply stores. I use these when I'm seeming up a sweater as well. They are big and sturdy and they are easy to remove and easy to see so you won't get a rude awakening on the eve after blocking. They don't seem to rust either- you really don't want rust spots on your FO.

I start with the top edge of the shawl. That bit of yarn you threaded through before you soaked the object? Pull it tight and pin the top edge out. I usually tie it cleat-style with two pins. You don't want this to move around too much when you are pinning the rest of the shawl.

Once you have the top straight edge secured, find the bottom point of the shawl. Stretch it out and pin that down at the point. I stretched this pretty gently since it was laceweight handspun. You will need an entire psych team to talk you down if you ripped your shawl during blocking. When in doubt, a little bit less blocked is better then having a mess to deal with.



There! Almost done! Now you just have all the points to pin out. Usually, a good pattern will have specific blocking instructions. This one wanted each big leaf point blocked, plus the four smaller points around it, all marked by where you correctly placed a Nupp. I started at the bottom and (this is important) kept going back and forth to the left and right of the shawl to pin the points. Symmetry...kind of important on a lace shawl.

Since there are 12 points, and 5 pins for each point plus more for the top and the bottom, I used almost 70 pins.



For the first time, you get to really see your handywork.



Neat, huh? Nevermind the fact that I found a dropped stitch while I was doing this. It is fixed now. I'll never tell you where it is. You won't be able to find it.



I put the ceiling fan on and dragged in a second fan, just to improve my chances of having a bed to sleep in that night. It was pretty humid out that day, so I left the house for a few hours just so I wouldn't be tempted to futz with it or unpin it before it was dry.

And that's blocking for you.

Aeolian- still chugging along

I just need to say that I love this pattern. Much less intimidating than I thought it would be, mostly because it is so well-written. It flows along nicely, but it keeps me interested because each row is different.

I've got about 5 rows left. Lace looks like ramen noodles until it's blocked, so this doesn't do it justice. Still. It's all I've got:



Hooray, my official knitwear photographer is back in town!

This weekend we went to Governor's Island for a faux country getaway. You can totally fool yourself that you are someplace far away from NYC, but you are actually in the middle of New York harbor.



The views are really amazing- it takes a second to take in what you are actually seeing. It's such an interesting vantage point of the city.



Most of the island is closed off to the public- it was a former Coast Guard base that was abandoned and a lot of it will be demolished. Some of the old houses are being utilized as art galleries.



That's downtown Manhattan in the background. Crazy, right? It's so close, but you have a big green lawn to nap out on. Nary a siren or car alarm to be heard.



There is a lot of art on this island. I found a dragon, made entirely out of chairs and scrap wood:


They have a free ferry leaving from downtown Manhattan and from Brooklyn on Friday, Saturday and Sunday until mid-October. There are food and drink vendors (we found quality homemade ice cream) but it's an ideal place to pack a picnic and chill.

I got a new postal scale (whoohoo!) so I'll be weighing the new spindles tonight and posting them on the Etsy store tomorrow.

Progress, Updates, etc.

I've been a busy knitter lately, but a lousy photographer, so I have no pictures to share yet. I've recently finished a couple pairs of socks. I cast on for the Espresso sweater. Ooh, wait, I did take a picture of that:



This is my big fleece-to-sweater project. It started out as a big, stinky CVM fleece. I spun it up and ended up with a 3-ply dk weight yarn.



I'm almost done the back (thanks to my rather awful commute this morning, so I feel like I win the traffic war) and I'm loving the variegations in the yarn.

I'm knitting it up on size 4 needles, so it is taking quite a while. Because I carded it and spun it up woolen, the yarn is very rustic and fuzzy. It also means that the cable will not be as well defined. Details, details.

I made real progress while on vacation on the Aeolian. I'm on the final edge chart, and I predictably ran out of yarn. I'm back to the wheel this weekend to spin up some more and finish it off.

The boy is still on his motorcycle, zooming around Nova Scotia. This makes for an insane amount of productivity time I normally don't have. I'm hoping to have a huge number of new spindles done and ready to list on my Etsy store by the end of the month.

This weekend is the Garden State Fiber Festival. If I make it out there, I will have much to report on Monday. It supposed to be beautiful and sunny on Sunday.

Aeolian progress

I sat down one day last week, beads and handspun in hand, and cast on for the Aeolian shawl!



I have to sit down and concentrate on it, or I'll be losing YO's and making a tangled mess really quickly. I'm pretty psyched though- it's not difficult knitting, you just need to be in the mindset to sit and concentrate for a while. Lace frightens me, but once you break it down into bite-sized chunks it seems pretty do-able.

I'm using size 8 seed beads in a pretty purpley-pink. I didn't have a crochet hook small enough to impale the beads on and I was impatent to start, so I strung the beads onto the yarn beforehand just push them down the yarn as I get to them. It's easier for me to string them like this rather than fiddle with them one at a time- I have this heriditary hand tremble that makes doing something like that really difficult. It's not bad at all- some people in my family has a very noticble partkinsons-like tremble. It does make picking up teeny tiny seed beads and threading them a bit of a challenge though. I'm glad I bought extra because most of them ended up on the floor.

I started swatching for the Espresso sweater in handspun as well last night. I didn't mean to start a new project. Wednesday night I try to meet up with the local knitters for some tea and socializing. I went through all my projects on the needles and I had nothing that I felt like I could bring with me- Lace is a big no-no when I could possibly be (and want to be) distracted, I have one Fair Isle sock project going, a complex cabled band for a sweater, and a lace cami that I have to do some soul-searching on as it is a canidate for frogging. So I use my time wisely and bring along whatever needs to be swatched.

Summer Weekends

Time to get out of the city and out to the country!





The rain wasn't fun, but it is nice to get away.

In other news, I cast on for the Aeolian. Finally. I'll have pictures soon. It's going along really quickly and I realized I'll probably need more beads.

It was actually hot enough to put the AC window unit in last night, so I dragged my wheel and my knitting into the bedroom and fooled myself into thinking it was fall.

Knitting in High Humidity

My limp-wristed attempt to knit lately has been pathetic! Aside from the fact that my ahem day job ahem takes up all my quality time lately, by the time I get home from work and whatever else I have going on, I just feel too warm and gross to touch yarn. It's been a mild but wet and stormy summer so far. The bedroom window unit has yet to be installed, and I'm kind of hoping I'll get around to that soon. It's nice to have a cool room to retreat to when it's sticky out.

I completed two of my Tour de Fleece goals. The fist was to spin for at least 10 minutes every day. I did that, and then some- on most days, I would end up spinning for at least an hour. The second was to tackle my spinning UFOs. I completed spinning for my "Fine Fleece" Espresso sweater. That's 1500+ yards of dk weight 3-ply from a CVM fleece. I skirted, washed and carded this fleece myself- it's truly the largest spinning project that I've undertaken.



I spun a 2-ply laceweight BFL for the Aeolian. I though I had spun enough, but I only spun about 250 yards total, and I need over 500. Back to the wheel for this one.



I also spun some beautiful Spunky Eclectic Shetland and plied it to with a dark purple batt that I had made. It's worsted or aran weight. I love how the dark purples line up just. I'm hoping to have enough to make a sweater yolk from this.



Knitting has been slow as hell. Right now on the needles, I have a man's cardigan (wool, ugh, how you have forsaken me in this weather), the ill-fated silk cami, a pair of lace stockins and a pair of wool socks. Slooowly knitting along when I end up in and AC-ed environment for more than a few minutes.

My Week Without Blue Cheese

Back from Vacation! I had a rather chill and refreshing week in the far North of Maine. Good times with family and friends, unfussy food, sleeping in the great outdoors, hiking, kayaking, swimming, and most importantly, lazing.



The Katahdin region is beautiful this time of year.





It wasn't all fun and games though...



A pair of socks were finished. These are the Rogue Roses socks. It was the BMFA Rockin' Sock Club shipment from, um, March. I've come to realize that it's okay to not start and finish the club socks the day you get them.

I modified them- i discontinued the rose vine pattern on the foot since the roses would irritate the tops of my feet. I'm thinking about gifting them. I have a lot of family who live in the far Northern Maine, and they need warm woolies more than I do in the relatively balmy winters of NYC. Some of them were eyeing the socks in progress with a bit of interest.



Some spinning was done. Actually, a lot of spinning was done. Much more than I would on a normal work day! Miraculously, I spun every day for at least 10 minutes as part of the Tour de Fleece Goals. The Bee ended up being a perfect travel compainion. It was my carry-on bag and fit right under the plane seat. It survied a couple of boat rides as well.

I finished the BFL for the Aeolian Shawl:



Not sure of my yardage yet since I just did a hasty elbow skein. I need to throw it on the niddy noddy and give it a bath to set the twist. This is my first finished yarn in long draw. It's 2-ply lace weight.

I started some brightly colored Shetland for a yoke sweater. It's a ply of dark purple Lorna's Laces wool top in "Black Pearl" and some Spunky Eclectic Shetland in the "Raisin Wannabe" colorway.





I love how the purple in the Shetland matches up with the purple in the Lorna's Laces, but then transitions to pink and then acid lime green.

Back to reality now, where everything seems a bit too frantic and noisy. At least there is blue cheese here! I sat down and chowed a good portion of a block of Roquefort. There was a noticible lack of it in my diet the past couple weeks.

Aeolian Shawl SAL/KAL

I started spinning for the Aeolian Shawl. Several of my friends are doing this as a Spin-Along Knit-Along. It's gorgeous, but I'm intimidated by lace patterns. I'm hoping this will help me conquer my fear. I'm only committing myself to the smallest shawl size at this point, and I'm pretty sure I've fallen far behind everyone else at this point.

Here is what I'm using:


It's some oatmeal colored BFL top from my stash, soft and silk and a feathered fawn color. I'm going to spin up about 3 oz laceweight and 2-ply it. I have a couple of packets of seed beads that might work with this- some dusty pink and some bronze.

So far I have a negligible amount spun up on my bobbin. I love spinning BFL- it's soft and silky and it has a nice long staple. It just flies out of your hands as you spin it and I can sit there for hours, mesmerized by it sliding through my fingers. I think that I'm so anxious about the lace pattern that I just can't seem to get myself sitting down to spin it! Oh, that and my work has been crazy as it is the end of the quarter, so I really haven't had the free time that I'd like. I'm hoping to have this all spun up and ready to start knitting by the end of the month.