FO: Coraline Sweater

Well then. It's been a crazy past few weeks for me with a lot of changes going on at work and maybe (eventually) at home and all the other good fun things that take up all my time, force me to stumble home at 2am and do it all over again the next day.

I did manage to finish a sweater that I had been plugging away at for a while.

It started as a whole bag of discontinued Cashcotton DK from Rowan.



I don't remember where I got it, which is kind of tragic. I just remember it was cheap- maybe $30 for the entire bag?- and it's really lovely stuff. I think Rowan will discontinue yarns periodically, only to re-label them or futz with the blend amounts. Which is really good if you want a cheap bag of yarn every now and then. Not so good if you run out of yarn before you finish and need more.

This one is a blend of Cotton, Cashmere, Angora, Nylon and Rayon. It's super soft and very lightweight and it has nice drape. The angora gives it a nice, fuzzy bloom. As far as a cotton-based yarn goes, it's one of my favorites.



I didn't get gauge so I crunched the numbers and figured out that the gauge I got on US 4 needles would get me a size that fit if I made the smallest size. I plugged away on it in the latter part of summer, and finished the miles of plain boring knitting fairly quickly. The yoke was a little time-consuming, but I loved the smocking.



I also loved the tiny gorgeous details: the slipped stitch edges, the bottom hem, the applied i-cord edging on the neck and sleeves. This is a very well-designed pattern from Ysolda.



I have not figured out what I'm going to do about the closures yet, but I sewed the buttons on just for fun and stuck a dpn in it just to see what it will look like.



So, it fits me in the sense that I can put this on, but it's a bit too tight for me in the arms and shoulders.



I wouldn't be able to put anything heavier than a light cotton cami underneath, so it's not even a very good layering piece for me.



Which means it's an easy giftmas present to someone who would be a good match if I ever need a kidney donated. It's a special sweater, and I love the design and it's probably purely my fault that it doesn't fit, but I'm sure someone somewhere could slip this on over their shoulders without having to tug down at the balled-up t-shirt sleeves underneath. I blocked this to death trying to give it a bit more ease, and I'm entirely too lazy to pick out what I've done and re-knit the yoke. I'm not totally disappointed- look at all the yarn I've used up!- and I do like giving stuff away, especially when it doesn't fit me perfectly. No tears here.

The specs: I used 8 skeins of Cashcotton DK yarn- 1136 yards. US size 4 needles for the body, US 3 for the bottom hem. I will either sew button loops on or put tiny hook and eye closures on the inside of the hem since that's super-fiddly and I usually feel like I have enormously huge hands when I'm trying to do details like that.

New Spinning Batts!

I have been going a little crazy with the drum carder lately. The unexpected super high humidity we've been having means that I don't have to deal with the static and flyaways that always seem to end up in my eyeballs or in my dinner, so I will toast to that. A la votre!



I do love blending fiber and colors to make beautiful and unique handspun creations. It's pretty labor intensive...not only does the carding process take quite a bit of monotonous cranking, but I usually make a pretty big mess in the process. I can't just take a few fibers from the pile and blend them; I have to take out my entire scrap and carding stash and lay it all out and pick handfuls of what I feel would match up well together. Once I have all this out and set up, it's impracticable to put it away at the end of the day, so I tend to do my carding in week-long sessions where the dining room table is occupied by piles of fiber, and we have to sit on the floor in the next room to eat. I need to use good judgement as far as my timing goes.



Plus, all the fur flying in the process means that my vacuum cleaner makes a death rattle in protest. Worrisome. I plead with it daily.



After much experimentation, I find that the batts I like best are under 2oz. They just hang together a bit better into compact bundles, and because I'm not jamming so much on the carded, I end up with less waste as well.



Everything can be found in my Etsy Shop, and I will be listing more in the coming days. Each batt is made up of merino or a super luxe blend that might contain merino, alpaca, silk, bamboo, faux cashmere, BFL, cashgora, angora and kid mohair. Most of it I have hand dyed; some of it is natural sheepy colored; still other bits are leftover from spinning projects that have accumulated over the years. All of it is super soft and ready to be made into a special yarn.



Best of all, anything 2oz and under is only $12-$13 as I only have so much space to store big, fluffy batts and I need to move these things so I can make more.

www.KnotMyDayJob.etsy.com

The Shetland Who Wants to Be Pretty Returns...

And this time it's in yarn form.

My wee Shetland fleece has been all spun up.



It started out as a fleece that had tons of cross-fibering. It was clean and didn't have any other terrible flaws aside from the fact that it looked like it had been carded already. It was hard to pull out individual locks, but they weren't so stuck together where I was getting tears and breaking the fleece. I didn't pay a whole lot for it and I washed it up in the bathtub with no issues. It was taking the leap from fleece in a bag under my bed to usable product that was hanging me up.

I had the brilliant idea to turn it into roving at the Loop spin-in, and blended it with a good deal of tussah silk that I had dyed up. It gave it a rich, slightly metallic sheen. I threw in some angora I had lying around for good measure.





I spun it up as thick as I can and now I have an Aran-weight 2ply.


It didn't take me that long- I whipped through the almost 2 lbs of roving an just a couple weeks- but I've been lazy about plying. Having time to sit down in front of the wheel to finish everything has been a huge challenge.



It's lovely- I really enjoyed spinning this and I was a little melancholic when the last bit of it got sucked onto the bobbin. The staple on the shetland was very long, and the silk reinforced that, so I didn't been much twist in the singles. I plied it tightly though because I love the way a tightly plied yarn looks- so neat and orderly. I have 5 skeins plied up so far, all with 110-160 yards a piece (yeah, I know. I have to work on my consistency). In the end, I'll have enough for a small sweater. I love the fact that it's not so blended that the silk didn't get lost here.

So aside from resolving to get more spinning done (and knitting and cooking and organizing and weaving and dyeing and jewelry-making and blogging and learning new languages and doing yoga and everything else that I feel like my skills are constantly withering away) I will have to eventually pick a project for this yarn.

Meanwhile, as my spinning stash gets spun up and the knitting stash gets knitted, I keep getting my AVFKW club in the mail. Luckily, they are small bumps.



This is "Cherry Blossom", a blend of Alpaca/Silk and Merino/Silk.



This one is "Ambrosial", which is a nice soft chunk of Targhee. I love how dark and saturated with color it is. I should probably discontinue this club for a bit. I now have 11 little bumps of fiber in need of being spun up. It's starting to add up and I'm just not spinning fast enough. The colors and fibers are so gorgeous though. I don't think there has been one month where I wasn't thrilled with the colors.

I promise an etsy update soon- I have a huge stack of freshly dyed yarn and roving that I need to get listed. Also, a giveaway of sorts, but it's going to take some thought and some organizing on my part and I really do want to go on vacation sometime this summer, so it might be a little while until that happens.

Loop Spin-In and the Shetland Who Wants to Be Pretty

A couple weekends ago, a bunch of us headed up to the Loop studio for her monthly spin-in. It's always nice to have a chatty afternoon spinning with friends.



I brought along a Shetland fleece that I had bought at Rhinebeck a couple years ago to have processed.



It was a nice fleece from Longfield Farm, but I wasn't so inspired by it to really get into it. I've been finding that if I feel a fleece is just okay and nothing special, I tend to be unenthusiastic about doing anything with it and it just sits there. It's mostly gray with some brown spots and had a lot of cross-fibering- there were no real clean locks coming out and the fiber had the appearance that it had already been carded while the sheep was still wearing it. It's been hiding packed down in a space bag for over a year now and I've been dreaming of either making it beautiful or giving it away the next chance I got. So I dug around in my stash and pulled up a lot of silk that I had dyed in peaches and blues- both bombyx and tussah. A little more digging found something else I wasn't so enthusiastic about spinning- Angora rabbit fiber. This drastically reduced the amount of fiber I had in my big bag of carding scraps- bits of leftovers or dye jobs that I'm not happy with that I incorporate into batts when I am carding.



Everything gets loaded up onto the belt of the carding machine and fluffed up. The fleece is on the bottom, the silk and angora on top. I actually did this in 3 batches, so this is just the first third of what we did.



A touch of a button sets the machine in motion. All the different sized drums pull the fiber in, blend it all together, and then spit it out as roving.






It's magic. What comes out is airy, so much softer and gorgeous. Steph the Loop Lady is really a glitter girl, so as an additional bonus, it picked up quite a bit of glitter leftover from previous carding sessions on the machine. Let's call it a patina and go with it.



I brought this in to the studio packed into a space bag with all the air sucked out, but I left with it in a huge 20-gallon trash bag. It's so fluffed and airy, and it's really quite fun to spin as soon as the machine spits it out. In fact, I'm getting a little bit nostalgic thinking of spinning it right now while I'm stuck in the office.

The addition of silk really did me some favors here. Shetland can be very silky in texture, but if it's not a fine, soft fleece then it can be kind of "grabby" when you are spinning it. The silk added a subtle pop of color throughout the fleece and it now drafts like butter. I spun up a tiny sample and I'm in love. The total weight came out just under 2 lbs. Depending on my spinning, I could possibly squeeze a sweater out of this. The angora will give the final yarn a slight bloom. I'm suspicious of using any at all...did I ever tell you my purple angora sweater story? I will soon, promise....but just that tiny bit of it doesn't seem so bad at all.

It will have to wait though- I have much plying to do before I start another big spinning project. I have to free up some bobbins from both my wheels and finish a few other projects. I'm currently plying my gorgeous cormo from Foxhill Farm. That should take no time at all...I just need to sit down at home, throw a movie on the projector and get it done. Except I'm almost never home during the week, so plying time is a rarity. I also need to ply the final two bobbins of singles from my BFL fleece.



I already have 3 skeins of it spun up and plied, all of them over 240 yards a piece. It's very rustic- lots of beautiful lumps and bumps with this yarn no matter how hard I tried. So I stopped trying and let it be, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's worsted weight, and once I have the final bobbins finished up, I will have enough for a sweater. I have a pattern in my head that I am in the process of getting down on graph paper. It's going to be warm and cozy, with a small amount of Noro worked in to give it just a small pop of color.

I also got something that UPS brought me last week that is slightly traumatizing me, but that is a story for another day...

Some Works in Progress

I've been a busy worker bee lately. I need to take advantage since I usually get sluggish in winter. I'm totally on a roll and checking things off my to-do list at a furious pace.

We made beer.



I don't even like the taste of beer. I keep trying it, thinking one day I will get over it and be the average beer-drinking american. I drink beer and I feel bloated and full of burps and unwell. Because I drink it so slowly, I never get a buzz going and spend the rest of my time desperately searching for a glass of wine to wash the taste out of my mouth.

I do like to make things though. I seem to like to make things that people will ask/tell me, "You could get that at WalMart/Target/Safeway, etc for cheaper/easier". Also, isn't science fun? Starches and sugars being converted into alcohol for our pleasure? It's entertaining on so many levels. Get to work, you yeasty bastards!

Please observe my wort.


I'm in love with the way everything smelled in the brewing process. It's currently sitting in the fermeneter, getting big and strong and alcoholic. If anything, I figure the one with the beer is the one with the friends, so this will get drunk by someone eventually.

My brew-happy co-worker also informs me that no one has ever died from drinking home-brewed beer. Always a huge concern of mine.

So I cheated and even though I took a dumpling-making class, I went out and made someone else make them for me.

Mandoo in Koreatown makes their own dumpling, right then and there. They are beautiful little gems that are the perfect cold-weather cheap-but-delicious eats. There's pretty much no limit to how many dumplings I can eat.



If this woman goes missing it's because I've kidnapped her. She'll be safe in Brooklyn, I assure you, making a mountain of dumplings in the comfort of my own kitchen.



Now I'm inspired...I will make dumplings very soon. I've been also making pickles lately. Cukes and cauliflower and garlic and hot peppers and pretty much anything else I can put in jars. Then I make bloody marys with the leftover pickle juice. It's fantastic.

I've been knitting and spinning as well, but I'm slow with the picture taking.



This is the Devon sweater by Norah Gaughn. It's from her lovely little book of men's knits that was published by Berocco a couple of years ago. This picture is a bit old as it is now done the sweater with the exception of the ribbing around the neck and blocking. It took no time at all- I really love making sweaters that are huge swarths of stockinette stitch, with some interesting details thrown in to keep things interesting. I used Cascade Eco in the lichen colorway (the yarn color doesn't show up true in the above photo at all, and that's my fault).

I finished another handspun hat, but I need daylight to do it justice in photographs.

I cast on for a pair of ribby socks in BMFA yarn. Socks are my daily commuting activity and I feel kind of lost if I don't have a pair in the works.

I spun up some fiber:



I made a big fat 3-ply from it. It's very soft, and I would imagine that it really blooms up nicely with all that downy baby camel in it. I'll post pictures soon.

Oh, and my mom got me some Angora fiber. She bought it at the Fryeburg Fair, which is an enormous agricultural fair that happens every fall in picturesque western Maine.



It's lovely and soft, but I think the downy fibers need some humidity in the air in order to be manageable- the static really creates a monster.

Garden State Sheep and Wool

This was a couple weeks ago, but I'm way behind and getting caught up with everything going on. The Garden State Sheep Breeders put on an annual sheep and wool festival. It's very small, nothing fancy, and mostly livestock. There is a fleece auction, but it was unimpressive- there were a lot of mediocre and very dirty fleeces. The few that were outstanding were being shown only and weren't for sale. Boo hoo.

There were pretty angora rabbits though:




Most of them were so tame and they really enjoyed the attention.


This one was all glug glug glug glug.



They had sheep shearing



and lots of sheep being shown and paraded around. Alas, Rhinebeck is right around the corner. I had a fun day, but went home empty handed- nothing grabbed my attention enough to take home.

I decided not to go to Maryland Sheep and Wool this year. I checked the forecast a few days before and it was supposed to be near 90 for the weekend. I went to the beach instead. I love Rhinebeck because it really gets you into the sweater-season mood. You're outside in the chill fall air all day and it makes buying wool seem completely sensible. I just couldn't see myself getting into the sheep and wool spirit while wallowing through heat and humidity.

Plus, I still have this rather gorgeous Cormo fleece from last year that hasn't seen the spinning wheel yet.



Anyway, here are some pictures from last year. It wasn't quite so hot, but we had some rain and then some crazy swampy humidity.


Blue Face Leicester ewe. I think she looks kind of bashful.


Getting ready for the show ring


One of the things that MDSW has that Rhinebeck doesn't is lambs. Baby animals make me go "awwwwwwww".




Jacob lambs


Cotswold


Corriedale


This was a really friendly Blue Face ram. He was gorgeous but I couldn't get a picture of him since the second I scootched down to his level he would shove his face at me for petting.


Angora kids. Curly awesome sproingy goats.


I wish I had faster photo reflexes because this llama was about 3 seconds away from spitting.




Maybe next year we will get a nice chilly spring weekend for MDSW.

Mothball Mohair

I had been looking for a baby mohair fleece for a while now. I'm not a huge mohair fan, but the superfine baby stuff is amazing. Really amazing. It blends really nicely and adds strength and luster to anything you mix it in with.







Kid angora goats are absolutely adorable as well.

At Rhinebeck, they have a separate sale for mohair and alpaca fleeces. I got there kind of late since I was petting the Leicester Longwool sheep and watching the nice people from Colonial Williamsburg do a combing demo. They still had lots fleeces left at noon, but it seemed like the really primo ones were gone already. Nothing was striking me until I saw this:



That's my golden fleece right there. It is the first shearing of a six month old angora goat. It had long, silky ringlets of the most gorgeous golden brown color. 6-7 inch staple length throughout, clean as can be. Did I mention how soft and silky it was? Anyway, I was in love.

I took it to the checkout table and the refreshingly honest gentleman there gave me a warning: this fleece had already been returned once because it smelled of mothballs. MOTHBALLS! I shrank back in horror. Slowly, I crept back to the trash bag of fleece and with shaky hands, opened it back up. I inched closer and let my nose hover a couple feet above and took a whiff.

Yup.

There's no mistaking it.

Mothballs.

I whipped out my phone and started calling fleeceophiles and goat breeders I knew. Has anyone ever dealt with a fleece stored in mothballs? I was assured by one goat breeder that the smell would wash out with a little ammonia added to the bath. Other people said that there was no way it would wash out. Finally, we had a very nice goat shepherd stop by, kvetch about how terrible it was for someone to store their fleece in mothballs, but assured me that it would wash out.

A ten dollar discount made me feel better about the situation in general. Baby mohair isn't exactly cheap.

Once home, I set about to washing this right away. The smell was strong- what I didn't originally pick up on right away at the fairgrounds was now filling my apartment with that awful chemical smell. I think the reason why I failed to originally detect the smell when I chose the fleece was a combination of all the sheepy and goaty smells that might have overpowered it, and the fact that it was cold enough out to make my nose run a bit making anything but the most odoriferous smells hard to detect. Once it was home, it was definitely the only thing I could smell.

I did my standard fleece-washing treatment- hot water and a whole lot of Dawn.



Mohair has a wee bit of lanolin in it. No where near as much as a sheep, but enough to leech a little brown into the bathwater. I would usually only give it one wash, and then a rinse or two.

After the third wash (with lots of soap) I finally felt as though maybe the smell was dissipating. I did two rinses with a whole lot of vinegar. Most of a bottle, and a little bit more for good luck.

I then dried the fleece on a window screen with about a dozen of cedar blocks tossed in and a fan in front of it. Once or twice a day, I would come by and give the whole think a flip.


That's my fleece drying condo, built right next to my alcoholic beverage condo.

I'm happy to report that the mothball smell is completely gone. I bagged some of the fresh clean fleece up and passed it around to some knitters and spinners at my local meetup, and it passed the test. Not a hint of mothball remains.



On a side note- I found out it was Steph from Loop who originally bought the fleece and then returned it. Thanks, Steph.