FO: Fortnight Hat

BT Shelter has fast become one of my favorite yarns.



It's a blend of Targhee and Columbia wools, very lofty and springy. It's a rustic, imperfect tweedy yarn, and it knits up to almost a velvety texture.

I brought along a hat pattern and a skein on my Rhinebeck weekend trip to have something simple to work on. This is the Fornight pattern from Jared Flood. He's really masterful at writing patterns to suit his yarn.



So I cheated a little bit and I decided to work the garter stitch section flat, instead of in the round as it is written. I love plain garter stitch and I don't do it often enough. When I hit the cable section, I joined in the round and then seemed up the garter section. I am the laziest motivated person on earth. You can barely see the seam. I can't chew gum and walk, so doing any other kind of knitting when running my gob in a social situation means I have to choose my projects wisely. I end up making a lot of sleeves and other plain things when I'm socializing or else it will look like a spider on LSD made it.





It only took me a couple days to make. It's a great little hat- completely unisex, cozy and easy to wear.

The cables have slip-stitches, which give them an elegant exaggeration that might have gotten lost in the fuzz of the yarn otherwise.



I'm currently working on a pair of textured lace mittens out of the same yarn- the color is "Soot"- and I'm hoping to have enough leftover yarn to whip up another Fortnight hat.



I didn't use up quite 1 skein for the original hat, and it seems like I'll have plenty of yarn leftover from the mittens.

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.

FO: Juneberry Shawl

Well now. It's been quite the eventful past couple months. City life means you very infrequently get a little time to yourself, and when you do, I find myself just thrilled to be able to sit down and have a couple minutes of quiet time to myself.

So we had a weird spring where it was either cold or raining, and just when I started to get into the asparagus that was crowding the markets, it becomes unbearably hot and humid. I really had to convince myself that turning the oven on is a great, fabulous idea and I've paid good money all winter for the privilege to sit in a sauna and a steam room, so now I get it for free.



Asparagus did eventually get cooked and eaten. It was a trial though.

In my attempt to keep my stash in check, I dug up 4 skeins of Shelter. The color is "Almanac".



I cast on for the Juneberry Shawl a couple months ago. I fell in love with the textured lace. LOVE LOVE LOVE.



The knitting of the actual body of the shawl hummed around at a nice pace. I honestly thought this would be done in two weeks. The pattern was so well-written and charted, I zipped through it with no problems at all.

Then I came to the knitted edging. It was much bigger shawl than I anticipated, and I spent a couple of weeks plugging away at the edging. It wasn't hard at all, but the pattern was complicated enough to require my full attention.

I got to the halfway point and to my dismay, I realized I was pretty much out of yarn. Not doing a gauge swatch will cause that to happen. In the end, I was about 25 yards short. Sad face.

I was about to buy a new skein when Ravelry came to my rescue. I found another knitter who had leftovers of the same color, and they were willing to send it along to me. Brilliant! I groveled quite a bit and thanked them profusely, and I promise to do the same with any leftover yarn I have from future projects.

It only took me another hour to finish it up. I blocked it on my bed, where it took up the entire bed and I had to hinge it over the edge of the mattress to get the lace to open up.

And....



VOILA!



It's enormous! I love the textured lace and how it transitions from one theme to another.





I really should have gone down a needle size and ended up with a smaller shawl (and no issue of running out of yarn).



It's so dramatic and lovely.



I feel that this shawl has ceased to be an accessory. It's the main event.



Props to Jared Flood for another impeccable pattern.



The specs:

The Juneberry Triangle by Jared Flood. I used 4.5 skeins of Brooklyn Tweed Shelter yarn and US size 9 needles. The bouncy targhee-columbia yarn blend made for great lace stitch definition.

FO: Turn a Square

Oooh boy. I have lots of catching up to do. This has been a winter of constantly being sick, or in the process of getting sick. Those who know me well know that I never, ever, ever get as much as a sniffle most winters and plow right through whatever bug is going around. Not so much this winter. So there is a nice dose of Schadenfreude for you.

Let me tell you about my co-workers for a second (you know I don't like to mix my work life in with anything else, but it's good back story). I work in a sales department, which attracts the kind of people that are competitive in everything that they do, including gift-giving. I use this to my advantage as much as possible, especially around the holidays. If they want to assign their love for me with a cash value, I'm okay with this. If they want to put a little more thought into to get in my good graces and get me a nice fat gift certificate to an upscale yarn boutique, I wouldn't say no. They also tend to stock my personal bar with top-shelf goodness that will keep me warm and happy year-round.

So off to Purl Soho I marched on a bitter cold January day, with my freshly printed gift certificate in hand. It's a beautiful store with equally "beautiful people" clientele, all of them ready to drop a small fortune on a sweater's worth of cashmere. You have a rather unsettled feeling in that shop that the sheep that produce the wool for their yarn somehow produce no poo at all, and are a magic breed of sheep that have the ability to fly at night when no one is watching. It's priced accordingly.

I picked up a sweater's worth of thyme-green Merino and some Brooklyn Tweed Shelter, a new yarn that everyone has been buzzing about.



It's not particularly soft, but it's an interesting blend of Columbia and Tarhgee wools, which makes it very lofty and bouncy. It's rustically spun woolen-style, with lots of interesting neps spun in for texture and a heathered effect. Jared Flood has been blogging about the whole wool-into-yarn process on his blog recently. It's fascinating and I recommend checking it out.

I used some of the pretty brown color, Nest, to make a hat.



I choose the "Turn a Square" pattern, which, appropriately enough, is a Jared Flood pattern. I dug out a skein of Noro Silk Garden that was leftover from a coat I made a couple years ago to use as stripes. The results:





The stripes are very subtle. I love it. Best of all, this took me all of 3 days worth of commuting from start to finish.



He's already worn it a bunch, hence that slightly rumpled look. The requisite guy hat must be able to be crumpled down and shoved into a pocket, and it fits that need quite well. It's a good guy-beanie shape with the square top. It's cozy and warm and already looks like a favorite.



I did a jogless stripe technique to make the seam less visible. You can still see it though.

The best part is that this barely used half a skein of each, so there is definitely enough yarn leftover to make a second one. I did enjoy working with the Shelter. However, I found that when I tinked back to fix a mistake, the yarn would sometimes come unspun completely and break. It spit-splices really well, so it's not bad to fix. Just a bit troublesome that it does that.

The specs: I'm a super-loose knitter so I had to go down several needle sizes in order to get a hat that fit. I used US 3 needles for the ribbing and US 5 for the main part of the hat. I only used about 70 yards of the solid brown Shelter, and even less that with the Silk Garden, making this a great hat if you have scraps to use up. The pattern was well-written and simple.

Fiber Club

Let's talk about stash, shall we? I've been kind of holding out on you stash-wise. A few months ago, I joined the A Verb for Keeping Warm Essential Luxury Fiber Club. All I can say is "wow". The talented Kristine only uses natural dyes and unique blends and rarer breeds of sheep. I have been super pleased with everything I've received so far. Plus, it's only in 2-3oz increments so I never feel overwhelmed by fiber, but just insanely tickled and inspired that I have this bit of awesomeness in my hand.


This is the latest club shipment. It's 2 oz of Wensleydale fiber and 1 oz of tussah silk. I'm thinking about spinning the Wensleydale into a thick-ish single, spinning the silk into thread, and then crazy-plying them together.


2oz of a 50/50 merino and cashmere blend. The colorway is called The Pyrenees. It's begging to be spun up soft and lofty and knitted up into something that you could wrap around your neck and purr like a kitten.


Merino/Silk/Yak blend. The colorway is called "The Best Bite". It's dyed with Indigo. Heavenly soft.


"Sweet Tart". 3oz of Targee Roving. I love the fact that she searches out less common breeds of sheep.

I'm busy knitting away a small lace shoulderette with this selection:

It's "Rainer Cherries" merino/silk.

I split the roving and lined up the colors for minimal candy-cane effect.


Spinning it was a joy. It's knitting up so soft and lofty. Swoon.