In the mail

I always love getting mail and the last two days have been especially good to me. Yesterday I got two skeins of Blue Moon lightweight Socks that Rock (Rooster Rock colourway) in the mail. These skeins are part of my payment for knitting a pair of sample socks for Cookie A's upcoming book. If you look at the PDF my socks are the purple ones that appear on the back cover. I knit the socks back in April but I will wait to post my pictures until the book is actually out (and I know what the socks are named).

This morning the mail man delivered 8 oz of Crown Mountain Farm's Corriedale Pencil roving (Twilight colourway). I won this after donating to Trampled by Fleece. They are raising money to help pay the drug costs of a knitter and philosophy undergraduate who has Lyme disease. This roving is actually an early bird prize; the final raffle will be a t the end of this month.

Sadly I doubt any fiber or yarn will arrive in the mail tomorrow.

Finished, in progress, almost begun

The I finished the wine coloured Urchin first thing this morning and it is now blocking/drying on a dinner plate. I'm pleased with ow it came out but I feel it is missing a little something. I'm going to look for some ribbon or a button or something to jazz it up a bit.

In the meantime I'm plugging away at the shawl. I just finished the fifth repeat which means I'm 30% finished. It also means that the shawl is now more than half its final length and width. It actually looks like a shawl. This is when it pays to remember that half the length is not half the shawl. I will be knitting this for a while yet.

Since Christmas is starting to appear on the horizon, the shawl won't be my only knitting on the needles (and I'm not referring to the two sweaters that are lying abandoned). After doing some swatching with my green hand spun I realized that a) I really like how it look in garter stitch and b) I don't have enough to knit the shawl/lap blanket. My solution was to take some white and green marl yarn (dk weight) that I got at the big NDG destash and dye it to match the hand spun.

In the original version of this shawl the center was hand spun and the border was mill spun. My plan for this version is to have the center mill spun and the border hand spun. Now that I have all of the yarn dyed up and dry I should be casting on any day now.

Bulky yarn

The wine coloured Corriedale is dry. I think it qualifies as a bulky yarn. Hurray. I ended up with 134 yards and approximately 6 oz of yarn.

I cast on for another Urchin but found that all of the twist in the yarn was coming out as I knit. I ripped back and put the yarn back through the spinning wheel to give it more twist. It is no longer balanced but it is knitting up really nicely. I should have another hat by tomorrow.

Determining progress

I've spun up the wine coloured yarn and now I'm just waiting for it to dry to see how close to a bulky yarn I managed to get. In the mean time I'm knitting away at my lace shawl (and ignoring the sweaters that still need sewing up). The lace is nice and easy and repetitive so progress has been pretty fast.

The thing about shawls like this, which start out with very short rows and then get longer and longer rows, is that it is hard to tell just how much you have completed. It takes no time to add inches to the length at the start but you know it will take forever by the end. Since I like to know how far I still have to go, I broke out the basic algebra and geometry.

The shawl is a simple equilateral triangle with the base twice the length of the height. All I want is what percentage I have finished at any given point in the knitting. I could have figured it out row by row but I don't need anything that precise so I figured it out based on chart repeats. Assuming I am knitting the shawl with the suggested 9 repeats, after one repeat I'm 1% finished; after two I'm 5%; after three I'm 11%; after four I'm 20%; after five 31%; 44% after 6; 60% after 7; and 79% after 8.

I'm almost finished my fourth repeat tonight. I'll update my Ravelry progress bar.

Spinning for an Urchin

I really enjoyed knitting the Urchin pattern and I've been wearing the hat when ever I go out, so I've decided to knit another one. This time, though, I want to use yarn I've spun. The pattern calls for a super bulky yarn, maybe thick and thin, which is a good deal thicker than I have made before. So tonight I spun up some small sample skeins to decide how to proceed.

I knew I wanted to use the Louet Corriedale roving in the warm wine colourway. I also wanted to add some Fiddlesticks laceweight in a similar colour (50 % merino, 50% tussah silk).

My first sample (far left) is a thick and thin single plied with a strand of Fiddlesticks. Because I'm not used to thick and thin I think I over felted this in the finishing step fearing that it would come apart otherwise.

Moving right, my second sample is a cabled yarn. I spun a single of Corriedale and then plied it with a strand of laceweight, adding extra twist while plying. I then plied this 2 ply to itself to get a 4 ply cabled yarn. I think I added a bit too much twist but otherwise I like how this sample turned out.

My last sample is another single of Corriedale plied to a single of laceweight only this time I held the laceweight taut and let the Corriedale wrap around it as I plied. I really liked the effect but I'm not sure I could make it as thick as I need.

I finally decided that I would do a cabled yarn to get the desired thickness. I wanted more shine, though, so instead of plying a single strand of laceweight to a strand of Corriedale I decided to use two strands of lace weight. This should also help build up the thickness a bit. I've spun and plied one bobbin's worth of 3 ply. Tomorrow I will spin another such 3 ply and then ply everything together. Hopefully I'll end up with something bulky.

Pictures

It is knit night again, so I thought I'd post some quick pictures.

The green is dry and ready to be knit as soon as I decide what it is going to be. I'd like to make it into some sort of wrap but I will probably have to supplement it with some other yarn to get sufficient yardage. There is swatch knitting in my future.

Last night I cast on for the Cliete using my orange hand spun. I'm going to see how large a shawl I can get with my 680 yards of yarn. I'm making a point of not spinning the rest of this orange roving into something until I know if I will need to make myself some more lace weight to finish the shawl. It will be awhile before I get to that point.

Nothing much doing

If it weren't for NaBloPoMo I don't think I'd bother posting today. Most of the day was taken up getting my Ontario driver's license converted to a Quebec license and working to get the car licensed in Quebec. Good times.

The green hand spun is currently drying and I should have a nice picture and a good idea of its final weight tomorrow. In the meantime I've been using the Ravelry pattern search as inspiration for what to do with my hand spun. I think I will make something up for the green but I've picked out Cliete to make with my orange lace weight. It's been awhile since I knit a shawl and I'm looking forward to it.

Christmas knitting should get started any time now...