This crazy merino has become something of an obsession around the house.
This is a small portion of it. I’m working with it a section at a time.
It’s both terrible and wonderful. This fleece came from a sheep who was determined to be as dirty as possible, sheered by a drunk (no fleece should have so many double cuts as this one does), and skirted only by someone’s imagination.
Here’s an average size bit of vegetation pulled from it.
I was up to four ounces of veggie matter when I gave up and stopped weighing. The veggie matter was the least of the problems.
And yet, it’s wonderful somehow. I can’t keep my hands off of it. When I’m in the same room as it is, I have to keep myself from trying to card it, to pull out the best of the locks and open them. I just walked near it this morning and suddenly realized I had to run if I was going to make it into work on time (made it with two minutes to spare only thanks to a fast bus ride). I’m using a flick carder on the locks that just want to be opened and spun right as locks. The rest is going on a drum carder. I want to spin it on a spindle, to spend even more time with it, to really enjoy it.
The cats feel the same.
I can’t lay it out on the floor to work with it without some cat or other coming over to play with it. I don’t blame them. It’s exceedingly soft, even for a merino.
If you need me, I’m going to be spending the next ten years turning this into a sweater.
May 18th, 2010
The fourth shawl of the 10 shawls in 2010 challenge is Citron, knit in Malabrigo lace from stash (making it the second of the 5 that are to be from stash yarn).
This is the first time I’ve worked with this yarn and it’s amazing. It’s so soft, and it works up easily. I didn’t frog much, but I tinked a little, and it held up fine. It’s definitely a single. when I finished, I couldn’t find my scissors, so I unspun it a bit to break the end. It’s spun a tiny bit thick and thin (it’s advertised as hand spun and I can believe it). It’ll find its way into a larger shawl soon. Maybe after I clear the needles and finish Moonfleet.
The pattern works up very easily, and by the end you can do it by sight and memory. Fair warning, the end takes up A LOT of yarn. I thought I could do another repeat before I started the ruffle, but I ended with only 5 grams left.
I carded that merino yesterday. If pigpen were a sheep, he would be that merino. I spent two hours scouring each part of the fleece and I can still spin it in the grease. I carded it for close to 12 hours, and I have 5 grams of ready-to-spin wool to show for it.
After all this, I’ve decided to spin it on a spindle, not a wheel. If I’ve spent this much time with the prep, I’m going to take my time and enjoy the spinning.
May 17th, 2010
Forgive the headless webcam photo. I couldn’t find my camera, and I wanted to show the whole sweater.
This is Hey Teach, in Knit Picks Comfy Worsted. It knit up very fast. Just a fewdays from cast on to sweater.
This is a fun one. One friend thinks the right side is longer than the left. One thinks the left side is longer than the right. One thinks the whole thing is too long. One thinks the whole thing is too short. I think it serves its purpose. It keeps me warm in the office when the air conditioner is set to Arctic Blizzard Blast, and that makes me happy. It rarely visits home, except to get washed and go back to work.
It makes me want to knit more sweaters.
May 12th, 2010
Jane’s daughter takes horseback riding lessons, and the teacher, Nancy, has alpaca as part of her petting zoo. She’s not a fiber lady, though from what I’ve gathered she’s dabbled in machine knitting, and she had a ton of fleeces lying around. Jane asked her for one for me, and Nancy gave it to her.
I have to admit, I was nervous. I didn’t know what to expect. Would it even be skirted? Skirting a fleece is what removed the poopy stuff. Would I be pulling leg hair out of the blanket? The good part of the fleece is the blanket, from the back of the animal–the rest is useless. I studied everything I could on how to skirt a fleece, as I’ve never done that before.
I was a fool to worry.
This is probably the cleanest raw fleece I’ve ever seen. It’s perfectly skirted. No guard hair. Very little veggie matter. It’s about three pounds, all of it usable, and extremely soft, even with all the dust still on it.
I look into this bag and see a cardigan waiting to be born.
May 11th, 2010
There’s a lot of shawl knitting going on around here. A lot of shawl knitting. Here are some photos from the various mystery knitalongs.
This is the April clue for the KALendar shawl. The theme is branches and saplings. It’s the first clue that has purls on the right side row.
Clue 1, clue 2, and part of clue 3 of the Goddess Knits anniversary Knitalong. I chose C, C, and Q in that order. If you’re not doing Goddess Knits, it’s a choose your own adventure shawl. Every clue has four charts, A, B, C, and Q. You just pick one and knit it. You can mix and match at will, so there are 1,024 total possible combinations.
This is the first six clues of Evenstar. the beading section is kicking my tuckas. So far I’ve started and ripped that six times. Seventh time the charm?
Up close of the last clue. I love the giant flower with the evenstar motif in clue 6.
And this is the swatch for Moonfleet, which is starting Friday. Yes, I’m going shawl happy.
May 10th, 2010
This shawl and I are having a kind of rocky relationship. It’s Evenstar, and I do love the design. The yarn is Knit Picks Gloss Lace in Mango, a color I fell madly in love with the first time I saw it and which has finally found its calling.
I think I knit clue 1 something like fifteen times before I got it right. It was a short clue. It was done before clue 2 came out. Clue 2 sped past. In clue 3 there was a tiny errata concerning moving stitch markers that I countered by assuming I was an idiot and had somehow misplaced all of my stitch markers, so it all evened out nicely. I dodged the second error in that clue, the one that wouldn’t have an impact until clue 4, by not starting clue 4 until it was noticed (a whopping 5 minutes after the clue came out). So it seemed all was sunshine and light with this darling.
Then I did clue 4. Somehow I dropped a few stitches. Now I’m good at fixing lace, and worst case I thought I could knock the whole panel down to the stockinette portion and knit it back up. I tried, and tried, and I totally failed. So I put in an after the fact lifeline on the last row of stockinette and tore all the way back to that. I knit one round and put it in a short-term time out. There are a lot of stitches in this clue and clue 5 comes out on Friday.
Then I woke up to find a moth larva on the shawl. A big one. It didn’t damage the shawl. It didn’t damage the yarn. It damaged its own life expectancy by crossing my path–I don’t do mercy when it comes to moths.
The game of late has been knit 200 stitches and tink 50, but I’m halfway through clue 4 and maybe, just maybe, I’ll be done before clue 5 arrives.
April 5th, 2010
This is yet another Unoriginal Hat, my fourth so far. I’m certain there will be more. This is with the size 10.75 needles and finally it’s exactly the right size. The yarn is gigante and the color is Cherry Tree Blossom. It’s fun working with a bulky yarn after using laceweight for so long. It works up so fast. The hat took about two hours total, and right now, a single round of Evenstar is taking close to an hour.
Hikari now likes to eat standing up. My cats are weird.
April 3rd, 2010
A few months ago I knit these Sunday Swing Socks from a skein of Luxe in Summer Rose.
The skein, advertised as being 100 grams, was closer to 106. That happens a lot with independent dyers. The socks took about 56 grams total. So I figured I might just be able to swing a shorter sock with the remaining yarn. I divided the yarn into 25 gram balls, and intended to work toe up, but then decided on Debra Chinn’s Ankle Bracelets sock pattern. It was about as short a cuff as I would want.
It worked.
And this is all the yarn that’s left over.
March 31st, 2010
When the Spring 2009 issue of Interweave Knits came out, I fell madly in love with the Fountain Pen Shawl. I knew I must knit it. So I set the magazine aside in a safe place, and, well, it’s safe from me all right. I have no clue where it is. Of course, I realized this long after the issue was gone from the racks.
Jocelyn, mistress of all things printed, was able to find me a copy of the pattern in the library, and I have finally cast this on.
It’s the same construction as Adamas. You start in the center back and knit down one side of the triangle and up the other, increasing by four stitches every other row. The chart isn’t as easy to memorize as Adamas, but it’s not all that hard.
The pattern calls for laceweight yarn, but the lady at the yarn shop knit hers out of Drops Alpaca fingering, and it was gorgeous. I decided to use the same yarn. The color is similar to the luxury blue ink from Noodlers, and I thought that was appropriate for a lace pattern designed to resemble fountain pen nibs. It’s to be the fourth shawl of the 10 in 2010 challenge, and I think it’s going to be my favorite.
March 30th, 2010
This is my Iron Man Shawl. It’s the third of the 10 shawls in 2010 challenge, and the first knit from stash. The yarn is laceweight merino dyed in the Iron Man colorways (red and gold). The pattern is Adamas.
The shawl took 75% of the skein, so a mere 660 yards, but it’s huge. I couldn’t fit the entire thing on my blocking board, so I had to cheat. That’s why there is a hole in the middle where nothing would have been pinned anyway. I needed that square on the end. It’s far longer across the top than my wingspan. That’s one of the funny things about shawls. They tend to look too small until they’re blocked. I thought this one would be just a tiny shawlette until it hit the water and the board.
The pattern just says “bind off”. I did the method of K1 *K1 K the 2 stitches just made together rep from * to make the bind off loose enough to block well, and I’m pleased with the results.
March 29th, 2010
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