I hate waiting for stuff I buy online to get here. I got a new toy last night but I think I’ll wait until it’s here to show it off.
Monthly Archives: February 2009
Friday, Friday
This week has flown by. I’ve had a cold and I haven’t been sleeping good, so most of my week has been spent trying (and failing) to do as little as possible, it’s just one of those weeks. I have made some progress on a few projects. First up, the spinning. I filled my two small bobbins with ingeo singles and here I’ve started plying them. I’m still not sure what I’ll do with this stuff or even if I’ll bother spinning the rest of it (I have some natural gray Shetland that’s been calling to me and I’m watching an auction on Ebay for ten pounds of unwashed wool, can’t remember the breed, though). I just wish I had some fiber reactive dyes (dye used on plant fibers) because this white is so boring, it’s pretty, but boring.
I’ve also been doing some card weaving. This is a pretty bad picture but you get some idea of what I’m doing. I’ve been following some directions for a DPN case from WeaveZine, which appears to be off line right now, and I’m having issues. It looks like I threaded a couple cards wrong so my pattern isn’t turning out right. Not to mention the horrible problems I’m having with tension and the fact that a few of my older cards are falling apart and keep getting tangled up. I think I’m going to have to scrap this and start with something else. Or I could keep going and consider this practice, sounds better than just trashing all this cotton.
What else have I been up to? I’ve done some babysitting. I’ve wasted hours reading SecretTweet. I found a lot more of the yarn I’m using on my scarf so I frogged the edging and I’m adding some length to it since it was so short. I finally got to see the first two episodes of Dollhouse and it looks great so far. It will be interesting to see where the show goes. Confession time, I really liked Firefly (and Serenity) but I never could get in to Buffy.
I’m boring lately and have nothing to say. But, I hope you all have a great weekend!
Fiber Friday
It’s been a while since I’ve done a Fiber Friday so here we go. First up are some scrappy coils that I spun last Friday but never posted. This is different wools, Llama, Alpaca, Mohair, Nylon, Soy Silk, I don’t even know what else. This was a bunch of waste from using my hackle (fibers that are very short or too tangled to be pulled off the tines) that I carded and spun thick and thin and then coiled on some crochet cotton. I think there’s five or six yards here, coils take a ton of fiber but I love the way they look.
And this is the white corn fiber (plus a gray cat hair that I didn’t notice until I was editing the picture). You can kind of see in the picture how fuzzy this stuff is, it sheds everywhere, but it has a touch of sheen and is a nice bright white. I did try to blend this with some wool but it just clumped up and was too hard to spin. Spinning it alone is a chore with it shedding and breaking, that short staple length takes a bit of getting used to, but I think I’ve got the hang of it now. I’m pulling clumps of fiber out of my bag and spinning long draw, treadling the wheel pretty fast and putting a ton of twist in it. I’m close to filling my second bobbin now and there’s still about three quarters of the first bag left, each bag is about ten ounces.
I’ve got a serious case of wanderlust lately. My evenings have been spent plugging the names of random cities into Priceline and seeing how much a short vacation would cost. I had no idea plane tickets were so high, I haven’t flown in about eight years, I think. I did find that I can fly to Ireland cheaper than I can fly to Washington, DC, which is a little fucked up, and I can fly to Peru cheaper than Toronto. Of course, I can’t afford to fly anywhere right now (I’d have to wait to get a passport anyway, I’ve been out of the country but I never needed one before) and I would just jump in the car and head out for a weekend or so, if I had a car. I hate this feeling that I’m stuck here but I am, at least I’m being honest with myself. This stuck feeling is really contributing, if not the cause, of this funk that I’m in. It will pass soon enough, it always does.
Catching Up
I’m saving my spinning to blog about tomorrow, so here’s some other stuff. I’m running out of yarn for my scarf so last night I started the second border. I think I can block this out to be the right length, so I’m not worried about it being too short. This yarn is so hard to get a picture of, it’s a dark blue, almost black, and I just can’t get any detail to show up. I’m going to order a set of blocking wires soon (I keep saying this but I never order them, can anyone recommend a set?) and then I’ll get to block Irtfa’a, finally. Anyway, little digression, this scarf is zooming right along and I’ve really liked knitting it. The body of the scarf was easy to follow, the repeats were short and went really fast, but now I’m on the second border (you can see my cast on on the right side of the picture) so things will be slowing down a bit again. The border has open work on both sides, the repeats are sixteen rows, and there are two different patterns to work at the same time so I have to really pay attention to what I’m doing.
I really need something easy to work on at the computer but I don’t have anything I can start. I thought about making a vest but I can’t decide on a pattern, I thought about starting some socks but I’m not really in the mood, it’s that funk I talked about yesterday, I just can’t make up my mind on anything.
One thing that has been holding my attention is braiding. I can whip up one of these little braids in five or ten minutes so they’re the perfect project when I want something quick and easy. The top braid is a basic five strand braid, the bottom is a four strand flat braid, they’re both made out of nylon cord. I really like braiding with the nylon, it’s smooth and regular and if I don’t like what I make, it’s easy to unbraid and redo. I wasn’t happy with the green and yellow braid and I’ve already unpicked it an I’ll try something else later. I have no idea what I’ll ever do with all these little braids I keep making but I really like doing them.
That’s all I have today, tomorrow: handspun!
Funk
I’ve been in a bit of a funk this month. I’m having a hard time coming up with things to blog about (besides cookies) and I haven’t really been making anything (except cookies and a lacey scarf that I can’t seem to photograph), so I haven’t bothered blogging. I’d rather not write anything than write about how I don’t have anything to write about.
Today, though, I actually made something from start to finish. I had this superwash wool and nylon yarn in my basket of handspun and I decided to try an experiment. I cut ten strands of yarn about ten feet long and did a five strand braid (I held two strands together). I was hoping it would be a cute little scarf but it came out narrow, about two inches. It looks pretty cute wrapped around my neck two or three times as a little skinny scarf, though.
Here’s a detail shot. The yarn had yellow slubs, white nylon knots and little sections of pink nylon. When I came to a slub or knot I held them in place on one side of the scarf so it has little puffs sticking out. Nothing too exciting, but it’s cute.
I’ve also been doing some spinning. I spun up some scrappy coils last week but it’s been too dark to get a good picture of them and I’ve been spinning some white ingeo into pretty thin singles, trying for a fingering or sport weight with that. The ingeo is some that I got off Ebay (and forgot to blog about). The auction said it was two bags of ingeo (made out of corn) waste, so it was cheap. The fiber has a super short staple length and it sheds everywhere and feels a little synthetic and squeaky, guess that’s why it was so cheap. But I have around a pound of it, so I’ll spin it and see how it turns out. I’m barely half way through the first bag and I’ve already filled one bobbin so I should get some good yardage with it, too.
I’ll try to get some pictures of my black scarf tomorrow, but for now I’m off to catch up on blog reading and email before Lost starts.
