I’m so lame. Like, really, really lame. I’ve been knitting but I haven’t felt like taking any pictures. My stole is looking just like it should and I’ve knit about half of it. I’ve been wasting all my time watching stupid TV and playing the Sims and reading YA fiction, some of it has been really poorly written, but entertaining, some has been really good. It’s been cool and extremely humid here all week so I haven’t even tried washing the Shetland. I haven’t done any of the spinning I wanted to do this week, either. I have cooked (roasted tomatoes and eggplant, some pasta with tomatoes and peppers, cookies). The picture is from the Sims game I’ve been playing. I haven’t done much of anything this week and, you know what? I just don’t care. Sometimes we all need a week off.
Monthly Archives: May 2009
A Little Knitting, A Little Dirty Fleece
After the shawl disaster, I needed something new to knit, I was going nuts without anything on the needles, so I cast on for a big scarf/small stole. I turned to my favorite lace book, Victorian Lace Today, and came up with the Alpine Knit Scarf. I’m using a cream colored Jaggerspun Zephyr on US4 needles. This is over half of the bottom border and the knitting is definitely not boring on this one. There is a lot of patterning to pay attention to here, lace is worked on both the right and wrong side of the border and then just on the right side of the main panel, so I can’t just turn the brain off and knit, I have to pay attention, which is what I really want right now. The yarn is beautiful, more of a creamy white than the picture shows, and very soft with a little shine, that’s the wool and silk. Nice.
During the day I’ve been cleaning my black Shetland fleece, this is it. There’s more here than it looks in the picture, plus it’s all compacted, it about quadruples in size when it’s fluffed out. I’ve been pulling off sections and cleaning it (it’s actually pretty clean, there is some grass and hay and just a few little poop pieces, nothing too bad) then washing the piece I’ve cleaned. Yesterday I only cleaned about an ounce or so, just to see how it went, and things were great, I was really happy with it.
This is all I cleaned yesterday, not much here. I picked out the VM (and poop) and fluffed and opened up the locks then stuck it in a laundry bag and washed it in my (clean) dye pot. It took one scouring with some dish soap and two rinses to get it cleaned. Today I tried my luck with a lot more than this and washed it in the bathtub which went a lot easier. I was able to wash much more wool and it was so much easier than messing with the little dye pot. I think I’m done washing fleece for the week, we’re supposed to get some rain this weekend and I’m tired and want to get back to dehairing the cashmere.
More of that Cashmere
Today I decided to try dehairing the cashmere I bought over the weekend. Now, I really have no idea what I’m doing here. I googled “how to dehair cashmere” and came up with nothing useful (lots of links to cashmere rugs, though) and I only found one post on Ravelry (that I can’t find again) about it. What I read on Ravelry said to wash the cashmere and some of the guard hairs would float to the top and you can just skim them off. While the cashmere is drying you can run your hands over the fiber and the guard hairs will stick to your hands and then when it’s dry, you can hand card the fiber and the rest of the guard hairs should stay in the padding of the cards, something like that, anyway. So I filled my sink up with water and gently pushed the cashmere down into the water and did yoga for about a half an hour while it soaked. Came back and all the cashmere was floating at the top, not just the guard hairs. OK. I took the fiber out of the sink and squeezed most of the water out of it and tried running my hands over the fiber and everything, not just the guard hairs, stuck to my palms. I tried screaming some foul language at it and that, obviously, did nothing. By now I was starting to get a little frustrated so I grabbed my blanket (the one in the picture above) and the wet cashmere and sat down in the back yard. I had decided to just pick the guard hairs out by hand. Out of nowhere came about a dozen wasps, so I grabbed everything up as fast as I could and headed for the porch. I’m allergic to stinging insects and getting stung and going into shock while I’m here alone doesn’t sound like much fun. I went back inside and just laid the cashmere out to dry and gave up for the day. Tomorrow, once the fiber is all dry, I’ll try the hand card method. If that doesn’t work I’ll just lay the blanket out on my living room floor and pick it out by hand there. I give up on doing anything outside, between my allergies and the wasps, I’d rather not even mess with it.
Before I even tried washing the cashmere I took it, the llama, and my angora outside, dumped it all on my blanket and picked through it. The angora was fine, it’s really clean, but the cashmere and llama had a little VM that needed picked out. The llama has been dehaired already so, thankfully, I don’t have to mess with it. There’s a lot more fiber in the little bag than I thought there was, too. It just needs a quick wash, it’s a bit dusty, and it will be ready to card and spin. I love the colors.
If you follow me on Twitter, I posted last night that I thought I was going to run out of yarn for my shawl and a few minutes after that I did. I’m about half way through the last chart and I only have about six inches of yarn. This is Helen’s Lace, which means it’s too expensive to justify buying a whole skein to finish the shawl, and I have no idea what color it is, so I guess I’ll frog it and knit something else. I love Victorian Lace Today, it has such beautiful patterns and a ton of information on knitting lace, but the yarn requirements are way off. I’m not the only person who has complained about this, either. My skein of yarn had about 2600yds and the pattern called for 2200yds, I shouldn’t be out, especially since my gauge was little tight. Whatever, I’ll think of something else to do with it. Times like these I’m really glad I’m a process knitter and that I don’t wear my shawls, I feel no guilt or anything about ripping this out and starting over with something else. I am a little upset about the yarn requirements in the pattern being off, though, books should be edited better than that (especially when you figure how much they cost).
So, seems like everything I’ve done today is a giant fail (I’m pretty sure I broke my coffee grinder, too), I really want to do some spinning now but I’m afraid I’ll mess that up, too. I think I’ll just wait until tomorrow to try anything.
Fiber Fair
I went to our small local fiber fair Saturday, same one I went to last year, and did a ton of buying. I had planned on buying a lot of fiber, and I think I did that, pretty good. Here’s what I got.
Starting on the top row, from the left. Those three big balls of roving and the smaller ball on the right front is some pretty gray/brown Shetland, the white ball, on the front left is Merino. There about and pound and a half of the Shetland and 4oz or so of the Merino. The next two pictures are a couple ounces of amazingly soft Angora, it is beautiful stuff.
On the next row, I have some blue variegated Merino/Bamboo/Nylon sock yarn. It feels almost like silk and has a subtle sheen to it, I’m waiting until I get my copy of Sock Innovation before I decide what to knit with it. Next is 3lbs 12oz of Shetland fleece. There are some lighter brown spots and is already skirted and barely has any VM, I’m going to start sorting and cleaning it this week. Last on the row is half of the cashmere (yep, cashmere) that I got. They were selling it in 1oz bags, I bought two. This one has been fluffed out and had some of the VM removed, I’ll have to do the other one. This is about a million times softer than the angora and is a soft gray and white color.
On the next row, some batts and a braid of roving. The blue batt is 50/50 bamboo/milk protein, the roving is bamboo, the pink is Cotswold, Merino and angelina. I want to spin these into one really pretty, soft, fluffy yarn and maybe weave something with them, but we’ll see. Next is a picture of everything, minus the fleeces. On the left, towards the back in a bag is some Louet Northern Lights pencil roving that I forgot to take a picture of, I’m going to make a felted bag for my mom with it. Last is a bag of raw Llama fleece. It’s been de-haired, which is good since I have no idea how to go about that and is almost as soft as the angora, it’s also clean enough that I could spin it without washing it.
We got a late start Saturday, we overslept and went to the farmer’s market and didn’t head to Marshfield until 2pm, the fair closed at 4pm. We had a little over an hour to look, which was, obviously, long enough. I’d hate to see how much more I would have bought if I’d had more time. I know I would have got at least one more Shetland fleece. The weather was pretty bad, it rained in the morning and then was cold and windy all afternoon. There weren’t many people there, at least while I was there, and a lot of the vendors had left already by the time I got there.
My favorite part was the animals. A lot of my pictures came out blurry but these were the best. We have: Llamas, Shetland lambs, two cashmere goats, freshly shorn alpacas, and more Shetlands. I love the goats they were so pretty and really friendly, the little goat in the middle kept sniffing at me and wanting his nose rubbed. These are the goats my cashmere fiber is from. And the Shetlands are just tiny and adorable, the alpacas were so cute with their big poofy heads and long skinny necks, and I just love llamas, so pretty.
I’ll leave you with a short video of the Shetlands, they were so loud. And you can really hear how hard the wind was blowing in the video, too.
A Bit More Weaving
I realized today that I haven’t had any spinning to post on Friday in quite a while. It’s not that I don’t have any fiber to spin, I just haven’t been in the mood. I’m supposed to be heading out to Marshfield, MO, tomorrow for a little fiber fair so maybe that will be the jolt I need to get me back at the wheel.
I did do some weaving this week, it was a good way to pass the time while I re-watched season 5 of Lost before the finale on Wednesday. I finished this yesterday. This is the recommended first project from Hands on Rigid Heddle Weaving by Betty Linn Davenport, one of the books I ordered from Amazon. I used some cheap, crappy acrylic yarn that I had leftover from making baby blankets for the warp and weft. I don’t like the yarn and I’m not crazy about the colors, but I learned a lot making it and the finished object isn’t too bad. I really tried to keep my tension even to make the selvedges look good but I had some problems in a few spots, but they evened out a little with some steam.
I had some first here. My first stripes with weft yarn which are easy to make and taught me the correct way to tuck in my ends. My first float pattern which I think looks pretty good and adds some texture and interest to the plain weave, it was easy to do, too.
I probably won’t ever use it for anything (the colors, I can’t get past the pastels) but I am happy with how it came out and it was good to have the practice. I think that I’d like to play with color again soon. There’s a pattern in Weaving Made Easy for a houndstooth bag that I really like and I really want to try some log cabin type patterns. The rigid heddle is so versatile and I can’t wait to play around with it some more.
