hibiscus

It has been a couple weeks since I have knit anything. I guess I needed a little break after the flurry of knitting I've done recently. During my knitting lull, I did manage to finish a spinning project. This skein of yarn is merino & soysilk and is soft and lustrous and gorgeous. The roving was dyed by the talented Pigeonroof Studios. It is part of their "luminosity project," which I was a little obsessed with for a while (and still am, but I am taking a break from buying spinning fiber). The colors are really deep and intense and I love yarn that has subtle variegations but is mostly a solid color.

I generally don't wear much pink and I'm racking my brain trying to figure out what I should knit with this very pink yarn. It really is beautiful though, with all the different shades of pink, and I have enough yarn (the skein is about 4 ounces, 457 yards) for a scarf or shawl or other medium-sized project. When I was pregnant with Levi, I went through a major pink phase as some weird response to finding out I was having a boy. Maybe I should hold onto this skein in case I find myself in a similar situation one of these days!

peat

Here is my latest handspun yarn. It was spun from (yet another) Pigeonroof Studios roving, in color "peat." It's 80% merino, 20% tussah silk. I have to admit that I started spinning this about a year ago and then got wrapped up in teaching and taking care of Levi, and it got ignored. Well, with all this goat frenzy as well as wanting something to enter in the Vermont Sheep & Wool Festival, I finished the spinning over the past few days.

It is navajo plied, which is a method of getting a 3-ply yarn from a single strand of singles yarn, and I did this to preserve each individual color of the roving. So, instead of ending up with all the colors plied and blended together (resulting in a tweedy yarn), I got a yarn that will give a more stripey effect when I knit with it. I'm really happy with how it turned out and now have 3 skeins of yarn to enter in next week's wool festival!

Speaking of the goat frenzy, it seems that there are at least 3 other people, if not more, with way more votes than me. That's okay, we'll be patient until the day when we finally have some fiber animals of our own. I am grateful to all my family and friends who solicited votes for me. I'm especially grateful to my siblings, who got involved in this quite passionately. I didn't know that they understood my passions and interests as well as they apparently do...and I feel very lucky to have such supportive people in my life!

fingerless gloves

In these last weeks of waiting for baby, it seems like all I want to do is sit on the couch and knit. Which means that when I see a pattern that I can't resist, I immediately cast-on. This pattern, the cashmere fingerless gloves from Purl Bee was completely irresistable to me, but I couldn't justify the expense of the cashmere. Luckily I had some handspun alpaca, merino, bamboo yarn that seemed to be the right weight, and oddly enough I had even mentioned making it into fingerless gloves when I first finished spinning the yarn. I used Blue Sky alpaca sport weight in dark brown for the trim, as was recommended in the pattern.

The gloves are great, and the glowing hearth yarn is one of my favorite handspun yarns ever. I am giving these gloves to a friend for Christmas, but only because I have enough of the yarn left to make something for myself later. I don't think I could completely part with this one...it's so glowing and warm and gorgeous.

I am also planning to make these same fingerless gloves in red and brown (with an orange button, like in the original pattern) for myself...to go with a new wool coat with red trim that I got last fall. I anticipate that sometime in the near future this coat will zip up over my belly again and I'll be happy as a clam to have coordinating gloves to go with it!

bark BSJ

The trip to Portland involved a 2.5 hour bus ride and over 6 hours of flying, each way. Aside from a short nap here and there, pretty much all I did during the transit was knit this Baby Surprise Jacket. It is made from my handspun bark yarn (dyed by Pigeonroof Studios), which is a sport weight yarn, and I think I used size 4 needles for this one.

I literally think every woman I know between the ages of 28 and 35 is currently pregnant, so I anticipate knitting many more Baby Surprise Jackets in the near future. I'm in love with this one though, because the handspun merino-silk yarn is so beautiful, almost too luxurious for a baby! But you know, nothing is too good for certain babies.

bitter orange

The last few Pigeonroof rovings that I have spun have been so beautiful as yarn that I am hesitant to knit with them. I'd rather just look at them! This one is different. It's colorway "bitter orange" in 80% merino and 20% tussah silk. I really loved the color of this one and was excited to spin it. But I'm not happy with my spinning at all! I was trying to spin a thicker yarn, but this one just seems dense and it isn't very pretty to look at. I'm also not as even of a spinner when I try to spin thicker (I think in the future I'm going to stop trying - I'll just 3-ply my thin singles if I want a thicker yarn). Plus it is very barber-poley, which I'm not so crazy about in a yarn.

And I learned something about myself. When I am not 100% satisfied with a yarn, I just want to knit it right away! So I discovered a way to get myself to knit more: spin yarns that I'm unhappy with! Just kidding, I won't do that, but check out how amazingly gorgeous the bitter orange is in this knitted garter stitch swatch I made.

I LOVE it. It's tweedy and interesting and it drapes really well (because of the silk)...and I love all the colors. Now I just have to figure out what I'm going to make with it. Unfortunately I only have about 200 yards, which isn't a whole lot. I'm really anxious to knit with it though, so hopefully I'll figure out something good.

bark handspun

I finished spinning yet another Pigeonroof roving. It is one of the two I talked about here... 80%merino, 20% tussah silk dyed in colorway "bark." It was a really subtle roving, which suits me well...I'm still not a huge fan of wildly variegated yarns, and it spun into a gorgeous yarn with a slight shine from the silk.

It's about 360 yards, 4.1 ounces, and once again it fluffed up into a really soft squishy yarn. Back in my spinning heyday (just over 5 years ago when I lived in Moscow, Idaho), I never spun yarns like this...I mainly spun drapey, very fine yarns with a looser ply. It is probably partly because I am spinning a lot of merino these days, which is really springy, and partly because I've been making a conscious effort to ply tighter. I'm really really happy with my current spinning though, and it is very knitting-friendly (though obviously I haven't even been knitting with it!), so I guess I'm just going to keep it up. I did recently buy some chocolate brown bombyx silk, which I can't wait to spin, and that will be a nice change of pace from all this fluffy merino.

Anyway, stay tuned (my two readers!) because my quilt is officially finished, and I will try to get some decent pictures this weekend and post it. It turned out really great, and I'm so glad that I did the whole process myself instead of having someone else quilt it.

green tea

Above is another roving I was lucky enough to get from Pigeonroof Studios. It is 3.9 ounces of organic merino dyed in colorway "Green Tea." It had every shade of green from minty green to olive green, several shades of brown, including some reddish-brown, and even a couple tiny patches of blue. Pretty amazing. The whole time I was spinning the singles, I was worried about how all those colors would blend together...but I am SO happy with the final yarn, I can't stop looking at it.

I spun it really fine (I ended up getting over 400 yards of yarn from this 3.9 ounce roving), and the organic merino is so springy and soft that it fluffed up into an amazing squishy yarn. It would be perfect for socks, but I'm just not sure yet what it will become. Obviously I haven't been spending much time knitting these days...so I'll have to work on that. I just can't stop spinning!

some alpaca spinning

I am amassing quite the collection of handspun yarn, and I really need to start knitting with some of it! For some reason, spinning has been very therapeutic to me lately so I've been spending more time spinning than anything else.

These two yarns are from amazing batts I purchased from Loop. The brown yarn was spun from batts called "Butterscotch Sundae." It is three colors of baby alpaca: Dark brown, light brown, and white, topped off with some gold tussah silk. I love what silk does to yarn...the beautiful glowing quality that it gives. The brown skeins are spun pretty fine...a little heavier than true laceweight yarn, and I have no plans for it yet.

The green skein below is from Loop batts named "Sour Apple." It is a blend of 50% gray and green alpaca with 50% green bamboo and a touch of tussah silk and silk noil. It is a silky, drapey, and strong light worsted weight yarn...and I love the color! For some reason I think it would make a beautiful throw pillow cover. I was thinking of using it as the weft in a piece of woven fabric that I could make into the front of a pillow cover. My thought is that it would be really pretty aside my birch forest pillow on the bed that will (someday) be home to my quilt.

handspun hemp washcloths

About six or seven years ago I made my first batch of these handspun hemp exfoliating washcloths...I gave one to my sister and one to a friend. In the past year or so, I visited these two recipients and happily noticed that the washcloths are still in use! So recently, when I was going through my stash of yarn and spinning fiber and found two little packets of hemp fiber from Habu Textiles, I pulled them out and started spinning.

Spinning hemp is no walk in the park. I spin because I love the tactile qualities of merino, alpaca, and silk. In fact, I'm so spoiled these days that I don't spin anything but the very softest most luxurious fibers...probably because my time for spinning is so few and far between, so I want to make the most of it. Hemp is coarse and stringy and clumpy, and the only reason I tolerated spinning it was the promise of some really cool little washcloths at the end. I spun with a little bowl of water next to me, and I periodically dipped my drafting hand into the water so I could smooth out the fibers as I spun. I ended up with a fairly fine (though not as fine as my first foray into spinning hemp so many years ago) two-ply hemp yarn.

Exfoliating hemp washcloths are best done in a lace pattern, so I turned to Barbara Walker's A Treasury of Knitting Patterns and picked out three patterns. I aimed for enough repeats to give me an approximately 8.5-9 inch square washcloth. The top washcloth is 4 repeats of "Shell Lace" (p. 209), the one in the picture above is four repeats of "Fern or leaf-patterned lace" (p. 208), and the washcloth nearest the bar of soap is five repeats of "Vine Lace" (p. 218). I added a garter stitch border on all sides of each washcloth. I knit these on US size 3 knitting needles.

Knitting with hemp is a little like knitting with twine (i.e. not very pleasant), but it actually softens as you knit with it. Also, I threw the washcloths in the washing machine and they came out even softer. So the cloths are the perfect texture for gently exfoliating, and will definitely not be scratchy on the skin at all.

Two of these are staying in my own household this time, and the third will be a gift (along with a bar of amazing soap) for my friend Jen who just defended her master's thesis. By the way, the bamboo charcoal soap pictured above is from Purusha, who quite possibly makes the best soap I have ever used.

goldenrod

I just finished spinning this lovely Blue-faced Leicester roving in colorway "Goldenrod" from Pigeonroof Studios. I actually can't believe that I managed to snatch this one up, Pigeonroof's rovings tend to sell minutes after they are listed...but I just happened across this one on a weekday and I guess I just got lucky! I used to avoid painted rovings because I really don't like the "barberpole effect," when you get a really dark color and a light color plyed together...it's just too contrasting for me, I like a more subtle effect. But I have to say that Pigeonroof's colorways are pretty amazing, and the prevalence of white fibers in the roving made all the colors mute out a little bit, and I ended up with a beautiful subtly variegated yarn.



I almost gave up on this one too...I plied a few yards and did not like what I was getting...I thought I had spun too thickly, the yarn felt coarse...so I just let it sit for a few days. That is unlike me because once I start plying I usually can't wait to get it done! Anyway, when I finally finished the plying, I was amazed at how it turned out. And once it was washed, it turned into a really soft and fluffy yarn, exactly what Blue-faced Leicester should be. The only bad thing is that now I'm hooked on Pigeonroof Studios, and I'll likely be among the crazy crowds snapping up rovings the minute they are listed!

poetry in stitches

This is a knitting project (sorry for the backlit photo!) that I completed years ago, but I haven't knit anything as involved and time-consuming since...so I thought it was worth posting. The pattern is from Poetry in Stitches, an out-of-print knitting book, but I had to majorly rewrite the pattern because I knit this sweater with handspun yarn that was much thinner than what the pattern called for. The original pattern was on page 120 of the book, and had accents in black instead of brown, as well as "lice," a dot pattern, all over.



The yarn is handspun Blue-faced Leicester in natural and brown. The colored yarn is the same Blue-faced Leicester that I naturally dyed with fustic, osage orange, cochineal, madder, and indigo extracts. Looking back at the original picture of the sweater, it seems I managed to match the colors pretty well with my natural dyeing!

glowing hearth

Here is some yarn that I spun with some gorgeous batts I bought on etsy from loop. It is a blend of pumpkin-colored merino, burgundy alpaca, and gold bamboo fiber, and the bamboo just makes it glow! You can see all the colors better in the singles yarn before I plyed it:



It ended up being such a soft and luscious yarn, and I can't wait to knit with it. I've been wanting to make some fingerless gloves for a while now, and I think they'd be so luxurious in this yarn!