I’ve been quietly spinning away on the gray fleece from Jefferson Sheep and Wool for several months now. It hasn’t been moving very quickly, but it’s been progressing. It doesn’t get much blog face time because, well, it’s gray wool. I love it and it’s beautiful and it makes a great yarn, but there’s really not much else to say about it. One skein looks about the same as three skeins, which look about the same as 9.

With no knitting in the works, the spinning has gotten a lot more attention this week. As I’ve gotten closer to the end of the gray fleece, I’ve begun to realize that I’m getting more yardage than I would have expected from the weight alone. This is a gently-processed roving, and so it has a lot more air in it than a commercial top.

I originally bought the fleece for me, but it just so happens that the sheep is named MacGyver, and I know a particular engineer who would dearly love to have a MacGyver sweater. When I hit 1000 yards, I thought that I might just squeeze out enough to make a sweater for Branden instead.

Last weekend, we tallied up the current yardage, what was left on the bobbins, and made some educated guesses about how much we could expect to get from the bag.

And it’s not quite enough. It is very, very close, but it is not enough.

And so, I started exploring ways to get around that niggling problem of not enough yarn. The sweater can’t get any smaller. The yarn shouldn’t be knit any looser. Lace is not an option. But what about a blend?

When I went to Jefferson, I bought one roving for me and two rovings for Branden. His rovings were huge, and I am sure to have more than I need from them. Of course, neither of those sheep are a MacGyver. But one of them is a dark brown that matches quite nicely with the gray.

I spun a few samples. We liked the outcome. So I spun a few skeins. I thought about a sweater design that would use all of them, fading from gray into dark brown with mixed skeins in between.

And now, instead of being a couple of bobbins away from done with MacGyver, I’m spinning another 2/3 of a sweater in two-tone and solid brown. It’s a lot more Shetland to spin, but there will be plenty of MacGyver left over.

Not much has gotten done this week, I’m afraid. We heard back on the house, and they went with someone else.I was afraid of that, since one of the other people looking at the place seemed to know the landlord really well, and if I were in her shoes I’d go with my friend over a stranger. So, we begin the house hunting again.

My knitting has hit that awkward in-between stage where one project is done before another has quite taken off. (I seem to run into this problem a lot lately. Need to work on planning for the next project sooner.)

I’ve been swatching happily away for the past couple of weeks, using this as my bus knitting. It’s made great progress, and I’m excited about the stitches I’ve been coming up with.

But then, last Sunday, I finished one swatch and just couldn’t figure out where to start looking for another. I’m working on “plain weave” textures right now, feeling my way through two-color linen stitch variations. I’ve tried quite a few, but haven’t found what I want just yet. I thought I had it two or three times this week, knit a few rows, and then realized that no, that still wasn’t it. There’s a lot of one step forward and two steps back in this project right now. I think it’s getting closer, but it isn’t moving yet.

The Namaste scarf has met a similar fate. I had swatched two different stitch patterns that I really liked in a similar yarn, and then bought this yarn to make the actual piece. I was home sick from work one day about three weeks ago, and I managed to get half a skein knit up. Yes, I have been that behind in blogging. I could have sworn that I’d taken pictures and blogged about it weeks ago, but can find evidence of neither. So, belatedly, here is the scarf I started:

The problem is that I don’t like the stitch in this yarn. I love the yarn, and I like the stitch, but the two aren’t playing together well. I think the silk and the tencel together give the yarn a little too much drape where the stitch requires bounce. I knit as far as I did hoping that I’d suddenly like it once the fabric got to a size where I could really see how it hangs, but the next day I looked at it again and had to admit that it’s just not there yet. I like it, but it just doesn’t “pop.”

So, the scarf requires some more tinkering with stitch patterns and swatches. It’s amazing how hard it is to come up with interesting stitch patterns in fully reversible lace with simple repeats. I had fallen into two in a row almost by accident, but now it’s looking like others may be harder to find. That’s not a problem, but it requires time and brainspace to find what I want, and I’ve been rather short on both lately. And so, the Namaste scarf has also been put aside to ripen.

Unfortunately, nothing else has really been stepping forward to be knit, and so I have had an almost entirely knit-less week. I’m hoping to cast on for something this afternoon, or else it will be another week before I have time to figure out what’s next. (And it will be another week before I can get into the stash closet, since we have a houseguest coming tonight and there is now a twin bed set up in front of the closet door.)

So, here’s hoping for more knitting next week!

I have gotten lots of comments about the yarn that I used for my latest sweater.

It’s beautiful stuff, and it’s hand dyed by Ruth over at Knitting on Impulse. It just so happens that she’s having a sale. They don’t come around very often, and all of her yarn is irresistible to anyone that shares my color palette (which would be most of you, I believe). That’s probably why it also sells out very, very quickly.

So, if you’re looking for some yarn that just must be bought, you might want to jump over and take a peek. If you’re not looking to buy, I would recommend not clicking through (consider that fair warning).

A few notes on the yarn: I bought the BFL worsted. It’s a lovely, sturdy, high-twist yarn. I would really call it a fingering-weight, though, so beware that you might be knitting “worsted” on size 3’s. (Unless I somehow got the fingering weight labeled as worsted, but I think that’s unlikely.) It took me 8 skeins to make a sweater, and I have a little bit left over. Because the yarn is high-twist, it is also very dense, and makes a heavy-weight garment. If you’re someone who tends to pick up sweaters and say “but it’s so heavy“, the BFL might not be for you. I love it, and I think it will wear like iron. The extra weight also makes it nice and warm. Ruth also has many other yarns that look equally delicious…I just have a particular weakness for BFL.

So, if you’re hankering after some beautifully-dyed yarn, go take a peek. I just got the email in my inbox, and thought I’d share in case anyone was tempted by the earlier links that I’d posted and needed an excuse to check out her shop.

The house hunt is officially on. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before, but we are moving (again) in June. Or at least Branden is moving in June. I don’t have a job down there yet, so I may end up staying here a little while longer and moving in July; there are lots of things still up in the air. Honestly, I’m beginning to think that everything will always be up in the air, but at least I think I’m getting better at juggling with all this practice.

Either way, we have now officially begun the house hunt. This starts out many months in advance of a move, with a profiling of yarn shops, craft guilds, and hackerspaces in the new place. You know, the important things. Fortunately Chicago has all of these things in spades, so there won’t be any worries there.

Then begins the haunting of Ravelry boards for the given area, a few months in advance. Mapping out of particular neighborhoods begins in earnest, and extra details are added into the list for our top choices.

And now, the actual hunting begins. We drove down to Chicago for the day on Saturday to view our first candidate, and it looks really good.  The current tenants are still in the house, and we felt badly enough snooping in their closets and such, so we didn’t take pictures, but it’s very cute and has pretty much every feature on our list. I’m trying not to get my hopes up too high, since there was a lot of competition, but we applied and we think things went pretty well. So maybe. Fingers crossed!

Sunday was also a busy day. Franklin Habit was in Madison for the Knitter’s Guild Knit-In (which I missed due to house hunting), and he was teaching at our favorite LYS & coffee shop. We ended up on the wait list for the morning class, and only got one spot, so Branden took the Photographing Your Knitting class, and I took the afternoon Knitting from Antique Patterns class. Lots of good information, increased temptation to wander through the forests of old patterns (once I have brain space). We basically camped out in a yarn shop all day; it’s hard to complain about that.

In all, it was a busy but pretty good weekend. And now somehow it’s Tuesday night already. How does it do that?

Every once in a while, the universe has a message that it tries to send your way. Sometimes it gets through, and sometimes it’s a bit garbled. This month, it appears to be talking to me with a mouth full of marbles.

On two separate occasions, I have apparently had problems with financial documents (from different companies) just not showing up. Actually, in both cases there is pretty clear evidence that they never sent the documents in the first place, but we’ll be nice and just say that I never got them.

And, because I never got the original message which would have been simply fixed, this month I have received threatening letters about accounts overdue (for which I had never received a statement, and for which no statements had been sent) and tonight for an account about to be closed (because one part of their system has lost a certain number that they need after having stored it safely without anything changing for 7 years, and even though the same number is stored in a different part of the same system it can’t be transferred, because the two parts of the system can’t access one another).

So I get the message that I missed the message. But how am I supposed to respond to a message that was never sent? And why, oh why, are you suddenly going to close my bank account for lack of a number that you already have???

Clearly, there’s something I’m missing here.

Well, after months and months of knitting, the sweater is finally done.

I don’t really know why this one took so long; I started it way back in October, which puts it at about 5 months to finish. That beats my three-month record for Oblivion, and this one wasn’t even knit on particularly small needles. (Well, they’re not small anymore…threes feel downright large some days). I love the yarn, and I even liked the knitting.  The stitch pattern made me a little crazy at the cuffs, but that only lasted for a few hours.

Nope. I’m afraid that the only real reason that this sweater has taken 5 months is: distraction. I’d work on it for a while, and then the current body/sleeve would get too big for bus knitting and it would become evening knitting. I don’t get to do a lot of that, and I tend to like to work on projects that move quickly in my limited evening hours. So it got replaced by one thing after another.

But now, it is done. I finally finished the neckline and bound off on Saturday afternoon, and then wore it all day on Sunday. I may also have worn it to work on Monday, but since no one saw me both days it doesn’t count. Besides, I had to verify that it goes equally well with the green shirt and the red shirt. (It does.)

As it turns out, it was finished just in time. Today was in the high 50’s, and tomorrow we’ll be well into the 60’s. It’s still likely that the cold will be back, but my heavy sweater days for this year are numbered. At least now I’m ready for fall!

I posted last week about the samples I made in preparation for dyeing the February Cardinal roving based on Ellen’s picture. I also dyed the fiber, but I didn’t get it done in time for it to finish drying for pictures. We fixed that little problem this morning, so without further ado, here are the results of my little experiment.

I dyed four different colorways, three that were aimed at actually reproducing the colors in the picture, and one that was just riffing off of the new colors on my sample cards.

The first two that I dyed didn’t come out quite as I had hoped, but (as usual) I love the way that they did come out. Both rovings use the same set of colors, but one is balanced more toward the light end of the spectrum,

and the other has more dark.

Put together, though, they’re hard to tell apart.

This pair shows the problem with dyeing high-contrast colors right next to one another. Without some kind of gel thickener, the colors tend to bleed into one another. The dark dye also tends to take over the light regions, evening out the (purposefully uneven) dye application. It produces beautiful results, but it’s not really the representation of a dark forest with a brilliant flash of red that I was going for.

The next roving is my favorite of the bunch. It’s just a combination of very pale colors, all toned down with a tiny touch of gray. There’s a blue, and a green, and a brown that give the hint of color, and the three combine to make a very softly variegated fiber that stops just short of being pastel.

I absolutely love it, especially in the shiny blue-faced leicester roving.

The last roving came the closest to what I wanted. That’s especially good, because I made 8 oz of this one (and only 4 oz for each of the others). This time, I left out the red, and focused on the deep-dark greens.

I tried to leave some pale spots, but again the dark colors bled in and mostly filled the space I’d left undyed. There are some spots that echo the trees in the foreground, but most of this roving is based in the shady greens in the background of the photo.

Instead of putting red into this fiber directly, I kept a small piece aside and dyed it separately, to be added in at will during the spinning. This makes a bright, pure red for maximum contrast with the green, and without the problem of the two colors bleeding into brown.

I think it would also be fun to spin this way, adding in a cardinal here and there on a whim, whenever it seems like there’s a little too much solid. It wouldn’t take much to have a forest full of them, peeking out from between the branches.

In all, I think this was a pretty successful experiment. One roving came close to what I had envisioned, and the others took me in directions I wouldn’t have expected to make fiber that I really like. It added a few more colors to my sample cards and made a few more pieces for the shop. And best of all, it was fun to do. I definitely think we’ll be trying this again soon.

You may remember that I posted a week or two ago about how spring was here.

Well, since then, winter’s been doing its best to convince me that I am wrong. I don’t believe it for a minute…the buds on the trees, the birds singing in the morning, and the sun being up when I’m walking home from work are telling me otherwise, but for now winter has been making a show of being here to stay.

Everyone in lab has been kind of keeping an eye on the end of the 10-day forecast, hoping to get a first glimpse of the temperatures rising into springtime. (Actually, they already have risen. We’ve been above freezing almost constantly for a month now. In these parts, that counts as springtime. Yes, I still love it here.)

This week, it looked like we’d be in the upper 30’s and low 40’s every day.  And then this is what the world looks like this morning:

Looks like we actually got the 4-5 inches of snow that they predicted last night. I may have a strange sense of humor, but really it just makes me laugh. It will all be gone again in a few days anyway, and for now, I’m really enjoying my (hopefully?) last snow of the year.

This snow is the wet, heavy kind that comes when the temperature is really too high for it to have any business snowing in the first place (read: spring). It’s a New England snow, really. It’s not the powdery, fluffy stuff that we usually get here in Wisconsin. I absolutely love the way it sticks to everything, turning all the trees into white shadows of themselves.

I think it’s one of the prettiest snowfalls we’ve had all year.

It looks like spring isn’t coming today, so I think I’m going to go out and enjoy my last little bit of winter on my way to work instead.

I don’t suppose anyone around here needs to be told that I don’t believe in ripping out to fix a problem when a little creative surgery will do just as well. It probably also won’t surprise you that this is especially true when I have two sleeves knit from the shoulder down on size 3’s to fix. I spent some time this weekend snipping and grafting to rework the shoulders on the almost-done sweater.

I’m not entirely sure what went wrong with the shoulder shaping, except that I knit a fitted sleevecap, and then ended up with a sweater that really wanted a drop sleeve. Something about the deep v-neck opening makes the sweater lie lower on my shoulders than I’d expected, making a drop sleeve is much more appropriate. I also made the sleeve cap shaping end too abruptly, which looked fine on the needles but left me with a distinctly bulgy shoulder once things were finished.

See that extra wedge of knitting?

It makes an ugly little triangle shape when the sweater is actually worn.

And you can see that tucking that extra little bulge to the inside really helps things to lie flat again.

The solution, then, is to remove that little bulge altogether. I started out by marking the row of knit stitches that went straight across the shoulder, where I wanted the seam to end up. Then, I snipped a stitch.

And I unraveled the row.

Then, I put the sleeve stitches back on the needle, and pulled out the shoulder shaping, all the way back to the picked up stitches.

And I grafted it shut again.

For comparison, here’s a picture of the sweater with one shoulder fixed and the other untouched. Bet you can’t guess which is which.

Looks a lot better, doesn’t it?

About a week ago, Ellen took a picture of a cardinal. And then, she asked me if I could dye spinning fiber that looks like it.

My dyeing skill is definitely not to that level, but I love a challenge, and what’s a challenge but the opportunity to try something you’re probably not ready for? (If you want to see a master of matching photo to fiber, check out Ruth’s blog over at Impulse of Delight. I want every yarn that she dyes.)

There are two main challenges in this project. The first, is contrast. It’s easy to make yarns with subtle variegation. You layer on a bunch of colors, and you gently smoosh (yes, that’s a technical term) the dye together to mix and blend it as much as you like. For contrast, it’s a different story. Dye goes onto fiber as solutions, not really any thicker than water. It’s easy to let two colors bleed into one another, but it is hard to keep them separate. You can buy gels and thickeners to help out, but I’ve never used them and don’t want to add another layer of complexity to the process right now.

So, contrast. Hard. That photo even has two kinds of contrast; there is the contrast between very dark and very light, and the contrast between grey/greens and bright red.  This is fiber for spinning, so there’s also the additional blending (i.e. loss of contrast) that you’ll get at the wheel from spinning multi-colored fibers together.

Contrast is challenge #1 in terms of difficulty, but it falls second in the process, at the stage where the dye goes onto the fiber and then again when the fiber gets spun at the wheel.

The first challenge is simply choosing which colors to use in the first place. I had the right greens right off, but the right grays just simply didn’t exist in my sample card collection. The gray in the photo is not a simple color; it’s a subtle mix of gray and blue in some regions, and gray and pink in others. Just diluting black wasn’t going to cut it, so I spent yesterday afternoon playing with all the different ways to add a hint of color to a pale, pale gray.

Predictably, I like the blue-grays and the green-grays the best, but I also got a pretty good range of pink-gray and even a couple of yellow-grays (though those are almost more like a pale mustardy brown, if you ask me.)

I usually prefer to use deep, saturated colors with a lot of intensity, but I am finding myself utterly charmed by these pale, pale colors. In their finest moments, the samples remind me a little bit of Blue Moon’s Spirit series, which I have always loved and will someday find an excuse to use. I never knit in white, but I love, love, love all those barely-there shades of color.

Even before Ellen asked her question about the cardinal, Branden and I had been discussing how to add a “suggestions” box to the website so that people can suggest color combinations and/or photos for me to play with when I’m dyeing. I don’t want to do custom orders (at least not as a general thing), because I don’t have and I just don’t want to have very precise control over my dyeing process. For me, a lot of the fun is in the magic of just seeing what happens, and I think that would get lost if I was focused on trying to match someone else’s vision. Or even my own vision, I suppose. I go to the dye studio with deliberately fuzzy expectations, and I’d like to keep it that way.

So the idea of custom “orders” is out, but I really enjoy working with combinations of color that I wouldn’t have put together on my own. I have a fairly limited personal palette, truth be told, and it’s really fun to step outside of it and dye something that I would never think to wear but that represents another person’s taste in my mind. I’ve dyed for friends four or five times, and I really enjoy the process of figuring out which colors will work for them, and putting them together in ways that surprise (and usually delight) me. Basically, I want the push outside of my box that custom dyeing would give, but without the pressure for me to get it perfect, or for the suggester to order if they don’t love what I come up with. Dyeing is always a gamble, and I never want someone feeling obligated to pay for something that doesn’t match their vision.

And that’s where the suggestion box comes in. People can suggest colors, combinations, general ideas (winter ocean, bali sunset…), or whatever else comes to mind, and I’ll put it on my list of ideas to play with someday. I might get to it immediately, I might get to it in a year. I might make a mess of it, or it might come out brilliantly. When the fiber/yarn is dyed, I’ll post it, and people can buy if they like it. If it’s not what they had in mind, it can find a home with someone else.  I’ll get to play, and the shop gets filled with things that someone is likely to enjoy, and anyone who cares to read along will get to watch the journey.

The cardinal picture has been a really interesting pilot study for this idea. I’ve been thinking about it all week, plotting and planning ways to get the colors I want to work in the ways that I want them to work. It’s been a lot of fun so far, and it’s certainly opened up a whole new range of colors for me to explore, even if the final fiber isn’t what I hope it will be.

Thanks to Ellen for suggesting this current exploration, and for the rest of you, keep your eye out for a new suggestions form, once we figure out how on earth to make one that will do what I want. Surely there are some colors out there that you’d like to explore?