I may have mentioned that knitting time has become commute time. I can usually only knit for about half of the trip, since the second half is on a more crowded subway train. Still, I am getting quite a bit of knitting done. I’m thinking of counting my commute time in sweaters knit rather than hours. Behold the results of this week:

That’s the top of a raglan sweater, a little hard to see in its crunched-up on the needles state. This is the yarn spun from the Harriet fleece that I’m making for Mike’s sweater. I’m about half way to the sleeve split, I’d say. I ended up having to go down to size 2 needles to get the fabric I wanted, but the knitting is pretty fast anyway since it’s all stockinette.

So fast, in fact, that I need to get some spinning done before I can continue. All of the Harriet fleece is spun already, but I’m a little short on yardage and so decided to make a wide band at the shoulders with some of the leftover MacGyver yarn from Branden’s sweater. That was all fine and good, until I went and found the MacGyver yarn and realized that it was spun at a heavier weight.

I thought that the two yarns were about the same, but never did any sampling to check because I wasn’t originally planning to put them together. When I looked at the two yarns, they are very clearly different.

Comparing the gauge of the two sweaters, I am pretty sure I’d have distortion around the stripe if I were to use the MacGyver yarn directly. What to do?

Well, it occurred to me after thinking about it for a while that I’ve never tried yarn reconstruction. I’ve heard of others splitting yarns up into individual plies and respinning or repurposing them, but it’s not yet in my bag of tricks. It then occurred to me that it should be.

So, I unspun my three ply yarn by running it back through the wheel, and then wound the three plies onto separate bobbins. Then I took two of them and plied them back together, to make a yarn that really is very close to what I’m going for.

I now have one skein of yarn unplied, and am working on winding those live singles onto separate bobbins. It was a lot easier in my 6-yard sample than it is for a whole skein, but it is slowly progressing. I’m thinking I’d better hurry up, or I’m not going to have knitting for my commute next week!

We are back from one family get-together, and will be turning around to head off for another next weekend. In between, we squeezed in a class on hot glass at the local hackerspace. I’ve always wanted to play with glasswork, and have never gotten around to it. When Branden saw the class come up in their summer list, we decided it would be fun to try. So, we spent all day yesterday and today playing with torches and soda lime glass, making everything from beads to pendants and free form sculpture.

(You can see Branden making a marble in the front there.)

Glasswork takes a good bit of practice and quite a bit of concentration, but it was a lot of fun to try. The instructor was very good about giving us the tools and then letting us wander off and try things on our own, so we were able to cover a lot of ground for just two days. Today’s work is still cooling slowly in the kiln, but here’s a mug-shot version of the things we made yesterday:

We started out with glass swans, which show a distinct progression as we got a feel for the glass. Then we played with beads for a while, and then went off-roading into pendants and free-form work. My collection is on the left, and Branden’s is on the right. My favorite item from the first day is my little fish, hanging out just left of center (I have no idea why he’s upside down….)

I’m hoping that we’ll get to take some proper pictures when the other pieces come back, but that’s about all that time and brainspace will allow for tonight.

Of course, the last thing I need is another hobby, but it’s always fun to try new things, and especially ones that we might be interested in doing together. I’m somewhat relieved that there’s a relatively high cost barrier to entry on this one, though. I really don’t know what I’d do with a million little glass things while I learned how to make the really nice ones, or even with the nice ones when we got there. Unlike knitting, this is a hobby where it’s fast and easy to make something, but it isn’t a finished product. If we were really into jewelry making, then it would be cool to be able to make our own beads, but that’s another hobby that’s in the “maybe someday” list. It was definitely a fun weekend, though, and glass work is something that I’ll probably do again, when they offer another class. There is also talk of setting up a dedicated studio at the hackerspace, which could open even more doors…

We also dipped our toes into another hobby just before we left Chicago. I’ve been fascinated by bonsai for years, but have never had a chance to try it. The Chicago Botanic Gardens (which is a fabulous place that you must visit if you ever get the chance) has a huge class list of things that interested me, but we lived pretty far away and expected to be in Chicago for a while, and so somehow I never actually signed up for anything. I was talking about this with Branden a couple of weeks before we left, saying how I wished I’d taken the time when I had the chance to get into their classes, since there’s nothing like that in Boston.

We had scheduled a visit with some friends for the weekend before we left, but one of them was sick at the last minute and we found ourselves with an unexpected weekend on our hands. Packing was well underway, so we decided to go to the Botanic Gardens one last time before the move. It just happened that the Midwest Bonsai Association had their semi-annual show that weekend, and that they were offering classes. We snuck in on a last-minute opening, and made our first bonsai:

We really liked the process, and were pretty excited about exploring it further. Unfortunately, the plants haven’t been doing well. Their leaves started getting dark spots and dropping off just a few days after we got them, and within a week they’d lost all but a few leaves. That’s not unusual for repotted bonsai from what I understand, but then their branches started dying as well. I’ve been trying to nurse them along, but I don’t think that they’re going to make it. I think that they probably have some kind of disease based on the symptoms and how they spread, but I’ve emailed back and forth several times with the instructor, and she’s absolutely certain that I’m just not caring for them properly. I gave up trying to talk to her when she said that they were dying because they needed partial shade outdoors rather than in a bright but not directly-lit window indoors for their convalescence period. It seems a little odd to say that trees can’t handle being indoors for even a week without losing all their leaves and half their branches.

So no luck with bonsai. It’s something that I might come back to far, far in the future, when I have a permanent house and tons of room for finicky plants, but it’s more than I’m ready to get into now. Since you only really need to groom the trees once every year or so, it’s not a terribly active sport, and so most people end up with 80 or 90 plants from the sounds of it. I tell myself that I’d manage to keep just a few, but then we know about slippery slopes. You’d need quite a greenhouse to support that kind of collection, and I think we’re probably just not that interested. Still, it was a fun thing to try and say we did, and I’m following along with several new blogs to learn more about it.

There has also been knitting in between these upstart hobbies, but not much and it’s not terribly exciting yet. There should be more soon…I have lots of commuting to do!

Well, things have officially gotten busy. I started working last Friday (a day earlier than expected, but I needed to get the building key so that I could go in over the weekend and drop off boxes). Turns out that my commute is about an hour and a half each way, but there’s about 20 mins of walking in there that I’m calling exercise so that it sounds better. (And so that I get credit for being disciplined and exercising every day, when the truth is that I have no choice.)

A week in, I’ve made lots of progress in lab, have failed to make any progress with IT and HR, and have a to-do list that is literally several pages long. And yes, I am falling in headlong, which surprises nobody.

However! I have decided that, since this is my last summer of not technically having any responsibilities besides those I give myself, and since I am already showing up to work 3 months early to get a head start, Fridays are my day “off” to catch up on other things I want to do.

Like blog.

Except I can’t find my camera. I have a bunch of pictures on there that I wanted to show you, and it is just nowhere to be found. I really wish that the house was together enough for house pictures, but there are still a few niggling things that need to be done before it’s done, and right now it looks like a house lived in by two people who work a lot and don’t really feel like hanging pictures in their evening time. (Which it is. At least it’s an honest kind of mess.) All the major things are done, but that last inch is taking longer than the mile, you know?

So. House photos soon, but not today. I was going to show you pictures of our one walk down into Salem, where we peeked in at my new LYS, but that’s on the camera that’s on walkabout.

The one thing that’s great about my hour commute is that I’m on a train. That means that I can knit, at least some of the time. I’ve been getting in about a half an hour each way on the commuter rail, but it’s easier not to knit on the more crowded subway at rush hour. That means that I am zooming along up the second side of the waving lace sweater:

I am well into the neck decreases, and should be done with the shoulder strap in another hour or so of knitting. I need to get the pattern written for the front section today so that I can start the back panel and test all my decrease charts.

We’re leaving tomorrow for Florida, where we’re attending Branden’s family reunion. It should be interesting, as I’ve never met most of the people there, and he last saw them in something like ’95, when he was a freshman in high school. (To give you an idea of the strangeness of “reuniting”, I’ve met his mother in person only once the day before our wedding 9.5 yrs ago, and haven’t seen her since. We got along just fine, but their family really isn’t anything like close, geographically or otherwise.)

I am hoping for knitting time, though I understand that there are lots of “family activities” planned, so we’ll see what happens.

I have gotten some spinning done in the evenings lately. Last night, I finished plying up the Fiber Optic singles with the brown Rambouillet that I dyed to go along with them.

(I also have a picture of the two source bobbins with the plied yarn, but you can guess where that is…)

I really like the way this came out. Using just two plies preserved the long color repeats of the silk, and the brown lends a nice background color to the yarn. I’m not usually a fan of barberpole/marled yarns in the skein, but I almost always love them knit up. When I look at the skein in my hand, the barberpoling seems really pronounced and the brown is almost too dominant, but if you step back a bit the silk pops right out again.

(Can you see it there, sitting on the brown sweater I need to mend?)

I spun the brown and the BFL/silk to the same gauge, but the Rambouillet is significantly fluffier than the BFL silk and so doesn’t take as much fiber to make the same thickness of yarn. After plying the two together, I have 6 oz of yarn, which means that there is 2 oz of brown left on the bobbin. I find it amazing that I seem to have gotten twice the length out of the Rambouillet, but it is pretty fluffy stuff. I’ll ply the rest of the brown on itself, and that should give me another 2 oz of matching yarn to play with.

All told, I ended up with 453 yards in 6 ounces, which puts me pretty firmly in the laceweight category. It still need to be washed to set the twist, but it’s pretty fine right now.

And with that, I am off to begin pattern writing, packing, and otherwise getting my house in order. Hopefully I’ll be back with more pictures soon!

Walden, Linda, and Ellen have been busily knitting away on test versions of the spiral shawl, and I’m thrilled to say that it’s finally ready!

It’s been so much fun watching the test knits develop, and especially seeing the effects of different yarns. I often want to knit the same design over and over to see how it would look in different yarns and different colors, but I usually get sidetracked before it gets done. This time, I’ve gotten to follow along with the making of three very different versions:

Linda knit her shawl in hand dyed Knit Picks lace, in a beautiful blue color highlighted with areas of lighter turquoise. Here it is relaxing on the deck of her boat – doesn’t it look like ripples in the surface of the water?

Ellen took a different tack, using a more variegated yarn (Findley Dappled Laceweight by Juniper Moon). Here’s hers all stretched out for blocking. The way the colors play together looks like woodgrain to me.

Walden’s version (in Beehive Scotch Fingering) really highlights the shawl geometry. The different color stripes really pop out, and I love the detail of using one row of each color right at the cast off edge, too.

You can also see how differences in the blocking can alter the final shape of the shawl by comparing Ellen and Walden’s shawls. The pentagon shape is really pronounced in Walden’s version, where Ellen’s has much more gentle curves.

Either way, all the versions seem to fit the models quite well, don’t you think?

You can go check out their blogs (linked above) for more photos, too.

Thanks again, ladies, for your careful test knitting!

The basic tech specs (and photos of my finished shawl) are available on my pattern page, along with a link to purchase a pdf of the pattern through Ravelry if you’d like to see what this design will do with your own yarn.

The past couple of weeks have been something of a blur around here. Last Tuesday, we picked up the truck.

I have to say it’s grown a bit since we moved from Boston 8 years ago.

But then, come to think of it, so have we, so I suppose it’s appropriate.

We left Boston as a couple of just-past teenagers, newly graduated from college with a dorm room’s worth of stuff in a 10-foot truck. This time, we’re coming back as a senior engineer and a professor, lots of life lessons and a few hobbies later, and it’s a 24-foot truck this time around.

It turns out we overestimated the space we’d need by at least 4 (and probably 6) ft of length, but better too much than too little, and it was nice not having to worry about packing everything in the absolutely most efficient way possible.

Loading the truck took almost no time at all. We had a treadmill in the basement that I didn’t want to risk moving ourselves, so we hired movers to come carry it up the 7 stairs it would take to get it out of the house. It turned out that they had a 2-hr minimum time, so we ended up with help carrying things out after all. We worked on it for a couple of hours in the morning before they came, getting all the important and fragile things in first. Then they showed up, moved the treadmill in 5 minutes flat, and then proceeded to empty the rest of the house in under an hour. Not bad, all things considered.

That gave us time to clean the house and do a walk-through with the landlords, and meant that we could get on the road a half a day earlier than we’d planned. Next morning, we packed the cats into their custom travelling arrangement, and set off.

People always ask how the cats do with traveling. The simple answer is: just fine. They hate being confined to their carriers, but our car is a hatch back, and Branden built a divider out of PVC pipe, some connectors and window screen. For long trips we set up the cat beds, a litter box, food and water and let them out in the back of the car. There’s a carrier in there in case they want it, but they never do. We let them in and out through the back seat (which flips down), so that they can’t escape in the process. With this configuration, they’re only mildly put out at the idea of traveling.

Here’s Artemis surveying her new domain, waiting for us to get on the road.

Once the car is in motion, she pops down and doesn’t come up again much until we stop, but she’ll occasionally perch for a while and watch the world go by when we’re driving through parking lots. I get a bit of a chorus from the back seat for the first few hours of the drive, but then they settle down and go to sleep.

Hotel rooms are the most exciting thing ever. They must be investigated in detail, and immediately upon arrival.

Artemis is usually the more thorough explorer.

It’s actually hard to catch a picture of them, because they’re always in motion. But then, eventually they settle down.

The only thing that they seem to mind much is getting into their carriers to go back and forth to the car. The rest is all a great adventure, as far as they’re concerned. (And they get dry food on the road, which is just the best thing ever. Oh, to be a cat.)

A little over a thousand miles and two days later, we arrived in Salem. My sister helped us unpack the truck, and since then we’ve been unpacking, and carrying boxes up the stairs. This house has three levels, and of course our offices are on the third floor. That doesn’t seem like a big deal, until you realize that the majority of that 24-foot truck belongs in our offices.

It’s an interesting  expression of where our priorities lay, that’s for sure. The living room has a couch, a rug, the piano, and now the treadmill in it. We decided to leave the bookcases down there, too, rather than carrying 25 cubic feet of books up three flights of stairs. The bedroom is pretty much a bed, a dresser, and a closet full of clothes. The rest of it belongs either in the kitchen or in our offices.

So, we’ve been schlepping things up and down the stairs, unpacking, arranging, running out to get all the little things that we need, and then arranging again. It’s getting there, but it’s not done yet. It’s all those little details that take forever. The move itself was fast and easy, and most of the unpacking is done. Now it’s just those little odds and ends that need to be tied up, and it seems like they’ll never end.

I’ve also been tying up the details on the spiral shawl pattern this week. It’s also almost there; one more thorough proofreading, and I think it’s set to go, so look for it soon. If only my office were so close to done!