I have been going through one of those long phases in my knitting where I seem to rip back more than I actually knit. I make great progress on something, only to find that there’s a small but problematic error way back at the beginning, and the whole thing comes out again.

In keeping with this trend, I finished the first sleeve on the Briar Rose sweater last week, and immediately picked up stitches for the second. I knit about 4 inches down from the shoulder, was just about to cast on for the rest of the sleeve, and realized that I had somehow picked up about 30 extra stitches and not noticed. So, I ripped back.

Normally a little setback like that doesn’t affect my knitting much at all, but it’s been hard keeping up the momentum lately with so little time outside of work. After some thought, I decided that I needed a fast, instant-gratification type project, and went digging through the stash looking for bulky yarn.

I discovered that I don’t have any.

Truthfully, this is a very good thing and reflects healthy stash enhancement practices, since I never, ever knit with bulky yarn. But in that moment, I really wished I’d given in and bought something bulky and fluffy and soft once upon a time.

As I dug through the stash, I came across this scarf, which is one of my very rare UFOs.

It was last seen on the blog in June 2008, if you can believe it. This is the #1 reason that I don’t keep UFOs around. Once they’ve been abandoned, they’re very seldom resurrected.

I love the color and pattern of this scarf, and the yarn is some wonderfully soft baby alpaca that was local to the Seattle area (I bought the yarn at Weaving Works in Seattle). It’s a heathered yarn, dyed in the wool, in the true sense of the word. If you look closely, not a single fiber in there is purple at all. In fact, they’re garishly bright, primary colors:

It’s a little hard to see here, but the yarn is made up of electric blue, fire engine red, and even a little bit of daffodil yellow, though you’d never guess it from far away.

Really, the only flaw with this project was the usual one for scarves on my needles: terminal boredom. There is just something about knitting a flat, narrow strip of fabric that makes me crazy, and I abandon scarves more often than any other project (I’d say they make up more than 50% of my UFO collection, and a much larger percentage of discarded projects). Unfortunately, scarves are currently high on my wardrobe “gap” list, and are highly versatile items, so there are likely to be more of them in my future.

This one was already more than 4 feet in, and really just needed a foot or two to finish it off. It’s knit at a loose, drapey gauge on size 8 (!) needles, which feel like telephone poles after all the knitting I’ve been doing on size 0’s and 00’s. It took me a few attempts to figure out what size the needles should be; this project had been neglected for so long that I’d put it on holder needles and not even bothered to record the initial needle size. A repeat or two of experimentation worked that out, though, and I set merrily along my way on Sunday afternoon.

By Sunday night, the boredom was beginning to kick in again already, but I had added almost an entire ball (just a few inches short of the necessary foot) to the scarf, and it was looking like a quick win.

…and then I realized that I’d made and propagated a pretty obvious mistake through that entire foot of knitting. I ripped back, and am working my way forward again, bit by bit on the train. Tonight I knit 6 rows, pulled back 4, and then knit another 8. Sigh. Someday, something will get finished, and at least the needles are big enough that this one is moving pretty quickly. In the meantime, I’m getting great knitting time value for my yarn!

In other news, I have unspun and respun three skeins of MacGyver yarn in preparation for the updates to Mike’s sweater.

I don’t know what exactly I learned about unspinning yarn from my first adventures with it over the summer, but this process was about a thousand times less painful than I remembered from last time. That might have something to do with the fact that it isn’t currently 90+ degrees outside, but in any case it went quickly and was relatively painless, even with the fuzzy, felty Shetland. One of the remaining skeins had a lighter gauge to begin with, so I think I’ll probably leave that one as it is. This means that I’m ready to do some surgery, just as soon as the sweater makes its way here for me to repair (probably this weekend).

I also put the latest tea towels on the loom last weekend, and am weaving along on the second one. I didn’t get any weaving time in this weekend, but hopefully I’ll get to squeeze some in one night this week.

I’ve been doing much more crafting lately, but haven’t had anything terribly bloggable to show for it. Still, after a certain point, any blog post is better than no blog post, so here goes.

I have been knitting happily away on the current Briar Rose sweater for a few weeks now, but haven’t posted because it is still in the shapeless blob stage. The body is done, one sleevecap is picked up and knit, and the sleeve is knit down to about the elbow. Since I knit the sleeve separate from the body, this is now back to being train knitting, and that sleeve is the result of this weeks’ commute. It isn’t much to look at yet, but hopefully soon it will start to look like a sweater.

I do love the way the texture is turning out, and I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the gauge will be right in the end. Most of my knitting doesn’t change size much when blocked, but this fabric is knit slightly looser than my usual, and it grows a bit with washing. I think I’ve compensated for that appropriately, and the fit is supposed to be fairly loose and sweatshirt-y anyway, so I’m hoping that the final product will turn out to be the right size (and that I won’t run out of yarn!).

After taking the rainbow scarf off the loom, I set about winding a warp for some tea towels. 420 wraps later, I have a new warp all ready to be threaded on the loom, hopefully this weekend.

And finally, I am unspinning some yarn. If you remember, I unspun some of my MacGyver yarn for the Mike sweater that I made last summer. Since it was a surprise, I was flying blind on the sizing, with only measurements taken in secret from a favorite sweatshirt to go by. I knit the sweater to be a few inches too long on me, but it turns out that I didn’t account quite enough for Mike’s weight-lifting shoulders. Since it’s a raglan, that ends up making the whole thing a little too short. We gave him the sweater when we visited in early September, but it was something like 95 degrees that day, and he only tried it on for a second. I was pretty sure that it was too short, but he was equally sure it was perfect, and didn’t want me to touch it.

Now that it’s actually cold out, he’s started wearing the sweater, and is ready to admit that it needs some more length, in both the sleeves and body. It’s just a simple matter of snipping a stitch and adding a few inches, so it shouldn’t take long, except for the fact that I knit until I ran out of yarn. I had added the dark MacGyver stripes to help stretch the light gray yarn, because I knew I wouldn’t have enough for a sweater of that size. And now I need a few more inches. The MacGyver yarn was already spun in a different weight for Branden’s sweater, but I discovered that I could reduce the 3-ply to a 2-ply and get a very similar weight.

Of course, that means that I now have to unply more yarn. This is not my favorite thing to do by any stretch of the imagination, and I’ve been avoiding the project since Christmas. Today, I finally sat myself down, wound a skein into a ball, and started in on it while listening to the latest Twinset Designs podcast.

Right now I’m just taking the plying twist out of the yarn; the next step is to split the three plies off onto separate bobbins, and then reply two of them together. Then I’ll use the new yarn to widen the accent stripe in the sweater, adding a couple of inches to both body and sleeves. I don’t love this part of the process, but I’m happy that Mike has decided to let me tweak the sweater to be a bit more wearable. As I told him at Christmas, that’s the wonderful thing about a custom garment – there’s no reason why it can’t be perfect.

We’ve just finished the first week of the new semester, so classes are back in full swing again. I’m hoping that it will be a little less crazy this term; I have far fewer students, but a much harder course to prep. We’ll see how it goes, but so far so good. I was feeling under the weather this week, but hopefully that will clear up with a weekend of sleep and fiber, and I’ll be back at it next week. Until then, there’s plenty of yarn to unply…

The speed of weaving always shocks me. The planning and setup can be slow, but the actual weaving is fast. I seem to have found some more crafty momentum over the break, which I am hoping will carry me through the new semester (starting Monday).

But let’s talk about fiber. Last night, I cut the rainbow scarf off of the loom.

I am still in love.

I ended up with about 9 feet of fabric, with all the wonderful color gradients from the naturally dyed yarn.

This is one of those wonderful projects where you really can just sit back and let the color do the work. I love seeing how they transition from one to another. It wasn’t possible to make the edges of the repeats line up perfectly, which gives the transitions a lovely feathered look.

I think the high contrast section  is my favorite, but it’s hard to tell.

I decided that plain stripes would be boring, so I split the two skeins into several different stripes. The purple/blue/pink skein split into 4 stripes, with the color repeats all going the same way. The two main stripes got almost all of the yarn, and then there are two very narrow ones at the selvedge to tie it all together. The yellow/green/red one was split into two wide stripes whose colors matched, and then I broke off the yarn, offset by half a color repeat, and wound on the rest. This means that the center stripe has the same colors as the two wide outer stripes, but they change at different times.

Then, at the loom, I used different threading to make different patterns within the stripes. The yellow/green/red skein has a straight twill pattern, with uninterrupted diagonal lines. The diagonals are the same for the wide stripes, and opposite in the center. Then, I got random. (This is very unlike me.) As we threaded the pink/purple skein, I made sure to keep a basic twill structure, but I changed direction every so often as the mood hit me, so that those stripes have a random zigzag pattern. I had no idea how this would turn out, but I really like how the different textures add an extra layer of complexity and interest to the piece.

It turns out that my weft choice needed refinement yet again. (This is one reason that you really need a weaving stash. You always need to try several things before you find the one that works.) It’s hard to capture in a photo, but you can sort of see it here.

I had planned to use the rose-colored laceweight that I had dyed to match the pink in the warp skeins. (The bottom stripe in the sample above.) I thought it would complement them nicely, but instead it washed them out. It also muddied the yellows and greens, which I didn’t care for. Then, I switched to a dark gray, which was much better but not quite right. In the end, I chose a dark purple bamboo yarn, and it was perfect. The purple in the weft accented the colors in the warp, but the contrast was high enough that it didn’t fight with the yellow-containing colors like the rose had. The higher contrast also emphasized the woven pattern more.

Once it was on the loom, this was about the simplest thing you could weave. One pattern of four steps, repeated over and over (though I did manage to make mistakes and had to unweave more times than I like to admit…sometimes having room for the mind to wander is not a good thing!)

I have no idea what this will become. For now, I am petting it and just enjoying the fabric with its long, uninterrupted color repeats. Maybe someday it will figure out what it wants to be, but for now it’s quite happy just to exist.

And now, I need to hurry up and get something else on the loom!

It turns out I did find time to craft on our long weekend. No surprise there, I suppose.

I posted a while ago about the latest scarf that I was sampling on the loom. I had just finished the sample, and started weaving on the body of the piece. But the more I wove, the more I hesitated. It wasn’t turning out quite the way I wanted. I used a variegated yarn in both the warp and weft, and the two colorways were fighting each other, and fighting the pattern.

I started to think that maybe I really should have stuck with the solid pattern weft yarn from the sample.

The woven pattern shows up better here, but it made for a very pale overall fabric, and I’m not a pale colors person.

And then I started thinking. I liked the warp best when I switched to using a dark gray and the variegated yarns as weft colors. What if I used the dark gray and a light yarn as weft instead? That produced this:

The two cones are the pattern weft colors, and the small skein is what’s in the warp. The pattern looks muuuch better, though. Here’s a side-by-side:

The bottom sample on the left looks very washed out to me, and the sample on top looks too busy. The one on the right is perfect, though. It’s always worth it to try that one extra thing.

Of course, I have just now noticed a mistake in the weaving in the photo above. Can you see it there, right at the top of the photo? Ah well…too late to change it now. I can’t count how many times I unwove to fix that very mistake, too. I guess it’s no surprise that one of them slipped by eventually.

The overshot pattern that I was using for this piece takes quite a lot of concentration to weave. I don’t have many no-talk projects, but this was definitely one of them. Once I got into the rhythm, it was quick to weave, but it did take quite a while to get there.

I finished up the weaving on Saturday, and immediately sat down to find something else to put on the loom. Weaving projects go best if the loom isn’t left idle; I find that even a few days can be enough to lose momentum between projects, and I’d like to keep it busy this year. As soon as I cut the scarf from the loom, I went rummaging in the stash and these popped out at me.

Those are two skeins of sock weight and one of lace that I dyed in a natural dyeing class in Madison. I love the colors, and they’ve been wanting to become something for quite some time, but I could never put my finger on just what that would be. On Sunday, I sat down and wound a warp from the two sock weight yarns, being careful to line up the color repeats as I went. Branden helped me to thread it onto the loom, where I immediately fell in love.

This is a simple project after the last one, something where the weaving is pretty mindless and the color does all the work. I did end up choosing a different color for the weft, since the pink was too prominent in the fabric using the laceweight as weft. Choosing the right weft color is still just short of black magic as far as I’m concerned…there’s no telling what will work until you try, and it’s usually the one you think will clash terribly that works best. It got instantly better when I switched to a dark purple instead, and I am so excited about how it’s coming out.

Those colors were taken well after dark, but they actually look pretty true to life thanks to my new Ott lights that Branden got me for Christmas.

I’ve often wondered if the hype was worth it. I’m still not sure that I’d pay full price (we got them on a great clearance sale at Joann’s…yes, we often end up Christmas shopping together for one another), but they really do a marvelous job with color. Maybe this is just what we needed to capture the colors of fiber from the dye studio?

And, lest you think that weaving has gotten all the attention, I also have evidence of knitting time. More than 11 hours, in fact. I know, because I listened to the entire audiobook of The Hobbit this weekend while knitting away (guess who also gave me an Audible account this year?).

Unfortunately, the sweater is still in the stage where it looks like a shapeless blob, but I am pleased to say that it is a shapeless blob that’s been split for the armholes, at least. Here’s hoping I can keep up the momentum as the semester starts back up! Methinks I need a new audiobook…

That just about sums up my weekend. Once I stopped wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing, I managed to fit quite a lot of crafting time in there, as well as a few good books and some time with Branden. We got our first snowfall of the year, ate lots of cookies and drank a lot of tea, and generally enjoyed doing a whole lot of nothing around the house. Not a bad way to start the new year, I think.