I hope you’re not all sick to death of spring flower photos yet. Around this time of year, I just can’t get enough. My little row of crocuses is happily blooming away:

We bought a mixed bag of bulbs, and so far they’ve almost all turned out to be orange and white. I’m a little disappointed, because the purple ones are my favorites. There are a few of them in there, though. And it’s also possible that they’re just coming a little later than the others; there are still some plants in there that haven’t bloomed.

Elsewhere in the yard, one of the mystery flowers has been revealed. See those buds, right at the base of the leaves in the upper right? I’m pretty sure that means that these are hyacinths.

And this one is pretty certain to be a tulip. (I think I even see pink!)

On the other side of the fence, the daffodils have also put in an appearance. They were the late-sleepers of the bunch this year; I think that everything I planted (and a few I didn’t) are now accounted for, though for many it will still be a while until they bloom.

We’ve begun preparations for our back yard projects now, too. Our job this spring is to turn our back yard (currently astroturf) into something a bit more appealing. First up, we’ll be putting in a small patio, and then I will be going crazy filling it in with shade-loving plants, and anything else I can make grow on 2 hours or less of sun a day.

I might have started on the going crazy already, actually. I bought a few more bulbs when we were at Home Depot the other night:

Honestly, I think I bought at least one of everything that had a “full shade” label on it, and a few that didn’t. I might be just a little over-eager for planting season. It has been several years now since I’ve had a proper garden to muck around in. There’s clematis and bleeding heart, elephant ears and astilbe, lily of the valley, begonias, and caladium. Fortunately, the back yard is huge (at least if you consider how empty it is, and how full I plan for it to be), so there will be plenty more coming as the season goes on.

And, because springtime is always the best time to finish a sweater, I finally finished the second sleeve on the Briar Rose sweater.

I can’t believe it’s taken this long. The last foot and a half of the second sleeve took about 2 months, but it is finally done. The goal was a slightly textured, sweatshirt-like sweater, and I think it succeeded. Much to my surprise, it took all three skeins of the Briar Rose 4th of July, and I even had to cannibalize the swatch to finish the sleeve and collar. My swatch gauge was off a little, so it ended up a few inches longer than I expected in both the body and arms, and a bit wider across the chest than I’d accounted for. There’s a tiny bit of bunching at the front shoulders as a result, but it’s not too bad, and it goes with the sweatshirt feel.

It finished blocking this morning, and I’ve been wearing it all day, and I can definitely vouch for sweatshirt comfort, anyway. Yay for a finally-finished sweater!

March has been its usual, tempestuous self this year. I think we got almost as much snow this month as we did in the rest of the year combined. That hasn’t stopped spring from coming, though. On Monday, we were greeted by this:

The tulips are also coming up, getting ready to take off as soon as the warmer days arrive.  Don’t they have such pretty leaves? I didn’t plant these…they were left here by the last tenants, so it will be exciting to see what they look like when they finally flower.

On Thursday, we noticed this little crocus, poking up right through a leaf.

And then on Friday, there were a few orange crocuses open, too.

If that’s not a dose of pure sunshine, I don’t know what is.

We went to visit my grandfather for an early Easter celebration yesterday, and his rock garden was just full of flowers, opening into the warm spring sun.

We also took advantage of the beautiful weather and our new gray card for the camera to get some photos of the completed corespun sweater, in which the color is actually just about right.

I finished it last weekend, and we just haven’t had a chance to take photos while it was light out. I’ve managed to wear it twice already, though, which is a good sign. I love the openwork in the yoke shaping (though that upper row could stand to be a little bit less stretched).

And overall the shaping came out well. I love how all the little details worked out. You can hardly see the transition from the original yarn to the second colorway (right around the waist and elbow).

Just after I wrote my last post about the sweater, I remembered that I had some beads that would match the color beautifully. I’m not usually a big fan of beads in my knitting, but this was meant to be a fun sweater that pushes against those edges, so a few beads found their way in around the cuffs and hems. I put them in a garter stitch channel that mirrored the garter details around the yoke, which gave the edges a slightly more finished feel.

The beads were about two rows tall, so I knit a set up row first, where I knit a ssk, double yo, and then k2tog at each place I wanted a bead to go. In the next round, I took the double yo and threaded it through the bead, and then slipped a stitch behind it. For the third row, I went back to a plain stockinette row, knitting into the front and back of the loop from the double yo (now threaded through the bead as a single stitch) to make two stitches again. It worked out perfectly, and that extra slipped stitch across the back of the bead keeps them from popping through to the inside of the fabric and disappearing.

I also found the perfect buttons in my stash. It’s a little hard to see in the picture, but their rims are a very faint teal, just exactly the right color to match the sweater.

The corespun worked out beautifully in the cuffs and hem, too. It’s just a simple garter stitch, picked up and knit all the way around the edge in one piece (with a tiny mitered corner at the front). The garter stitch made a very soft fabric, so I reinforced it with grosgrain ribbon to keep the button band from gaping.

The body and corespun yarns were completely different weights, but after comparing swatches and counting stitches I decreased 1 stitch for every three, and it worked out just right. I knit two rows of the original green-ish corespun to transition between the body and the slightly bluer corespun. That tiny accent row really helped to pull the two colorways together; without it, they didn’t quite look like they matched. Having just a little bit of contrast between the two colors highlights their similarities and diminishes the slight differences between the base color in the two yarns. The color in the beads did the rest, accenting both the green and the teal to their best advantage.

The sleeves ended up a wee bit shorter than I expected, but that has turned out to be a good thing, since it keeps the bell-shaped sleeves out of my way while I work. (Otherwise, they’d end up getting dipped into everything I’m working on.)

Right up until the end, I was pretty unsure about whether this would end up being a worn garment or simply an art experiment that goes in the closet and is never seen again. It falls pretty far on the girly side of what I wear, and it was kind of a crazy leap to put a (for me) light/bright color, lace, beads, and art yarn all in one piece. It really came together in the final sweater, though, and I think this is one that I’m likely to wear quite a lot this spring and summer.

Eight ounces of spinning goes really fast when you’ve just spun 3 pounds. The new yarn for the teal cardigan spun up overnight, almost. I had two braids of fiber that were very close in color to the original, but they had been dyed months apart and on different fibers, so there was little chance of a perfect match. One of the braids looked about the same color as the original Polwarth yarn, and the other was slightly darker. I alternated back and forth between knitting the last of the original yarn into the sleeves, and plying one single from each braid together to make another 500 yards of 2-ply yarn:

Looking at it in the skein, I couldn’t tell the difference in color by eye at all; it’s about as close to a perfect match as you could hope for. This weekend, I used the new yarn to knit the last few inches of the sweater body. The join isn’t quite invisible. You can see it here, about 3 inches up from the bottom of the sweater body.

Still, it’s close enough that it echoes the color stripes in the rest of the sweater, and is pretty subtle.

I have enough of the second color to finish the sleeves, and now I find myself back at my spinning wheel working on the corespun accent yarn for the hem. I’m not very good at spinning corespun yet, but I’m slowly gaining more control. I spun a sample yesterday, using a sewing thread core to make the yarn a little finer than the last sample. I knit a swatch last night:

The unevenness in the yarn gives it a little texture, and the different fibers blended into the batt pop up in tiny sections of dark or light here and there. This particular section of the batt was mostly the main color, so there isn’t a lot of accent fiber in it, but you can see a tiny spot of the navy on the left, and a little bit of the white banana viscose in the top right. This has also taught me that I need to blend in more of the accent colors when I make a batt. I like the look less in the batt, but will like it more in the spinning.

The swatch actually encouraged me to spin a little less evenly to emphasize the texture difference, and to make sure that I include the accent fibers at pretty regular intervals to make a slightly less homogeneous fabric. (And yes, art yarn spinners can all laugh at me here, because this is really about the most controlled art yarn I’ve run into. Baby steps. Baby steps.)

Here’s the swatch with the sweater body. I’ll have to figure out my gauge conversion, and then I’ll pick up stitches around the bottom of the body and the front button band and work a garter edge in the corespun yarn. I’m also thinking that I’ll probably play with some mitered corners at the bottom of the cardigan fronts. I’ve never knit a mitered square before, so that will be a fun thing to try here. I blocked both the body and the swatch last night, so I should be ready to knit on, just as soon as I’ve finished spinning the yarn.

In the meantime, I have a couple of sleeves to knit, and then we can sum up this little game of knit-spin hopscotch with a new spring sweater.

Ah, spring. I posted on Feb 28th proclaiming that it was here, and then last Friday we got 10-12 inches of snow. Winter in New England is always a sore loser, and never goes without a fight.

Spring always wins in the end, though. After just a few days of warm weather and sunshine, the snow is almost completely gone. It may be back again still, but it’s certain not to hang around for long.

The extra snow doesn’t seem to have slowed down the bulbs down much, though. I’m not certain what this one is, but I do believe that’s a leaf beginning to unfurl. (I thought I put snowdrops here, but snowdrop leaves don’t look like that, so I don’t know what this one will turn out to be.)

These are mystery plants, too dense to be anything I planted. There are quite a few bunches of them like this around the front yard…they must be leftovers from the last tenants. I’m excited to see what they might be!

The crocuses are popping up like crazy, and they’re starting to send out their long, thin leaves, a sure sign that they’re really ready to go.

I think these are the “deer resistant” tulips that I planted. There’s just one bunch of them, down by the driveway.

(We don’t have deer, nor did I know that they had a taste for tulips, but I suppose it’s good to be covered, just in case.)

The daffodils and narcissus by the front fence have not yet made an appearance, but they tend to be latecomers to the spring party, hanging back until they’re really sure it’s time to come out.

I think that these are my miniature irises; I had expected them to come up late also, but they’re jumping up faster than anything else, and seem to be completely undeterred by last week’s blanket of snow.

I just had to go poking around to look at their progress yesterday, even if the real reason I went outside was this:

Might not look like much from the outside, but it gets a little more exciting when you get to this:

That, at long last, is my much talked-about drum carder.

I’ve been talking about buying a drum carder for about 5 years. I even went and looked at a used one in Seattle, but it wasn’t in good condition and I decided that I’d rather just wait. I’ve thought about it off and on since then, but the time never seemed quite right. Then, last spring I used Elaine’s carder to process all those fleeces in a couple of weeks, and I played around a bit with blending. It moved up the urgency list, and I was all set to buy one at Rhinebeck last fall.

Thing is, that batt blending made me think that I might want to play around with selling batts, and I could only fit 1-2 oz on a regular carder, and I’d rather make bigger ones if I’m blending for sale. I hemmed and hawed about this for quite a while, but finally decided that I’d rather have a tool that I could grow into than one that might limit me, and so decided on the double wide.

Of course, a bigger drum is a bigger price, too, and so I decided that it would be better to wait a while longer, to give our finances a little more time to recover from my 9 months of unemployment and two moves in rapid succession last year. (I should say here that all of these delays are completely my own hesitations…Branden has been telling me to just buy the thing already for years.)

Also, I didn’t want to buy it right in the middle of the busiest year of teaching (they say the first year is the worst), because I wanted to be able to use it when it came. I’m still not sure that I’m ready to use it just yet, but we ordered it on Saturday, and now it is here and waiting, as soon as I come up with something to try.

I was very surprised by the speed of delivery; I was expecting a couple of weeks’ delay between processing the order and shipping, but Otto had it out the door practically as soon as we’d ordered it. It’s beautifully made, and cranks like a charm (though I haven’t sullied it with fiber just yet…soon). It’s all put together and waiting on the dining room table, waiting for me to get to it soon.

In fact, the dining room table part is the only tiny snag in this whole story. I had never seen a double wide in person, so I didn’t really have a good sense of how big it would be. I knew how big a single wide carder was, and really math says that twice as wide should be just what this one turns out to be, but wow. It’s bigger than I thought. It’s almost as big as my table loom. For all my dithering, I haven’t quite figured out exactly where I’m going to put an unstackable piece of equipment that large, but something will turn up. I’m sure it will find a home somewhere soon, and in the meantime, it’s waiting right where I can see it, reminding me that it’s probably time to play.

I dyed up the fiber for the Blue Eyes sweater back in May to use up the last of my stock of Finn fiber before our move to Boston. The fiber was just shy of 3 lbs, which is more than I’d usually spin for a sweater, but I wanted to use things up and so dyed it all. It doesn’t hurt to have extra, and Branden sweaters require a good amount of yarn, because he is long in the torso and arms.

Well. I have been spinning off and on since June, and have just finally finished the spinning for this project. I haven’t been spinning much at all lately, so it’s taken quite a lot longer than it normally would to get through the fiber. Add in the extra spinning for Mike’s sweater and a couple of other small projects in between, and somehow it’s been 9 months since I started.

The project might have dragged on for another month or two, even, had it not been for the fact that I am running short on yarn for the new sweater I’m inventing on the fly (it doesn’t have a name yet; must fix that). I wanted to get the Finn off of the bobbins and free up the wheel for the new yarn, so I’ve pushed my way through the last 5 or so bobbins in the last week and a half.

I have just a tiny bit of fiber left, and I’ve been debating whether I really needed to finish spinning that last little bit, or whether it could really go into the fiber-mixing collection that I’ve been building up. The best way to answer this was to calculate the yardage for the sweater yarn, and to see where we stood. I usually tally my yardage as I go, but between one thing and another it just hasn’t happened for this project. I knew I had a amassed quite a pile of skeins, but had no idea of the actual yardage until I sat down today to count.

I have 2670 yards of 3-ply, DK to light-worsted weight yarn. That’s just shy of 1.5 miles. No wonder it’s been so long on the spinning wheel!

I think I’ll probably have enough, don’t you?

After months of feeling like my knitting isn’t really going anywhere, I was a little stunned when this sprung off my needles this weekend:

I started at the collar with a vague idea of where I was going, and added lace and purl row details as the mood struck me. I knew within minutes of starting the swatch that this was going to be an addictive project. I think my hands have been missing the texture of handspun yarn, really. I love the Briar rose yarn and it is going to make a beautiful sweater, but commercial yarn doesn’t have quite the same feel to it, and I think I was missing my handspun without realizing it.

It also helps that this is the yoke part of the pattern, and the yoke always goes quickly. Add to that the fact that I’m knitting on size three needles (which feel huge now t0 me) and throw a few pattern rows in there to help stretch the yarn and keep things interesting, and you have a recipe for fast knitting.

The pattern is a simple yarnover mesh, and I really love how it worked out. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to guesstimate the gauge difference for stockinette and the lace based on my swatch alone, so I blocked it on the needles on Sunday night, and am thrilled to report that it seems to be laying flat. I haven’t had much time to knit since the weekend, but I’m looking forward to getting back to it. It’s now past the sleeve split and into the body, so it’s back to a smaller number of stitches again and is moving quickly.

Almost too quickly, in fact. I realized on Sunday that I only have 8 oz of yarn when I thought I had 12, which means that I’m rather short on yardage. Fortunately, I have a couple of braids in the spinning stash that complement the main color quite nicely.

The colors are close but not quite the same, which I think will give it a nice gradient effect and help to prepare for the corespun. (Oh, yeah…I also need to spin the rest of the corespun, too…did I mention that I didn’t really plan this project out carefully?) I am currently thinking that I’ll spin one single from each braid, and then ply them together. The extra 8 oz will stretch the yarn that I have, and should give me enough to make the sleeves a little fuller, and probably also full length. The whole yoke was knit from 3.5 oz, so having 16 total should give me plenty to play with.

I have to admit to being a little torn between forging boldly ahead with the knitting (and risking running out of yarn) and holding back a bit to let myself catch up with the spinning first. If only all problems were so difficult to solve!

Fortunately, spring break is next week, so there’s a good chance that I’ll find some good, solid knitting and spinning time soon. I have about 6-8 oz left to spin on Branden’s sweater yarn to free up the bobbins, and then this project is next in line. It’s wonderful when projects practically knit themselves!

I may have mentioned that I haven’t been knitting all that much lately. I technically have a project on the needles, and I’m excited about finishing it, and it is very close. I even have it in my bag so I can knit on the train. The stars are aligned, and all the pieces are in place.

And yet, somehow, it just hasn’t been happening. I have skeins of yarn scattered all over my office that have been swatched and rejected, or that are waiting to be swatched for some project or another, but nothing has jumped forward.

And then, I spun that skein of corespun yarn a few weeks ago. I was feeling lazy, so I didn’t put it away. Something about it was tickling at the back of my mind.

It sat there quietly for a week, and then it whispered that it might go well with some yarn I spun two years ago for a sweater to wear to my sister’s wedding. The project didn’t swatch up the way I wanted, and so the yarn had been tucked away to wait for the perfect moment.

(Sorry for the terrible light…the first picture is much truer to color…that coverlet is actually beige.)

But there wasn’t much of that corespun; only about 20 yards. Not much at all, really. But what if I threw in a couple of the batts that I carded up last spring?

There isn’t much fiber there; the batts look huge because they’re so puffy, but I don’t think they’re more than 4 oz total. Still, they match the other yarn, and together they look like the colors of the ocean. The yarns are completely different weights, and the corespun is very uneven (not my usual knitting yarn), but I think it will give a nice extra bit of texture if used carefully as an accent.

And all of a sudden, I have a swatch.

That’s about all I have, really. This is like the spiral stripes sweater in that it isn’t really a design; more of an idea and a prayer, and a rather fuzzy idea at that. But what I can see of it is an idea that I like a lot. And sometimes, that’s all you need.

Have you noticed the sun coming back in the mornings? I’ve been feeling it for a month or so now – the gradual lengthening of days as winter quietly transitions into spring. Slowly, slowly, the sun becomes warmer and the air becomes lighter. The robins come back, and all the birds start to sing. It is now at least mostly light out both when I leave the house and when I get home, which is a sure sign of ever-increasing hours of daylight.

It’s usually about this time that I wake up one morning and realize that it has absolutely become spring again. Forget the snow on the ground, forget the frost coming tonight. Yes, it’s cold and wet and rainy, and it sure feels like winter. We might even get a blizzard still. But winter’s hold is loosening, and soon we’ll be sliding effortlessly into spring.

And it is here, right now, under the snow, quietly pushing its way up through the half-frozen earth, gearing up to burst forth in a blaze of glory as soon as the moment is right.

Today, it is official.

It is clearly spring when the crocuses begin to break ground. I wasn’t expecting them for several weeks yet, but when we went out to the car this morning, there they were. (They weren’t there yesterday.)

Crocuses are my favorite of the spring flowers. They’re usually first, and they are unstoppable. I cherish that tough, resilient optimism that cracks open the frosty ground, forcing its way skyward. I’m especially excited this year, because we planted something like 300 bulbs last fall. (I felt a little like a demented squirrel out there digging all those tiny holes in the ground, but I think it will pay off.) I’ve wanted to plant spring bulbs in several of the houses we’ve lived in over the years, but we never moved in at the right time to do it. So this year, I jumped at the opportunity. Our front yard should be spectacular if they all make it through the winter. There are crocuses and snowdrops and some little bell-shaped flowers in this patch, and then there are 75 daffodils by the front fence, a bunch of irises and some special tulips, and then a few other small things tucked in here and there. And probably something else I forgot (that’s the squirrel part). I can’t wait to see what emerges as the snow recedes!

A week or so ago, word came through the local knitting grapevine that Windsor Button is closing its doors. After 75 of business, their landlord has decided to renovate, and I guess it’s just time to move on. At first glance, it seems like this should just be another notice of a store closing and things changing in downtown Boston. And yet, somehow this is much more than that.

I had never been to the store itself, but I know it from my grandmother and my mother and a hundred other crafty people in my life who used to frequent the once-chain of stores. This was the place to go for sewing notions, for all of the buttons and other oddments that go into making of clothes. The New England crafting community talks of this place in that longing, reverential tone that knitters use to describe a visit to WEBs, or maybe to Rhinebeck. It has clearly always been a center and a mainstay for the creatively-minded, and it has been on my list of places to visit ever since we came back to the city. It’s always felt like one of those major landmarks that you can count on to be there when you need it, always ready with the perfect notion or little detail, always stocked with just the thing you need. In fact, I remember saying to Branden that being near Windsor Button would be one of the big crafting perqs of living back in Boston – always knowing that the perfect finish was just a few T stops away. I hadn’t made it over there yet, but it’s one of those places you keep in your back pocket, looking for just the right occasion to visit.

There used to be several stores planted around the area, but over the decades they have dwindled to just the flagship store, nestled in the heart of Boston. And now, that one store is about to blink out of existence.

On Saturday, we went to visit before it disappears.

It’s not much to look at from the outside; just a simple name on a pretty plain building. But there’s a large yarn store, a huge notions section, and a button wall tucked inside. And yes, I do mean a button wall.

There are buttons of all shapes and sizes, and plenty of each kind (no running short of one button for a sweater like in most stores I’ve been to). Each button is copied on the front of the bin with a price, so you can browse from the sales counter, and ask a clerk to get down the boxes you want to look at. (I wish you could browse directly, but I can only imagine the practical hurdles of managing a setup like that.) The selection truly is mythic.

I spent an hour or so there, browsing my way up and down the counter, looking for the unusual and unique that I wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else. All things considered, I think I came out with a pretty reasonable collection (click to embiggen):

I was shocked to find myself drawn to those big, bold buttons (the blue one in the top left is about 2″ across!), but they’d be just the thing for a casual wrap that wants a touch of stylishness, or to dress up a bag or jacket someday. I was thrilled to find the silver clasp closures for the front of a sweater or shawl. I have wanted something like this a few times before, and these are much, much better quality than I could get at JoAnn’s. Overall, I was drawn to asymmetry, found a few flashy things, but mostly ended up with a collection of nice, solid buttons that you’d put on a favorite sweater. I also picked up some hardware for making bags:

And a random assortment of simple buttons from the $5 a bag bin.

All in all, I am quite happy with the haul. It wasn’t inexpensive to make a button collection in sweater quantities (from scratch) in a day, but I do love the ones that came home with me, and I’m sure they’ll find their way into something someday.

I am very sad to see this store go, not only because of the quality of their selection, but also because of the place that they have held in the hearts of crafters for generations. Everyone who knows the store has a memory of shopping trips with their grandmother, or some other fond recollection. Thank you, Windsor Button. You will be sorely missed.

This week I’ve found myself between projects, with no particular idea of what’s coming next. I’ve tried casting on three things, with three different yarns, but none of them has quite worked out. I have quite a lot of yarn, but nothing is really jumping out at me right now.

Fortunately, it’s not true that I’m completely between projects yet. The Briar Rose sweater is still awaiting its second sleeve, and I very much wanted to work on it on the train this week. It wasn’t at a transportable stage yet, though, so I had to go without. I finally sat down and pushed through the (very tiny) hump that needed to be knit first, and it’s now ready to go for this week. So, that will keep me busy for at least a few days more.

The Mike sweater is finished, blocked, and returned:

…and now fits much better than before. (It’s even a titch on the long side, which I understand is a good thing.)

Last weekend, in lieu of another project to knit, I played around a bit with my spinning wheel. I took some of the wool I blended on Elaine’s drum carder last spring, and a cone of cotton from the weaving shelf.

And I spun up a little corespun.

I learned to spin corespun a couple of years ago at the Madison spinners’ guild, and was surprised at how much I liked it. I’m not usually much into art yarn, but this is one technique that stood out to me as possibly very useful. For something.

I’m not sure what it will be useful for yet, but I put it on the back burner to think about another time, and lately it’s been jumping up and down, begging for attention. It’s a great way to get a very light, lofty single without using a lot of fiber, and it spins up very quickly. It’s a very strong single, because the “core” is there to give it strength. I have no idea what I’ll do with this tiny skein (I got about 40 yards), but it was a fun experiment to play with for an hour or two. It’s a completely different way of spinning, and it took quite a while to get my hands to cooperate with what my brain was telling them, but I got the hang of it in the end.

This weekend, I’ve been spinning up another bobbin for Branden’s next handspun sweater.

I am thinking that this will be the default next project, if nothing else comes along and grabs my fancy in the next week or so. I was hoping for something quick in between, but if nothing pops up I might head straight into this one.  I have about 6 bobbins worth of spinning left to do for it, though, so I’ll need to hurry up if I’m hoping to be ready in a week or two. I guess I’d better get back to spinning!