I can now officially stop whining that Boston never gets any snow. We’ve had about 4 snowfalls this year that left more than 1/4 inch, and after each one it warmed up and all of the snow was gone in a day or two. I think this will take a little longer to melt, though.

That’s the view out our front door. That fence is almost as high as my hip, and you can see our car over on the right if you squint.

The impending storm meant that school was cancelled yesterday, and so I spent the day cozily working away in my office at home.  My grading is half done, at least.

We have some shoveling to do, and then we’ll spend the rest of the day tucked in here. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t go out. They’ve shut down all of the roads, and it’s a $500 fine if you’re out and about during the storm.

The snow is still falling, and blowing around in drifts. We’re lucky that we’re pretty far from the coast; some of the towns along the waterfront are without power and/or are expecting flooding with the next high tide.

I do love the snow, though. I’ve missed waking up once a week to new snowfall like I did in Madison. It doesn’t feel like winter without it, and the world is so much prettier with a fresh dusting of white.

I have gotten some knitting done since my last post. In fact, I have been meaning to post since Sunday; this has been one of those weeks where you look up and suddenly it’s Friday and you wonder how it happened. We’re just entering the busy part of the semester, so time is suddenly slipping by faster than I expect.

Despite multiple froggings, I did manage to finish the new alpaca scarf.

I’ve even worn it twice, and can attest to its warmth. Sometimes I find alpaca a bit on the itchy side, but this is a very nice prep with almost no guard hairs, and it’s lovely. I think I knit that last foot about three times overall, but it is finished, and saved from another 5 years in the stash.

I’ve also been working away on the edits to the Mike sweater.

Both the sleeves and the body were a few inches too short, but I am out of the lighter yarn. I did have some of the dark yarn left, though, so I decided to widen the dark body band. Instead of pulling out the whole lower part of the sweater, I used one of my favorite tricks and snipped a stitch.

One tiny stitch, and then unpicking a row all the way around.

Then I picked up the live stitches and knit on, adding about 4″ to the dark body stripe, with a couple of accent rows along the way.

Last night, I finished grafting the body back on and unpicked a sleeve. With nowhere to go, I might even finish this project today.

I’m kind of liking these fast-finish projects lately. A little work here or there, and suddenly I have a newly-FO. I’m not sure how much editing of knitwear I want to do, but I do have to say that it’s helping me feel like I’m getting somewhere, even when I don’t have much time to knit. And there are some other sweaters in my closet that I’ve been meaning to rework for quite some time…

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.

It’s that time again, suddenly – time to check off another year. 2012 was a year of change for us; both Branden and I started new jobs, and we moved again (twice). Both of us got one year older (funny how that works). As of last week we’re both in our 30’s. Neither of us is particularly attached to our age, so there’s no sense of loss or midlife crisis looming…just a sense of surprise that time really is passing quickly. We celebrated our tenth anniversary this month, and are now busy plotting the next 50 years. Earlier this month, I was “elected” to take on some family-related responsibilities now that we are back in the state, and am struggling a bit to figure out exactly what that will mean in our lives, and to build edges that define what we will and won’t do. We’ve made many new friends this year, and reunited with some old ones. I lost one friend to cancer last week, after two years of hoping that he’d beat it. Good things and bad things, large things and small things, one after another, somehow all piling up to make a life.

I can’t say I’m sorry to see this year go, nor am I particularly anxious to put it behind me. It is time to move on, though, I think. I don’t know exactly what I’m hoping for in 2013…I generally prefer take things as they come rather than making expectations for a new year before it arrives. A little more quiet, perhaps.

I do like to set some general intentions for my crafting, though. These aren’t goals or resolutions; just directions I want to explore. For this year, I’d like to weave more. These past few months have been so full of things to think about and process through that knitting has been too quiet an activity at times; too much room to think, not enough feeling of progress to pull me in. Even this process knitter grows impatient sometimes, and more product right now would be good. Weaving goes quickly and can be either mindless or very challenging; I think this will be an important part of my crafting in 2013.

Of course, I don’t intend to leave knitting behind, either. I really enjoyed the colorwork in the Fall Colors sweater, and have a tickle at the back of my mind that says there may be more colorwork to come this year. I don’t know what it will be yet, but the seed is there, waiting for the right time to send out shoots.

I have always loved simple knit designs with lace inserts or small details to make them special. This may be a year of exploring those ideas, working toward clothes that are easily worn to work.

I think that I will also continue pushing into ever-finer gauge knitting. This might seem counterintuitive, given my current want for quick progress, but I really am finding that I like fine gauge knits better for some things, work clothes foremost among them.

Along with all the yarn, there are piles of wool in my closet, just waiting to be spun. I hope to turn at least one of them into a sweater by the end of the year, and to finish the spinning for Branden’s Blue Eyes sweater very soon.

I’ve been saying this for a while now, but I think this may also be the year of the drum carder. At this point, the decision is made as to which carder it will be; it’s just a matter of waiting until the moment is right.

I am also hoping to get my workload to a point where I can begin reawakening Desigknit over the months to come. We have a basement here, and though it’s not ideal as a dye studio, it will work well enough. We need to reclaim my tools from our friends’ garage, but I am hoping to be dyeing again soon. I am still pondering what form the business side of things will take this time around, but I’m looking forward to playing with color again in the near future.

There are so many things to look forward to, so many projects to put on the list, but I think that this is enough for now. I may get to all of them, or perhaps to none at all. Only the new year will tell.

What’s on your list for 2013?

After the crazy month that December has been this year, it feels really good to be finishing off 2012 with a long weekend at home with no plans whatsoever. There are some books hoping to be read, some yarn hoping to be knit, maybe some cookies to be baked and some weaving to be done, but there is nothing on the schedule (except tentative and nebulous plans to see The Hobbit this weekend if we find ourselves overwhelmed with all this free time).

I’m not sure what will come of it (if anything), but I’m glad that there are at least a couple of days of calm in here before the new year and new semester begin again. Hope you’ve all enjoyed your holiday celebrations, and that you’re also finding a little time to unwind as 2012 draws to a close.

I mentioned in my last post that I wound a new warp for the loom. Last weekend, I stole a few minutes between grading exams and did some sampling. It always amazes me how different the same pattern looks when woven with different yarns.

The light yarns are showing up the best in this photo, but they really toned down the colors in my warp yarn.  You can still see a little bit of the vertical striping, but it’s pretty subdued. I wanted something that would highlight the warp instead, so I decided to go with a dark gray background color, shown second from the top in the photo above. The flower pattern is less dominant, but the colors show up nicely. When it’s viewed from the right angle, the colors really pop. I wove a couple of repeats yesterday, and I think it’s going to work well, though the pattern isn’t as bold as what you see with the pale yarn in the bottom of the picture.

This is an overshot pattern, which means that you weave with two different colors and alternate between pattern rows and plain rows. It takes a bit of thinking to keep your place in the pattern, but it does make for an interesting fabric.

I also finished another bobbin for Branden’s sweater yarn. That meant that I had enough to ply again, so today I plied off three fat skeins of handspun.

I’m about half way done with the spinning now, so this should be ready to cast on early in the new year.

Of course, the exact cast on date will depend on my progress on my latest Briar Rose sweater (which desperately needs a name). I’ve only been able to knit a few mornings on the train in the past couple of weeks, so it’s progressing pretty slowly, though you can really see the texture starting to pop out.

Tomorrow is the last day of class; then there’s one week of review (i.e. lots of office hours), and the final next Tuesday. It’ll take 2-3 days to grade that, and then I’m home free for winter break. I am determined to take a few days completely off between Christmas and New Years’, and then it’s on to prep for next semester. Still, the between-semesters time should be quieter, so I’m looking forward to getting some real crafting time in there somewhere. Soon!

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

I’ve been taking advantage of the break from work to take stock and catch up on some fiber projects around the house. When we last discussed the Fall colors sweater, I had just pulled back the upper sleeve shaping to make a couple of tweaks, and was just a couple of inches from done.

Well. I knit an inch. Then I knit two inches, and then almost 4. The sleeves still seemed too short, but were now a couple of inches longer than the sleeves on my reference sweater, so I finally decided to trust the measuring tape and call it good. A couple of weekends ago, I grafted on the sleeves and did the final finishing of the inside seams.

I had originally planned to cover the raw steek edges with bias tape, but decided that that would make them too stiff. Instead, I just loosely whip stitched over the raw edge to hold it in place. I can’t believe how  much neater it looks! Here’s the “before”:

Once everything was finished to my satisfaction, I blocked the sweater and tried it on.

The sleeves are still too short.

I put it aside, and decided to let it sit for a while before making a decision. This is a perfectionism-defeating strategy…sometimes things really don’t seem as important a week or two later. Of course, sometimes they really are just as important. When I wear the sweater, I feel like I have gorilla arms. Therefore, the sleeves really do need to be longer.

I’m not sure exactly what’s happening here. There must be some difference in the shoulder fit or shaping that I am just not seeing. Maybe it’s the stiffness of the double layer at the steek edge? I don’t know what it is, but something is changing the way the sleeve hangs from the arm opening, and it’s affecting the fit, requiring a much looser upper arm and a longer sleeve. My gauge did change pretty dramatically on going from fairisle to stockinette, so that may have something to do with it, too. I thought I’d accounted enough for that, but perhaps not. In any case, I need to go back, snip a stitch, and redo the upper arm shaping one more time, adding a bit more length as I go. I’d rather fuss with it now and get it right than end up not wearing the sweater because it’s uncomfortable (or constantly tugging at the sleeves when I am wearing it). I haven’t quite worked up the enthusiasm for that yet, but it’s at least made it back into my workbasket for next in line. Maybe tomorrow.

I’ve been humming away on the new Briar Rose sweater during my train commute lately. I’m about 4 inches into the body pattern, and am liking the basketweave pattern just fine. I’ve been noticing that it’s looking a little small, though, so on Friday I measured to check that it was really the right size. Verdict: 34 inches, not 39 – a full size too small. Sigh.

My swatch did stretch when blocked, though, so I did a quick blocking on the needles this morning, and it stretched right out to 40″ with no problem. Saved by the swatch!

Now I’m just waiting for it to dry before continuing on with the body pattern. It will be good train knitting for the week, at least.

In the meantime, I spun up another bobbin for Branden’s sweater:

I really think I like this color the best of the three plies that are going into this yarn. I need another bobbin of the dark gray and turquoise, and then I’ll be ready to ply off batch #2. It looks like there’s probably another 2 bobbins of each left to spin, so there’s plenty more to come. Shouldn’t run out of yarn on this one!

And then, this morning, I wound up a new warp for the loom. I’ve had this yarn in stash since February of 2009, when I bought it at Madrona.  It’s been waiting for just the right project, and a couple of years ago I decided to weave with it. I bought a companion skein for it at Rhinebeck last year, and am just now getting around to warping it up. Fortunately, hobbies have no deadlines, so things can marinate in the stash as long as it takes, but it will still be nice to have it worked up.

I had to weave off my last two tea towels to open up the loom for this one, but haven’t done all the hemstitching and the wet finishing yet, so I’ll show those to you later.

With all of these things in the works, I think I should be covered through the end of the semester. Only 7 classes left!

Those sleeves might never end, but it’s reassuring to know that the semester will.

As I said last week, I am slowly, slowly working my way back toward normalcy after the really heavy “crunch” weeks of the semester. There is suddenly light at the end of the tunnel, though – Thanksgiving is this week (!), and then there are only three weeks of classes before the semester is over (!!). This happens every term with teaching; there is the exciting burst of beginning, then that endless slog of middle-time, and then all of a sudden the end has come and gone and you’re left wondering what on earth just happened.

This week is the one where things really start to lighten, though. It’s not over yet, but it’s starting to ease up, and the end is firmly in sight. And also, this week is Thanksgiving Break, so there is time to breathe and catch up a bit before the final push.

As always, the first harbinger of normalcy is the return of knitting. I can’t say I got much done this week, but it’s more than the week before. After much dithering over the swatch, I decided to just cast on and at least knit the ribbing because it didn’t actually require a decision.

The blog vote was also split, so I eliminated one more choice this morning and then Branden cast the deciding vote. Basketweave it is. It’s not the cushiest of the fabrics, but it has a clean, crisp texture that will work up just fine. Also, just picking something means that I’m not heading knitless into another week. (Much as I believe in letting the creative process move at its own pace, there are times as a mostly-monogamous knitter when that gets me into trouble. No knitting on the needles is one of those times, and calls for some additional prodding to reach a decision.)

I’ve also been doodling around a bit with some swatches in the Rambouillet yarn that I spun as a shop sample for Greencastle.

The color of this yarn has always made me think of fields of wheat, and for some reason it’s been calling to me lately. So last weekend I pulled out some needles and just started knitting, looking to see what would emerge. It doesn’t look like much here, but after several variations on a theme, I think I’m starting to converge on the kind of pattern I want. I spent some time yesterday flipping through the Walker books to see if there was anything along those lines, and ended up heavily modifying one of her designs to help me over some hurdles with mine. It’s not quite there yet, but the general idea is coming:

I’m interested to see where exactly this leads; I haven’t done much designing of my own stitch patterns, so it’s exciting to toy with the idea, and simple lace makes for a good canvas.

I also got to spend some quality time with my wheel earlier this week when my brain was too done with thinking to attempt design. I’ve added one more fat bobbin to the pile for Branden’s next sweater.

I thought that the sweater would be spun and half knit by now, but these things always seem to happen in their own time.

One day of teaching, one day of research, and then the rest of the week is (mostly) free for family, fun, and fiber. I can’t wait!