Evolution of spin

No new knitting to show yet (though I’m in the midst of binding off a shawl), but I have finished spinning my first braid of Corriedale top and I wanted to post a little progress photo or two.

The above knit item is a coaster I knit from the very first wacky yarn-type substance I made; the toilet paper roll holds a bit more of the same that I’m not sure what to do with.  The curly mess at the bottom of the first picture is what I spun in class, and the ball and what’s on the spindle are what I’ve spun since, getting more even all the time.

Check that out!  It mostly varies from about N to 2N units of thickness (with a couple of “whoopses”) – still uneven, but quite respectable.  I’ll be plying it in the next few days and then…gotta figure out what to knit with it!  Next up, spin something that’s not so damn thin!  My spindle is a heavier one meant for spinning fingering or worsted weights, or for plying, and although I was pretty proud of how rarely I broke my yarn as I spun these singles, it sure wasn’t never!  And I don’t want to be stuck only ever doing skinny stuff, despite the fact that I do largely want to spin things in doll-scale that aren’t available commercially (thick-and-thin, Cowichan-inspired barely-spun singles, etc.), plus I think it will be a good challenge to work on getting my yarn more even at a larger gauge.

Hats and yarns and spinning, oh my!

Folks who read the ABJD Knits group over on Ravelry might have already divined that this is in the works, but here’s the official announcement.  I’m working on a super-simple pattern for toques of all sizes, sized not for “tiny” and “large” but for wig sizes (e.g. 5-6″ and 8-9″) to make things easier on owners of dolls with unusual head sizes (not that I know any of those…).  I’ve worked out three sizes so far, 3-4. 7-8, and 8-9.  I’m planning to do at least two more, 6-7 and 9-10, but I’m not sure if there are many dolls who wear size 4-5 or 5-6 wigs.  NEED MORE RESEARCH!

Here’s a teaser photo showing two sizes and two styles of brim.

By the way, aren’t the two of them cute together?  I didn’t expect them to form a couple when I brought Suzuha home, but then BJDs love to surprise you!  Somehow I find their size difference adorable – in Edik’s embrace she literally has a handspan waist!

My design work, however, has been interrupted by a new hobby: hand spinning!

On Thursday evening I started messing around with my spindle and some youtube videos and some Corriedale fibre that was a “learn to spin” gift along with my BFL/silk top from Everything Old.  Here’s what I came up with:

It’s awfully uneven – there are cocoons of fibre almost a centimetre thick, and it thins down to cobweb weight in a few places.  But it’s…yarnlike?

Then yesterday, I took a drop spindling class at Knotty By Nature, joined by my lovely sister.  I learned a lot, bought some more fibre, and had a lot of fun! Here’s my sister, spinning her impressively fine and amazingly even single.

And me with…mine.  It’s miles better than the first already – I’ve learned how to deal with those cocoons and how not to let it get quite so thin – but I’m still having a very tough time getting the spin distributed evenly, so I have sections that are very soft-spun and others that are corkscrewing like mad.  But that’s okay; I now have lots of fibre to work on!

When I got home, I was in such a great, energized mood, and I didn’t want to stop spinning!  So I took the rest of the white Corriedale and some scraps from the braids I bought today as well as my needlefelting stash and spun a ridiculous riot of colour, which I attempted to ply with that first single.  Here are the results – my first yarnity yarn!

My plan is to knit a couple of coasters from it – something decorative yet useful.  I’m still waiting for the yarn to be fully dry after setting its twist, but I should be able to knit it up soon.  Meanwhile, more spinning!

Fluffy!

One of the best things about spending my workday catering to a toddler’s wishes is that I get to spend an inordinate amount of time just sitting at the window, looking at things.  Birds are a big hit – there’s a seagull who hangs out on a streetlight out front, and we often watch crows flying by.  And then when it snowed, I noticed the flock of robins that seem to visit the back yard quite regularly.  This is maybe half the group; it seems to be about 15-20 birds that visit the little ash tree daily.

Sadly, these fat, sassy birds are very shy and every time I tried to actually get outside and photograph them, they flew away.  In fact, as I took these photos from behind the glass, there were a few times when I felt they flew away because they noticed me looking away from my viewscreen and right at them.  Well, I do have eyes on the front of my head like a predator, so I suppose I can’t entirely blame them.

These guys aren’t even the fattest ones, but Big Fatty Robin was the most skittish, so you’ll just have to take my word that ze’s out there, looking rather as though a normal robin had put on a big fluff suit.  Kind of like this sweetie that somebody else photographed.

Speaking of fluffy, wonderful things, here’s another bit of fibrey goodness I just brought home.

That right there is a gorgeous braid of Blue-Faced Leicester/Silk top from, yes, my recent favourite, Everything Old!  It’s also proof that I am going to learn to spin!  Because I can’t let something that pretty sit in a drawer forever!

I’ll be learning to spindle spin, as I mentioned when I bought my starter spindles, partly because of the space issue, partly because I can buy a lot of drop spindles and fibre to spin them on for the price of even an inexpensive second-hand wheel, and partly (maybe the largest part) because I see drop spindling as a connection to a long line of fibre crafters stretching back through song and folktale into the dim mists of history.  In particular, my mother sings one Quebecois turlute (a kind of folksong with mouth-music refrains, often sung at breakneck tongue-twister speeds) featuring a woman with a distaff:

Dans mon chemin, j’ai fait rencontre d’une vieille… turlututu
D’une vieille… turluron, turlurette
D’une vieille… turluron, turluré
D’une vieille… rare beauté.

Je lui ai dit, ma bonne vielle, voudrais-tu faire… turlututu
Voudrais-tu faire… turluron, turlurette
Voudrais-tu faire… turluron, turluré
Voudrais-tu… m’embrasser ?

La bonne vieille avec sa quenouillette, a voulu faire… turlututu
A voulu faire… turluron, turlurette
A voulu faire… turluron, turluré
A voulu me… frapper.

C’est les jeunes filles de notre village, elles ont des beaux…turlututu
Elles ont des beaux… turluron, turlurette
Elles ont des beaux… turluron, turluré
Elles ont des beaux…jupons pichets!

C’est les garçons de notre village, ils ont des beaux…turlututu
Ils ont des beaux… turluron, turlurette
Ils ont des beaux… turluron, turluré
Ils ont des beaux… cassons barrés!

Which is to say:

In my street I met an old…
an old…
an old…rare beauty!

I said to her, “my dear, would you like to…?
would you…
would you like to…give me a kiss?”

The old woman with her distaff wanted to…
wanted to…
wanted to…beat me!

“It’s the young girls in our town, they have the pretty…
They have the pretty…
They have the pretty…lace skirts!

And it’s the young men in our town, they have the handsome…
They have the handsome…
They have the handsome…striped undershirts!”

(Apologies if my translation is inaccurate…I think it’s close enough to convey the idea, but French 12 was a long time ago now)

I want to be a sassy spindle-wielding Woman Of A Certain Age, and beat men who get fresh with me with my fibre transportation system!  Plus, the word quenouillette is just so fun to say!  And so I snuggle my fluffy fibre and pet my pretty spindles and plan to register for a drop-spindling class early next week!

 

Hester in the works

I started knitting Ms. Prynne (that’s Hester Prynne, she of the Scarlet Letter) at the beginning of the month as part of a knit-along in the What Would Madame DeFarge Knit group on Ravelry.  As I wrote back in the summer, Ms. Prynne was the first thing that popped into my head when thinking of ways to put my gorgeous pink Kattikloo sock yarn up close to my face where it belongs.  But I was unsure.  See, I have a horror of high necks!  I find turtlenecks uncomfortable, and as a woman with a generous bustline I have very much internalized the concept (brought to you by What Not To Wear) that lower necklines look better on a frame like mine – a concept that I assure you is borne out in photographic evidence.  And as Em at Everything Old said, cowls are either close-fitting enough to be warm, or loose enough to look good!  But although I looked at pages and pages of patterns, I couldn’t find any other neckwarmers that felt right for the yarn, so Ms. Prynne it was!   I chose some fabulous, funky beads left over from another project and got to work!

And then this happened:

All week, it’s been below zero.  And not just a tiny bit, but like -4 or 5 degrees ALL DAY.  I know half the continent (and all of Canada, except Vancouver) is laughing at me, but really, in a normal year we get temperatures around 0 or -1 intermittently, and occasionally maybe get down as low as -3, but most of the winter will be around 5-10ºC, so this week has really been exceptional, and not just because of the unusually solid precipitation!

The day after the first big dump, the day when I went to work thinking “well, that was pretty but it’ll all be gone by tonight” and came home going “WHERE AM I, TORONTO?” I was waiting for the bus with a shawlette tucked point-forward into my winter coat (it’s not actually a coat; it’s actually a sweater with a zipper) and my hood pulled up, but god damn if my neck wasn’t freezing!  The shawlette does a great job of warming where my low-cut tops leave me exposed, and my face is apparently willing to Just Deal With It, but there was evidently a hole in my wardrobe.  A hole that only Ms. Prynne could fill!  But although I worked at top speed that evening I was not able to finish it, nor have I yet.  So I decided it was time to take fashion into my own hands:

Yes, that’s me wearing my unfinished cowl, ball of yarn tucked safe in a pocket.  Yes, I know it was brave of me to go out with my needles uncapped, and yes, I did have to pick up a couple of stitches after I put it on incautiously and dropped the last few.  Hopefully I’ll get it finished before we have any more really cold weather (it’s started raining now and temperatures are supposed to be up around 6º or more, so presumably I’ll have some time).  And I decided that A) it doesn’t look that bad, high neck or no, and B) it’s such a comfortable garment that I don’t even care, so nyah!   Next, I will KNIT ALL THE COWLS.  ALL OF THEM ALL THE TIME!

sad dolls in snow

Those darn job things have their uses, but they do keep a person from getting in any daytime photography.  Still, is there any better time to photograph snow than dusk?  (Some might argue “Yes, any time there’s enough light for your camera to work properly.”  To them I say “Nyah!”)  And it is, after all, Victoria…I’m already surprised that the snow has been here on and off for two days, and I have no hope that it will still be around on the weekend.

I flatter myself that in her Pevensie coat, Rada really does look like Lucy Pevensie wandering into Narnia for the first time.  Only the coat fits her too well, heh.

Suzuha’s just a snow fairy plain and simple, perhaps admiring her own handiwork with the withered apples on our little tree.

Happy snow day!

New Year WIP round up!

Phew, the holiday madness is behind us!  But I still have some knitting lingering from December that I’m enjoying getting on with now that my Christmas knitting is but a memory.

Okay, strictly speaking those socks in the manly Regia jacquard yarn (Spring Cable socks, the cable is there somewhere, I promise) are a Christmas leftover.  With Mr. Salamander home from mid-November nursing a back injury, it proved impossible to complete a surprise pair of socks in time for Christmas, so I wrapped up the WIP, needles and all, and resumed working on it around Boxing Day.  But I don’t really count them as a Christmas failure since when I planned the project I was still 2 weeks out from starting my new job and anticipated having plenty of time while Mr. Salamander was at work to finish them.  Fortunately his back just needed a few weeks of babying, and he’s back up and at ‘em starting this week.

See?  There’s totally a cable hidden in there.

The sherbet coloured socks are for me, of course, Anastasia socks by MintyFresh.  They have been ideal companions this winter, amusing me at choral concerts and big social gatherings, and now that I’m back at work (daytime childcare), I have been working on them at nap time as I alternate reading chapters from The Scarlet Letter and The Hunger Games on my Kindle app for iTouch.

And the shawl!  Remember a month ago when I was laughing at the hubris of thinking I would actually start a shawl in the car on a road trip?  Well, I did!  The first chart on the Percy Scarf is decidedly simple enough for knitting in company, although the Frost Flower chart (with patterned rows on both right and wrong sides) had to wait until I got home.  I’ve finished the first repeat; planning to do 2.5 instead of 1.5 as in the original.  I had actually planned to do this the first time I knit this pattern, but was worried I’d run out of yarn.  I’m happy to be working on it again with a more generous skein, since the Frost Flower pattern is one of my favourite lace stitches, and I’m gratified to find things are going fairly quickly this time since I’m a little more familiar with the pattern.

As usual I have big plans coming up.  Just moments ago, I wound my Kattikloo sock yarn from this past summer’s Fibrations Festival in preparation for casting on the Ms. Prynne cowl (hence my decision to read The Scarlet Letter).  I am very close to finishing work on the Ur-Bun coat pattern, too, and thinking about a series of hat patterns for BJD starting with a free toque for all sizes…if I can squeeze in enough time for design in between my plans for another shawl and still more socks!

it’s Christmas, it’s Christmas time!

All my gift knitting is done!  Done and blocked!  And ends woven in!  And any buttons, etc. sewn on!  In fact, I’ve had about 24 hours to bask in my done-ness!  So finally I have a few minutes to devote to the blog, and I thought it was time to show off my dolls’ winter outfits.

It’s my festive doll shelf!  What with Mr. Salamander being so handy (he’s a contractor, and a damn fine woodworker), we have a lot of shelves around the house, including one specially for our small Christmas tree (we get a 3-4 foot real one because we are fancy and setting up artificial trees destroys the skin on my hands), which doubles very handily as a doll photograph staging area (or it would if the lighting were a little better…something I hope to improve in the new year).

For Suzuha I put together one of the Barbie dresses I bought her with a hair tie to make a snow fairy outfit!

Edik, of course, is Brat Moroz/Santa Dahhhling.  One of these years I will make him another Christmas costume, but I love his elf outfit.

And Posy, in a wool felt top ‘embroidered’ by needle-felting with laceweight wool yarn!

Rada is wearing my completed Winterhold.  I’m hoping we’ll get a bit of snow this winter; I’d love to get some outdoor playtime pics with this one!

My second crack at the stranded colourwork turned out completely adequate (although I think I have a ways to go before I could describe it as “good”) and overall I am in love with this cute coat!

“Do you think it will snow today?”

Nothing can possibly go wrong(er)

I’m in a very impatient, dissatisfied mood with my knitting right now.  I think it’s partly because of the Christmas knitting: one project, I really want to start but can’t until I get some measurements, for which I’m relying on someone else; another project I started and decided halfway was a complete failure; a third I basically finished but it turns out the buttons I have on hand are not appropriate (not functional even…this is no minor design quibble); and a fourth I haven’t been able to start because the person it’s for is always hanging around (cough*Mr.Salamander*cough).  And then, I ran out of yarn for Winterhold and just when I’d made my peace with the fact that the collar would have to be a little narrower than it was meant to and bound off (but conveniently before I started the blocking process) I found an unexpected stash of what I think is the same Kroy yarn…at least enough for another couple of rows.  So now I’m unpicking the bind off, picking up the stitches, and feeling very annoyed with the world.  Every new project I pick up, I find myself putting down a moment later.  This one requires too much thought.  That one is boring.  And so on ad infinitum.

This is a difficult mood to be in when we’re about to make a long drive and enjoy a weekend away visiting Mr. Salamander’s cousins up island.  Of course I won’t spend the whole drive knitting, I’ll be reading aloud from “Does Anything Eat Wasps,” a collection of fascinating Q&A published by the New Scientist magazine (until my voice is hoarse from speaking over the diesel engine), and I’ll be singing along with, no doubt, some J-Pop (mine) and CCR (Mr. Salamander’s), talking about the scenery and the like.  But you can’t go on a 3-hour drive without knitting, it’s just not allowed.  So I’ve cast on and discarded a sock (too much effort to learn how to do short-row toes right now and I’m too bloody-minded to admit defeat and just use Judy’s Magic Cast On), started another Wee Tree (that I almost certainly won’t finish this weekend, and possibly won’t touch again before Christmas), attempted and horribly failed at a free-form felting project (that’s what happens when you think “gee, I should try to wing this thing I saw at a fair one time” 45 minutes before you’re supposed to go over to your mom’s for dinner).  My latest spasm?  Oh yes, I’m going to knit a shawl!  In the truck!  And while spending time with other human beings! Nothing can possibly go wrong!

Here’s my picture of how nothing can possibly go wrong:

 

humility

Usually new things come easily to me.

Not so much colourwork.  I present for your amusement some extremely amateurishly tight stranded knitting, featured in my adaptation-for-45cm-BJD of Everything Old spinner, dyer, and designer Emma Galati’s Pevensie (which incidentally is a super sweet pattern that I foresee knitting in the intended size range some time down the road):

But let’s not dwell on the fact that I was so obviously, completely wrong when I thought it was just a bit too tight and would probably block out.  Let’s not think about the fact that I’m about to frog the whole thing back.  No, instead, let’s talk about how awesome the tonal variation in the two sock yarns I used for CCs looks.  Let’s focus on how the subtle shading works with the already awesome motif to enhance the illusion of three-dimensionality!  Because this combo of yarn and pattern is so awesome I’m not even going to try and pretend that a seed stitch ruffle was some kind of intentional finish to the garment.  No, I’m going to rip it back and make this coat perfect because it deserves that kind of attention!  See?

Incidentally, the red is leftover Everything Old Hopscotch from Mr. Salamander’s socks.  I think I’m pretty cool, using a designer’s yarn to execute her pattern.  The grey is my beloved Shibuiknits sock, and the white is Kroy and I still dislike it pretty much the most of any sock yarn I’ve knit with (thankfully this is my last ball of the stuff, and I think this pattern will pretty much use it up).

I’ve hidden my other project under a jump for those of you who don’t like to be thinking ahead to Decembery decoration yet.  I mean, sure, wait ’til after Thanksgiving, right?  But here in Canada that was already over a month ago, so NYAH!

Desert Bus for Hope

You might have noticed the shiny new button up in the right-hand corner there, the one that says Desert Bus Crafter, and you might be wondering what that’s about.  Well, Desert Bus for Hope is a charity gaming marathon, where a team of awesome people formed around the folks from Loading Ready Run play the world’s most boring videogame (Desert Bus, a real-time cross-country coach-driving experience) for as long as the money (ultimately donated to Child’s Play) keeps rolling in.  As the drivers try to stay awake during their 24-hour shifts at the wheel, everybody else participates in live chat, wacky challenges, auctions, and giveaways – with perhaps a few celebrity cameos and call-ins as well!  If you’re a geek and/or you like to support charity and/or you like to see people engage in ridiculousness for a good cause, you have to check them out, starting tomorrow (as I write this, the countdown is at 20 hours and change) and continuing for at least 94 hours…more as new donations come in!

Some of the auctions and giveaways are sponsored corporately.  There’s some amazing-looking stuff from Wizards of the Coast if you like Magic: The Gathering or D&D.  There are video game sets, including some that have been signed by Big Names or are phenomenally hard to find.  But in my opinion the coolest stuff that comes out of Desert Bus is the craft-along!  For months now, crafters around the world have been working on geeky videogame- and fandom-related projects large and small.  Some will be auctioned off, others will be given away.  A crochet Dalek!  A skirt with tetris blocks on it!  A gorgeous glass plate with the Minecraft Creeper on it (best snack server ever)!  TWO THREE COOKING MAMA APRONS OMG!  IT’S OKAY, MAMA WILL HELP YOU SUPPORT CHARITY!

And, well, there’s this:

That right there is the slightly more finessed sibling of the Angel-Banishing Sigil I made for my sister’s birthday.  I bought pre-made felt for the button itself, then needle-felted the sigil on with yarn again.  This one has a proper pin back and everything, not just a safety pin sewn on with silk yarn!  And it was photographed by someone with a modicum of skill!

I’m really happy to be even such a small part of this epic charity event.  I know I’ll be tuning in to support the Desert Bus folks, and I hope you will too!

P.S.
I was just looking at it on their site thinking about the grey backing (I wanted black but it was out of stock) and I had this awful facepalm moment where I realised I could have done both layers in the same red as the front.  Oh well, live and learn…