3 posts tagged “gifts”
This is the next batch of black alpaca carded with purple merino. More than half of the fibre is carded now, and it's going much quicker with the drum carder than it did with hand carders :-) I've actually spun one batch of this, but I don't think I've taken any photos. It's about 5m/g, and will either stay as singles or end as two-ply, depending on what I decide to do with it. It's probably going to be another woven wrap, but at the moment everything looks like a weaving project to me, since the loom is spread across the library floor in pieces having been varnished at the weekend. I'm resisting the urge to assemble it for as long as possible, because I can't start using it for another week and a bit, so barriers are good ;-)
The grey-pink alpaca for my MiL's Christmas present is finally all spun and plied. The first picture is a closeup of two balls of singles ready for plying, and it's really just another excuse to show off the macro capabilities of my new camera! The second picture is of the finished yarn, about 500m of two-ply. I spent some time the other day swatching from my sample of this yarn, and I didn't come up with anything I liked, so this is starting to look like a weaving project as well. Of course, weaving it also means the finished item (a scarf) will be larger, since weaving uses less yarn than knitting, so this is solidifying into a plan.
My old camera died, so I'm way behind in taking photos of things, but today I bought a new one, which I chose on its ability to take closeups. So here's the last week or so's crafting...
Spinning! The alpaca (first two photos) isn't new spinning, but I took the photos to test the closeups - the second is without flash, because super macro doesn't work with forced flash, but it still shows that the picture is clear even this close up. The third picture is the plied result of the shetland-merino-silk-mohair mix, and the fourth is to be a gift for a friend. It's the hand-painted purple wool I bought at the Knitting and Stitching show, but it was so matted it wouldn't spin easily without carding it first, so it's much less variegated as yarn than it was when I bought it. I've got two more lots of fibre from the same supplier, but carding really would mess up the colours in those, so I'll have to carefully pre-draft before spinning it.
Knitting! We bought teapots on holiday in Cumbria, and now I've made a teacosy from the three-ply wisteria yarn that matches the navajo ply in my dissertation socks. It took me a day, and the top is Cat Bordhi's whirlpool toe! And I'm still knitting along on Clessidra - over halfway through both socks now.
Also afoot: plans to knit ChildHood, although probably without the hood, just because the pattern says the hood knits up large and benefits from being tried on, and there's no way that's practical. I think I'll do this with red as the main colour and orange as the contrast. This is, of course, utterly unlike anything I'd knit for myself, but that's the point of having small relatives, no? (She will be a niece, by the way; I'm knitting bright colours because I hate the tyranny of blue-for-boys-and-pink-for-girls, not because we don't know.)
The current plan for what I'll knit this into is a garter stitch seafoam scarf or shawl, although I haven't yet swatched to confirm I like the stitch, but I had such fun knitting Bellatrix (which is basically seafoam in stocking stitch), and it gives a nice open texture (also, more area for less yarn!) that it seems a good plan.
