11 posts tagged “grey”
The second is a last-minute Christmas gift for R, which I partly wove in front of him on Christmas Eve, figuring (correctly, it turns out) that he pays no attention to what I'm making unless I talk to him about it. There are stripes in the weft - plain dark grey Jaeger merino and black tweed YSL - but they're much less obvious in the flesh than in the photo.
Next up (pictures three and four) is the finally-finished Clessidra. I don't think I'll use the riverbed sockitecture again, because I don't like how it fits me, but I love the socks and am going to wear them to a crafting date tomorrow :-)
Picture five is R's blue socks with a reknitted heel after he wore a massive hole in one of them. I think I've still got some of the blue, but I'm not sure where, and he didn't mind them being mended in black.
The last pic is my new sock project, double knit socks which I'm knitting wrong side out, so I don't have to move the yarn backwards and forwards (near side is English-style purl, far side is continental-style knit, so one strand in each hand, which is fun). The downside of knitting them this way around is that I can't read my knitting on the wrong side, so whether I'm increasing or not on any given row is a bit random but because I'm knitting them at the same time they'll match anyway so it doesn't matter, and I'm planning a short-row heel so there's no other increases or decreases to keep track of. I wanted to use different yarn to make it easier to keep track of which stitch belongs to which sock, so these will end up non-matching stripes - once I've finished the toe I'll break the yarn and swap them over, and keep swapping them at random intervals throughout (must remember to break yarn to do this, so I don't end up knitting the two together).
My first ever weaving project, in progress (made from Knitwitches sock yarn):
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.
I bought a drum carder. I also bought several little bags of pretty fibre in amounts too small to be anything on their own. An appropriate justification for both of these facts is carding different fibres together to design the composition of the yarn as well as its colour and shape.
Left to right: carded and uncarded fibres next to each other; four different uncarded fibres; carded batts; spinning in progress.
At the last minute, I decided to go to the Knitting and Stitching Show with J, and to save myself from an unbridled orgy of stash enhancement, I set some rules. Fibre was my prime target, but only interesting hand-dyed fibre. It is of course possible to buy hand-dyed fibre on the internet, but it's hard to choose - so much depends on things which aren't obvious from a computer screen, so I much prefer to buy it in person. The only yarn I was allowing myself to buy was sock yarn, and even then it had to be either reduced or unavailable online.
Final acquisitions were 3.25mm Addi turbos for knitting Henry, and an Onya bag to replace my current spare bag which is wearing out. A good day!
As a result of a long-held scheme, I have finally cast on for Clessidra, only a year after buying the yarn! Naturally, I'm converting the pattern to toe-up, and using Cat Bordhi's master numbers rather than the numbers in the pattern, but I am following the pattern part of the pattern, so that's alright. Although toe-up means I'm a long way from the exciting hourglass cables :-(
The yarn is purple Cherry Tree Hill, as seen in my Baudelaires, and the needles are 2.25mm Knitpicks. It's coincidence that these are the same size needles the pattern calls for - my 2.5mm Addis are otherwise occupied, 2mm is too small, and I only have 2.75mm needles in DPNs.
I'm still plotting my MiL's Christmas present - the photo to the right is a pile of alpaca rolags I've hand carded in preparation for spinning them, on the theory that I might as well card in front of the TV to encourage me to spin, and therefore possibly get the whole thing done in time for Christmas. Still, I saw her this weekend and warned her that the price of lovingly hand-crafted gifts was possible lateness ;-)
The colours in these are deliberately not mixed much - I'm carding to tidy up the fibre, not to blend colours, and I'm hoping the eventual yarn (which will be two-ply) will be gently variegated.
But I really don't like hand carding very much, so I'm forming a scheme to purchase a drum carder to make the process easier. Space in the library is, as ever, at a premium, so some book weeding and miscellaneous tidying is called for before I'll allow myself to add to the pile of crafting equipment I'm keeping.
I finished my mini-weaving project, and wove the resulting braid into a small square of meta-weaving, which I'm rather pleased with. In fact, I'm so pleased that I'm plotting a loom acquisition, or rather, scheming to get R to buy me one for my birthday. Only a little one, but I'm already plotting my first real weaving project. My excursion into buying coloured clothes this spring and summer has left me with a problem now the weather's getting colder: all my mid-layers - cardigans and wraps - are black or purple, and don't go with some shades-of-red clothes I've bought (or the others I may still buy). For a while I've been plotting to ply my burgundy merino fibre with something variegated and autumnal (as yet unpurchased), but my original plan was to knit a wrap with it. However, I'm not actually all that keen on knitted wraps, and much prefer woven ones. The loom I'm scheming for is 80cm wide, which should be plenty big enough for a nice wrap, and I'm excited about the colour possibilities in spinning hand-dyed fibre then weaving it :-)
I'm loving these socks. If I liked to wear the colours of my own cats (tortie and ginger) I'd make another pair for myself on the same theme. Sadly, I don't wear brown or orange, so that's not going to happen. Or maybe I'll make up some other illusion design for something. Or maybe I'll just finish these and go on and do something else ;-)
