6 posts tagged “wheel”

I have turned the heel on the wisteria socks and begun on the leg. Both heels, both legs, because I'm still knitting these in parallel, which seems so far to be an excellent cure for the dreaded Second Sock Syndrome. The cable panel is still mostly indistinct, but it's clearly a different texture, so that's all that matters really. 

And I only had to add my last skein (about two-fifths of the total) partway through the heel, so these will still be navajo-ply for a good amount of ankle before I switch to the thicker three-ply for the ribbing.

I'm still really happy with these - they're soft and pretty and I made them! I'm all impatient to finish, and since I'm taking the rest of the weekend off from the Dissertation of Doom, maybe I'll knit these socks instead :-)

I've also been spinning more purple singles - I'm now at nearly 700m, but it's not going to be enough, so I'll have to buy another bag of fibre (oh, the hardship). And then I'll have to start planning a pattern...

...And the equivalent quick update from the spinning front!

The top picture is the second batch of Wisteria fibre that's destined for navajo plying. It's about 300m, which means I'm still on track to product at least 200m of possibly-sock-weight three-ply. I'm itching to ply it, but navajo works better if the singles have relaxed a bit, so I am resisting the urge.

The second picture is my skein of spinning oddballs :-) I have a long-term wip which I've mentioned before, of a scrap scarf made from all the remnants of my commercial yarn; I decided early on in my spinning that I didn't want to absorb my handspun remnants into that scrap project, but would make a separate one. The new Knitty has some stash-busting remnant ideas, which reminded me to get on with sorting out my spinning remnants, so I skeined it up yesterday, and was surprised that it comes to about 100m! And it's really pretty. It's currently one of the 'pet' skeins sitting on my desk to be stroked every now and again, and it's made me realise properly that I love all of my spinning, even my crappy beginner efforts. I don't feel quite the same about my knitting - I feel attached to all of it, but I don't feel uniformly positive about all of it, possibly because it's now finished, and has to be judged on how well it is performing its function. My handspun yarn, on the other hand, is still en route to its finished state (since I assume I'll eventually get round to knitting with most of it), so there are no disappointments to detract from my love for it. I can see flaws in some, of course, but I love every little bit of it anyway.

The second and third pics are singles from Texere's cerise merino, about 224m/50g, which I spun on one of the new whorls offered by my new flyer (bottom picture). The second picture is just before I twisted the skein into, well, a skein, and I just loved how it all curled up like that :-)

The fourth pic is of the same skein, sitting on top of the silk hankies which I will probably ply some of it with. The hankies probably won't make as much yardage as the wool (I got about 150m from the other pack of hankies), so I'll have to think a bit more about it. Maybe I'll keep it as singles, and just knit it in a project with the silk, or maybe I'll ply them (like the lilac 'silk cut' yarn), and put the leftover singles into the next skein of oddball. Not sure yet.

Finally, as mentioned above, my new flyer. I'm pretty certain now that my wheel is an Ashford Traditional (from the 1970s - about the same age as me!), and since my existing flyer had only one whorl (ie only one speed at which the flyer moves relative to the wheel), I splashed out on a replacement flyer with three - three! - whorls (whorls are the circles-with-groves at the left of the picture - the drive band (piece of string) is wrapped around the middle one in the pic). What this means is that I can spin with more twist (for finer yarn), without having to vary the treadling speed. This is a good thing, because there's a speed of treadling that is most comfortable, and controlling twist by speeding up is annoying and tiring. And since this (relatively cheap) addition works, that means I can plan for later, more expensive, additions, like a lace flyer unit which provides more - and smaller - whorls, ie higher ratios and allow for even finer yarn.

I've spun five-eights of the Wisteria fibre (from Freyalyn on Etsy). Four of those eighths (ie 100g) are wheelspun with a long draw (my first attempt at same), and then wheel-plied into lovely soft squooshy aran-ish three-ply, about 100m thereof (top picture). The leftovers from the three-ply made about 12m of two-ply (second picture) with a similar effect; not enough to do anything with, but I must admit to wearing it around my wrist and admiring it ;-) The two- and three-ply are both plied from non-matching singles, to blend and mix the colours, and I really like the effect. In fact, I like the effect so much that I nearly backed out of my plan to navajo-ply the remaining 100g...

I've spun a quarter of the remainder so far (the singles are in progress in the third picture). Spindle-spun, to make it as fine as I can, and getting fairly even laceweight singles. Impatiently, instead of leaving that 25g on the spindle and attaching the second 25g (I only split it in the first place because the length of roving was too long to be manageable), I wound it onto the swift, turned it into a ball and went straight ahead with navajo-plying, to produce the bottom picture. The colours are stronger and less muted than the thicker wheelspun yarn, and I really like them this way too :-) I should get something like 200m of something only slightly thicker than bought sock yarn out of this. 

The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook has been making me think about contrasting yarn from the same starting point - the three-ply aran and the navajo-ply sock are spun from the same fibre but using different tools and techniques, and they look quite different; I'd love to see how they look together. The tentative plan here is to knit toe-up indoor socks from the whole lot. Knit the foot from the fine navajo-ply yarn, with its strong colours and clear colour changes, and then switch to the squooshy aran - more muted colours and more soft and cuddly - for the leg (making appropriate adjustments to stitch count and needle size). I guess it's kind of an in-joke-for-one - the point of the plan is to compare and contrast the two different yarns, and the audience for whom the experiment is intended is just me (I don't know any other spinners). But the colours are so beautiful that it can't help but look pretty :-)

This is the result of the Caribbean fibre I bought from Freyalyn's Etsy shop :-)

It's two-ply, about 324m and about 200g. Unfortunately (for me), I chose this to make for Katie, who gave me my wheel - I checked that she knits when she gave me it, and promised to spin her something. It's lovely and I wish I was keeping it, so I hope she likes it! Haven't yet figured out how to deliver it, since I don't want to do it in person.

The first two skeins (one and three in the picture) are more blended and less candy-striped than the second two, which is noticeable to me, but I don't think it's too bad, and it taught me some things about how to treat colour, which I'm considering with my current spinning project, which is the Wisteria colourway from the same dyer. 

In other spinning news, my Amazon package finally arrived yesterday, with two new spinning books in it. Hands On Spinning is more basic than I was hoping - large chunks of it deal with things I've more-or-less taught myself already - but does feature useful discussion of drafting methods, one of which - long draw - I've put into practice with the Wisteria.

Talking of the Wisteria, here it is, fibre and two bobbins of singles. It's lovely :-) When I've spun the remaining fibre, I'll three-ply it and probably make socks - it'll be a bit thicker than fingering, I think, but I'm hoping it will work for around-the-house socks anyway. Of course, I reserve the right to see the finished yarn and completely change my mind and do something else with it, or just keep it around to stroke.

Depending on how this lot (which is 100g, half my supply of this fibre) works out, I might navajo-ply the other lot. I'm not especially keen on stripes in general, but I'm interested in the technique, and I'm interested in comparing what the two different yarns from the same fibre look like. I might even knit them in the same thing as an interesting experiment in colour. This thought, and indeed much of how I'm thinking about the colours in this fibre, is influenced by the Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook, which I've been flipping through. I haven't read all of it yet, and I think it's going to be mostly inspirational rather than instructional, but it's got me thinking about things to do with colour. And it's very pretty indeed - lots of good photos. It hasn't toppled the crown of New Pathways as my favourite sock book, but I'm glad to have it.

This looks much less peacocky now it's finished than it did in progress, but the name remains anyway. The weird thing about it is that it often manages to look like blue-shading-to-purple, when it's actually blue and green, and neither shade of blue admitted to having any association with purple when still in fibre form.

It's soft and smooshy three ply merino, really quite evenly spun and plied (both on the wheel), and about DK/worsted sort of weight. I've no idea at all what to do with it but I love it anyway. Maybe I'll just keep it as a pet, and get it out and touch it every now and again ;-)

The second picture is 'two thirds peacock' - a tiny amount of two ply from the light blue and the green left over from the three ply. The last picture is 'ever diminishing peacock' - a very tiny indeed skein of green two ply. Both of these are too small to do anything much with. They might go into the scrap scarf, or I might eventually come up with something that requires tiny bits of yarn. Some sort of freeform patchwork 'art' type thing, perhaps.

Oh, and this (right) is a better FO picture of the purple three-ply - it's much more like the actual colours than the one I posted the other day. I started making flip-top mittens out of the other skein of this, but they didn't work in various ways, so I've frogged. Back to the drawing board. If only spindles and spinning wheels came complete with an automatic inspiration generator for what to do with relatively small amounts of yarn - things in the 200-300m area. Hats and scarves and gloves are the sorts of things I'm thinking about, but since I already have enough of those items and am fussy about (a) what I knit, (b) what I wear, and (c) what I want to do with my precious handspun, perhaps I should work on considering yarn as an FO in its own right, without feeling that I need to knit it into something immediately.

These are the Cheshire Cat socks from Purlescence, and I'm knitting them - as will be obvious at a glance to anyone who knows her - for friend-R in honour of her grey cat Ghost and her black cat Shadow. The other sock will have the colours reversed, so the illusion cat is grey :-)

I haven't done illusion knitting before, and it's lots of fun, but it's suffering from new spinning energy, of which more later.

To the right are my lovely, lovely new Harmony wooden interchangeable needles, a Christmas gift from partner-R. The yarn in the bag is a clue to the half-written-post WIP I mentioned above.

The top picture to the left, the skein, is a spinning FO, my best yet. Shetland wool, lilac and "natural black" (I can't decide if this is grey or dark brown). It's only about 140m, so not enough to do anything much with, so I'm saving it to be an accent in something knitted with another yarn.

The bottom pic is a spinning WIP, and I'm still getting better every time, so this is thinner and more even than the above. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with it, but I might ply it with some light-ish grey I haven't yet spun

And finally, the piece de resistance! At a party at Bopeep's place on Christmas Eve, one of her neighbours offered to give me a spinning wheel. I half thought she was joking or drunk, but it turns out she wasn't :-) The bobbin is my first attempt at wheel spinning. Not very even yet, but much better than my first attempts at spindle spinning.

And of particular note is that I took the wheel home about 6.30 this evening, covered with dust, and in many different bits (the parts visible in the picture were eight pieces, I think), and with only help from a guide to the parts of a spinning wheel from Joy of Handspinning,  I worked out how to put it together and get it working. It's lovely. I don't precisely have room  for it, but even partner-R admits it was fate :-)