Knitting History

Little Things

Strange things happen when you spend a couple of weeks obsessing on a job interview. The body starts having bizarre reactions to stress, for example, the bottoms of my feet blistered up and started peeling! Very weird. It doesn't hurt, but is kind of itchy. Another odd stress reaction occurred last night when I left my purse in the women's restroom of the college and got part of the way home before I realized it. Someone turned it in to the campus police, who called my house and really freaked Dan out (he was wondering why my purse was someplace I was not, and worrying that I had been accosted). Of course I couldn't call him, since my money and my phone were in the purse. But I was fine and luckily had put the car keys in my pocket, so I made it home, and then we both went to the campus police to pick up the purse. The only thing missing was a $5 bill, and I felt very lucky.

In the past two weeks of focusing on other things, I also ran out of food and toilet paper, errands and obligations piled up, and once I had the emotional letdown of the whole thing being over, not exactly having gone the way I hoped, those things were waiting to pounce to make me feel even less efficient and even less successful. So yesterday I buckled down and got the bills paid and the groceries bought, and today I'm tackling the errands.

Brenda had a great thought in the comments. She suggested that when you interview for a job, you should get a goodie bag for your trouble, and I think that is absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately, I did not get a goodie bag for my two weeks of effort (more, really, if you count the hours and weeks spent putting together the perfect application), so I have been treating myself a little bit, making my own goodie bag, if you will.  Some of the treats really wouldn't fit into a bag, and there is no particular theme to my purchases, but they all felt pretty good.

I sprang for a bale of peat moss and some compost for the backyard, and was seduced by some cunning little shade plants that wanted to come home with me. The phaleanopsis orchid that the car dealership gave me for spending too much money (and which, incidentally, none of my friends is willing to adopt) got a new pot:

I also got some orchid food so I can at least make an effort at keeping it alive.

While on safari searching for Mother's Day cards, an absolutely gorgeous "Mint Chocolate" coleus flirted its velvety leaves my way, and I succumbed:

Since these are outdoor plants, their chances for survival are reasonably good.

I also bought pens. I've been on a crusade for a couple of months now to purge the house of all Bad Pens - the cruddy ballpoints with the crusty ink at the tips, the gel rollers that mete out a parsimonious flow of ink and kind of scratch across the page. All the pens exhibiting undesirable pen behavior are now landfill. There is nothing like the feel of a good pen laying down a generous flow of ink on a page. So I picked up a package of pens that have given satisfying performance in the past as well. It's the little things, you know.

I put the Lace Edged Raglan temporarily aside since all the body pieces are done and only the sleeves remain. I plan to do a provisional cast on and start the sleeves this evening, so I can adjust sleeve length later if I need to. Instead, I  started the Bellatrix Socks, and was rewarded with a highly entertaining sock pattern in bright-and-perky yarn. I'm loving how these are turning out - so cheerful:

Today, it's off to the library to conduct some neglected business, grading of papers that students are getting anxious to have back, and maybe another trip to the hardware store to get more compost since I seriously underestimated my compost needs. And knitting, more knitting, the knitting of sleeves.

Stunningly Mediocre

Well, my performance in that job interview was stunningly mediocre. I did okay on some parts, and really dropped the ball on others. Some of it was my fault, like leaving out the most important point of my teaching demonstration that made my conclusions unintelligible, and some of it was not my fault, like the questions that just did not work to my strengths. Que sera, sera.

So I'm allowing myself a little time to be disappointed, and I may stick another pin in the voodoo doll. And as Elizabeth Zimmerman pointed out, knitting is the perfect antidote through all crises. Luckily for me, the Bellatrix sock pattern is available on Ravelry again, and I have the  perfect clown barf yarn to go with it!

Thanks so much for your kind and supportive well wishes. I shudder to think what would have happened without them :-)

Que Sera, Sera

I was doing really well for a couple of weeks posting regularly, and then I got scheduled for a job interview for my dream job and it all sort of fell apart. I am interviewing for a full time job teaching at a college that I have worked at before, and I love the college, the other faculty, and the students are really wonderful. I have found that it is really better to have a pragmatic, Que Sera, Sera attitude about the whole job interview thing since it helps with the nerves that accompany such an experience, but in this case, it's hard. I really want the job, and if I don't get it I will be crushed. If I do get it, I will be ecstatic. I've been prepping for the interview obsessively, but there is only so much you can anticipate. So if you have a spare ounce of positive energy to send me on Tuesday, May 6 at around 10:20 a.m. PST, I would be most appreciative. I need all the help I can get.

In the meantime, I've been spinning to help calm myself. I finished plying the singles spun from the carded batts, and here are the results :

I ended up with about 300 yards of sportweight yarn and I love the way the colors blend and change. This is such a good example of the kind of colors you can get in spinning that you can't get any other way. Here is a view in the skein:

I'm thinking scarf for this yarn, but I'll have to ruminate on what pattern I would like to try.

The next item up on the wheel at the moment is some silk. I dyed some silk top a while ago and finally started to spin it. I was planning to make a 2-ply silk yarn, but I know I won't have enough to really make anything significant. So I thought about doing one ply of the silk and another ply of a wool since I love the interplay of the matte wool against the shiny silk. I dug through my handdyed pile o' wool and came up with 3 one ounce pieces in various shades of blue and periwinkle:

I also have some odds and ends of indigo-dyed wool that I could throw in there, carding up some batts. The silk is on the bobbin, and I think it will look gorgeous plied with a single spun from the various shades of dyed wool. So that is the ongoing spinning right now. It will probably take a while to complete this yarn, since silk spinning is slow. It needs much more twist than wool does, so I have to calm myself and get into a meditative state to spin it. Which is probably exactly what I need right now!

Weaving Woe

I finished weaving off the blue cotton warp, but it seemed like I was fighting with my loom the whole time. I put new treadle tie ups on the loom because the old cotton ones kept slipping, and it took some trial and error to get them adjusted correctly so I was getting a good shed. In the process, I ended up with some skips, and my tensioning on the warp was not as even as it could have been. In other words, the finished product had some issues. Here is part of the woven cloth:

Can you see the twill pattern? Nope, I can't either. That is because the weft yarn was too close in color to the warp yarn, and the pattern got lost. So as you can see, I had a lot of lessons with this warp. And it reminded me over and over again that I am a beginning weaver, and it is hard to be a beginner. It takes perseverance and the ability to pick yourself up when the project doesn't turn out as well as you would like, and sometimes the learning curve is pretty steep.

I remember feeling like this when I started knitting, too. I look back on patterns that seemed terribly hard then, and now they seem very easy. I imagine with experience, weaving will be like that too. Originally I had planned that this warp would make three cotton baby blankets that I could keep on reserve for all the various babies that keep getting born (incidentally, my friend Lacy had her baby boy, Jakob, last week. Mother and baby are doing well). The warp was only long enough for two blankets, and there are mistakes in the weaving. The mistakes can be fixed by threading a tapestry needle and setting to work, whispering incantations over the fabric while correcting the errors, but it would have been nice to have it turn out right the first time.

The saving grace of this project is that the fabric feels wonderful. The 2.2 cotton warp and the cotton flake weft softened up beautifully in the wash and it is a perfect blanket fabric. I chose a good sett for the threads so it is soft and drapey, but not too loose. So I did do some things right! And the rest, I know, will come with time and experience.

Soggy

My project monogamy on the Lace Edged Raglan is paying off, and it is beginning, just beginning, to look like a sweater:

The back is done, and over half of one front is done. I hit a snag this week when I had a clumsy moment and upended a cup of tea into my knitting bag, resulting in a soggy sweater. The back is still damp, and I couldn't work on the front that evening because I was afraid of stretching out the damp yarn. The jury is still out on whether there will be staining, but it is looking hopeful at the moment that there is no lasting damage. Note to self: always choose yarn colors that coordinate well with spilled tea. I think the front has dried well enough that I can work on it tonight.

In other more exciting news, I got a note from Jane Waller that she is definitely planning, in conjunction with Knit on the Net, to republish her fantastic book, A Stitch in Time. In fact, it will be a new and improved Stitch in Time, since rather than publishing facsimiles of the original patterns, she is redrafting the patterns and also knitting new versions of each item. So you can see actual examples of the wonderful sweaters and such in contemporary yarns! This is very good news, and I can't wait to see what the new book looks like. I think it is so wonderful to preserve our knitting heritage in this way, and so many of the designs from the past still look contemporary and fresh.

Happy Medium

I spun up the batts from last week, with some nice results. If you recall, we had the horizontally dyed batt:

and the vertically dyed batt:

Which I spun up into two separate plies:

The top bobbin shows the horizontally dyed batt spun.

The bottom bobbin shows the vertically dyed batt spun.

The plan is to ply these two together, and see what we end up with. I really like the way the heathered colors in the batts produced a yarn with some sparkle and variation. Single colors tend to look a little flat, and having the various colors really does add depth. The question is whether this will translate into a nice looking plied yarn, or whether all those colors will get lost, or worse, look too busy. I'm hoping for a happy medium!

Cable Guy Renaissance

Several years ago, I wrote my first ever pattern for a pair of men's felted slippers with cables. It didn't exactly take the knitting world by storm, and that was fine. But one day, I decided to add the pattern to Ravelry, and when I went to do that, someone had already added it! Not only that, but a few people had actually used the pattern and there were some really nice slippers out there!

I can't tell you how excited I was that people were actually making the pattern - okay, not a lot, but still I had pretty much assumed that no one knew the pattern existed and I was the only person on the planet who had ever made it before. There is a particularly nice pair on Ravelry made of Cascade 220. And people have been visiting the blog looking for the pattern, so I moved it to the top of the sidebar to make it more easily accessible. I may even make a pair out of Cascade 220 myself - the cables show up much more nicely in that yarn than they do in the lopi yarn that I originally used.

This discovery was  extremely encouraging, and it really made me unreasonably happy.  So happy that my fiber life became invigorated, and I have posted to the blog every day this week. I seem to have a lot to say about fiber lately, and that is good. I can't guarantee that it will last, but for now, it's all good.

Magic Man

Since I can't make the Bellatrix socks right now, I've been looking at the queue (which is holding steady at 2 WIPs) and trying to figure out what small project I can make while I'm simultaneously working away on the Lace Edged Raglan sweater.

I've been meaning to make a small felted bag for my bike, just big enough to hold my cell phone and my keys when I go out for a spin. And I already dyed one skein eons ago - a chocolate brown that used to have pastel colors sprinkled throughout (I know, yech) which I overdyed with lemon-lime Kool-Aid. I found a pattern I could adapt for the bag - Miriam Felton's Retro Wedge Felted Bag, and I found a couple more undyed balls of this yarn:

The skein to the left is already dyed, and the skeins to the right are the "before" shots of the extra yarn I found languishing in the stash.

You may be wondering why on earth I am dyeing brown and lime green yarn, and I can only explain by noting that my bike looks like this:

This is a seriously tricked out  lime green Schwinn Varsity that Dan "accessorized" for me with wooden fenders stained a dark brown, and brown leather handlebar wrap. He really knows how to add bling to a bike. People stop in their tracks and gape at the bike when I ride it (but this is a bike-loving town, so that isn't really unusual). Dan has had people in cars pull him over when he was out riding on some of his creations so they could get a closer look. I would show you pictures, but unless you are a serious bike geek you probably wouldn't get it - half the time, I don't even get it.

Anyway, the bike bag is the final thing I need on this bike to make it really comfortable. Riding with keys and phone in your pocket is unwieldy. So I have the pattern, I have the yarn, and all I needed now was more lemon-lime Kool-Aid, which of course became the only flavor of Kool-Aid that my local stores seemed not to have in stock. I have been haunting the grocery purveyors for weeks trying to find lemon-lime, with no luck.

Dan was going to the store last night, and I asked him to check for lemon-lime Kool-Aid, since he seems to be on a roll with finding things I need (contracters to finish the back yard, belting for my drum carder). And wouldn't you know, he found it:

That is a box of 50 (!) packets of lemon-lime Kool-Aid, which he obligingly brought home for me. The scary part is that I'll probably use it - not necessarily all of it for this project, but lemon-lime Kool-Aid does give a particularly vivid lime green than is somewhat difficult to obtain with any other type of dye. If you mix the lime Kool-Aid with a little bit of orange Kool-Aid, just a touch, you get a nice olive-y green too.

Finishing up dyeing the brown yarn will be a weekend project, and then I can start my bag. This is another project I have been contemplating for several years now, and I'm excited that it is finally coming together! Thanks, Dan!

Batt Grrl

Ready to see some batt action? Here are some experiments I did with the drum carder. I had two 1-ounce pieces of BFL that I had dyed with the exact same colors in two different ways. I had been wondering for a while why people dyed roving with the colors going in short horizontal stripes. It kind of makes sense when you are dyeing yarn, if you are looking for short color repeats. But for roving? I wasn't sure I saw the point.

As I said, I decided to do an experiment dyeing two 2-ounce pieces of roving in exactly the same colors, one set with horizontal bands of color, and the other with vertical bands of color. As far as the dyeing goes, it's easier to put the dye on horizontally (one reason why people probably do it that way). Here is the roving:

Here we have vertical bands of color. Note how some of the dye bled - into horizontal bands! Reason #2 why people dye in horizontal bands!

Next, we have the same BFL roving dyed  with the same colors in horizontal bands:               

Nothing too dramatic about that. It looks like most handdyed roving.

Originally, I wondered if it would make a difference in spinning. I figured I could break off the same-colored horizontal hunks and get long repeats that way, or break the roving down the length and get short repeats that way. On the vertical dyed roving, same thing only reversed. But I never got around to it, so now we're going to see the difference when you drum card the roving.

Here is the roving dyed with vertical stripes run twice through the drum carder:

We have a purple background with streaks of the various colors running throughout. It is soft and fluffy and just begging to be spun. I could have blended the colors more by putting it through the carder a few more times, but I liked it like this.

Here is the roving dyed with horizontal stripes run twice through the drum carder:

We have a lot more variation in color, and if you were looking for long repeats of colors, this would be the best option. I could make this more uniform by taking pieces from all the batts and carding them together,  but I like the variation.

Of course, the colors are going to mix even more when I spin them. I'm thinking I'll take one batch of batts and spin a single, and take the other batch of batts and spin a single, then ply them together, just for fun. I'll bet I end up with an interesting yarn that probably looks a lot more uniform than the unspun batts would suggest. It will be an adventure to find out for sure!

Meant To Be

Some things are just meant to be, in their own time and at their own pace. I had two long-term projects that had been on hold for years - literally years - that got finished up last week because apparently, the time was right.

Long-term project #1 was my backyard. I have a tiny backyard, that used to have a cement pad which left a rather large margin of heavy clay soil left to be planted or covered in some way so it wasn't just dirt. I spent a few years after we moved here trying various plants and soil amendments to no avail. I could get a few things to grow, mostly in containers (did I mention that the yard only gets sunlight a few hours a day?). I learned all about shade plants, but another limiting factor was the fact that there are huge redwood trees surrounding our tiny plot of ground that continuously drop pine needles and cones and little crunchy bits of plant matter all over the yard at all times.

Dan and I finally decided that the only thing to do was to rip out the cement and install a brick patio over the entire yard, a patio that could be frequently swept free of all tree offerings, and then my gardening career could turn entirely to container plants. Dan saw a load of brick being offered for free on Craigslist, and he hot-footed it over to pick up the bricks. Free bricks! What a great deal! We were so excited.

So I looked around, and found a contracter to come and rip out the cement pad. With a great flourish of jack hammers, the deed was done. Then I contacted a couple of landscape contracters to get bids on laying the brick, and just about fainted dead away at the bids. This was a couple of years ago when the economy was doing well and everyone and their brother was doing improvement projects on their homes. One contracter wanted $4,000 and said it would take 6 weeks to install my tiny patio. I sadly closed the curtains on the window that faced the backyard (which looked, incidentally, like a bomb had dropped on it, with rubble from the cement and dirt and piles of bricks waiting to be laid) and just ignored the issue, because it only made me unhappy to contemplate how awful it looked and how we couldn't really do anything about it:

This photo is really only an approximation, since you would also have to imagine in the great pile o' bricks and the cement rubble to make it truly accurate. And by the way, this is the scene that I got to enjoy while working at my loom. Bleh.

That was the sorry state of affairs until a neighbor had a brick patio done by a contracter who a) didn't charge her an arm and a leg, b) was prompt and brought the project in on time and on budget, and c) was available to look at our yard. He came and was pleased that we had the materials already and had the cement removed already, and he gave us an affordable bid, stating that the project could be finished in 3 days. So we went for it. And now we have a lovely brick patio:

We didn't have quite enough bricks to cover the entire area, but the strip around the edges is, I believe, manageable. I'll dig up the soil, amend it, and try planting some nice ferns. And we're happy.

Long-term project #2 involved the drum carder that I got at an estate sale a couple of years ago. Somehow we managed to get it home without the drive bands, and when I called the manufacturer, they told me that they had changed the specifications on that drum carder a few times, and since I didn't know when my drum carder had been made, that I would have to measure for the drive bands, send them the measurements, and they would make a drive band. Each drive band (I needed at least 2 and potentially 3) would cost $25 plus shipping, and if they sent it and somehow my measurements had been off, I would have to order a new drive band and no, I couldn't return the one that was the wrong size. This seemed somewhat unhelpful to me, and I wasn't willing to throw away my money on the potentially wrong sized drive bands. So I waited and contemplated alternatives to ordering the drive band from them.

Finally, Dan came up with the right solution. He found a mail-order hardware company who offered urethane belting, and he ordered 10 feet of it. It arrived last week as the patio was being completed. He cut the belting to length, lit a candle and melted the two ends of the belting, and fused them together. It worked:

He ordered "urethane solid cord round belting, clear, 3/16" OD, 1-1/2" min pulley diameter" (that is the exact wording on the invoice) from McMaster-Carr just in case anyone is in need of affordable drive bands for their drum carders (mine is a Patrick Green Beverly). The belting cost $7.83 with $5 shipping, and I got exactly the right size drive bands on the first try.

I spent part of the weekend drum carding up a storm while gazing happily at my new patio. And I thought about how sometimes, perseverence and dedication are needed to get things done, and sometimes you just have to wait long enough and things will fall into place. The hard part is figuring out which kind of a situation you are dealing with!