Knit Sisters

Thanks, Ellen, for your lovely and moving post yesterday. 

And now we all know (in case you hadn’t figured it out for yourself) who the real writer in the family is.  Remember when Ellen wrote about how she would be embarrassed when everyone compared her design for the competition to mine?  Well, I have much the same feeling when thinking about my writing in comparison to hers.  Oh, I’m competent enough, but that girl can really WRITE!  (Please don’t think I’m whining or feeling sorry for myself–I’m proud as punch of my sister’s writing and extremely happy that she’s willing to share blog space with me on a daily basis.  It’s just a fact, is all.)

OK, now on to other things…  I came home from work today all ready to get moving on today’s post.  First thing, to take some pictures.  Hey, wait a second, where’s the digital camera!?  Rob’s taken it to work, that’s where it is.  Well, crap.  So here’s the plan:  I’ll write the post, put it up on the blog, and put the pictures in later when the camera’s back. 

I now have two skeins of the lime green tufted superwash plied with the rayon ribbon.  Dude, it’s way, way cool.  (Rob says it’s “weird.”  What does he know, anyway?)

It’s also really fun to spin this stuff.  (Well, after the endless miles of spinning the wool in the first place.)  I have no idea of what I’m going to make with it after it’s all done, but no matter.  (Perhaps I’ll give it away as a contest prize.)  My initial idea of making sock cuffs with the tufted yarn and the attached sock feet with a matching smooth yarn has gone out the window.  I just like it this way too much.  I want it all to look like this.  And by golly, I’m in charge of my spinning!

I worked on another little project this week.  Remember the stash?  Well, Rob moved a cabinet out of the garage last weekend and into my studio space.  I cleaned it out, moved it into the corner, and filled it with goodies.

 

Looking at my cabinet full of lovely fiber and yarn gives me a warm, glowing feeling inside.  However, the truly scary thing is that this operation didn’t seem to make much of a dent in the other parts of the stash. 

 

I’m sure that there’s a life lesson about materialism and being content with what you have in this little story, but I’m just not feeling up to ferreting it out.  Instead, I’m concentrating on that warm, glowing feeling and the fact that I never, ever have to face the prospect of running out of yarn.

 

Hey, thanks everyone for your wishes for a speedy recovery!  I believe it helped.  (Or perhaps it was all the time I spent lying in bed.)  In any case, I am, if not fully recovered, well on my way.  (Although, I also believe Lorinda was right and that gifts of roving would not only make me feel much better, but would also help my immune system fight off future attacks upon it.)

In answer to Deb’s question in the comments, yes indeed you may use a Barbara Walker stitch pattern!  No need to reinvent the wheel, as it were.

I have been working on spinning the lime green superwash.  I finally finished spinning all the combed wool and started plying it.  The attentive among you may remember that I wanted to insert tufts of the waste wool from the combs into the two-ply as I plied it.  I started doing that last night.  Wow.  That was seriously cool.  And addictive.  I finished up a bobbin in no time.

                                    Look at that!  Doesn’t it remind you of your fun and crazy aunt sitting beside all the rest of the staid and conventional relatives? 

 

The only problem I ran into was that it took me a relatively long time to insert the tufts, and so the two-ply got a bit over-plied.  I thought about plying it back onto itself as a cabled yarn, but I really wanted to maximize my yardage.  I came up with a few different solutions:  ply it with another single spun from a different roving or fiber, ply it with a commercial yarn, leave it as is and hope it would relax a bit when washed.  I finally remembered a light green rayon ribbon yarn that has been aging in the stash for a while.  Wouldn’t that look cool, to add a little bit of shine to the yarn?

Here’s the result:

 

Here’s a fairly cruddy closeup:

Unfortunately, the very thing that makes this ribbon yarn so beautiful makes it really hard to photograph.  It reflects the light amazingly.  I once made a scarf for a friend out of this yarn, which turned out looking gorgeous.  But, this yarn also has a tendency to pull easily, so the next time I saw her with the scarf it wasn’t quite as gorgeous-looking with all the little pulls poking out of it.  But, plying it with the tufted wool yarn should ameliorate that problem, right?

In any case, I think it looks really great.  (Nothing like blowing your own horn, huh?)  Harvey said, “That looks awesome!”  You don’t get higher praise than that from a ten-year-old.

In answer to a couple of questions:

Yes, I think any leaf-themed original design is fair game for the contest, even if it was designed at some other time. 

And Barbara asked about when I learned to spin and if it was hard.  The first part of that question is easier to answer than the second!  I taught myself to spin on a drop spindle in 2002, so I really have not been spinning that long.  I went to NY Sheep and Wool in the fall of 2001 and discovered that the yarns I coveted most were the handspun yarns that people had for sale.  Instead of buying these yarns, I bought myself a drop spindle, some roving, and a spindle spinning book.  I kind of put them aside until that winter, when I just decided that I was going to figure out how to spin, no matter how long it took!  I looked at my book, gathered a few little tips, and dove in.

My family jokes that they always knew when I dropped the spindle on the floor, because I would let fly with a “Shit!”  And I guess that leads to the second part of the question:  is it hard?  Like many things that you do with your hands, spinning takes practice.  Somewhere I remember reading that when you are learning to spin, you should spin at least a little bit every day, to really cement the feel and the process into your muscle memory.  Like knitting, it’s a skill that you hold in your hands, and no amount of studying is going to make you proficient without the actual practice. 

Personally, I think you just have to be determined to learn and make up your mind not to give up.  I also believe that it’s a good idea to learn on a top-whorl drop spindle, so that you can really get the feel of drafting before you have to learn to manage a wheel.  It’s also a much, much smaller outlay of money–you can decide if it’s really something you want to pursue.  (A decent beginner spindle can be purchased for $10 or $12–I learned on a $10 Louet top-whorl.)

And speaking of spinning, my progress on the lime superwash:

                                                         I’m getting there, slowly but surely.

I’ve been working on the sherbet socks, too.

                                  Halfway on the first sock.

Hey, here’s a funny picture of my little (ha, ha) feet wearing my one half-sock on the spinning wheel treadles.

 

Hugo thinks this whole half-sock thing is highly suspicious.

                                     “Do I have to wait until you’re done with those before you take me for a walk, or what?”

(I’m still working on the secret project, as well.  Of this we will not speak…)

I have been working diligently on my new design that I can’t show you, so I guess that would be the end of that discussion.  (I do have to say here, though, that this whole “full time job” thing is really getting in the way of my knitting time.  Re-entry has been hard this year.)

But I’ve also been back at the wheel doing a little spinning, trying to finish up that lime superwash.

Progress:

 

Another view, where you can see the single strand better:

                                OK, I admit, this second photo is a bit gratuitous, but I don’t have much in the way of photos today.  (That would be because the project I’m working on I can’t show you.  See above.)

I had an interesting offer yesterday from someone who would like me to make cookies for them every month and ship them (the cookies) to them (the person).  I was trained as a pastry chef and actually worked as a pastry chef for a while.  Although I don’t work in the industry anymore (long story), I do make wedding cakes, specialty cakes, and other baked goods/pastries for private clients.

This offer got me thinking about cookies and their general goodness, and then I thought about one of my favorite cookie recipes.  I decided that it would be fun to share this recipe on the blog today.  (Please note:  This is an original recipe of mine, so I’m not violating anyone’s copyright.)

So, without further ado, I offer you my recipe for

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 1/2 c. (3 sticks) butter 

3 c. brown sugar 

3 tsp. baking soda 

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1 1/2 tsp. salt  

1 1/2 c. crunchy peanut butter 

3 eggs 

4 1/2 c. flour 

4 c. (24 oz.) chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375.  Cream butter, brown sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in mixer until light.  Add peanut butter, beating until well-blended.  Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Add flour; mix until blended.  Stir in chocolate chips.

Scoop onto ungreased cookie sheets.  Flatten with fork in a criss-cross pattern.  Bake 8-10 minutes, or until cookies just start to brown on top.  Cool on a wire rack.

Notes:  This is a big recipe.  Use a 4 1/2- or 5-quart mixer. 

Adding the baking powder, soda, and salt to the butter and sugar when you cream them is a little trick I learned in cooking school.  Doing this really distributes the small amounts of these ingredients throughout the dough, and because all three are granular (like sugar), it doesn’t interfere with the creaming process.

I use a small ice cream scoop to portion my cookies.  It works great, is quick, and they all end up being the same size. 

I’m a little worn out today, and consequently have had a lazy kind of day.  I’ve gotten a few things done, but not much.  I did go ahead and put a facing on the leaf edging for Blue Bamboo. 

 

I just used the same yarn, having had no luck finding anything silk or rayon in the stash that would work for the facing.  I like that idea, though, and I’m definitely going to keep it mind for a future project.  (By the way, the yarn I’m using for this is Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece in the color “Blue Paradise.”  It has stood up remarkably well to all my experimenting and ripping out.  Good show, Brown Sheep!)  I did go down a needle size for the facing, though, and then attached it with a half-graft.

Diane asked in the comments if you could finish each leaf point separately, like a sawtooth border.  I don’t know how exactly you could do that one this type of edging, which is picked up from the vertical edge and worked outward.  However, there are leaf edgings which achieve that kind of look that are worked in a strip and then applied, or can be worked perpendicular to the edge and joined to the body every other row, like you would on a shawl border.

Here’s a detail of the leaf motif that will go on the upper back; I didn’t think it showed up too well in yesterday’s photo.

I also finished another skein of the cabled yarn.

When I went outside to take my photos late this afternoon, Tortellini came over and talked to me for a while.

She loves to be outside in the summer, and walks through the grass as though she were a big cat stalking her prey on the plains of Africa.

Well, despite my protestations about “getting out of the fiber’s way” and all that, I have bent the butterscotch and pink wools to my will just a bit.

 

I did make a 2-ply yarn out of them, but then I thought how cool it would be if I took things one step further and made a cabled yarn.  Here’s a detail:

 

A cabled yarn, for those who may not know, is made by taking two 2-ply yarns and plying them back together in the opposite direction.  You could conceivably take two 3-ply yarns and ply them, two 4-ply yarns, etc., as well as doing other nutty things like plying a 2-ply with another single, a 2-ply with a 3-ply, and on and on.  These yarns, according to Diane Varney in Spinning Designer Yarns, fall under the broad heading of crepe yarns.

The advantages to cabled yarns, in addition to having almost limitless yarn design possibilities for the handspinner, are that they are very strong, they pill less when knitted and worn (because more of those little fiber ends are locked into the yarn), and they show stitch and cable work beautifully.  Disadvantage?  They take more time to execute for the handspinner and they eat up your yardage.  (Although, of course, you are getting a thicker yarn.  You pays your money and you takes your choice.)

For example, this yarn has been through my hot little hands four times.  Once, to spin the singles.  Twice, to ply into a 2-ply.  Thrice, to ply into a cable.  Four times, to take off the bobbin and wind onto the niddy-noddy.  You can see how this can get time-consuming.  But it sure is pretty, no?

In the midst of all this mad plying, I took a little break to comb some more of that lime green superwash.  Except it’s not really lime green to start with.

 

Isn’t that ugly roving?  Gold and khaki.  Yum.  And yet, when you put it through the combs, it morphs into something quite lovely.  Amazing.  Those folks at Brown Sheep really know their stuff.  (This is a superwash mill end from Brown Sheep, in case I didn’t already say.)

And, hey!  Remember my plan involving Ziploc bags and wool?  Here’s proof that I am, indeed, moving forward with that:

 

A very large Ziploc bag full of 4 1/2 pounds of washed wool.  This is a natural grey/brown Romney fleece that I bought last year (in the grease) and just finished washing recently.  Don’t ask me what the plan is for this–I don’t yet know.  But, man, I love those natural grey/brown/black fleeces.

Lorinda, you asked what we’re reading.  I listen to lots of books on tape and CD from Recorded Books.  Right now I’m listening to Monk’s Hood, a Brother Cadfael mystery by Ellis Peters.  I’m reading Sharpe’s Tiger, by Bernard Cornwell, a prolific author of historical novels whom I recently discovered.  In general, I like to read historical novels and mysteries, with the occasional guilty pleasure of a romance thrown in.  Oh, and I do like a well-written fantasy or sci fi now and again.

 

On Saturday Rob and I went with his family over to Jamesport, MO to do a bit of shopping and a bit of sightseeing.  While the rest of them looked at antique shops, I spent a happy hour at Wool Ridge, a lovely little knitting/spinning/weaving shop, where I poked around in the wool and talked to the equally lovely owner, Geri.  Of course I couldn’t leave without a purchase (or two or three) and so I acquired this naturally-colored brown wool:

 

And this black wool:

 

This stuff is very cool; it has reddish-brown highlights, as well as some grey strands that Geri told me were the next year’s wool growth coming in before the sheep was sheared.  I couldn’t resist–I already combed up a little bit of it:

 

I also (somehow, I just don’t know how it happened) acquired some raw white wool that I’m not picturing here today because, let’s face it, pictures of white wool are kind of boring.  But I have big plans to dye it, and I’ll keep you all posted about that.

In spinning news, I made some progress on the butterscotch wool and also did some hard thinking about what to ply with it.  Here’s what I came up with:

 

This is a Brown Sheep mill end roving that has been in the stash for a while.  It’s interesting because there are so many colors in there:  pink, red, light blue, yellow.  This gives the spun yarn a kind of richness that you just don’t get from solid-dyed rovings. 

 

The two singles side-by-side:

 

I started out thinking that I was going to make this yarn a 3-ply, and I even briefly considered making this the third strand,

 

but I really think that it’s asking to be a 2-ply.  (Besides, that lime green just looked too yucky next to the golden beauty of the butterscotch.)

Who am I to stand in the way of a yarn’s true destiny?  Sometimes you just have to get out of the fiber’s way.

First off, proof that Rob was really in St. Louis over the weekend:

 

It looks hot there, doesn’t it?

Second, thanks for the kind comments and great response to the first five sizes of the S4.  I am working on the second group of sizes even as we speak, and hope to have that pattern completed and up on the site (thanks Alex!) within the next week. 

If, as you work through the pattern, you have questions or things are unclear, please feel free to email me directly by clicking on my name where it appears at the top right corner of the site.

And now, as promised, some new pictures of what I have been working on.

I finished spinning and plying the two handpainted rovings. 

 

A close-up:

The two singles worked out to be almost exactly even in yardage when it came time to ply them together, which made me very happy.  I was afraid that I would end up with significantly more of one than the other, and then I would have to decide what to do with that extra bit.  Ply it back on itself?  Leave it as singles?  At any rate, such a dilemma was, happily, averted.  I ended up with 5 good-sized skeins (1 pound) of 2-ply, which I have no idea what I am going to do with.  But it’s pretty, isn’t it?

I started spinning that butterscotch-colored wool:

 

This is wool that I purchased at the Heart of America Sheep Show and Fiber Fest this year.  It was washed and dyed, but not processed any further when I bought it.  I put it through my combs, and have finally started spinning it.  Let me just say, I love, love, love spinning my own combed fiber.  It’s so easy, it almost spins itself.  Compared to those handpainted rovings, which required splitting and (tedious) predrafting, this stuff is like magic.  Don’t get me wrong, those handpainted rovings were fun and ended up being quite beautiful, I think, but they were definitely more work. 

I haven’t been doing much knitting.  It’s too hot, even in the air conditioning.  I find spinning to be a cooler activity, because you don’t end up with a heavy, woolly thing in your lap. 

Hugo says, “I know it’s really hot out there, but I still kind of want to go out.” 

Well, my dear husband returns home today, and I must say that I will be very glad to have him back.  Despite the fact that I practically pushed him out the door myself, I missed him quite a bit.  (It’s hard to get to sleep in that big bed all by yourself.  That’s all I have to say.)

After reading Ellen’s post about dating, it made me feel a little bit better about the fact that I scarcely dated at all before I got married to Rob.  I was 20 years old when we married–that’s pretty young.  I mean, if I had a 20-year old daughter right now, I would be horrified if she told me that she was getting married.  But, to give my 20-year-old self her due, I did make a good choice.  Not that our marriage has always been easy, but here we are, 15 years later, still together.

Yes, but, I hear you say, how does this relate to your knitting and spinning?  Well, the salient point is that he still has the digital camera, so this post is likely to be somewhat photo-poor.

And how did I spend my lonely weekend? 

1.  Working on “Sarah’s Simple Summer Sweater” pattern.  This has turned out to be a challenging enterprise.  It reminds me of when I used to do recipe testing and editing:  you have to think in a very logical, step-by-step kind of way.  That’s not the way I usually think, so it’s a stretch for my li’l ol’ brain.  But fun.

2.  Spinning on the handpainted rovings.  (See Friday’s post for picture.)  I have one of them all spun, and am now working on the other one.

3.  Playing around with this:

 

This is some handspun superwash that I just went a little crazy with when I was spinning.  By that I mean that I just spun it up, without any kind of plan.  I bought the roving here, in the same big box that the roving that became Ellen’s handspun sock yarn was in.  (Again, see Friday’s post for pix.)  There was red, and then there was some light blue.  In a nutty moment, I combed the red and blue together, spun it up, and turned out the yarn you see above.  It’s sort of a worsted/heavy-worsted weight, and I’ve already knitted this up once, a few weeks ago, into a scarf which I promptly ripped out.  The needles I used were too small, there wasn’t quite enough yarn, it was a little too wide, blah, blah, blah.

So, I picked it up again this weekend and tried out a few little things.  Tried out 4 different stitch patterns, to be exact.  And what does the yarn look like now?  Well, it looks like two tidy balls of yarn.  (I would take a picture, but, you see, I don’t have the camera.)  This yarn has yet to tell me what it wants to be; I want it to be a scarf, but it’s not cooperating.  Upon consideration, I think what it’s telling me is that it wants to be gifted to someone else.  (This is a backhanded way of being generous–make this uncooperative yarn someone else’s problem–so there.)

4.  Knitting on this and then ripping it out:

 

I decided that if I want to do this stitch pattern in a full-scale stole (which I think I do), I really don’t want to burn out on it by using it for a scarf.

5.  Hanging out with Harvey.

6.  Watching, for approximately the 20th time,  The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

7.  Knitting intermittently on this:

I haven’t decided if this is going to be for Rob or not.  If it’s not, then I’m going to put a beaded fringe on either end.  If it is, then no beaded fringe, ’cause beaded fringe doesn’t seem very manly.  Opinions, anyone?  (Once I cut the fringe, there’s really no going back.)

See ya’ll Thursday, when new photos will be forthcoming!

Rob left early this morning to spend a long weekend in St. Louis with his brother, taking the digital camera with him, so I haven’t had a chance to assemble the organized and erudite post that I usually do.  So, for my Friday offering this week, I offer the following assortment of tidbits. 

I’m making somewhat slow progress spinning on the handpainted rovings.  (And if you’re thinking that this looks remarkably like a photo I may have posted before…well, you’re right.)

 

I’m getting a little bored with this, truth to tell, and other fibers are calling my name.  Maybe this llama fiber next:

Or this wool:

Still plugging away on that brown cotton swatch.

 

Hey, Ellen, remember that handspun superwash sock yarn I sent you a while back?

Got any plans for it?  I’m expecting something really, really great.  No pressure.

Harvey and I, having passed our first tae kwon do test last Saturday, are going to the belt awarding ceremony tonight, and we have to take “covered dish,” so that we can have “pah-tay,” as Master Yu so fetchingly puts it.  I’m thinking chocolate cake.  But, I need to get moving on that, whatever food item it turns out to be. 

And what am I going to do with myself this weekend without my dearly beloved husband?  Yes, you guessed it:  PAH-TAY!