Unfurling

Fern
Pattern: Fern, by Ann Shayne. From Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside the Lines
Size: I knitted the size small, but blocked it to the dimensions of the size large. I did this on purpose as alpaca relaxes a lot in water, and I wanted the finished fabric to be quite drapey.
Yarn: Berroco Ultra Alpaca Fine, 50% wool, 20% alpaca, 30% nylon. Colours 1277, 1279, 1275, 1284, 1294, from Village Yarns, Cumberland, BC. Fiddlehead embroidery was done in Kauni Effektgarn 8/2, 100% wool, colour EK from Fun Knits yarn shop, Quadra Island BC.
Needle: 2.75mm and 3mm Addi Turbo circular, and Susan Bates steel circular
Tension: 32 sts and 32 rows over 10 cm (I blocked it hard to add length)
Cast on: February 10, 2009
Finished: May 27, 2009
Modifications: Used four buttons instead of the eight shown. Substituted yarn, including using a brown and a purple instead of two unavailable greens.
Notes: The fiddleheads were extremely -- well, fiddly. The designer's instructions for this part of the process were limited: "Chain-stitch fiddleheads at the hem of the coat as shown in the picture." A template would have been nice, but I managed to free-hand them well enough. It was trial and error - I ripped out about seven of them all told, and redid them - they looked wonky the first time around.

Click photos for a much better view.

There are meant to be buttons all down the length of the coat. The sample in the book has eight, and it looks wonderful (although in the book photos, all the buttons below the chest are undone to allow the lower 2/3 of the sweater to open up). I did try using eight buttons, but found in the end that simply using four at the top looked much sweeter.

The buttons are not identical. There are two of one style, and two of another. This ups the cuteness factor considerably.





Here is a view of the sleeve, set in with the stripes matching up. Don't think this didn't take careful sewing and clever easing - it really, really did. Thank T-Fal for upright-steaming irons.



You can't get an idea of the beautiful drape of this fabric from pictures, but here you can see it a little bit. It's light, smooth, and almost silky-feeling.

The coat is very long on my model - she is a year younger than Ruby.


Her mum was there for this photoshoot, and for a minute it was looking like I wasn't getting this sweater back. I said "You can't afford it".

Actually I said "I can teach you how to knit if you like."

Again with the matchy stripes on the sleeve seams.

Thanks to the darling little girl for modelling, and to her wonderful mum for giving me the sweater back.

And thanks to my Uncles Joe and Dave for commissioning this garment - it was a beautiful thing to create - maybe my favourite knitted item ever. It really kicked my butt at times, and in the watches of the night I often wondered if I'd ever finish, or if I'd end up hanging myself with my circular needle out of frustration...but I made it to the end and I'm glad I did.

Enough Said.

The Camel's Back

That's a possessive - as in 'straw' - not a contraction, as in 'welcome back, camel'.

No more words. No time. Only captions. Enjoy.

Sorting. Far left - washed & drying. Centre - picked ready to be washed. Far right - waiting to be picked. Bottom - compost.

Shetland rolags - tricolour foreground, white (faun?) behind.

White Shetland locks washed and ready for carding. Quite a bit of feed contamination in this fleece.

The Romney is all carded - 139 rolags altogether. (Disappointed with the amount of second-cut in this fleece. Wish I hadn't paid $2.50/oz for it. Got robbed.) Divided them in half, spun one half in 24 hours, using my newly-acquired spinning technique which is SO FAST and which everyone should know. I love it. I want to marry it.

Romney Bobbin love, up close. English Woollen Longdraw, Be Mine.

Comin' to the end. I'll be happy to see the back of this one.

Cheeky. If only it were that easy.

Oh, and.....what the heck was I supposed to be doing? Oh, yeah - de-ignoranting my children. This is Science.

Unless you wanna help.

Everyone who's anyone has only one question to ask Shannon these days. Phrasing includes the following direct quotes:



"How is Fern coming along?"
"Did you finish that sweater you were working on at my house the other day?"
"...so what's the news on Fern??"
"Are you done that sweater you were knitting for Ruby?"



In answer I give you Blocking Day:



And the sleeves, blocking together to ensure they match:




After it's dry, I'll knit on the collar, sew on the buttons, seam up, and then embroider the fiddleheads all around the bottom of the coat.


And this would only take me a couple of days, if it weren't for the rest of my life, which threatens to overwhelm at the moment.



Tomorrow is our troupe's hafla - a belly dance party for dancers only. It's a fantastic time, but of course Yours Truly is responsible for what will amount to six hours of work tomorrow (plus cleanup afterwards) and making several pairs of sparkly gauntlets I'll be selling to try to make back the cost of the party itself. If I sell ten pairs, I can also pay for the $125 Exotic Fibers spinning class I'm hoping to take in September.


And speaking of spinning, now we come to the most truly urgent of all my present obligations. My friend's son, eleven years of age, (reads the blog when the post is appropriate - Hi Aidan!) has a flock of about eight Shetland sheep. He is a knitter, but wants to learn how to spin. His sheep were shorn on Monday morning, and guess who got

All.
The.
Wool.





Raw fleece needs to be washed within a few days of shearing, before the lanolin hardens on the wool. I have about six raw fleeces here, each weighing 2-4 pounds. Each fleece needs to be sorted into grades before it's washed.





Once it's washed (by hand and at 140 degrees Fahrenheit), it gets spread between sheets outside on the grass, where the diffuse sunlight and spring wind will hopefully (Oh Please) dry it fairly quickly.


So please - no more questions about how my world is revolving these days. Unless - well, y'know.

Exercise in futility? Check.

Well, yeah, we did Earth Hour. Not sure that it made much difference, as we were the only ones on the stinking street with our lights off.

Jeepers, people, get on the freaking bandwagon already.

There should be one of those big levers like Madeline Kahn pulls in the movie Clue. Then I could shut off the whole neighbourhood at once, will they or nill they.

Sewing update, as if you cared.

The fabric I was going to use for Em's dress is a no-go. Too heavy for a child. I took her to the fabric store and let her choose her own. HUGE tactical error. More on that later.

Knitting update.

Fern was going smashingly until I started bringing it to Wednesday knit nights, where I made mistake after mistake, resulting in me ripping the second sleeve back to the wrist and reknitting it. It's the stripes - I blame it all on the bloody stripes. My feeble brain has trouble remembering which is Colour B, which is Colour C, which is Colour D, and which Colour E.

Colours A and F are easy.

So basically things are going pretty damn crappy here at HSB. I meant to publish a review tomorrow but if I write it now I have a feeling Blogger will lose the entire thing and I'll have to start over. Not to mention I am in such a foul mood that I'll probably pillory the poor author, making my Blackstrap Hawco review sound like an epic hymn in praise of the purest, highest art.

I'm outta here. See you tomorrow if I can muster the will, with a review (hopefully) or more bitching (probably).

It's been - One Week since you looked at me.

That was kind of a long break. Things got away from me a little.

Actually I was busy. See?

Fern is coming along beautifully. I thought this would take me forever, but no - the end is nearly in sight. I'm 3/4 done the first sleeve.

The ends will take me a fair few days to weave in, though.

Spinning

I finished spinning the purple top, and ended up with two bobbins of nearly the same size. I let them rest for a couple of days, during which The Intentional Spinner arrived, and I got to read all about plying.

Judith tells me that you should rewind your bobbins before plying - that it evens out the twist and makes for a smoother finished yarn. Yes'm, boss, I said, and, not having a bobbin winder, spooled it onto my ball winder over a TP core to keep the centre from twisting inward.

It turns out Judith was right - I could feel the twist running up and down the length of the single "like water", as she promised. The singles were much more even afterwards. And if you're going to try this, you get the best results with a long distance between the lazy kate and the winding device - I placed mine about seven or eight feet apart.

I popped the two balls of singles onto the lazy kate, and started plying. HORRIBLE MESS. The TP core wouldn't spin properly on the shaft of the kate, so the singles started slipping off the edge of the ball, and snarling themselves around it. Then they'd break, or too many strands would slip off at once and they'd become hopelessly tangled in plybacks. I had to break out quite a few sections of singles, and couldn't seem to get them to splice together properly. I got very frustrated.

When I say I got very frustrated, I mean I almost went off in an apoplexy.

I put the balls of singles into two separate bowls, and let them roll around while I plied. Still not an ideal solution - I think I'll be hunting around for a bobbin winder.

I started out by adding approximately the same amount of twist as I had put into the singles - did this for about 25 meters before I tried hanging a loop, and realised I was putting in about twice as many twists as I should be.

I ended up putting in four foot-beats per arms' length of yarn, then two to reel it onto the bobbin. That seemed to work out well, and before long (actually it was exactly the length of Batman Begins) it was all done.

I skeined it

and it's soaking now.

Until it's dry and swatched, I won't know if it's at all useful or successful. I can confidently say, though, that I spun this too hard. Being a novice, I did what felt right. This turned out, on further research, to be the "worsted draw"...easy to spin, but man does it kill all the softness in the yarn. Live and learn, though - I'll be working on my woollen draw for the next project, the Romney.

Fiddlehead

I've been doing a lot of knitting lately - more than you'd think, from reading the blog. I was over at my friend's a few weeks ago and she remarked that she had been to my blog and was happy to see I had posted, until she saw it was knitting. She heaped scorn on me. She scathed me.

It put me off blogging about knitting, but then I realised there wasn't much to talk about if I didn't talk about that, and got over it.

I'm making Ruby a third sweater - she lives in Ottawa, she needs 'em - and my uncles chose Mason-Dixon's Fern. Fern is a beautiful sweater, maybe the nicest child's sweater I've seen yet. The original is knit in Jamieson & Smith Spindrift, a 2-ply 100% wool - non-washable. For this family, machine-wash is a must, so I needed to sub the yarn.

Some crocuses for you, to break up all this knit-talk.

The problem is, Jamieson & Smith Spindrift comes in eleventy-one subtle colours, six of which are used in Fern - four different greens, a brown, and a turquoise. All of the colours are gorgeous, heathered shades, muted and harmonious. Once I started looking around for a different yarn, I realised just how rare it is to find those colours in a washable yarn.

So I needed to find a yarn that:

1- is washable

2- is heathered

3- is not too scratchy

4- has at least four shades of green, all complementary

5- cost $55 or less for the whole works.

The planning page from my knotebook.

Suffice it to say, I had a terrible time finding something. I thought I had it with Sisu, a sock yarn in quite a few solid, woodsy colours. I was so confident about that yarn, I even budgeted for it during the planning phase. But Sisu yarns are too clear - they have all been bleached before being dyed, and without the heathered look they just looked so unrefined and clumsy. Plus they didn't have a turquoise.

In the end - and this yarn search took me the better part of six weeks - I found Berroco Ultra Alpaca Fine. The only thing this yarn was missing to be a perfect match was two shades of green that were in the original sweater. By this time, though, I was desperate to cast on, so I just swapped in an earthy purple, willy-nilly, for one of the greens. For the other, driven as I was to the last ditch, I threw in a skein of Estelle's Arequipa (Rav link) sock yarn in a variegated green, which happens to contain almost all the other colours in the sweater. I was way over budget by this time, but Who Cares? Chances are I'm going to have a fair bit of at least a few of these colours left over, and socks they shall become.

This photo was taken in bright sunlight. The yarns are actually a lot more muted than they appear here.

I've finally cast this on, and being that it's knit on 2.75mm and 3mm needles, I expect it will take me a while to complete. The knitted fabric, though, is heaven...I wish someone would pay me to make MYSELF a sweater out of fingering weight alpaca on 3mm needles.

---------------------------

Spinning continues to thrill me, and Marianne* and I have made firm friends with each other. I'm spinning an 80% merino, 20% silk top on a high ratio to try for a lightweight yarn I can make lace out of. It's purple. So far I'm enjoying spinning the singles so much, I don't even care if the resulting yarn is knittable (judging from the Beginning Spinners' Group on Ravelry, the chances of my first yarn being knittable is about a thousand to one against).

---------------------------

Marianne Dashwood is the name of my spinning wheel. What....didn't you know all wheels have names?