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I’m back to full-time job hunting, which basically means full-time knitting and watching Charmed (which is the latest sci fi/fantasy show I’ve gotten into. I love it; it’s like Buffy except sometimes the characters are happy and there are more witches). This means there is more time for knit blogging.
I recently finished up the last pair of shark mittens on order. They look like this:
I also started another knitting project for me (even though I have two others on the needles at the moment). As I mentioned the other day, it’s Karlsro in some recycled wool. I went down a couple of needle sizes, and this is my sleeve so far:
Don’t mistake it for a swatch. You know I don’t do that.
I also managed to do some dyeing the other day. I recently recycled some undyed wool from a thrift store vest, and I dunked it in some dye:
Colorway: Sharks. For knitting more shark mittens, obviously.
Colorway: Gradiation Experimentation. I rolled yp two 50g skeins into loose balls and dunked them in a bucket of purple kool aid for a bit. Voila, two gradient-dyed skeins. Not sure what to knit with them yet. Maybe a striped something or other. Thoughts?
*awkwardly shuffles to the front*
*taps mic*
Hello?
Well, it’s certainly been a while, huh? Two and a half weeks. Do I even have readers left?
I know it can be irritating to read posts that are just apologies for not posting, so I’ll keep it brief: As I mentioned before, I spent some time in DC and then I spent some time in the hospital (I’m fine now, it was a mental health thing). I just got back to Virginia Beach yesterday and spent most of the day cleaning.
I haven’t been doing a whole lot of knitting, but I’ve sort of been working on the first of a pair of Skew socks:
I also did/am doing some unravelling:
(A 60/40 cotton/acrylic with horrible seams)
(lambswool/angora/nylon)
(wool/nylon)
Oh, also, while I was in DC, I visited a yarn store (Knit and Stitch = Bliss in Bethesda) and purchased a skein of Malabrigo worsted in Noviembre:
So I’ll go back to the knitting and then I’ll get back to the posting. : )
So today I received in the mail a metric fuck-ton of yarn. A grand total of 21 skeins (plus a pattern book). Half Noro Silk Garden and half Noro Kureyon. Before you ask, no I didn’t buy it. And no, I don’t keep to keep all of it. I’ve started another WWFY trade. I’ll be knitting this sweater:
Out of this yarn:
And in return I get to keep the book, the leftovers and ten skeins of Noro Kureyon:
I’m pretty stoked about this trade. I’ve never worked with Noro before and I’ve heard some bad things about it. But I’ve balled up a few skeins of the Silk Garden and I kind of like it so far. It has a similar thick/thin/single texture to Lamb’s Pride (a yarn I LOVE) and the colors are pretty. I’ll be on the lookout for awkward color sequences and missing dye, but I haven’t seen any major problems (or major vm) in the 3.5 balls I’ve done so far.
I don’t anticipate this sweater taking long (it’s knit from side to side on freakin’ 10.5’s) so I’ll probably be taking a break from Haruni and my blue/red socks. I want to finish at least the first chart of Haruni before I start this sweater (as chart A is the perfect thing to knit while I’m watching SG1 on my computer–interesting but not hard).
I’ll let you know progress as I make it and I promise I’ll show WIP photos of the socks and Haruni soon.
Well, after a few weeks of knitting whatever the hell I wanted, I’ve decided to take on a couple more Will Work for Yarn trades. I’m also still knitting a sock. The sock, so far, looks like this:
Pretty simple, smooth going. But I’m putting it aside to work on soakers for a swap. The pattern in question is the adorable Turtle Butt soaker. The yarns in questions are a variety:
The mostly-knit one is one that I am finishing (the grafting and the leg cuffs). Then there’s a medium in black and pink and a large one in grey and blue/green. In return, I received a skein of Lorna’s Laces Shepard Worsted in Flames, a skein of my partner (SeptemberSocks)’s hand dye (same colorway as the blue/green above) and two colors (two and three skeins) of Alpaca Cloud (in Smoke and a darker grey). So yeah, I basically win. At least one of the colors of Alpaca cloud will become a giant shawl and we shall just see about the others.
Stay tuned for some swap stuff and the inevitable progress on the soakers. Also, I started a sewing project that I promise to show you at some point before it’s actually done.
I do. I so win at thrift. I went to a thrift store near my house with my grandparents today (they’re in town after my graduation) and I TOTALLY SCORED. SCORED. I found five sweaters total, all for $2 (one was only a dollar):
Two to felt (cashmere! I’m going to make a lovely light blanket when I get enough sweaters)
And three to frog:
From top to bottom: Old Navy cotton/wool, worsted/bulky weight (this is the $1 one), a probably fingering weight nylon/viscose/angora/cashmere blend (probably will be a lightweight sweater for me) and the coup de grace, a worsted weight CASHMERE sweater. I found bulky cashmere! It exists! I’m so excited to work with it. The three froggable sweaters are currently soaking and I’m just going to machine wash the other two.
I also found some cute shoes for $4:
Not sure what kind of socks I’m supposed to wear with these (suppose it doesn’t matter if wear them under pants). Yay, thrift store!
GUYS GUYS GUYS I FINISHED ALL MY EXAMS FOR COLLEGE AND I’M GRADUATING IN A WEEK FROM TOMORROW. More on that later. Just so you know, expect my writing this week to be a little… less than perfect. Generally it’s safe to blame vodka but Thursday is Cinco de Mayo, so you should probably blame Tequila. Cause I’m DONE WITH COLLEGE and that means it is CELEBRATION TIME.
Anyway, In case you were wondering, I have been knitting. A little bit. Working on two pairs of Manly Aran socks in a row burnt me out a little bit, so I haven’t been doing as much knitting as I usually would. What I have been doing though is acquiring yarn at an alarming rate. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Weren’t you just talking about graduating and don’t you not have a job or any money?” That would be correct; however, I already sort of had the yarn. Which is to say I had some sweaters.
As a poor/cheapskate college student, I like cheap things. You know what’s cheap? Thrift store sweaters. You know what thrift store sweaters are made of? YARN. I’ve had the sweaters for a while and have been on an unravelling binge. I haven’t weighed any of them yet, but suffice it to say there’s a lot of yarn here.
What exactly have I unraveled? So nice of you to ask!
There’s this Shetland wool sweater that I got at a Good Will outlet (1.20 a POUND, people). It had tags still on.
It frogged into a lovely laceweight, but Shetland is a very sticky wool, so I had to roll it into balls instead of onto the niddy noddy like I usually do.
There’s a 80/20 wool nylon mix, the perfect shade of white for dyeing:
Five skeins of fingering weight yarn that will probably become socks (though I’ll probably hold it two strands at a time for strength). The little skein is from the collar, which alone yielded 140 yards.
There’s a very shiny linen/cotton mix (60/40) from a large tank top:
About dk. Not sure how much for enough for a tank top and a sun hat, which is the goal. I’ll probably also dye this.
There’s this Talbot’s 100% silk pullover:
Silk, by the way, frogs like a DREAM. It’s super strong so it doesn’t break every couple of yards like the Shetland was wont to. Ton of lace weight yarn here. There’s another skein I can’t find, so pretend there’s three. I want to dye it and make a huge shawl out of some of it.
Finally, there’s the creme de la creme, three wonderful, beautiful, SOFT skeins of 100% cashmere:
Also lace weight but will probably be doubled or tripled for… something.
Sweaters, as you know, have a front, a back, and two sleeves (except for that tank top, which was a cardigan so it had a back and two fronts). But there’s only three skeins of silk and cashmere (well, the cashmere sweater had this weird tie front thing, but it gave four skeins and we’re pretending about the silk). With the second sleeve of the silk and part of a sleeve of the cashmere, I wound up one skein with the blend:
It’s going to be a bitch to wind since the yarns aren’t plied, just held together. But it makes for the loveliest combination of shiny and soft:
I’m probably going to dye most of these skeins before I work with them (maybe I’ll make some white socks). I’m still in frogging mojo, so I’m basically frogging down my entire thrift store sweater stash. I’m currently working on a wonderful Express sweater of lace weight merino/viscose/angora/cashmere. So soft. I’m thinking shawl.
None of these sweaters were over $5 and I’ve got easily over $100 worth of yarn here. The cashmere alone would probably be at least $50, and I paid $3.60 for the sweater. Truly, it makes my cheap thrifty heart sing.
I know what you’re thinking. “I didn’t know Brinn was spinning anything. Does she even do that any more?” I know. It appears that yes, I do in fact do that anymore. And the reason I didn’t mention it was because there was no time. On Saturday afternoon I spent some time by myself and decided I wanted to do some spinning. And not the thin solid colored singles I have on my smallest spindle. No. Big singles. To make big yarn. Or at least biggish yarn.
I wanted color. I pulled out this fiber, 4 oz of corriedale from Lakehouse Loft (on Artfire):
I grabbed my giant spindle.
I spun quickly, not paying attention to thickness or evenness. I just spun, figuring I’d ply it eventually. I spun for hours. I spun for like four hours. Then I took a brief break. Then I spun some more. I spun and spun. I went to bed. I woke up, ate lunch, and spun some more.
And then I plied because I finished the singles in less then two days of more or less continuous spinning. I plied and plied. My shoulder was hurting and my boyfriend was off at a choir concert I didn’t go to (he tells me not to; it’s a class requirement for him anyway, and anyway I am Not a Fan of choir) but I watched several episodes of series E of QI and kept plying.
And then it was plied. I skeined it up, threw it in a bath with a little wool wash, and smacked it on the table a little. Then I hung it over a chair under a vent to dry.
On Monday, I took pictures.
I spun four ounces of yarn to roughly worsted weight in two days. I made a two-ply yarn of about 140 yards in less than 12 hours. On my spindle. On my enormous spindle.
I think that’s quite an accomplishment.
How do you keep your yarn wrangling organised? It seems like an easy to answer question at first, but in fact organisation exists on many levels. Maybe you are truly not organised at all, in which case I am personally daring you to try and photograph your stash in whatever locations you can find the individual skeins. However, if you are organised, blog about an aspect of that organisation process, whether that be a particularly neat and tidy knitting bag, a decorative display of your crochet hooks, your organised stash or your project and stash pages on Ravelry.
Believe it or not, my craft supplies are actually very organized. I can usually find whatever I need without too much trouble, especially my knitting/crochet supplies. I keep my dpns in a needle roll, my fixed circulars in a roll I got in a swap, and my interchangeable set in the pouch they came in from Knit Picks (okay, it’s not the best pouch ever, but it works). My collection of stitch markers are in a box on my craft table and I have a couple in my notions bag, a little zipper pouch I keep in my purse with my current project.
My yarn is actually the thing that is the least organized, but it’s not too bag. I keep it in large plastic bins under my bed:
The bin on the left contains mostly sock yarns, along with sport weight and lace weight. The middle bin is mostly worsted weight (with a couple bulky weight things). The bin on the right is mostly scraps organized in bags by fiber, though it also includes over flow from the other bins (like the oversized cone of green lace weight that won’t fit anywhere).
Also, if you look carefully in the corner, you can see my small stash of acrylic, obtained mostly by a friend from an estate sale:
But the most helpful thing for organizing my yarn and seeing what I have is Ravelry. I finally uploaded my entire stash, pictures and all, to my Ravelry stash page in December. I’m so glad I finally did it: it’s great being able to scroll through all the yarn I have and deciding what to knit next. It also helps my organize my pattern queue–the first page has patterns matched with yarn in the stash.
In short: Bins and Ravelry. Yes.
Don’t worry, dear readers, I have indeed been knitting. I’ve been knitting a lot. It just so happens that I’ve been knitting the same thing over and over and over. I’ve been working on approximately a million pairs of shark mittens. Here’s a pair I finished this morning:
Same yarn I always use, Cascade Eco, and some red Valley Northampton for the mouth. They went pretty quickly and were mostly unremarkable. Fortunately, I only have one more pair to knit and then I can start working on other things. Other swap things. I can’t wait to be knitting for myself again.
A non-shark mittens thing I have been doing is some stashing of yarn. I had to order some more yarn for my boyfriend’s birthday sweater (which is still not done), but Knit Picks is discontinuing the Planetarium colorway of Comfy Bulky (why, I have no idea) but I ordered some comfy sport and some comfy fingering to hold together to finish the sweater, which will hopefully work. Since I was already paying shipping and I like yarn, I also threw in some sock yarn:
Stroll in Shoreline Twist (which is Ravenclaw colors, which will result in bitchin’ Ravenclaw socks)
Stroll Handpainted in Tea Party
I also recently bought a couple wool sweaters at the thrift store to unravel for the yarn. I finished the first one yesterday, resulting in four skeins of a very pretty red worsted yarn:
It’s about 514 yards, most of which will most likely be used for mouth parts of shark mittens. But maybe something else. The sweater was like, four dollars, so I’m thinking this was a pretty good deal. I washed another sweater this afternoon, an undyed beige, and once that dries, I’ll have some more yarn to unravel (and also dye). Yay!
So remember how I went to that craft fair like… a week ago? The delay in posting is due to finals week being next week, so I am currently drowning in both schoolwork and shark mitten orders.
Anyway, I didn’t really take any pictures (I feel weird taking pictures at that sort of thing) and it was kind of small, but I had fun. There were mostly jewelry vendors as these things tend to be, but there were also some people with sewn things, a soap/stuff vendor, and someone selling yarn. I didn’t buy much, but I did buy some honeysuckle scented soap and some yarn:
Pretty pretty sock yarn from Wild Hare Fiber Studio. The colorway is called “Peacock Strut” which is just so right. Pretty. The Wild Hare booth was one of the first booths I saw, and I spotted that yarn and decided it would be mine before I left (though I bought it near the end).
In other news, I have finally started my last pair of adult shark mittens (though I recently got an order for some baby ones). I’m going to relist the mittens on Friday, but I hope there’s at least a bit of a break so I can work on some WWFY stuff.
Stitch, Brinn, Stitch! 