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FUZZY GALORE |
Completed one of those Great Sweater Makeovers that strike fear even in the
heart of the most oblivious. I should explain that I have a fetish
for orange mohair that dates from way back. My mother as a rule
was an enthusiastic seamstress rather than a knitter, and while she made me many
dresses that I remember fondly, she only completed the one
orange sweater for me. Weren't we totally dashing :-)? At least you should
admire the very avant-garde stretch pants. My sweater has alas faded in
the picture, but the leftover yarn I found recently hasn't, and it was
very vivid indeed. The trip to the Alps
that prompted this burst of sweater-making (I'm sure she made her
blue one too) is still very vivid in my memory.
We were staying at a hotel owned by Jean-Claude Killy's mother, his little sister laughed at my Parisian self very nicely, considering, as she was skiing circles around me - she's been born at a time of year such that she knew how to ski before she really practiced walking, and I was already a tall klutz. We fell in collective love with the Killy's daschunds, and later that spring acquired from them a puppy, who grew to be extremely cute in that floppy-eared way. She also terrorized the whole household, bit her way through 2 continents, and died much later in California, very fittingly while trying to devour a passing car. Everyone I know who grew up with a daschund can show you the scars, and never pets strange ones in the street. On this trip I also saw my first avalanche, very close on the other side of a valley, and acquired a healthy respect for them which probably saved my bacon a couple times much later in the Sierras. Anyway, I remember this trip well and fondly, and consequently never got over the grief of growing out of the orange mohair, more like bursting out of it.
So something like 8 years ago I finally made this. It was from Pengouin yarn,
of course, since at the time I still had to import every bit of orange
from Europe, and I was a much more timid dyer.
The pattern is a Classic Elite one, slightly
altered as usual. I had done particularly well at reinforcing
with a row of crocheted chain the shoulder and back neck seams,
which went far toward controlling any further untoward stretching.
The collar was also good, being able to open it helped to
control the temperature, which would otherwise always require the great outdoors
to be tolerated, if not actual snow. It did mean though that I couldn't
just slash the front and transform it into a cardigan, which I'd
contemplated.
While the fuzziness and color were perfect, just what I had aimed for, there were a couple major pitfalls. One was that while I had painstakingly checked every ball for dye lot, some of them had been retrieved from the basement of the shop, where clearly they'd been protected from the light which had faded the upstairs ones. This didn't show in the least as I was toiling away by dim light in New England winter evenings. However the first glance at the finished product in daylight was quite revealing. I'm glad that even my awful camera shows this clearly so you can all agree... In addition, obviously I hadn't been quite exact on the gauge, or it stretched or something because mohair is heavier than wool, but it was definitely too long. Rather too big as well, but mercifully time has remedied that enough in 2 dimensions :-). Still, it was so long, so overwhelming, that I've almost exclusively worn it with pajamas. My mother was still alive when I made it, and was touched that I had remembered her early efforts so fondly. But she was extremely tactful about the results, merely mumbling something about not knitting much for the same reasons...
However as I was recently casting about in the closet looking for items
that'd be suitable to display my new passion,
the glass
buttons, I noticed that I'd made a couple that'd look really great on
the orange mohair. Just for laughs, I tried reproducing them
(my first try), and lo and behold I ended up with a good set.
So now I had to do something to make the thing wearable.
I looked at the sweater in the best light I could muster,
and safety-pinned the definite color changes. I found out that
if I wanted only the best and darkest, I'd end
up with a Britney Spears length, not normally my thing.
Not to mention that the most definite band is right
across the chest, running smack into the placket, and therefore not
really undoable without reknitting the whole thing.
And undoing seams, something which I just couldn't even contemplate.
So, forgetting about the proverbial Elizabeth Zimmermann glass of wine in the emotion of the moment, I snipped a thread and started unraveling. It took hours. I listened to great big swatches of radio programs. I snipped every 4-6" of yarn, because any longer and I developed gargantuan snarls. I finally worked it completely open. Rather than try to unravel directly, I snipped at the lower end of that pale band and unstitched some more. I pinned it all on La Mujer Pantera, and decided it was still too long. This time, sick of needle work, I tried unravelling directly by pulling and was surprised that it worked relatively well. When at last I was done, having removed more than 8", I had a major existential crisis, complete with running about the house moaning, demanding advice from everyone, pinning on everything and everyone, squinting, comparing with everything in the closet, which is of course silly, this being much looser and fluffier than anything else. Finally I shut up and grafted it back together, a bit too tightly I think, but that worked itself mostly out after I tortured it some more by pulling in all directions. You can see the line, I think, but you can just attribute it to the color change that's still there, although less stark.
It didn't turn out too badly after all, eh?
I'm still amazed at the improvement, and have only gotten out
of it to sleep. For those of you who worry about these things,
there was no point in doing anything to control the unravelled
stitches. Wool normally stays together quite nicely, even
if it hasn't been knitted in that shape for 5 years. I've
never done that silly machine sewing to keep steeks together,
and never come close to regretting it. But
mohair is even more tenacious, it will only unravel if you try, and even then
it takes some forceful persuasion. I didn't have a single
dropped stitch in the whole operation, and there were... hundreds of them.
Altogether, I'm glad I went through this ordeal.
Do I feel 10 years older? You bet. Was it worth it? Even more so.
Am I glad it's over? Most of all :-).
I should have mentioned that one of the most helpful things
I found about doing a show was the writeup that
Brandy Agerbeck
did of her first show. Wouldn't have considered it without her encouragement..
One of the things she said that struck me was that the less to keep
track of the better (isn't that true in life in general??).
And along those lines I really liked the suggestion to wear an apron
to hold your receipts and cash, so you wouldn't have to futz about
when someone wanted something, and most of all so nobody would have
to keep an eye on the tempting cash box.
So around 10pm on the day before, I pulled out the quilt cottons box and got sewing. I know, I'm sure Brandy wouldn't approve of that much procrastinating, but there was so much more to do beforehand... Anyway, these are not perfect on a couple counts - the pocket sizing was better by the second one, I used seam tape as for kiddie pants to close the money pockets instead of velcro because I didn't have any velcro, and I used plain bias tape for waist ties. Not to mention I vaguely felt that I should have printed our logo and used that as part of the design, but at least these were matched enough to our personalities.
Still, they functioned very well, they did make it a lot easier to keep track of things, and I'm very happy with them in retrospect. Thanks Brandy!
Barely two weeks and we're already burned out on production knitting. For
whatever harebrained reason, we decided that it'd be a good idea
to knit up a batch of easy scarves, and go sell them at a
crafts fair outside Sacramento, where a friend had a booth and
was planning on selling jewelry, delicious chocolate truffles, and other
non-competing but attractive items. Ha!
First of all, I knew better about fiber production. My two friends Anne and Priscilla demonstrated vividly to me how un-fun that can be eons ago, when they both were all too successful at making very large Turkish pants (hey! they were quite fashionable then). At least there were two of them, so they had a bit of moral support as they were slaving over hot machines 3 days a week for months, working their fingers to the bone and never quite catching up to the orders pouring in. They finally dropped it, and I just haven't had the same enthusiastic sewing companionship from them ever since, although they've both recovered somewhat, decades later. But these were the friends who'd previously get up late on Sunday morning, have a leisurely brunch, and work up say 30 bathrobes for all the friends as afternoon entertainement. So it was kind of sad that they of all people should get sick of sewing. And so far I had taken great care to avoid falling into the same trap.
In this case, the problem isn't just production burnout. After all, liberal ice application has kept tendinitis somewhat at bay, and we did see quite a few good movies while working on the scarves (netflix to the rescue!). But we ended up totally in the wrong venue - every booth in that corner of suburbia said 'handmade', 'unique', or 'one of a kind', but I can only conclude that these people were making their own glueguns or something, because maybe 3 booths out of 150 had anything remotely handmade. This was totally Michael's land, and clearly people couldn't distinguish good yarn hand knit from acrylic machine pompoms. Now I'm getting a hint of the causes of the recent tide of venerable crafty institutions, like the California College of Arts and Crafts, dropping 'craft' from their name. This was something which I detested in principle, feeling strongly that a good teapot should pour and a good sweater should fit and that functional art is in no way inferior to mere clutter, au contraire. But it wouldn't take a whole lot of these fairs to make one feel like craft is a dirty word.
In addition, they must have a Wal-Mart out there, because we sold a lot of kits but almost no scarves themselves. For a representative example, an old lady tried the old lady thing on me (as if I looked that young), and told me she'd love to buy one for her grand-daughter if it was.. $5-10! I was driven to answer that if I was her grand-daughter's age and lived in Malaysia that's no doubt what the price would be. Rude, but all too true. I think next time we venture at anything like this we'll have to get some sort of anti-sweatshop signs...
So this wasn't terribly successful. We got a nice pattern together, that's always worth it. We had fun working out good color combinations, even more fun. We actually had a good time hanging out with the friends in the booth, knitting a bit, stuffing ourselves happily with unappreciated truffles and overlooked almond toffee. But we aren't likely to try this again. And we do feel very bad for all the little sweatshop kids out there, the Chinese prisoners, the US ones for that matter, the poor slobs that make the $5 scarves at Old Navy, not to mention the ones that spin the yarn that goes into them. Slavery is alive and well is the only conclusion we can reach...
Here is the dregs sweater that Rose finished in a blink.
Pretty good for leftovers... But then again they were
leftovers from one of Ranchito del Sol's corriedales,
this is a bit like foie gras leftovers.
Rose mostly thinks of it in that disparaging way because
she thinks her spinning is terribly irregular, but
I hardly think so. The color is what varies the most,
which catches all the attention for variation.
And it came from her not carding all colors together all
at once, something she's gotten over since. Remember
this was her first hand-spun, if you can believe it.
Anyway, I like the color bands. And the regular background
pattern makes the whole thing hang together quite nicely.
I like that heathery cable thing, even if it does make
the cable more subtle visually.
I wish my dregs looked like this... Actually, I wish I could make sweaters with half as much aplomb, I'd be willing to use any materials :-).
Hubris strikes again. Full of happy self-confidence because of my completed cardweaving band, I thought I'd embark on a belt for Rose. She has a couple pairs of pants that she holds up with a 1/4" wide peruvian band, one that we got as a backstrap in Ed Franquemont's workshop. It's not bad looking, but it's really not adequate to the task :-). Since she liked the red and peach combination, I thought I could whip out something, along the same diagonal lines.
So I allowed extra warp as usual. And thought I'd be clever and put knots on the far end so I could comb out the tangles occasionally, which means I cut said warp every other turn and knotted it back together. And this time I remembered to add enough cards to make it an inch and a smidgen wide. I was also going to have the side effect of having smooth loops at the top which could be much more neatly wrapped to make a decent loop.
Ha! For some reason, I now have at least 50% more warp than I need. Not enough for another project, in short, but it's cut. And I've gotten myself into a total topological quandry, where I think the only way I'm going to be doing this is by getting it off the loom and tying into some stray dooknob. I understand more and more why this cardweaving thing seems to appeal so much to mathematicians. The only discernible good news is that since I seem to have somehow separated my cards into 2 batches, if I accentuated that I could perhaps weave an end loop a la Peter Collingwood, and then try to get them back together somehow. But I found as usual that he vaguely describes what's possible, with photo of antique to back it up, but leaves much of the implementation details to the imagination, so this might not work out. To top it all, I've used so much warp that I now don't have more than a few inches of the weft, still going on the basis that it'd be much less masochist to match border and weft (and yes, looking closely at the last border, it's a really good idea).
Sigh.
Meanwhile Rose was very taken with a cable pattern in the Fall Vogue Knitting, and she's working happily away on a 'dregs' sweater. Dregs because she'd already picked out the best of her early handspun for the last sweater, and this batch is uneven in both texture and color. But it looks good, so who cares, she'll just have to avoid wearing it to guild meetings to avoid offending technical sensibilities.
In case you hadn't heard, a major theft of spinning wheels and supplies occured last week, just before SOAR in Michigan. We're posting a list of the equipment missing, on the theory that spinning is a very small world and that it'll be impossible to sell a large supply of new spinning wheels without a trace... Carolina Homespun has been a great boon to the San Francisco fiber world for the past year, and we'd very much like them to keep them in business!
Took a small class this weekend - I went to one of the monthly crochet
meetings at Imagiknit,
my favorite live
yarn store. Mary Jane Woods was demonstrating from her upcoming book
(mmm...) 'crocheted socks ???' from I believe Martingale Press,
usually a good British publisher. She showed some interesting examples,
and attempted to shorten her usual 6hrs gig into 2, which obviously
isn't the easiest :-). So I skipped the nice stitch pattern and
went round and round like a fiend in single crochet, trying to get quickly to
the hard part. I first tried
what she was teaching that day, the short row heel method. When I was done,
and it looked decent,
I ripped. I loathe short row heels, in my opinion they're the best
argument for learning to make your own socks, so you don't have to
wear that. So I groped my way around and figured out how to make the
nice square heel flap and triangular gusset that give me good fit.
Aah. It wasn't totally great, but it worked well enough.
For years now I've been thinking that a nice pair of ripple socks would be just the thing for cold evenings (and Halloween). But Mary Jane was also advocating them as Christmas tree ornament, which does make a lot more sense than wrestling with circular needles on 15 stitches. It turns out the tiny one I made ended up with only red and green, so I think it's going to turn into exactly that (it's 3" tall). It'd also make sense for baby socks, although why people insist on putting socks on babies I don't know :-). I think they'd be too thick and not stretchy enough to make real socks to wear in shoes, but they'd be just fine as slippers.
Rose finally settled on a rug pattern, an even simpler one than what she'd looked at first. I really like it, and there are a couple feet of it on the loom. The camera is too cheap to work in the kind of gloomy living room (garden room :-), although this one doesn't have indoor slugs so we aren't complaining), so you won't see it for a bit. It's got a wide mottled band zigzagging crazily up between 2 large areas of black and gold. A bit 60s perhaps, but in a good way. Rose meanwhile is still traumatized, not sure she likes it, fretting about having to build up the gold side all the time without having it show too much. Now I tell her about Judith McKenzie's excellent tip to check for yarn compatibility: make 2 loops, interlock them, and run your fingers along the whole length back and forth under a bit of tension. This doubles any difference so our pitifully limited senses get a better chance, and also it forces you to rely more on touch than on sight, which is a better measure. I'm sure the contrast in value helped fool her in this case that she was spinning the same yarn, it's not a coincidence that the black is heavier. Anyway, that's very helpful hindsight :-).
Meanwhile, in a weird fit of solidarity, I thought I'd also try something
that had little chance of working right off, and my thoughts turned to cardweaving.
I've had a naked kind of straw hat for a couple years now, waiting for
something suitably crafty to dress it up. It got a fine bunch of tulle
and a stuffed lamb for Easter, but that's hardly practical for your
ordinary walk on the beach.
One limiting problem with band weaving is that we don't have a whole
lot of doorknobs in the house, and no really convenient spots to
tie yourself in backstrap-style. Gudrun Polak, whose workshop we
took in the spring, had an initial improvement on what we'd learned from
Ed Franquemont about that: instead of tying a narrow band around
the waist, she uses almost a belt width, and angles it 45o so she's almost
sitting on it. It's much more comfortable and as stable, perhaps in
part because card-weaving doesn't need as much tension adjustment as you go
as Peruvian braids do?
But I was most intrigued by Lynn Miller's write up of her twinkle loom setup, where she uses an inkle loom for cardweaving. Since we'd scored a $2 Schacht inkle loom at the thrift store a while ago, I felt that it'd be good to try to justify its continued residence in our overwhelming pile of stuff. So I tried it, and lo and behold it worked. Especially well since I was using the continuous-loop warping that works well for diagonal stripes, with consistent threading. It turned out that it was easy to work in the sun in the morning, and take the loom to the back for stupid movies in the evening, I'm very pleased with the portability angle, I could have taken this thing on a picnic!
I made things much easier for myself by using solid borders, and weft to match - no point in pushing masochism too far, and maybe I'll let people examine my selvages in another couple years. I also tied on the border warps so it'd be easy to comb out the kinks and retie, since I knew they were going to get heavily twisted before I'd be through, and that turned out to be an excellent decision. I managed to push the twist in the pattern warp out to the end fairly easily, till I got in the last stretch that is. But in retrospect if I was doing a long piece I think I'd skip the continuous warping and instead tie it all so I could comb out the kinks of the whole warp. I don't really want to stick to the patterns that have you twisting obsessionally the same number of times forward and backward. But the overtwist can add a nasty dimension that I can do without.
Alas, I had forgotten how to setup the cards to start, and couldn't get my hands on my notes somehow. I had a half-dozen books checked out from various libraries, and couldn't find the exact same pattern again, which led to a solid day of hair-ripping. Fortunately, the old trick of sleeping on it worked by the next morning, so I was off and trying to find and work out a pleasing pattern. I remembered just fine Gudrun's trick of separating the cards into 2 stacks and turning one forward and one backwards instead of flipping them, which makes the pattern easier to keep track of. But I just couldn't remember the initial card arrangement. Sigh. It's amazing how weaving can be like knitting some times - when you stop knitting for a bit as a beginner, it's easy to remember how to knit, but horrible to remember how to cast on, because you don't do nearly enough of that proportionally. And the inkle bit would work much better if one had a single set of cards - the nice mmemonics of the double pack get a bit lost as you're dodging the middle peg, and the ergonomics get a bit too funky as well if you try to leave the peg in the middle. Fortunately, advancing was very easy, didn't even have to loosen the tension, so I eventually kept both packs in front.
Anyway, I found a pattern I liked in Candace Crockett and worked it
out for the single threads that we had practiced before.
After a while, tired of learning to unweave (it's a bear remembering
to flip before shifting the cards..), I downloaded
Gudrun's helpful software from the
Loomy Bin
and then made some real progress. All I had left to do was put it
into action :-).
So it's done. I only did the points perfectly one out of 3 or 4 times. The width varied drunkenly for the first half. The weft shows in odd places. Next time I'll probably try one of Peter Collingwood's tricks for a neat initial loop, instead of the half-ass wrapped one I did after the fact. I was very happy that I put on an extra half-yard of warp, which came in really handy to practice on before I really got going. And the cotton Baby Georgia I used was a perfect choice - not so fine I went crazy, not stretchy, not too tangly, well behaved and smooth, I'll be using it again. But in the rush to work out the pattern I used the same number of cards than we had on the sample, not the at least double number I should have used to make a hat band detectible by the naked eye. I'll have to make a wider one now, but hopefully it'll turn out better :-). At least I did like both the pattern and the colors, which had good contrast.
We've been going around in circles on the rug. We're on rev 5 of designs, and not seemingly getting anywhere. Ironic, since this will probably take all of 3hrs to weave once we're going, but it's just not OK yet.
So the main problem is this: Rose wove a sample with the yarn we brought back from New Mexico, which worked just fine except for not having enough yarn and/or colors. So we spun plenty of churro, and we thought we were fine. Turned out that it's not at all suitable for tapestry, the warp shows through even after we unrolled the whole thing and re-sleyed from 6epi to 4. On further analysis, I think our big mistake is that the yarn is both more twisted than the original, and 2-ply instead of singles.
This reminds me of Judith McKenzie's story about being careful to 'improve' on designs that people have worked on for centuries. Her own revelation came when she saw how Turks were doing their rugs and thought to herself that there was no need to go through the extra work of making 2-ply yarn for the knots, since much of the later treatment of the rugs aimed at making them 'bloom' ie straighten out completely. She figured if she spun singles nobody would be the wiser and blooming would be easier. That would have been true, except that apparently it's much harder for dye to penetrate a single, even a soft one, and she had white spots in the middle of her well-blooming knots... So now she's more likely to figure that people, who generally don't have much time to waste, are likely to have worked out the minimum path to their traditional textiles.
Both the different factors in our yarn make it harder, denser, than the original, which means it's not compacting down enough, even with energetic beating, and that's why we're having a hard time covering the warp - no amount of re-sleying at 2epi is going to compensate. Funny how even when you hear a story like that from someone who knows everything much better than you, a bit of practical experience is sometimes necessary :-). In retrospect, it seems that all tapestries are made with singles. Ah well, next time.
This yarn is fine though, from good fleeces from Monterey County fairs past. There was little reason to ply it, except for the fact that even the Louet doesn't do yarn as thick as we'd have liked easily. Next time we'll try out the spindle on the Ashford traditional we got recently, or the navajo spindle Rose built for fun, that should allow for any amount of thickness. And maybe the lower ratio will also keep Rose from overtwisting, although the alpaca she's been overtwisting for me on purpose might have something to do with that too. She spun up a whole black fleece, and then a white one.
Then I made some noise about not liking black and white so much, at least not without some other color along with them, so she had me dye all the white. We used some Navajo tea from the same trip. We only had half the recommended amount, but a look at the prices from La Lana made us blanch ($96 for a lb of wool!! so much for cheap spinning!). So we dyed using what we had, and we think it came out just fine. We simmered the tea over a whole afternoon, we had soaked the yarn in alum water days in advance, and we added more alum to the final tea, finally simmering the yarn for another 3hrs or so. Apparently, persistence will substitute just fine for lack of materials. We have a bright color that's medium value, an intense gold yellow. That part is very satisfying.
So after she'd ripped a couple times and tried to beat it to death, she figured out that twill would cover the warp, which makes sense according to what little we know of twill vs tabby. Meanwhile, she had looked through some of the reference library, found another of those great raffia designs from Zaire, and industriously transfered it to a spreadsheet. Alas, it looked like hell in practice. Twill doesn't do clean vertical lines, and this was a maze full of vertical lines. I let a couple days pass and tried to bring up the topic tactfully, pointing out that if we could only do twill, we'd do better to aim for something designed for twill, that wouldn't have to be fought at every step.
This made me think of something which I think is a common pitfall with weavers who try their hand at wearables. It takes a lot of sewing experience to have an idea of what kind of fabric you need with the design you'd like, to begin with. Even when you have that, it seems to me that there is often an element of surprise about what fabric actually comes off the loom, unless you're Sharon Alderman herself or something. If a sample is made, it's often been too small to really show the qualities of the resulting yardage (1/2 yd would be the ideal minimum). Or the fact that the weaver loves the color/design means that the wrong drape easily gets ignored. The crucial step that often gets missed is the evaluation of the fabric after it's not only off the loom but finished, ie washed and dried properly, fulled a bit if necessary. Then it would be good to have a totally open mind - what is this fabric really good for? If it's not for the item one had in mind, a change of plans is definitely in order. But often the weaver feels that so much effort has been expanded in the original direction that she must push through at all costs. Or she has such a wrong amount of yardage for the project that now suggests itself that she backs off. So instead of an unexpected nice shirt, she gets a wimpy jacket, or conversely a stiff shirt instead of a good jacket. More subtly, a more or less tailored pattern may have been more suitable for what came off the loom. Obstinacy is just not the way to satisfaction with your projects.
So we started looking through Peter Collingwood. Then Rose tried what we agreed on. Looked bad. Ripped. Tried another one. Looked positively horrible. Ripped again. An entire afternoon devoted to trying another couple designs, same results. Now there's one on the loom, a few inches of it, but she doesn't like it. I don't like it enough to fight for it either, although it's the best so far. Sigh. Something will come up, I'm sure. Meanwhile, Rose's catching up with me: getting almost faster at un-weaving than at weaving.
Rose found (in 3 separate places..) the makings of socks she started eons ago,
and finished them. Something like two whole years ago, we took together
a spinning workshop from Judith McKenzie. In the middle of it, she
put out a huge pile of 'colonial roving' from Ashland Bay Trading
in the middle of the floor,
and told us to help ourselves. I can't quite remember
how this came about, but obviously we must have gotten distracted
into talking at length about some other topic, and we both spun up a storm.
We'd cleverly picked our favorite color combination (blue and orange)
and added compatible colors at a whim, and both just kind of went
on and on spinning roughly compatible weights while changing colors
irregularly. We did nearly a bobbin a piece.
We did an OK job of the spinning, and both really liked how the colors looked together, not to mention the yarn felt really smooth and beautiful. So Rose plied it all together, a bobbin from each of us to even out my generally heavier yarn with hers. And some of it got plied with the previous natural gray. Now we really were jazzed about the colors. Then she took off and made our standard Elizabeth Zimmermann sock special, and I just love the results. They look random enough, individually and together, but they very clearly belong together, don't you think? I like how she put the less-matching grey ply in the same position, so it looks more like a design feature than a desperate ploy for running out of yarn. Definitely my ideal in socks, belonging together enough but not entirely symmetrical... The fact that I've never managed to make 2 socks exactly the same is a chicken and egg philosophical problem with this, but on the whole I'd say the ideal is the chicken here, and the symmetry impairment only its natural result.
There are a few nits to pick with these, but nothing major. Rose cast on 56 stitches on size 0 because that's 'her' number. But the yarn was subtly heavier than the standard commercial sock yarn, so these turned out not only a bit thicker but a bit larger. We should have weighed them with a McMoran balance to check them against commercial yarn. She likes socks kind of slouchy on top, which these do a fine job of. Imho, that's because she's got too small feet (7 US, 38 European) to fit into the standard socks which are meant for men's average, and are too big even for my own big feet. But the problem here is that the foot is kind of slouchy too. It has a faint flavor of duck feet to it :-). Paula made some adorable booties for her new grandson, bright yellow, increase through the overly long foot, embroider the ends, that were real duck feet. What we should have done to get just slouchy tops would be to decrease to fewer stitches on the foot rather than the ankle. But in this case, stuffing them into shoes might be a problem unless we can full them into submission first. Ah well, she's got a fine collection of suitable Birkenstocks, and these socks definitely deserve a star position :-).
Rose had a fit of enterprise, got out the knitting machine,
and learned how to use it today. Just like that... We were talking
about scarves, speculating about the Lincoln singles we have
and using the natural creep to make naturally slanted scarves.
I must have said something about machines, because next I knew
she had all the manuals and book and was putting the machine together,
watching the video, experimenting with stuff. I left for
an errand with her snarling a bit at the slanted handspun.
I came back in what seemed like a blink and she'd made a half sweater in
Merino Frappe we had about the house.
Then she sat me down and made me do the other half right then, which I didn't
time but definitely took less than half an hour. Whew. My head is
still reeling.
Then we got into a bit of a halt. My previous take on machine knitting was that you get through the idiot part incredibly fast, but it makes knitting seem like an endless string of shaping (we at least slow to less than a crawl every time a stitch needs on or off), and vast expanses of finishing. So Rose thought she'd finish a funnel neck by machine, after shaping the shoulders, which worked well enough. But she didn't quite remember how she made another a few months ago, and didn't believe the evidence of her eyes, and decreased way too dramatically. The final effect is rather garroting. Ah well, at least ripping that much isn't too frightening :-).
I think she's kind of hung up right now because she's decided that the sweater is too wide and short. But that's because the waste yarn was a bit iffy, and because it looks like it'd unravel we didn't yank the thing out properly. I did tell her how important it was to yank the swatch (and no excuse for no large swatch on a machine) before measuring gauge, so she did that. But it's something else to trust that you did it right against the apparent evidence of your own eyes. So I should probably do the finishing for her, and give it a good yank myself before I let her see it flat again...
Finally finished a scarf from Nancy Finn's luscious silk/wool hand-dyed roving.
I was a bit shy about it, because I didn't have much and it seemed
Too Good to mess up, if you see what I mean... But I took the plunge
and spun it in a very thick-and-thin boucle, which I'm very pleased
with. I had done lots of samples of novelty yarns in Judith
McKenzie's classes, and invariably loved the results. But I had
my doubts about my ability to keep up the a compatible kind of irregularity
through a whole project. It wasn't as easy as making boring regular
yarn, but it was a whole lot more fun, and I like the results much better.
I'd noticed before that
one is better off making irregular quilt blocks extremely irregular,
otherwise they merely look a bit lopsided and like you just
missed making them regular. Likewise, if you're going to make
irregular yarns you kind of need to lay on the irregularity
with a trowel.
I followed Judith's boucle formula pretty well, spinning Nancy's roving in a fat and irregular way. Then I took a silk cap I had dyed in compatible colors and spun it in a very thin and tight way. Discovered along the way that I loathe silk caps, that they hurt my hands severely, that I really need to sit down and do wholesale predrafting if I use them ever again. Plied them both, was happy enough. Ran out of thin silk though. Missed getting the right kind of 60/2 silk for more binder from Robin and Russ at a couple shows. Finally decided to use some olive which wasn't quite a compatible color, because it was there. And screwed up at the end in a monumental way, plying the final binder in the opposite direction than I should have. Ouch.
But actually, I like the results well enough. So the binder just goes along the main yarn for a lot of distance, not doing its thing as a binder, so what, it's not obvious enough to harm anything, especially after it's knitted up. And I kind of like the extra twist, it made the fabric more lively. A bit less soft, but definitely made it leap up. So I might not do that again, but I think the next batch of roving will get more twist than I was originally planning. I do seem to be obsessed by twist lately. I've been looking over Rose's notes of her workshop with Kathryn Alexander at last year's SOAR, and her Spin-Off article about knitting alpaca. And I've been oogling the online notes on Anne Blink's Peruvian Ace bandage. Mmm.. I have some overtwisted alpaca, both S and Z spun, which Rose spun up a while ago and which has been languishing unknit through the uncharacteristically sweltering summer. I think I might give it another whirl through the spinning wheel to give it even more twist before I try to give it the Kathryn Alexander treatment and knit up a bandage of my own...
On another note, I'm used to 100% wool and there were a few differences with the half+ silk in this project. I knitted up the same width than I'd normally use (I like my scarves Moebius, wide and not very long), but the silk is keeping it from stretching, and it ended up feeling not quite wide enough, especially as is't sagging a bit more in the wearing. Not a big problem though, I was sorry I had a bit left, so I think I'll just add an idiot cord edging.
Rose finished a little weft-faced sample rug (about 30x36", less than a meter square).
It suffered from too much hand-wringing :-). She was mostly using yarn
that we brought back from New Mexico when we took a workshop from
Sara
Natani a couple years ago. But we had no idea what we were doing then, and bought
kind of a random assortment of colors in various small quantities, more
as a tasting menu than as an organized project. So there
wasn't enough of any one or several colors to do any kind of large, unified design.
To add to the
general funk, neither one of us has actually finished the small samples we
had started in the workshop, so our favorite colors had to be kind of
restricted for that future use.
So Rose spent much of the time lamenting the lack of colors and feeling both kind of aimless and thwarted... Now I think that in fact she did very well with what she had. I urged her to go and buy more neutral colors to extend what she had, but she didn't want to, mostly because the brown Brown Sheep (that's a bit surreal, excuse me..) she used at first started pilling even while still on the loom. So there are some very successful parts, and some less so. In my opinion, the ones that kind of flop are the ones where there is less contrast, like the pale grey and yellow or dark grey and deep red combos. That kind of thing is true in quilting too - one needs more contrast than one likes to look at up close for a design to be discernible from a distance, even a halfway across the room distance.
We both like the zigzag design very much, and we both think that she did a very nice job of changing designs and colors at different times. The little border is also great, and technically she did very well, the selvages are quite respectable, even without using the tempting temples (sorry, you can tell I just finished 'The book of salt' by Monique Truong and am feeling overly Steinian..) of the convenient rotary variety to hold them out evenly. The rug feels soft, almost un-rug-like soft, but it's also thick and cushy and very nice. Good sett, good beating, it's a fabric with integrity. Juliette will probably appropriate it as soon as we find it a permanent floor spot. Rose did a bit of soumac to begin, because that's what I learned to lock in the edge of a knotted rug. We're using a natural-colored warp because we both like that look much better than white, but she decided to experiment with a couple variations of damascus edge because she doesn't like fringe, even with natural color warp, and also because she was traumatized by proxy with my previous struggles with hand-knotted fringe. Alas, that's very difficult to do on soumac, which is too tight to easily thread anything through... So as you can see neither edge is quite done yet :-).
The followup is a bit hung up though. Rose was feeling all gung-ho about starting a real rug, for us, but a small sampling looked catastrophic: the handspun she wants to use next (we have a small herd of churro fleeces in the hall closet) is only slightly thicker, but that's apparently enough to keep it from covering the warp entirely. Eeck. So we had to cut off the sample, and we need to re-sley with 4epi rather than 6, we're pretty sure that 4 will do... either that or we'll have to commit harakiri with the sleying hook. Meanwhile, she's decided on a larger-scale design, with a big central zigzag, dark natural brown on one side and a lighter color on the other. She originally wanted white, but I talked her out of so much contrast. So she's busy spinning up white, and we'll use some navajo tea we have to dye it. This caused another crisis: I was sure I could find alum at my local hippie store, but apparently someone there objects to using heavy metals in canning, they have citric acid but not alum. Sigh. Saved again by our trusty Mendel's. So most of it is soaking while the rest is being spun up, and hopefully we'll have a quiet afternoon to simmer it soon.
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