Fiber Fool

I’ve already completed 4 finished objects already this year (two of which I can’t share, sorry). This weekend was Elizabeth Zimmermann and British mystery and drama weekend in my house. I had some class samples I needed to get knit up soon so they could be on display at Nanytutu’s. So I knit a pair of Mitered Mittens and a Ganomy hat, both of which are from Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitter’s Almanac. Without surprise, both projects were quick knits that produced great results.

While knitting up these samples DH and I watched the 1985 version of Bleak House, the first half of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (from Masterpiece Theater a couple weeks ago), and many, many episodes of Midsomer Murders. One has to love the ability to check out DVDs from the public library! Though I have to say I am finding the way the hold system works quite confusing. I had stuff on hold that was currently checked in and several of them were check out anyway instead of going to the hold shelf for me to pick up.

Pattern: Mittered Mittens
Designer: Elizabeth Zimmermann
Needles: Set of 5 US8 DPNs (bamboo - Clover I think)
Yarn: Brown Sheep’s Lanaloft Worsted (the newish mohair-free equivalent to Lamb’s Pride Worsted),
LL91W Herbal Garden, 100% Wool, 160 yds / 100 gm
Modifications: I made a longer and snugger cuff as well as added a thumb gusset.
Notes: The addition of the gusset and the longer cuff had me cutting it really close to get a pair out of one skein, but I made it with ~2 yards left when all was said and done. Phew! I found the yarn great to work with. It was quite consistent in thickness and very soft. It made me think of a more consistent Manos del Uraguay (or perhaps Malabrigo, though I haven’t worked with that yet). Dumb luck allowed me to get the striping that shows off the clever construction so well, but it makes for a fun pair of mittens that I’m sure will be quite warm. While the singles yarn may not be the most durable, it is quite lofty providing lots of insulating air in the fabric of the mittens.

Pattern: Ganomy Hat
Designer: Elizabeth Zimmermann
Needles: 16″ Circular and Set of 4 US9 DPNs
Yarn: Tahki Donegal Tweed Homespun, 853, 100% Wool, 183 yds / 100 gm
Modifications: I had a gauge of 4.5 sts/in rather than the called for 4 sts/in so I CO 88 sts, then increased to 92 after the garter stitch and worked most of the rest as written. I also decided to opt for the tassel (not shown at left) on the tip rather than the called for pom pom. In general I find tassels to hold up to handling and wear a bit better and since this will be on display at a yarn shop where it will be fondles and handled a lot I felt that was a better option.
Notes: This yarn was also nice to work with. It isn’t near as soft as the Lanaloft though. It did, however, soften measurably after the wash in SOAK. I still don’t think I’d want to use it for say a cowl or scarf, but I don’t think it will bother as a hat. Your mileage may vary though.

I have to say that knitting up these samples has me even more excited to teach the EZ’s Mighty Miters class. There is so much room for so many modifications as well as translating the patterns or different sizes and gauges. It’s too bad I won’t have enough time to knit all the different permutations that are floating around in my head. But, there are more patterns for me to get written and knit up and other class samples that need knit up as well. Anyway, these should be at the shop this week so if you are in the area look around for them at Nanytutu’s!

I am thinking that dedicating the weekends to mostly knitting rather than computer work is a great way to still have what feels like a weekend, even though I’m really working 7 days a week. Plus, knitting is more social than pattern writing or doing the books so if something comes up I can still make forward progress while being social.

Also, thank you to Matara for being my model. You did great and the hat looks fantastic on you!

I thought I would mix it up a bit this week and share with you some things that have caught my fancy this week…

When DH and I got married 5 years ago we were combining two adult households. We each had our own full set of dishes and no good place to store china so we didn’t register for a china pattern. Now, however, my everyday dishes are starting to look a bit worn after 12 years of fairly heavy use. It has felt like every time we get rid of something around here it is something of mine. I’m usually fine with replacing whatever it is, but I have started feeling as though I am living in DH’s house since everything from sheets to bath towels requires a compromise. So, a few weeks back I told DH that I would be picking out a new set of dishes to replace my current ones and that the decision would be mine, and mine alone. I guess he needn’t have worried as he likes the dishes I have fallen in love with this week.

The problem? It seems the pattern is brand new as of sometime in September here so I cannot find a store that has them in stock so I can see it in person. I did finally find good photos of most of the pieces in Mikasa’s Cocoa Blossom line on Amazon (yes, better than going directily to Mikasa.com). Oddly, the store in Fort Collins with the largest selection of dishes is Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and they do carry it online, but right now no stores in the region have them in store yet. Go figure! But, I’m pretty sure I’m in love!

While I’m lusting after “objects” I thought I’d include this one. I’ve been drooling over it (and the others like it) for months now. It is the Orange Nautilus Spiral Pendant from Etsy seller, Juln. It is natural that I’d be drawn to the orange, though I’m not sure if it’ll go with the shades of orange I’ve been wearing most often. It is so gorgeous I would want to be able to wear it often. The others beads and pendants in his shop are great. I have even seen one of his beads in person and they are well done and seem quite faithful to the photos.

This week I have been listening to a fair amount of music and what I have been queuing up most has been Magda Hiller’s Icing on the Cake. She is mostly easily classified as a folk artist. That said, she weaves together blues and country and jazz into a fun unique sound.

I would expect those who like female singer/songwriter folk artists who occasionally have a hint of country twang would enjoy Magda Hiller. If you like Lucinda Williams, Bonnie Raitt, Rickie Lee Jones, or Mary Chapin Carpenter definitely give Magda a listen. If you tend to be turned off by twang, don’t let that scare you, still give her a listen as she isn’t consistently twangy and I don’t think it is that strong. She can be found on eMusic, iTunes, and CDBaby if you want to give her tracks a bit of a listen and a few clips can be found on her web site.

Lastly, even with the new television season kicking off this past week I am most excited about Dancing with the Stars - season 5! I hadn’t realized this show had been around so long and I have never succumbed to it before this. However, I kept running into people mentioning it - the ladies at water aerobics, my cousin’s wife, etc. etc. So, on Tuesday I watched it online and was hooked.

DH and I are fans of ballroom dancing movies so I kind of new if I gave in and watched it I would be sucked in. But dang, weren’t Sabrina and Mark hot? I loved those hip hop moves sprinkled into the cha-cha. *swoon* And Sabrina’s dance experience certainly helped her out, even though it had not been in ballroom dance. Her moves were so precise and clean. It makes me want to find ballroom dancing lessons around here :-) Perhaps after I’m back on the water aerobics track for a bit longer we can do that. DH had been a regular swing dancer before I came along. While I don’t think my back is at a place for swing, it might do okay with the more basic dances like waltz and foxtrot.

I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive the darkness of the photo above. It has been grey and dark and damp - prefect sick weather. The flash was required to not get a blurry photos. Thanks to my sister there are no “hot spots” (more on that later). Some progress was made yesterday. I wound my handspun into a yarn cake! And, I knit…

I’m afraid this is all I can show you at the moment. While the gauge is nowhere near what I was hoping for the overall look of the knit fabric is exactly what I was hoping for when I prepped the fiber - slight undulations of value creating subtle striping! Yeah!

Thanks for all your well wishes. I think those (and some meds after a trip to the doctor yesterday) are working wonders and I’m feeling a bit improved. If nothing else, my head is much better knowing that I had not yet developed bronchitis as I had feared. My progress was aided in part by ABC. Yes, I’m a tad of a TV junkie. I like noise in the background when I doing stuff. If you didn’t know it - ABC has their television shows available for free viewing on their web site. In most cases the last four weeks of episodes shown (even the reruns) are available and the quality is quite remarkable. There are three or four 30 second commercial breaks (which I often use to check on e-mail). I caught up on last weeks shows yesterday from the comfort of bed rather than having to head to the basement to watch them.

Back to how my sister has improved my photography… By fantastic birthday shopping of course! Man it is great to have family that is more clued into one of your hobbies than you are for a change! On Friday a bit of a banged up package arrived from Adorama containing a wide variety of camera accessories. My favorite so far is the flash diffuser for the built-in flash. It slips into the hot shoe and forms a tent over the pop-up flash and then hooks over the name plate of the camera. It works miracles! It is still flash photography from a built-in flash, but it is so much softer with no hot spots. In fact, yesterday’s photo DH took with that in place as well. She also sent some anti-fog cloths from Nikon, an LCD screen shade, a set of three lens cap wranglers, a reference card for the D-80, and a table top Manfrotto tri-pod. Amber did all the hard work and mom pitched in for part of it. It was a fantastic package and kind of made up for the fact that the end of birthday week was spent in bed with a fever and cough.

I’ll leave you with a soft focus of the yarn cake in natural light just because despite the slight blurriness I think it is beautiful…

- I’m in a lull. I think the curtain may be lifting. I feel sparks of project ideas, but it will take a while to nail down details and such. I have sewing and knitting ideas swirling around in my head. Though I have aches and pains kind of holding me back in productivity. I should get the ideas down on paper so they are there for a lull when I feel better!

- I’ve been doing a *ton* of reading. Well, not like some people. But I’ve been reading a book roughly every 2.5 days. I just finished yesterday another book not in that stack because I was given it by a woman in my water aerobics class. It was Sisterhood of the Dropped Stitches. It was a pretty nice heartwarming romantic read about four girls who met to learn to knit while battling cancer as teens. They are all given the official stamp of remission when in their early to mid twenties and celebrate by setting goals they want to each reach by the next year. One wants to dance in a ballet, another wants to get a cat, the third wants to get an internship and the fourth wants to go on three dates. They all find out that goals are great, but they can’t always be met on a deadline. The book is written as a journal of the group. Most of it is written by one of the members, but each of the other members takes a time or two to write in the journal as well. It was decidedly Christian though. It wasn’t as preachy as some I’ve read, but Christianity was certainly a large part of the punch line so if that is not your thing you may give it a pass. If it is something you think you’d like to read, leave me a comment. I’ll send it on to someone if you promise to pass it along to someone else when you are done.

- I sprinkle in a bit of Northern Exposure Season 3 or House Season 2 (mom lent me her House DVDs since I had things to ship to her at a later date anyway). Is it just me or are our television series wrapping up much earlier than normal? The O.C. had the series finale a week or so ago. Psych is wrapped until summer. I’m pretty sure a few others are wrapped - Grey’s Anatomy, yes? That may also include it’s night companions Ugly Betty and Men in Trees…. I know there is often a lull in March while they take a break from February sweeps. But dang, I hope I don’t have to wait until September for most of these to have new episodes!

- I had my second voice lesson with SIL3 last night. It went *much* better than the first one. I wasn’t nearly so nervous. I still was somewhat and that cramps my range and she doesn’t push it much. But it’ll only continue to improve. I’m working on Dido’s Lament by Purcell as my classical piece, Come Rain, Or Come Shine for my jazz piece (which ended up being a good piece to reinforce some of the stuff I need to work on with Dido’s Lament eerily enough), and Defying Gravity from Wicked for my musical theater piece. Yesterday I was playing around on iTunes and discovered that they had an album of Wicked for Karoke! It isn’t the best one out there from the reading I’ve done, but it is much cheaper that what I’ve seen and I could have it immediately for practicing with. SIL3 or I playing the piano accompaniment for it is next to nil. Defying Gravity starts out with 5 flats and switches to 4 sharps and then back to 5 flats. Because I didn’t start learning piano until I was 13, I’m not real good. I can play the easy piano version of most anything and the regular of some things, but once you get into that many flats and sharps it would probably take me an entire year to work out playing it well and I probably still wouldn’t be able to sing with it. Anyway, Defying Gravity on that album is done quite well. Once I burned it to CD I can change the balance and turn down the demo vocals and wean myself onto the instrumental version.

- We may do another spring break road trip to the same location sometime next week! Yeah! I’m looking forward to it. I hope to get lots of fiber to dye. I’m also hoping to score some summer yarns that will coordinate with some skirts that I should be making soon so I can make some tees and tanks to go with them. Oh, speaking of making skirts, SIL3 asked me to help her make a skirt for auditions! I feel honored!

That’s probably enough randomness for now…

- Oh wait! I *hate* Bloglines! They weren’t even letting me manually ping them. It took something like 5-6 hours to pick up my blog yesterday. Grrrrrrrr!

Despite the lack of posts on the topic of knitting, there has been some knitting going on around here. Early last week I learned that some college friends of mine had their first baby, a girl, recently. While we haven’t been keeping in touch real well they were very good friends of mine so I decided to knit a baby blanket. I had been contemplating a way to mix up a log cabin blanket from Mason-Dixon Knitting for a while. I was thinking about ways to incorporate fibonacci sequences or that when I read about Cara’s random number version. So, I chose 6 colors of Lion Brand MicoSpun in bright colors and had Random.org generate 50 numbers between 1-21 with repeats. So far I’m about 2/3 of the way through the 11th random number and I’m liking it. It has a distict oblong format which I may end up needing to fiddle with as I near the final dimensions (I’m hoping for 36 X 36 inches roughly) but I’ll hold out until then because it is indeed random so you never know!

Microspun is not my ideal yarn. It is very splitty so you have to keep tabs on it much more frequently than a better yarn, however, it seems the only economical, washable yarn that feels nice and soft and isn’t an overdone baby pastel. I’m not a pastel person in most instances and I can only assume that mothers get sick of all the pastel colors so I opted for this color combination. To make these bright colors pop even more I chose my order for the colors to progress in complementary color pairs - red, green, yellow, purple (the darker blue in that color is really a grape color), orange, and turquoise. I think it has turned out well. It does mean that all warm colors are knit horizontally (in the above picture) and all cool colors are knit vertically. It’ll be interesting to see what effect that has on the final product. It is hard to tell now with not quite two repeats of every color.

I did tire of turning the blanket when it was small because it was so few stitches and then you turned and now because each turn requires adjustment of how the blanket lies in your lap so I taught myself to purl backwards so I can do the garter stitch without having to turn my work around. It only took a few rows of that and I was very nearly as fast as my regular purling so only slightly slower than knitting the row from the wrong side. I’m not doing it on every wrong side row as sometimes I just want to crank out the rows, but it is nice to be able to mix it up a bit. And as a bonus I’ve found I am less likely to split yarn when purling backwards!

My first pair of man-sized trekking socks are growing too, although rather slowly. With the baby blanket project and my recent obsession with sewing and cooking lately this sock probably hasn’t been getting the attention it deserves. The last two weeks I think it has only been pulled out at SnB. But, I’m about half way through DH’s feel flap (eye of partidge, I’ve been on a kick for my more recent socks). I’m really liking the socks and think this colorway does a great job of bridging men’s need for understated colors and the knitter’s need for interesting knitting.

My post is quite late today because at about 1:30 am or so when we had some thunder rolling through (I don’t think we got any measureable precip, unfortunately) Emma decided it was time to be up and playing. She didn’t act scared, but she was prancing all over the house and sticking her nose in DH’s face so I got up about 2 am and took her downstairs with me so DH could get some sleep. I finally got around to watching the first three episodes of Psych I had on the NOT-TiVo as well as this week’s The Closer. But, it meant I got about 2 hours of sleep and then didn’t get back to bed until 6am when DH got up. I’m exhausted! *yawn*