Finishing up some projects.

 Grey Corriedale -  I got 1 lb of it for a present and am just finishing up plying it.   I loved it until the last bit of spinning.   It just didn't feel quite so nice to spin then because it was a bit compacted.  The bag looked like wads of sliver, but in the middle was the end part of the roving bump, still wound up.  The inside part just was too squished to be as fun as I'd have liked.  Plying is fine though and going fairly quickly.    I'm trying to decide if I want to make something out of it or use it as  the second yarn for a colour work sweater project.  Decisions, decisions.

A scarf off the loom, finally.  I put this one on the loom in the fall.   I chose this yarn because hubby was with me and he noticed that I tend to gravitate towards certain colours and thought I should maybe try something different.   So I did and I obviously chose wrong.   That black is actually a pale grey and there is also a pale blue.   I disliked every minute of weaving this scarf.   To make it worse, I put two scarves on the loom thinking it was worth the experiment of making a slightly narrower scarf and getting two of them.   I only have one scarf to show for the months of avoiding the project because I realized I'd never get anything else done if I tried for the two of them.  Instead I finished the one today - a whole 1 inch to weave  and then cut the darn thing off the loom.   I didn't heave enough weft anyway, so I know I under estimated my yardage math!  It's done and I have a pink, purple and black to put on the loom which looks like it might be fun!

Then because I was given some old acrylic lace and sock weight yarns, I oiled up the Legare 400 and cranked out a tube for making trauma teddies to donate to a local police force at a crank in event in May.   I won't make as many as last year because there was a competition component which was a bit sketchy.  The gal who won all the prizes also ran the contest.  I'm not saying that she manipulated things, but the optics were not good for this and I don't want to go out of my way to be disappointed by the way things are run just in case it happens this year too.  Plus it's a whole lot of work to finish up those little bears, cats and bunnies.   I stopped making people dollies because finding suitable flesh coloured yarns is difficult and expensive around here.  I can make animals in any colours I want!

More socks, and odd things happening

We don't have a bush lot, so we buy our wood in logs from a local tree service, in dump truck loads.  What type of wood we get and when we get it, depends a lot on where he is cutting and for whom.   We've been getting a lot of maple this year in smaller sizes, which slices and dices so quickly.    Last week he dropped off a load, but one long, skinny log got caught under the dump truck tailgate.  It unlatched half of it, and while trying to hook it back on, it dropped on the other side, and crashed to the ground.  Unfortunately, he couldn't pick it up until the next afternoon, so it sat in the middle of our driveway looking quite sad.   I got photos but I didn't run outside to do so, as I didn't want to get in the way, or make the driver feel badly.

Sock that wouldn't fit anyone!

I've been making socks, or trying to.   If you don't want to practice and practice some more, this is not the
fibre art you want to try.   The learning curve is huge, but if you practice, watch videos, read and have someone to either help you out or answer your questions, it's not insurmountable.   I'm having successes now.  I went to a "crank in" on the weekend.  That's a gathering of people who haul 50 plus lbs of cast iron and aluminum bits and pieces, plus some yarn, and crank socks together, while socializing.   It makes for a fun day, but very little productivity, because counting and chatting doesn't work for me.  Not having a physical counter on my Legare, I have to count in my head, and as soon as I drift off to a conversation, I lose my count.    At the end of the day, I made one sock which wouldn't fit anyone in my family.  I also forgot to write down the various numbers of rows for each step, so I wouldn't be able to make a second one.   The whole event was very good for me in that I learned a couple of things, but moreso, I realized that even experienced crankers are making the same mistakes that I am making.  Plus I had a lovely compliment from the gal who sat next to me, who hadn't realized that I was a "newbie".

I went with a friend who is the mentor who is answering my many, many questions.  I'd asked her about cast on bonnets with metal rings.  She gave me some rings, plus teeny tiny stitch markers  to try.  I made a cast on bonnet with the rings yesterday.   It's different, and when it works, it was really easy to use.  A bit faster than a traditional one, in that I didn't need to fish out the little bit of yarn and manually hook it on a needle.  However, it was pretty easy to get a ring hooked on a needle without yarn, which causes a jam.  I'll try it a few more times before I make a judgement.   I've realized though that having a few extra cast on bonnets is a good thing.

I tried out the new cast on bonnet last night, making a tube at various tensions to test gauge of this yarn.   Today I did the math and made this mock rib sock.   It should actually fit someone!   Once I make it's mate (yes, I did write down the pattern this time), I'll have to learn how to graft the toes together.   It's a bit different from doing it on hand knit socks.    That being said, I've also been told that I start to knit my socks from the wrong side, probably because of that hand knitting.   I don't think it really matters in the end, as long as I can translate any written patterns I might use.

chipmunk for cuteness factor

CSM practice

This is the first pair of matching socks I've managed to knit.   It was with a fairly thick sock yarn, with only 150 yards per 50 g.  It was only $3 per 50g, and there was no choice in colour, and as you can see, the patterns don't actually match.  I first thought it was a tension issue, but I redid the one sock and it was the same.   This sock yarn though, is insanely soft. I've never wanted to just fondle a skein of yarn as much as I'd have liked to do this stuff.   They are too small for me but they'll fit my daughter, except that I think they may be too wide.   They are just sitting there waiting for me to decide whether to rip them out and redo them or finish them up for her.  Except of course that I changed to a different cylinder with more needles, so one way or the other, they'll have to wait.

I've started knitting several socks a day over the past week.   I've learned to remind myself to rehang the weight before cranking after starting to hang the hem.  I can't believe how many times I did this, only to have stitches drop and tangled yarn, leading to taking it off the machine, ripping it out and starting again.

Then I got the hem hung and the leg of the sock knitting and halfway through the heel, some stitches would drop, usually on the left side.   It turns out that sometimes the brake doesn't quite tighten the yarn up all the way, leaving a loop which is too large to make a stitch.   If I'm slow and watching carefully, it's avoidable.   

Then I realized that I was using cheap sock yarn and it had little recovery or stretch, which made for difficulties in itself.  I don't know if it was because I was reusing the same skein over and over, or if it's all the yarn from that company.  It was $5 /100g, so it's super cheap, but maybe not the best to practice with.   I bought a bunch to make practice socks for my kids, but I'm not so sure if it isn't yarn that I might need to wait a bit to use, until I have more experience.

socks are different heights - but otherwise good!

Today, after a false start, I made a whole sock.  I'd done the math to hopefully get it to fit.   When I got to the toe, I was a  little leary, because yesterday I also made a sock which made it to the end, and them my waste yarn didn't catch and I'd ended up casting off the whole sock.  No waste yarn means that stitches drop and you can't graft the toe together.   But the waste yarn was fine.  Then I put some crochet yarn in for a separator and knit the second sock.  Somewhere in there, hubby started talking to me and my brain, which was counting rows went AWOL.  The results is 2 socks which are almost the same.   Sock 2 is just a tad too long for my foot but it's also 1.5 inches longer than the first sock!

This yarn was mid priced, and I'd tried to hand knit a sock from it, but it wasn't my favourite because it's a bit splitty.  However, it knit up on the machine quite nicely.

There aren't quite enough hours in the day for all the things I'd like to accomplish sadly.   

This weekend we're doing a cooking class about hearth cooking.  I set the menu as Vegetable soup with forcemeat balls, waffles, carrot pie and lemonade.   Forcemeat is sausage, and little balls were made and either cooked separately or just popped into the soup to cook, to enrich it.   Waffles because I got a cast Iron waffle maker and haven't had a chance to use it yet, and carrot pie to show how to bake in a dutch oven.  Carrot pie is like a pumpkin pie, but using carrots instead.  It's surprisingly good.

 

Legare 400-

 It's here!   "It", is a Legare sock knitting machine my husband purchased for my birthday.   It's a newer model, but I don't really have a date for it, just that it was one of the later models.   It's mostly complete.  It doesn't have the box and is missing a couple of tools, but otherwise, it's functional.   It's heavy!  I knew it was heavy, since it's cast iron, but I wasn't expecting it to be quite so heavy.

Unpacking it was fun.   It was packed into this tiny box, with lots of paper, bubble wrap and tons of packing tape was securing everything.  I know what most of the pieces do and where they go, but one is still unknown.  It's a tiny little key thing.   The manual is in french, and my francais isn't good enough to understand it.  My French  is good enough to say that "My French isn't good enough to understand the manual in French" though.   

Legare - was a company from Quebec, although the Creelman company in Ontario actually made the machines.    It's a closed cam machine, which means it's pretty quiet.   While I'd have liked a new machine, because they are really state of the art and lovely, the cost is just too much right now.   This one works though and I've assembled it, learned to make a tube, hang a hem, make a picot, make a heel, and right now working on the toe.  It's a bit confusing to me, that since the toe is the same as the heel, that I should be having issues with the toe.  I also learned to cast on 3 different ways: with a web, using the cast on basket, and then with a cast on bonnet, which was the first project I made.

The first day I assembled it, and worked on trying to knit a tube.   I managed to get the yarn stand assembled backwards.   I found a video which showed the proper way to assemble it which was nice, since while it did work backwards, it was confusing to me because I couldn't figure out how the heel brake worked.   It's all good now though.

I've been running through all my little partial balls of leftover sock yarn in playing with it.   Then I used some yarn which I had a full 100g of, but it got crunchy after a short while, so it's been sitting, waiting for a project.  It was lovely stuff when I purchased it, but I've no idea why it changed.  It's never happened before, but it's now harsh and icky.  This is what I made the cast on bonnet with.  It's never going to touch a foot, so it doesn't matter that it's a bit harsh.

I took the rest of the crunchy yarn, after I'd made the bonnet and practiced some heels.  I actually made a tube with 7 heels on it.   I was having issues, and then I managed to look at a diagram of the cylinder from another company's manual ( maybe Creelman?) and saw where I should put the heel hooks.  I am currently using just the one V hook which was original to the machine.   Once I figured out where to place it when making the heel, it was a game changer.     It's supposed to be the same for the toe, and since the toe is exactly the same as the heel, I'm not sure why I keep dropping stitches.   

How do I know I'm having problems with the toes?  I found a formula for making socks to size.   I knit a tube to check the tension of this yarn, and then followed a formula to work out how many rows I'd need for the foot.  Everything is good until I get to the toe.   I'm guessing that I just need to figure out where the weights should go for the toe to make it perfect.

Yesterday my V hook fell apart and one of the very sharp hooks fell out of the brass tubing.   Hubby re-crimped it into place and it's working just fine now.

This sock yarn is a bit thicker than most,  It's lovely and soft though.    I will rip this one back and try again tomorrow.  Everyone has told me of the really huge learning curve to making socks.  I've only had my machine for a week, so I'm pretty happy with what I've accomplished so far.  I'm even keeping notes!   I've a book in which I'm writing down my steps/patterns, so I can make a matching second sock, and then duplicate them if I like the yarn and can get more of it.    I'm also keeping a running list of tension settings and stitches per inch/gauge, so that I can also have a starting point.

I've been reading blogs, forums, articles, books etc, and it seems some people use only specific yarn brands, which would definitely make it easier to keep your tension and gauge even.  However, I do enjoy a good sale, so some of the yarn I have is off brand yarn, and sometimes name brand stuff,  that I got at bargain price.   I recently got some yarns to practice with that were $4.99 for 100 g.   That's a very good price for sock yarn.  This will make practice socks and I'll save the good stuff for when I know what I"m doing.   I've gotten all my kids shoe sizes, so I will use their feet to practice getting different sizes.  :)   Now to find a 60 needle cylinder, a buckle and some heel forks.   And.. yarn, lots more sock yarn.