Another Shawl You Say!

 

I know I told myself I would knit any more shawls, but they are good evening knitting projects.  If it's simple enough, I can knit while talking or watching a show or even reading a book!   This one is entirely handspun yarn.  The grey is Corriedale and the white is Shetland /Blue Faced Leicester cross.  Both were lovely to spin, although the Shetland cross is taking a good while to process to get the VM out.  I found combing was very effective but a bit more work than I wanted to do.  Instead I've been flick carding the locks and carding them with hand cards to make rolags.  Takes a bit of time but I can do more at a time.  If I get industrious, I may call up a friend and see if I can use her picker to loosen all the locks.   A lot of the VM will fall out during that process, making the carding easier and faster.

I carefully measured the centre line, which is a cable to make sure that the shawl wasn't too large.  I then wet finished it in the washing machine with a bit of Eucalan.  I was careful about only letting it agitate for a minute or less at a time, checking regularly and letting it soak in between.  I was trying to get a balance of yarn blooming and just a bit of fulling to keep the shawl from becoming too big.   I'd use a larger needle size to make sure that the Corriedale stayed soft, so stretching was definitely something to take into consideration.  Well the wet finishing worked really well, and the stitches all evened out.  The yarn bloomed nicely and I'm impressed with how well the Eucalan worked to get the yarn really clean and it stayed soft.   It did however, not full much at all and it's a lovely, airy and large shawl.  I'm disappointed at how little the cable shows against the grey yarn.  While I know that cables show up better on lighter yarns, in my mind the grey was lighter than it actually is.  Still, it's a soft and cuddly shawl.  If I don't use it, it may go on a sale table sometime.

I did play yarn chicken with the bottom white stripe.   I was sure I had enough yarn left in the ball to cast off after I'd knit the required rows.   I got to the half-way mark and thought that  for sure there was enough to finish.   When I was 3/4 done the cast off row I was starting to wonder whether it would be better to switch out the yarn now, or to risk running out with 3 or 4 stitches left.   I kept knitting and yes, I won with 6 inches of yarn to spare!  Phew!

Of Dinosaurs and freshly spun yarn

I can post this now.  It's a dinosaur made of handspun and dyed yarn.   It was a wedding shower gift for my soon to be daughter in law, who when asked what the dress code was for the wedding was to "wear whatever makes you feel awesome, even if it's a dinosaur costume".  Then she said she kind of hopes someone wears a dinosaur costume.   Since I couldn't do the dinosaur costume,  I figured I could make her a stuffy to keep the fun going.   It's a free pattern on Ravelry and was actually for a dragon.  I left the wings off.  I was going to put a little tulle veil on it, but it didn't quite work with the spines on the back.  It didn't look finished without the spines, so I left off the wedding veil.

I'll have to admit, I do like the partners my kids have chosen.  

I just finished spinning and plying up 450g of Blue Faced Leicester top.   It went pretty quickly and I need to figure out what I'm going to do with it.   It still needs to be wet finished and dyed.   It's a light Worsted/DK grist before wet finishing.   I'm guessing it will bloom a bit and be a worsted yarn when I'm done.

I have some more of the Dorset fleece which still needs to be washed.   It's supposed to be a Dorset /Friesian cross, which actually works with the Dorset, making it a bit softer and nicer to work with, although Dorset is a fairly nice mid-grade fleece to begin with.   I also have some Icelandic that I need to wash up before the May long weekend.   It's an absolutely lovely fleece. It has a great colour, a defined Tog and Thel.  And I rather dislike actually spinning Icelandic fleece.   I'm using it for a class to get rid of it.

I attended a wedding shower this weekend.  It was lovely.  It was held in an old building, now a distillery, with old stone walls, wooded floor and a few antiques scattered around.  The atmosphere was great.  There were treats, a few activities but no actual games.  One activity was making bouquets (the wedding theme is wild flowers).  There were bunches of flowers and greenery, and little bags with tiny vases in them.   Most people made lovely bouquets, trimming the flowers to fit.   However, because there was no water for those vases to make transporting easier, I made a scraggly bouquet and just sort of put the flowers willy nilly in the vase.   When I got home, I trimmed them up nicely and popped them into the now water filled vase.  They are pretty now and now looking wildly over grown.    

The garlic is coming up in the garden nicely.   Some of it is about 8 inches tall already.   Garlic is an early sprouting plant to begin with.  Having been planted in a raised bed may help because the soil often seems to warm up a bit earlier.  As well we've had crazy amounts of rain so maybe all the conditions have aligned.   It did snow yesterday, crazy heavy flurries on and off.  I had to scrape ice off my car this morning too!  Which I find an unhappy task at any time during the winter, but more so in April!

 

A few fibery projects

Another critter made of leftovers.  The white parts are a bit of leftover acrylic yarn.  I know that because it squeaked a bit when knitting.  Also, because it wasn't in my bin of handspun yarns but in the bag of leftover bits from a cow I made last year.

He's very cute.   The original pattern has a wreath around his neck, but I'm just going to put a nice bow on him and call him done.   The pattern was a free pattern available on-line.  It's fiddly though, really, really fiddly.  The main part of the moose is fine, and so are the arms and legs.  They were all easy to knit up.  The ears and antlers though were quite fussy, small little pieces.  Nothing difficult about it, but it did take a lot of pinning to get those bits and pieces even close to the right places. 
 

I had some fleece leftover from various projects.  This was washed fleece, and most of it had been run through a drum carder.  There was some coloured stuff that I'd used to pick up extra acid dyes when I was experimenting with the old, vintage packets of Cushing's dyes.    I hand carded the bits and pieces, wound them up and layered them into big balls to make dryer balls.  I had to stop in a a dollar store after a meeting the other day to pick up a pair of nylons so I had a pair to stuff the balls into for felting.   

I stuffed a fleece ball into the toe of a stocking, tied a knot, put in another ball and tied a knot, 3 times.   I used a slip knot so that hopefully I could reuse the nylons again.   I put them into the washer, with a load of laundry, and then into the dryer.  They felted up really nicely.  The only issue I had was they were also trying to felt themselves into the stockings.   I got the first 2 out with a little effort, but had to cut the final one out as the stocking wouldn't peel off the dryer ball.  Of course once I snipped the toe of the stocking off, it was easy to peel the little bit of nylon off.   By knotting the cut end, I'll be able to reuse the nylons for another batch if necessary or I can use them to tie garden plants to supports if necessary, like that one stem of the tomato plant which doesn't want to stay confined to the tomato cage!     

Next projects on the list include having to divide and repot my snake plant (Dracaena trifasciata ).  It's been growing and growing.  I was thinking it needed repotting over the summer, but put it off.  Now it's obviously too big.  Well the one with the striped leaves is.  The more solid green one is still a baby but I'll probably repot that one at the same time. It will be a big, ol' repotting party because the spider plant and the lemon tree are also getting too big for their pots.  I may have to wait for the spring though, because I have a feeling this will be a messy job.

Shawls

This is the green shawl finished, except for blocking.  It's become a favourite of the cats, who seem to enjoy sleeping on it.   I like it too because of the more muted colours.  The pale green, not one of my favourite colours at all, looks rather nice with rest of the greens and the grey.  They work well together. The amazing part of this shawl is that I thought it knit fairly quickly and was quite fun.  Of course after the fact, it may have taken my longer to knit than I recollect.   Its size was limited by the amount of yarn that I had.  I have leftover pale green and grey, but the last section of dark green used the last of all 3 different shades.  I was just a few rows short with the lightest shade of dark green, so worked though the bits and pieces, cut ends, short balls of the other greens, working from the lightest dark green to the darker shade.   It looks just fine, and I only had a few little ends left.  It has a grey garter stitch border so that it would hang straight after casting off and wouldn't curl.

I'm not sure about blocking it though.  It is large and drapey.  I don't think I have a large enough space to block it properly.  I may just wait until the spring and block it outside on the deck.  

Currently I have another shawl on the needles.   I found several balls of this beige/grey colour in the bin of my handspun odds and ends.  I'm not sure if it's handspun because it's been in hand wound balls rather than skeins for who knows how long.   It's a bit flattened in places. Rather than re-skein it, wash it gently and let it dry before I used it, I jumped right in and started another shawl. My first try was a garter stitch shawl, a simple, plain every day garment.  However I got bored of the knitting fairly quickly.   I ripped it out, a whole evenings work, which was a bit irritating, and restarted.  This is almost as simple as the original start, but has a bit more interest in having to count the stockinette stitch rows, and the garter stitch stripes.  

 I had knit too far to rip it out when I realised that I had grabbed the wrong knitting needles and am using a slightly smaller size than I'd normally use for this weight of yarn in a shawl.   I'm blaming that on the fact that my interchangeable needles in my favourite size had one break.  They are stupidly expensive and I haven't wanted to spend the extra money on a new set of that size needles.  The cord is fine of course, although I have to figure out how to wiggle the broken end off it.   Still, the needles are wooden and feel really nice to use.  The one on this shawl is aluminium and has a stiff cord, which just isn't quite so friendly.

Also, I lost one of the needle point protectors, which I use to keep the stitches on the needles while I'm not actively knitting.  It fell off as I was moving it to photograph it and it seems to have just vanished.  I moved it barely 2 metres.  How can it disappear in that space?  There was a cat lurking, sooo.....

I'm pretty sure I don't have quite enough of the main yarn to finish the shawl in the size I was aiming for.   I do have some darker brown which is of a similar grist which looks like it might have enough yardage to do a final repeat or at least a bottom border.  Maybe I'll go for a seed stitch border this time.

I have 2 more shawls in the planning stages, possibly 3 if I weave the one.   I'm spinning up my birthday merino right now.  It's going to be a 2 ply yarn.  I have 454 g of the commercial roving, so it' spinning up fairly quickly.  With that much roving, I should be able to spin enough yarn for a decent sized shawl.  Right now the plan is to dye the yarn in shades of blue or blue grey.   Sometimes plans change though :)