How The West Was Spun

WIP Wednesday: May 30, 2012

SPINNING PROJECTS:

I finished up the first 4 oz of the BFL combo spin I'm doing.   Those singles are resting, and I started the next 4 oz.  No specific goal on this, but I'd like to get some spinning done at some point this week.  (How's that for vague?)

DESIGNING/KNITTING PROJECTS:

For my current Sekret Design Project, I'm about 20% of the way into the sample and that's my priority for this week.  I'd like to get another 20% minimum knit up on this.  The finished sample is due in early July.  I am really happy with how the pattern is knitting up with the combination of the yarn and the colorway and the stitch pattern.  I think it'll be a great project once I'm done.

I did get the sample socks for the sock club finished up.  Those are also at test knitters, and should be ready to go soon.  (While it is not for a sock club I'm hosting, the pattern will be available for both club members and the general public at the same time, so look for that in June.)

I have moved the fall collection hat to "easy knit" status, meaning I'm not likely to work on it except in the car or in situations I don't need to concentrate much.  It's a nice, relaxing, easy knit, so I'm saving it for those times. 

In the interim, then, since I've finished all the other socks I had in the queue, I've cast on for the fall collection socks.  For these, I'm using a great neutral colorway from The Woolen Rabbit, on Kim's workhorse Harmony Sock Yarn.  I just started these, so I'm basically only through the ribbing and the first few rows of the chart.  These will be my take-a-break project when I need a break from the bigger Sekret Knitting Project.

All for now.....

 

Shop Tidbits

A quick note to announce a few new things on the shop website.

First up, I've got a large batch of sale-priced laceweight yarns here.  The mill I use for a lot of my laceweight is making it very difficult to get cones, so these larger 1200-yard skeins are all I'll be carrying of this put-up.  The new put-up will be a standard 875-yard/100-gram skein.  These are all first-quality yarns, just ones that you won't see at this yardage in the future.  The mill is also discontinuing the 70/20/10 alpaca/silk/cashmere blend (BOO!), so what's up in the sale list for this base is all there will be of it. 

Everything on that page is discounted 25% off, so if you've got some laceweight projects lined up for summer knitting, this is a great savings for your lace projects.

New in the shop for June are two laceweight yarns:  Brigit Lace, which is a springy, 100% merino, a great workhorse of a yarn, suitable for any lace projects.  These are 875-yard/100-g skeins. And Arianhrod Lace, which is a 75/25/5 blend of merino/silk/glitter.  This is the lighter weight (875-yard/100-g skein) sister yarn to the Arianhrod Sock that Kirsten used in her pretty "Unsinkable Shawl" we debuted in April.  It has just a little bit of bling - pretty and delicate without being over-the-top.  It has a great drape and blocks beautifully.

If there's a colorway you'd like that you don't see listed currently in the available ready-to-ship skeins, please email me and I can get you taken care of.

All for now.....

More Landscaping

D and I put some more time into the yard this week.  While we were in Colorado last weekend, our landscape dude brought us a couple of trees and put those in for us.  It took about 1 week of no shade after the pinion pine by the door was gone to decide we wanted larger trees than the 5-gallon bucks from Lowe's, so we bit the bullet and paid to have a couple of Ponderosa pines brought up from his nursery and installed.

These are nice-sized trees - we got two, one for each side of the yard - about 12 to 14 feet in height.   We added some soaker hoses for these youngsters and put a mulch layer in around their roots, and we'll try to keep them fairly moist despite our current lack of rain and the high winds (and 2% humidity right now).

We also put in some smaller trees that we had already purchased - a couple of ornamental plums and a pear tree so we have an arc of trees out in front of the house.  The smaller ones will eventually help shade the deck.  We are just about finished carting rock from the property up to the front yard to form the walkway edgings, although we decided that the trees would look great with some rocks around their base to delineate between the mulch and the landscape rock (which is set to be delivered sometime this week), so we've got a bit more to do.

It's getting there!  Our next task, once the landscape rock arrives, is to start laying weed barrier, which we'll start at the point farthest away from this photo, and then work our way back to this vantage point.

All for now....

WIP Wednesday: May 23, 2012

SPINNING PROJECT:

As I thought, with D and I in Denver over the past weekend, I didn't get a lot of spinning done, but I am working on the "Burly" BFL and I've gotten perhaps 3 oz of the 4 spun up.

I'd like to try to get this first 4 oz spun up, and then I'll be ready to tackle the 4 oz of the 2IBH colorway I'm going to ply together with this. 

KNITTING/DESIGNING PROJECTS

Lots of good knitting time in the truck this weekend.  I finished up handspun sock #1 and started on sock #2.  I'm just about ready to turn the heel on sock #2.  I'd like to at least get that done up and might even get the leg finished this week.  The pattern is at the test knitters for this one, and I'm hoping to have it ready for early June.

In the meantime, I got the go-ahead to start the next Sekret Knitting Project.  Nicely enough, more of my shop yarn, so I dyed that up to get ready to wind it today and cast on.  This is a larger project, but not huge, and should knit up fairly quickly at the gauge I've selected for it.  Deadline on that is early July, so I'll prioritize that for a while and sneak in some sock-knitting time in the car or doctor waiting rooms to get the handspun socks finished up.

All for now......

 

Bhen

Once D and I decided the youngsters needed to go to new homes, I had been worried about Bhen.  I think I've mentioned he had lost his eyesight - just had slight peripheral movement that he could catch out of his left eye and that was it - so I knew he was very dependent on the other two for warnings about things that were downwind of him.  After Fargo left, he and Zel settled into a nice buddy relationship, so I wasn't sure how things would go once we moved Zel, but I was prepared to give Bhen a LOT of nose kisses and treats, and spend time with him just hanging out, because he had packed me around for so many miles on the trail, he more than deserved an awesome retirement where he was horribly spoiled.

But 3 weeks ago today, I went out to feed and he wasn't feeling well.  Doc came and treated him for some tummy ailments about 9 a.m., but by 1, Bhen was a lot worse.  Doc came back, was here with me most of the afternoon - we got about 10 liters of fluids into him, tubed him several times, and thought we finally had him feeling better, but after he left, Bhen got rapidly worse and was in a lot of pain, so I called Doc back and had him come put Bhen down.  He didn't deserve more hours in pain, and I know it was pretty bad, despite how stoic he always was.  Based on the whole constellation of symptoms, we're 99% sure he had a loop of twisted bowel and there's not really a great outcome for that even with surgery.  I got the chance to stand with him resting his head on my chest while I waited for Doc to come back.  He was pretty heavily drugged for the pain, but I know he at least could hear me - his Yoda ears perked forward whenever I talked to him - and I'm grateful I had the chance to tell him I loved him and remind him what a good boy he was.

I haven't even been able to formulate a post about this until now.  I cried for days - cried myself to sleep, cried when I went out to feed Zel - just cried.  Still am, actually.

So bear with me - I thought my best riding buddy deserved a post all his own.  He was one of my best friends, my go anywhere, do anything horse.  There was no trail in the world that didn't have his name on it.  I hope where-ever he and Sam are right now, they are hitting the trail at a trot with the wind in their manes and tearing up the miles. 

All for now.......

C-C-C-Changes

D and I had a nice, perhaps somewhat subdued trip to Denver.  We went out to dinner, read a book in the hotel room on Saturday while it rained/snowed a bit, did some shopping went to a museum, but the main reason we drove up to Denver was to effect some changes in things around here.

Some of you know that I've got an autoimmune disorder that I get an IV chemotherapy treatment for every 7 weeks.  I try not to have it be a big deal and mostly it's okay.  In the last year, though, it's kind of been catching up to me and I've been having a few more not-good days during those 7 weeks.  I'm not very good at saying I need to cut back (quit laughing, yes, I know - it's an obvious thing), but D and I decided that we needed to scale back on our riding and frankly, with Sammy's death this year, we had lost a lot of interest in riding. 

Sooo... while it was a hard decision, with the help of several friends, we got the younger two boys placed in new homes.  Fargo is down in Santa Fe with a long-time friend of my riding buddy, Corry.  Liz is PERFECT for him.  They go out and just poke along on the trails near her house with her big lab trotting along.  He rides out with her and her husband (they also own a mare who Fargo apparently adores).  She was looking for a quieter horse, but really wanted to have an Arabian again.  She's got a lot of riding experience, so anything missing in his trail experience, she's confident enough to handle and get him through, but she loves his great manners and how quiet he is and well... really.. if I had to pick anyone for him, she would be in the top 5. She's called about once a week since we took him down to her place just to give me an update on him and I know he's in a fantastic home, and is doing great.

We knew we wanted Zel to go to an endurance home - he's not really suited for walk-along trail rides with his motor - so while I had listed him on the endurance group's classifieds, I also put a call in to our trainer friend, Jerry, who you might remember came down from Salt Lake and helped Dave get Zel started.  Jerry has several endurance clients and he already knew Zel, so he did some screening of riders for us, and we found him what I think will be a really good match.  A long-time rider whose current horse is 19 and while still on the trail competing really needs to be thinking about retirement.  He's a very kind, quiet man, and (bonus!) his wife is an equine vet.  They have a ton of pasture and gorgeous facilities just north of Salt Lake, but a really packed schedule this spring, so we trailered Zel up to Colorado Springs this weekend, and this morning, he is headed out west with a professional shipper to SLC. I think he's going to do great there once he gets settled in at his new place there.  And it makes us feel good to know he'll see Jerry and vice versa every week for a lesson.

As you might guess, this is a huge change for us.  I'm not sure we've completely gotten our heads wrapped around it, and to be sure, we were pretty subdued this weekend after we said goodbye to Zel before heading home.

Read on for more.........

 

Spinning Friday: 2IBH - BFL - Thunder and Lightning

This was a fun spin.  The base fiber is from Two If By Hand.  It's BFL, and dyed in the "Thunder and Lightning" colorway, but this is a gradient version of it (meaning instead of short bands of dye color application, the colors run in longer sections from one end of the braid to the other, with each color only used once).

The original roving looked like:

I decided I wanted to keep this as a singles yarn, to preserve the long color runs, but I also decided that when I get around to using it, I wanted to knit a small top-down shawl, probably semi-circular, or possible half-hexagonal.  Either way, the rows in that type of shawl construction start out short, and then get progressively longer as you reach the hem.  So..... I decided I would like the bands of striping to stay relatively equal as I knit down the shawl.

With that in mind, I split the roving lengthwise into the equivalent of 6 long pieces, and then spun 1/6, 2/6 and 3/6 (holding the 2 and 3 strips together, and matching up the color bands), so that the yarn would have varying lengths of color blocks from short to long.  I wound up with 508 yards of laceweight singles from the 4-oz braid.

I have no idea if this will actually knit up in the fashion I've envisioned, but either way, it'll be fun to see how the color progression works.

All for now....

WIP Wednesday: May 16, 2012

Spinning Project:

I finished up the singles BFL I was working on (with pics of that to come on Friday) and moved on to more BFL.  (I have a lot of it.  A LOTTA lot.)

This is "Burly" on BFL from Funky Carolina eons ago.

I am spinning this up as a combo spin with another braid of BFL (toldja I had a lot) from 2IBH, which I'll show you when we get there.  For right now, I'm planning on spinning this as a fingering-weight 2-ply, one ply of each colorway.  Possibly for a short-sleeved sweater if I've got enough yardage.  I have started this, but probably won't get much accomplished as D and I are going to Denver for a few days in the next week.

Designing/Knitting Projects:

 I finished up the sock club socks!  Woot!  The pattern is off to be test knit, but the samples in the smaller size are done.  I just need to put the final tweaks on the pattern when it's done being test knit in the second size.

I also finished up my Cider Mill Pullover.  It needs ends darned in and a good blocking, but the sample is done.  After we are back from Denver, hopefully next week, I'll crunch some more numbers for the multiple sizes and then that can go to the tech editor and be put to bed until the collection is published.  I was really happy with how the sample came out - I knit it my size so I'd have the opportunity to wear it this fall and it fits me perfectly.

Would you like a preview of the colorwork pattern?  I love how nicely the Rowan Tweed colors work together.

With those 2 projects done, I'm still waiting on confirmation about yarn for the next Sekret Deadline Knitting project, so I'm going to focus on the handspun socks that I'm working on.  (Which I have had to frog back to mid-foot after the heel turn due to a martini on Saturday evening.  I can apparently knit with wine but not vodka on board.  Who knew?)

And I'm going to put the hat for the fall collection on the needles and get going on the sample for that.  That's an easy project I can pick up and put down pretty easily, if the yarn gets fast-tracked for the other Sekret project.

All for now......

 

Spinning Friday: 2IBH Shetland - Cuddlefish

This braid was the November 2011 2IBH club fiber offering.  The theme was "Visit the Aquarium", and the colorway is based on the cuttlefish cephaloid.

The braid is 100% Shetland wool.

I spun this up into a 2-ply light worsted weight yarn, with 254 yds/4 oz.  I'm thinking of using it for mittens or something like that, where it can be warm and wooly. 

I wasn't sure I would like the colorway - I'm generally not a yellow fan, but I like it spun up and plied.  I think it's more than the sum of the parts once the colors have the chance to get married and get to know each other a little.  Still probably not something I'd wear next to my face/hair, so I think warm mittens probably will be the way to go.

All for now.....

New Design: Hessian Boot Socks

I'm very excited to announce the publication of a new design, my Hessian Boot Socks.  These are available via Interweave Press's recent Jane Austen Knits, Summer 2012 publication.  (It's available right now for a downloadable order, or you can preorder the print copy at their site.)  All photos below are courtesy of Christa Tippmann and Interweave Press.

These are a 2-color sock, which I designed as a nod to the Hessian boots of the early 19th century.  Originally military issue, these became almost ubiquitous footwear for upper class and gentry class men in Jane Austen's time.  In an era when most men of those classes rode a horse as their primary means of transportation, these well-fitting boots protected their legs from rubbing against the stirrup leathers of the saddle. 

The socks are knit in my Freya BFL sock yarn.  They feature a contrast color cuff, heel and toes with a small faux side seam and diamond clocking at the ankle.  (You can choose to knit the diamond pattern as you knit the socks, or add it with duplicate stitch afterwards.  Or leave it off entirely!).  These are sized for men, but the smallest men's size will work fine for most 7-9 women's shoe sizing too.

Since the editors were kind enough to let me use a shop yarn for these, I'm offering yarn packs for the 2 colors as shown in the sample (or request your own 2-tone combination and I'm happy to dye that up for you if black and tan isn't your thing).

I'm thrilled to be included in this great publication.  There are actually several other patterns in it I wish I had the time to knit for myself too!

All for now......