roving

Snigna!

Not the best finished project photo ever, but Mid took the photo himself to share on facebook.

My last finished object of 2011! I finished them at 745 New Year’s Eve. They took much, much longer than I thought they would take to knit up, otherwise they would have been done in time for Christmas- I would have started them a week earlier.

I wanted to try to knit with unspun roving. I know that once upon a time they sold a yarn called White Buffalo that was essentially a ball of roving that they acted like was some sort of miracle yarn. I had some pencil roving put aside for my faux gradient, but I’m also not picky about what white yarn I use for that.

My thoughts on using pencil roving to knit with:

-gauge was easy. The roving adjusts to the size of the needle almost automatically.

-Obviously, this is a less than durable fiber to knit with. The first mitt is full of places where the roving drifted apart.

-Knitting with it was easier than I expected it to be, regardless of that fact-I was afraid that actually knitting with it would cause the stitches themselves to disintegrate. But that never happened.

-Each mitt has at least one major flaw (one cuff is row too short, and one thumb went on weird) because frankly, I was afraid to try to rip out the roving (I kept hearing strains of that meme, I’m a special snowflake, so delicate and unique…)

I’m not sure why these mitts aren’t knit more often. The colorwork isn’t that bad- and I hate colorwork. In fact, now I want to make stranded mitts for everyone I know. Or at least everyone I can stand talking to for more than 15 minutes at a time.

I will say that there’s a lot of…vagueness to the pattern. For the thumbs, as a starting point, you have to watch the pattern as it knits up- you place markers for the gussets and end up with 9 stitches between the gussets. You place 14 stitches on waste yarn for the thumb. So…where exactly does the other 5 come from? The 5 around the gusset who’s pattern never shifts.

The pattern also comments that the cuff could be knit in two colors. So I did. And thought that striped cuffs on these mitts look dopey (back to that I don’t want to mess with ripping out the roving bit). It then hit me that it meant corrugated ribbing- which creates a more attractive duotoned cuff.

The contrast yarn is Pisces, which I spun up this spring.

(Ravelry project link is here)

(For the record, Snigna is the Slavic god of snow).

spinning and swordfights

who was withholding the knowledge that knitpicks now carries wheels??? i’m supposed to be pricing roving for my class, not pricing wheels. i do have it narrowed down between halcyon and knitpicks. it may come down to shipping, because halcyon has a wider range of fibers and i can order full pounds without a problem. knitpicks is cheaper but i’m not sure how much shipping for a pound of roving will end up being. i want to snag light fiber for blending for myself as well and i don’t want white which means i want to try out halcyon.

i may end up with orders to both places because knitpicks carries batts too.

anyway. we went and saw the fourth pirates movie yesterday (sunday).

i have to say that i think it’s my favorite of the 4, but it’s also the weakest if that makes sense. it does feel a little flat and a little forced. and depp is showing his age, not that that’s a problem for me at all. but i also thought it had the most interesting storyline of all of them and it was surprisingly original (again with my elves and velocoraptor issue-how many times can you use the same movie monsters before you resort to interjecting random creatures into the storyline?); the siren/mermaid thing was really interesting.

i REALLY like the physical magick they had going on. as in, i could see it actually working like that. it wasn’t overdone and it didn’t feel all that forced. my only issue is that it seemed to be this excalibur type (soul eater style) thing going on; whoever held the focal item was the one that could use it regardless of who they were instead of the focal point being tied to an individual. i guess you can’t win them all and that’s such an insanely small point to get stuck on.

i liked the anne bonny aspect that they had going too. it took me a minute and a run through of my bpal collection in my head (sadly) to realize that a woman on a pirate ship wasn’t all that unheard of. as in, the set up was a little goofy and i wish she was a stronger character but it wasn’t all that far off of a situation that may actually have happened. i liked that they avoided the most obvious set up as well.

it was a dark film by disney standards which i appreciated. there were a few death scenes that were sort of shrugged away. i guess i felt like it was a throwback to the black cauldren and the horned king. there some details that i was actually suprised and pleased to see in there as a folklore/history buff (blackbeard actually did supposedly run around with a braided beard that he had a habit of setting on fire…).

it wasn’t a great film though. depp seemed a little halfhearted through the middle chunk. the movie didn’t really set up location all that well; one minute you were in one place and then you were in the next place with an assumption that you knew what was going on. the main romantic line was actually interesting but it seemed forced and the climax of that thread was slightly more confusing than i think it was intended on being. and ending seemed to suggest a fifth movie which would just be painful. i also didn’t like it in imax. i think i would have been happier with a conventional showing. it was a really pretty movie to look at but i think the imax took away from it.

Great Fiber No Buy: Day 6- it’s not my fault!

an early post, but relevant.

my mom apparently went out and bought me two bags of alpaca roving (yes, bags. i have no idea what size bag we’re talking about, i’m guessing anywhere between four ounces total to a pound, knowing how she buys wool) and a new spindle.

so while my diet has been broken, i’m also not the one to do it…

Great Fiber No Buy, Day 4: Foiled!

projects:

-green shawl- got 1/2 an hour knitted. this project is really starting to bore me. the colors are too alike, but the other greens in my stash are too different. in some cases that wouldn’t bother me, but right now the thought of mint green and forest green together just makes me cringe.

-pumpkin- 45 min. about halfway through. i’m about done with the first set of pumpkin colored roving, and i have the first two sets of singles spun and plyed.

-valkyrie vest- 1/2 hour.

-smoke- 1/2 hour. so much faster now that i’m splitting the roving.

-plying- 1/2 hour. started plying last month’s worth of smoke singles.

-1426-1 hour. up to rw 10 of the heel of the first sock.

Foiled!

i tried to go buy a new spindle at the one store that’s easily accessed in the area that carries spinning supplies, and discovered that they had sold all of their spindles. all of them. the place was pretty busy, which was a good thing i guess. i’m definitely not accussing of lying, but at the same time, there were people there holding spindles and getting first lessons, but the woman told me that all the spindles were gone earlier during the week. i vaguely remember hearing that they were teaching a spinning class requiring pre-registration though, so it’s probably not all doom and gloom like i’m thinking it is. i’m just in a less than pleasant mood to begin with.

it doesn’t really help my mood though. this was the first real test of my no-buy. i did walk out of there empty handed (and after a minor faux pas, i did tell someone where else to buy a product that the store didn’t have, in front of the owner. not good form, but sometimes you have to ask yourself, how much do you really care if every time you go there is an akward situation). but now mid doesn’t want me to get a spindle off line (gods, i don’t know why. i can’t figure it out) and wants me to go back in two weeks in hopes that they have spindles. i  may just order the stupid thing anyway. she did tell me how she thinks i can fix my ashford but i’m not sure it’s worth my trouble for a student spindle that i’ve gotten a lot of use out of.

bye bye rovings

i had three gorgeous bumps from slimchicken on etsy sitting in my spinning stash since june.

i do love her colors, and while i had problems with one of her bumps when i was trying to chain ply it, i think the bigger issue is that i just am not very good at chain plying- not the quality of the wool. i think the issue at play here as well is that i’m not used to spinning superwash either, so my normal reaction of, oh, too bad i’ll just spit splice it and move on didn’t work.

so these poor bumps just kept hanging out while my mom kept piling up more roving for me, and rhinebeck’s been creeping closer, and i finally realized that i was never going to get around to spinning them, or at least not in the foreseeable future.

i’m really active on bpal.org (bpal is amazing, if you’re into perfume) and do swaps over there from time to time. someone posted an ISO for rovings to send someone as a gift, and i decided that it was time to let go of the pretty bumps that i was holding onto just because they were pretty. maybe someone else will be able to use them for something other than space holders in my stash.

adventures in kool aid land, part 1

i decided to take the plunge into dyeing this week.

my parents gifted me with a few fleeces for Yule a few years back and i’ve been working on spindle spinning them off and on since. the issue is that the fleeces weren’t well processed which makes them hard to spin, and there’s just so much wool in every fleece that i get sick of the color by the time i’m a third of the way through the fleece.

i decided to try kool aid dyeing some of this particular fleece. i went with a red- i like red, and i figured i would aim for enough to make either full mittens or fingerless mitts if i didn’t end up with enough yardage for regular mitts.

i also decided to try dyeing on three different stages of fiber prep (mainly because i had an extremely small amount of wool actually spun at that point and i didn’t want to wait until i had more yarn actually spun). i had three mini skeins spun up- 2 in a ‘normal’ 3 ply and 1 in a chain ply. i also had a handful of carded wool that hadn’t been spun up, and a partial grocery bag of wool to be carded.

i skeined up the spun wool and then wrapped the rolags and fleece in separate pouches made out of cheesecloth so i could move it from soak to pot with minimal problems.

i ended up using three packages of tropical punch kool aid and 1 package of ice blue raspberry lemonade. it ended up sort of a rusty red on the fleece. the dyeing process itself was fairly minimal and straightforward- i soaked all the wool overnight in a water bath with a glug of white vinegar*, then mixed the kool aid with fresh water and the left over bath solution, dunked the wool in, and brought the whole thing to a boil in a stock pot on the back of the stove. it took me about an hour, start to finish. you’re supposed to let the dye solution go clear before removing the skeins but i think that i used too much koolaid. most of the sites that i’ve been reading have been saying 1 package to an ounce of fiber and i don’t own a kitchen scale so i took a shot in the dark with regards to how much fiber was actually there. the wool is pretty dark as well so i thought that i would err on the side of too much dye and have a saturated color than not end up with it taking at all.

the skeins came out looking kettle dyed. i think that the chain ply is my favorite out of the skeins- the loops tend to have less dye than the outer plies so it looks mottled. the rolags came out really saturated but i think they were at the bottom of the stock pot. the uncarded fleece is really mottled with some segments barely having been dyed at all- i’m guessing that if i do uncarded wool again i need to put less wool per package, more kool aid, and less stuff in the pot at a time so that all the fiber can get saturated. i think i may need more vinegar for uncarded wool as well. this is greased fiber as well so i’m not sure if the lanolin makes a difference.

i’ll post pictures of the results if the sun comes back out today, or i’ll post them tomorrow weather permitting. the lighting in this house is horrible.

*most sites say that you don’t need extra vinegar since kool aid is really acidic when it’s unsweetened, but a couple did advise a vinegar bath in case your water is hard, or just using bottled water. i couldn’t see buying water when i already had vinegar and i was trying to keep this as low cost as possible.