Maia Spins

Need Lots of Post-it Notes

We all need a reminder.  OperationBeautiful.com. 

Many thanks to Mary-Heather for the link.  More here. 

Stole My Heart

I've started a new stole.  This is the Lilac Leaf Stole (rav link) from Knitted Lace of Estonia by Nancy Bush.  The fist lace pattern is done along with the first few rows of the second pattern.  If you look closely, you'll see the first nupps just below the live stitches.  It is proving to be a quick knit; I started last night.

The yarn is a new one we are dyeing now.  It is Silk-Linen in a heavy lace weight (about 3000 yards per pound).  After dyeing it, I had reservations.  It was crunchy and seemed flat, showing its linen side.  Once it went through the ball winder, it changed into a soft drapey yarn reminiscent of cotton.  I am really enjoying knitting on it. 

The color is a quiet blue.  A departure from my normal color choices which is adding to the interest.

Hello Bedhead

Part of my plan to post smaller, more frequent blog posts.  Hopefully more interesting than this! I know I have been a bad blogger.  (But a VERY busy dyer).

Follow me on twitter, I post there regularly as MaiaSpins.

Black Sheep Gathering

Been too busy to blog!  I am out the door to Black Sheep Gathering.  Tactile will be vending.  I am looking forward to the sheep (I fell in love with the Shetlands and the Wensleydales last year).

I am also participating in Black Sheep Bingo.

Hope to see you there!

Farm City

I am so very excited about this book!  The author, Novella Carpenter, is a friend of mine and a very talented story teller.  This book is about her adventures creating an urban farm in a vacant lot in a ghetto neighborhood of Oakland, California.

From the back cover:
<snip> "By turns edgy, moving, and hilarious, Farm City marks the debut of a striking new voice in American writing." -- Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food (yes, THAT Michael Pollan!).

I started the first chapter and it was all I could do to put it down and get back to work.  Like her blog, Ghost Town Farm, I expect this to be a great read.

The kick-off event of her book tour will be this Saturday at BioFuel Oasis in Berkeley, California.  She will also be speaking with Michael Pollan on June 18th in Berkeley.  More events can be found on her blog and on the book blog.

Congratulations Novella!!!

Catching Up

So much to catch up on!  I had a great time at Maker Faire. 

That is one crazy zany event!    I love all the Steampunk styles.  It is high tech as seen through Victorian era eyes.

There were lots of cool vehicles like this snail car (satellites not part of the car).

Here is our friend Dre_ah with Jason.  Don't they look fabulous?  She is wearing a bodice, bloomers, and a hat she made.  All are beautifully crafted and fit her so very well.

And, Jason was looking very dapper!

I loved the human powered carnival rides. 

And the human powered music.  I think those are lucky audience members doing the pedaling. They would sometimes have to do some extra pedaling between songs to make enough power.

Joaquin was there to perform his duties.  This is a rare pouty moment.  How can he be so sad and so very cute at the same time?

Babies are so amazing.  One second he is crying and the next he is giggling.  I love that moment when he is between the two emotions and lets out a giggle-cry.

The booth next to us was Bug Under Glass (check out his website he has amazing stuff).  So cool!  Here is a huge moth.  I put a pen on the frame to give you a sense of scale.

A few more pictures of Maker Faire on my Flickr set.

Not much knitting has been accomplished lately but I do have some spinning.

I am spinning my Tactile club fiber from the April shipment, Finn wool.  It is yellow; bright, vibrant, yummy yellow made from weld. 

 The painted is on the wheel waiting to be plied.  My plan is to make a blanket from the first 12 months of club fiber (comfort version).

Here is the finished skein of the solid on my binder.  We send out informational sheets with each shipment.  It is on cardstock so I can punch a hole and attach a yarn sample.  I am also saving a bit of the painted roving.

Next up is my May fiber club featuring Cochineal.  Alpaca-Tussah on the left and Merino-Tussah on the right.

Fiber club is open for sign-ups now through June 15th.  More information here and the Tactile Ravelry group spoiler thread is here.

I am in Salt Lake City for a long weekend.  More on that in my next post.  Of to find SLC LYSs!

Maker Faire

A bit of drive-by blogging here.

Tactile will be at Maker Faire this weekend, May 30 & 31st at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds.

If you are planning on coming, please stop by and say hi.  We will be in the vendor room in booth 22.

Maker Faire is good fun for the entire family.  It is a DIY haven with music, food, and demos of all things crafty: robots, spinning (a personal favorite!), and Star Wars Puppet Craft to name but a few.  Check out the schedule for more info.

Hope to see you there!

Aeolian Finished

And what a lovely project it was!

I love everything about this shawl.  The yarn is so soft and I am still thrilled that I got 650 yards from 2 oz (57 grams) of fiber.  The pattern was very well written.  Best of all the knitting was easy.  The patterns were visible in the knitting and one chart flowed easily into the next.  I was able to travel with this project or pick it up for just a row or two without fear. 

Pattern: Aeolian by Elizabeth Freeman
Source: Knitty (Spring 2009)
Yarn: handspun Tactile Yak-Tussah in Pomegranate colorway.  I used about 520 yards, 1.6 oz.
Modifications: None except that I had enough yardage to add an Agave repeat.  See below for more on calculating enough yardage.
Started: March 28, 2009
Finished: April 30, 2009
More details on my Ravelry Aeolian page.
Model: my friend Linda who doesn't like pictures taken of her.  She bravely agreed to be my model.  I think she looks great!  Thank you Linda!!!

I made the shawlette with an Agave repeat added since I had more yardage than the shawlette called for.  Rather than worry about whether I had enough yardage to do that, I created a spreadsheet (everything is better with a spreadsheet!).  Here it is.  You will need excel to view it.  Feel free to use it and modify it for your own variations.  All I ask is that you give me credit should you post somewhere yourself.  I have made these spreadsheets for other shawls.  The page is linked on the sidebar and linked here. 

As you can see the shawlette turned out pretty big. Gotta love silk for its ability to grow during blocking!  I am wearing it all the time despite the fact that it is warm (who knew 1.6 oz of yak-tussah was sooooo warm!) and the weather has been toasty.

An aside:  I started this post on May 12th.  It has been sitting and waiting for me to take more photos.  I had all manner of ideas.  Now I am thinking I should post the darn thing and move along!  Live and learn.  And, yes, this is a lesson that could easily apply to the rest of my life.

Stripes & What I Learned

Roger's Stripey Socks are done. 

I learned a few things along the way and thought I'd share them with you.

Not All Stripe Joins Are Created Equal

As you can clearly see in the photo below.

The sock on the left I just picked up the new yarn and dropped the old one.  The sock on the right I wrapped the yarns as I changed colors.  Big difference!  And, the difference is greater in person.

Here is what I did (click on any picture to make it larger):
At a color change, loop the old color (here it is the purple) over the new color (the grey).  Tug on the new color (grey) to tighten the last stitch in the grey stripe below. 

You are doing two things to minimize the jog at the color change.  Looping the yarns around each other snugs them together horizontally.  Tightening up the last stitch makes it appear less tall minimizing the vertical jog.  Both give a flatter and smoother join.

Repeat this at every color change.

So you may ask why I didn't use the jogless join.  It is a lovely technique.  The answer is that I didn't want to have a traveling join especially on the foot.  To work the heel, I really need the join to be at the beginning of the round.  I could have stacked the join using jogless join but I didn't want the dip that comes with frequent row changes.

The other thing I did was to loop the yarns once at the join point (beginning of a round).  Say once after round 2 or 3 (I made 5 round stripes).  This doesn't help the join, but it will keep toes from snagging a loop when putting the socks on. 

Looping the yarns may make it harder to pull the last stitch snug (as described above).  You can use the point of your needle to pull on the loops and the yarn carried up across the contrast stripe.  I pull on the yarn from the inside while watching the outside to see how it looks and how much to tug.

A riskier method is to bring the carried yarn out after a couple of rounds.  After one round put the carried yarn back in.  The risk comes with forgetting to put the yarn back in.  One round and it just covers one strand of yarn (sometimes called the running thread).  Two rounds and it is a visible blip.  More than two rounds and it is an obvious mistake.

Why tempt fate?  Because it makes pulling the first stitch of the new color possible without using a knitting needle to tug on various stitches and loops.  Minutia!  I hear you saying!  Yes, it definitely is a minor detail.  It is the littlest bits that keep me entertained.

I made these pictures smaller so you would have to click on them and make a conscious choice to live with mistakes or flirt with frogging when you forget.

Striping The Ribbing

My best trick on these socks is an old favorite.  I like the clean and simple lines of the stripes and didn't want to muddy it with contrasting purl bumps at color change rows in the ribbing.  The solution is so easy.  Knit the first row of the new color.  Return to ribbing on all other rows (I used k2, p2). 

For my 5 round stripes that means:

R1 in Main Color (MC): knit
R2-5 in MC: k2, p2
R6 in Contrast Color (CC): knit
R7-10 in CC: k2, p2

The stripes look great and you can't tell that the knit row is in there.  The knit row doesn't change the look of the ribbing when it is relaxed nor does it diminish its elasticity.

The wrong side looks pretty cool too.  I may use this as the right side someday.  Sometimes the purl bumps add instead of detracting.  The simple act of putting the purl bumps on the knit stitches (the forward portion of the ribbing), makes them a feature.

A couple more shots of Roger's feet:

 

Today I am taking pictures of my blocked Aeolian!  That will be the next post.

Mando un saludo a los amigos de Marcela en Lima, Peru.  Hola!

Stripey!

Had a bit of a bug recently and it has kept me quiet.  A bit of knitting has been achieved though.

Remember the Island Fibers yarn?  Both started grey, one was over-dyed purple.

Now well on its way to becoming Stripey Socks!  Love, love, love them!  So does hubby.  Since they turned out a bit on the large size, they may end up his.  On the upside, I think there will be enough yarn for matching footsies for me.  (fingers crossed)  Dontcha love the inverse colors on the second sock?

I am breaking all my rules on these.  Okay, they are toe-up, that is usual.  However, I am not using my toe-up gusseted heel.  I wanted to maintain the stripes coming up the foot to the heel.  Instead, I increased as I got close to the heel and the worked back and forth after the heel turn.  I know someone must have named this method, but I don't know what it is called. Anyone?

Even more scandalous is that I am knitting these Magic Loop!  Why you may be asking am I forsaking my trusty DPNs?  Recently, I was talked into teaching a magic loop class.  Seemed like a good time to familiarize myself with the technique.  You know, BEFORE I teach it to others.  Turns out it is doesn't suck.  Who knew?  Yeah, a lot of you knew, I'm just late to the party as usual.

Last post I showed a sneak peak of my other new project from the Sweet Grass Wool singles I dyed orange.  I have almost 1100 yards and I am making a capelette.  It starts with a garter stitch neckline, has shoulder increases in the style of Faroese shawls, and then continues on with triangular shawl shaping.  Hmm, maybe I should call this the hodge-podge shawl-capelette-whatever-NotAPonchoBecauseFriendsDon'tLetFriendsWearPonchos garment.  We shall see what it is when it is done.  There isn't a lot more yarn, but I was getting bored and decided to cast on the stripey socks.

Now that I see the picture, it looks like a nice pattern for a sweater . . .  (thinking thoughts here).  Nice idea, but my track record with sweaters is not great.  It has still been 20+ years since I finished an adult sweater.  Yes, I am ashamed.  Sigh.

Speaking of getting bored and not finishing projects (maybe my most populated category of knitting - raise your hand, I know I'm not alone here), I finally finished casting off my Aeolian.  I started, got about 10% of that way done a stopped.  Guess, it made good decor in that state.  Yeah, that's my story.

An Aeolian lump.  Hey!  It may not be pretty (yet!), but I did finish the cast off.  (I'm taking accomplishment where I can get it!)  Any bets on how long it will be before I block it?  This makes 4 projects done and just waiting to be blocked.  Finish-itis alert!

Must go.  I am so behind in my dyeing it isn't funny.  Oh the tyranny of fiber arts!

Happy May and have a fantabulous weekend!