A Modern Writer's Adventures and Misadventures: 2015

Penultimate veil update

I have since gotten married, but I have yet to organize my pictures from the wedding.

With less than a month to go, I cast off my veil, washed it, and blocked it. True to the pattern description, I stretched it to six feet in diameter, but the way I wore it prevented it from being a train on the ground, which was good because I didn't want it to get dirty. I will have a last post with it on for my wedding, but that will come later.

I couldn't believe that my entire veil condensed into this sink! I was also surprised that the water changed color. Months of dust in the air did attach to my veil, so I'm glad I washed it out!

My first blocking attempt. It turned out that I needed more blocking mats, so it was more oval than circular. I waited a week for my order to arrive so I could block it correctly.

The final blocking. I still didn't have enough blocking mats, but they served my purpose. You can see more of the detail here.

Happy knitting!

Journey of wool fibers to hats

I recently bought a spinning wheel, and of course I started spinning with wool! I am still deciding on my style. With my first yarn, I fluctuated between the worsted technique (different from worsted yarn, though I did spin worsted/bulky yarn--weird how the definition changes from knitting to spinning!) and folding the fiber over my finger. Worsted feels more natural to me, but I suppose I will adjust my technique depending on the type of yarn that I want to spin. Perhaps when I am more advanced, I will cringe to read that I used multiple techniques to spin one yarn, but it spun, it's holding together, and I used it to knit. Below is the journey it made:

My brown correidale in a single ply.

Here it is plied with white wool.

Off the wheel and onto the knitty knotty

In a warm bath with wool wash.

Poorly twisted into a skein, but it made me so happy because it looks like yarn!

The two hats that I made from the yarn I spun. They don't look as "professional" as my other hats with commercially made yarn, but they still look fine.

Happy knitting and spinning!

Spinning Bamboo

I am trying to improve the frequency of my posts! I will also include pictures soon.

I bought my first spinning wheel last fall. Like most beginning spinners, I started off with wool. However, a charity that I would like to knit for prefers non-wool hats and scarves. Therefore I decided to try spinning bamboo.

Bamboo is challenging. It has shorter fibers, but they stick together a lot. I think that's what spinners mean when they call it "slippery." Unlike wool, the fibers really seem to go in the same direction and stick together. Sometimes, especially while I'm spinning, I have to pull very hard in order to draft the fibers out.

Starting the bamboo yarn was also challenging. I had tried spinning more loosely with wool to create softer yarn. When I attempted that with bamboo, the yarn kept breaking off and it was difficult to reattach because the fibers were too loose. Then I went to the opposite extreme and spun too tightly, which also caused the yarn to break.

I have experimented with how I hold the yarn and my pre-drafted. Spinning from the fold does work, but my pieces are longer than I am accustomed to with wool, so the thickness of my yarn seems to vary unless I take a very short piece. Another technique I have tried is pre-drafting the bamboo and spinning worsted. That works better for me with consistency, but it sheds on my legs a lot! I have read that shorter fibers do shed more, but this is something else!

I plan to ply it with wool, so hopefully that will prevent shedding in completed knit hats and scarves. I also plan to talk with more advanced spinners about their techniques.

I think, in the future, I will buy acrylic or another fiber to knit with for this charity because I really enjoy the feel of wool while I spin. Perhaps I will change my mind when I am more advanced.

Happy spinning!

Cap Shawl Border

The cap shawl is coming along nicely. It was taking me a little over an hour to do the 30-row repeat, but now it's going faster. Because of its structure, I don't keep the stitch counter on the needle, but on a table nearby. I change it every other row because they are so short. Purling backwards is fun! It goes much faster. I wonder why I don't do this stitch regularly... I may try to knit/purl backwards more in the future. Not only is it beneficial for short rows like these, but also for entrelac, so I understand. I have wanted to attempt entrelac for years, but have not found the time. I learned how to do it once. The tricky part was knitting backwards and picking up stitches, but now that I can knit backwards and read my knitting better, I think it would be easier.

The 30-row repeat is going faster for the border: I can do it in about 45 minutes now. I still find it relaxing, but I'm only about a third of the way through. If I do one repeat a day, I should be done by the end of March. Luckily I have spring break, so hopefully I can finish this shawl sooner. Once I'm done, I plan to blog more about spinning yarn. I also want to work on some projects that I've had on my mind for years, but other projects keep interrupting them!

Happy knitting!

Cap Shawl Update

I need to get better about posting more regularly!

The cap shawl, in Victorian Lace Today, is a huge project and is taking me forever! It doesn't help that I am in graduate school with a part-time job, but still, an hour a day--if I'm lucky--hardly makes a dent!

I started the project in early August, around the 5th. I only just finished the body of the shawl on Friday, February 13th. The complexity doesn't make this project so time consuming: it's the sheer number of stitches! It's knit in the round, so it's only knitting, knitting two together, and yarn overs--you don't even purl until the outer edge of the body! Yet towards the end, with 738 stitches, it's about an hour to knit a lace row and 45 minutes to do the knit row.

I went to Grandma's Spinning Wheel in Tucson to get help on starting the knitted-on border. Jimmy was a lot of help, and he was really friendly. You have to break the yarn, cast on eleven stitches, and start working on the chart, which I didn't have to write out because it's so much shorter. I did have to learn a new skill, which is purling backwards. It's so much faster than turning my work for each short row. It makes me want to knit/purl backwards for any short project, like scarves. I LOVE learning new skills in knitting, and I know I have a lot more to learn, which just makes me excited.

The border is going well so far. Since it's a 30-row repeat, one repeat is taking me about one hour, especially since I'm still going a bit slowly on purling backwards. The pattern is so easy, though, that it's very relaxing to work on, and soon I may be able to have a conversation while working on it. I hope that my feelings toward the border will continue to be positive and not transition to a purgatory-like state.

This shawl is going to be my wedding veil, and now that I'm so close to being finished, I cannot wait to see how it expands. My non-knitting friends and family don't understand what a knitted veil will look like (sweater on my head is what they envision). However when I go to a knitting store, everyone sees the project as I do. Regardless, it's not going to be a modern-traditional veil that is completely see-through. I will use it to cover my face when I walk down the aisle. I am NOT doing this traditional covering because I am traditional. I am insisting on covering my face because I spent so much time on the project that everyone should look at the veil for at least one minute. I'm hoping it's impressive.

More updates soon to come...I hope!

Happy knitting!