Ravelry Progress Bars?

How did they get there? Some geek with too much time on their hands must have put them in. Or maybe it was me, with a big lot of cutting and pasting from the techie discussion threads on Ravelry (it's easy cos they explain there exactly how to do it). They look pretty good though. Have I said before how much I love Ravelry?

By the way, those treefrog socks are actually finished now - I just haven't got around to taking photos of them. Be assured I'll post pics here too - I don't want to discriminate against any Ravelry-less readers.

And the Wicked sweater may actually be completed by the end of this weekend, as I've finally finished the first sleeve and have made good progress on the second. The body's a bit short still, but it looks as though I'll have plenty of yarn left to add to that once I've done the sleeves. I still love the handspun yarn I'm using for it - the more I work with it, the more the angora fibre in it blooms, it's going to be so cuddly soft to wear. Which means I'll have to go around hugging people to demonstrate :)

Spring with sheep

Spring is definitely in the air around here. This afternoon, while I was in the field feeding the horses, something spooked them and I turned to see all four of the sheep skipping about as though they were lambs. There's something adorable about seeing tiny lambs running around and playing together, but to see a bunch of year-old ewes with full fleeces doing the same thing is just hysterical, it looks so wrong! I really wish I'd had my camera with me. Sadly I didn't, but I'm sure you can conjure up a mental image - it was something like overgrown cotton-wool balls bouncing all over the paddock...

In the meantime, here's a shot I took of two of them at the weekend, during a much more quiet episode in their day:



Other exciting developments today - my copy of the the newly published Pluckyfluff book on spinning novelty yarns (Intertwined by Lexi Boeger) has arrived. I've been looking forward to this so much! And it was worth the wait, compared with her last book (which was brilliant, but tiny), this is huge - and so full of spinner's eye candy it'll keep me entertained for ages. Here's a pic of the cover - the inside is just as beautiful, I'm inspired already.



I'm planning to have a good read of it this evening, and then dive into my fibre stash tomorrow to start experimenting. Maybe I'll use those bouncing sheep as inspiration for a novelty yarn.

Beautiful things

A few weeks ago I wrote a post complaining about my old drum carder - the one that made my cashmere and shetland blend all noily? Well it got me so upset that I simply had to resolve the problem - and this week the solution finally arrived: a lovely new Strauch Petite carder from America. Isn't it beautiful?

I've been carding up all kinds of fibres from my stash (and I have a large and varied fibre stash!), but I've rapidly learned that it's easy to make some pretty ikky looking batts. Even the ikky ones seem to spin up ok, but I want to make things that are beautiful - batts that look so beautiful that I can't wait to spin them up. Anyway, last night I think I cracked it! I took some pretty blue merino top that I bought in Frank Herring's in Dorchester last week, which looked like a blended roving when I bought it, but actually was just three different colours of top twisted together. I split this up into its component colours, found some alpaca in my stash from a dyeing experiment that had gone horribly wrong (think snot green...), and a few handfuls of tussah silk. And then the blending fun begain! And from this:

I blended this:

Pretty isn't it? It's lovely and soft too. I'm having a hard time not spinning it up right now (but must finish spinning the painted roving first - otherwise no cookies).

Anyway, my plan is to take the other two colours of wool top, i.e. these:



Then I'll blend them into similarly beautiful batts, before spinning each colour separately, and finally ply all three of the singles together to make a three ply yarn. It's going to take a while, as I plan to spin them finely - for, you guessed it, knitted socks! But I think it's going to be worthwhile.

Oh, and in case you haven't seen enough beautiful things for one post, here's a pic I snapped of my little cat Fili this morning, enjoying some rare winter sunshine. I think she's smiling.

Stripey Superwash

I didn't post last week as I was preoccupied with a BWMB course I attended to learn how to shear sheep. For the last two years I've had problems finding a shearer who was prepared to come out to shear my tiny flock. So last year, after spending a whole day shearing four ewes with blade shears by myself, I resolved to learn how to do it properly with electric clippers. Since this is a crafty blog, I won't describe much about the course here - other than to say it was flippin' hard work! But I learned a huge amount about how to handle sheep, and I'm absolutely determined to get some more practice and take the certification test (passing involves shearing three sheep in the 'approved' way in 30 mins, I'm sure I can do that after some practice!).

Anyway, this weekend, exhausted, I thought a bit of gentle spinning would be in order. So, from some of this:


I made this:

Although I say it myself, it's beautiful yarn - I'm really pleased with how it turned out. The roving was a painted superwash merino from Violet Green Yarns, which I bought to make sock yarn - and to try out a superwash fibre, which I've never spun before. I wanted to preserve the colours from the roving as distinctly as possible, so I decided to spin a fine singles and navajo ply it. I haven't done any navajo plying in ages, and I ended up in a right old mess to start with - and the cat who 'helped' me made the tangles even worse! But once I got into a rhythm, the plying went pretty well. I had to run the plied yarn through the wheel (or should that be over the wheel?) a second time, as it didn't have quite enough twist the first time. I was plying on the largest whorl on my Majacraft Rose wheel, so that it went nice and slowly to give my fingers enough time to do the navajo chaining bit, but that also meant it was putting in very little twist with each treadle. The second lot of plying hid the joins in the chains better, although they're still a bit more open than I'd like. Not quite sure how to fix that. But overall, I'm delighted with how it turned out, I think it almost looks like a painted yarn, which is the look I was aiming for. So, that's 30 grams done, now I just have the remaining 100g of roving to finish!

Widdershins are done!

Here they are after a day's happy wearing by me:


I love how they turned out, they're the tidiest socks I've ever made (which isn't saying much I suppose, I've only made four socks so far). But I really enjoyed knitting from the toe up and I like the slip-stitch heel which looks like a cuff down sock. It makes them a little bit subversive I think, outwardly conventional, and only I know they were made differently. Well and you do too now, please don't tell!

I've already started the next pair, in some beautiful Natural Dye Studio BFL sock yarn:


I'm already getting better at the invisible cast on, I use Judy's Magic Cast On and it really is a neat method. This time I'm going to use yarn overs instead of the wrap and turn method, as recommended in a comment from Squeaky, here on my blog, and see if I get on better with that way of hiding short rows. I believe Squeaky actually wrote the Widdershins pattern, so she should know :) Thanks Squeaky!

Socky goodness and a problem with wraps

So, I've decided I like knitting socks. This is my second proper pair that I'm working on and I'm smitten. The pattern is the plain version of Widdershins from Knitty, which is worked from the toe upwards, but has a cushy heel flap that looks as though it was knit from the top down.

Warning - knitting tech talk follows (if you'd rather avoid this, skip between * and *... hey, that's like a knitting pattern):

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The heel is turned with short rows, and at the end of every short row, you're supposed to do a 'wrap and turn' (i.e. wrap the yarn around the turning stitch). It took me a while to work out what to do with the wrapped stitched after I'd turned the heel and was joining in the gusset stitches. The pattern said that on the final round of the heel turning part, where you do a whole round past all the wrapped stitches, whenever you meet a one, you have to to knit the wrap with the stitch it wrapped around. Hmm, this is sounding complicated just to write about it! Anyway, at first I did as I was told by the pattern, but while the wrap picking up thing worked on one side of the sock, I ended up with gappy holes on the other side. I knit and frogged the whole heel three or four times, and threw it across the room in disgust (at which point my sister, who was staying at the time, nearly suffered a knitting-related injury) before I figured it out.

When I had finally calmed down, had a cup of tea and gone to my 'happy place', I eventually worked out what was causing the problem. The gaps were appearing because I was knitting the wrap into the wrong stitch on one side of the sock. The gaps appear because the heel is worked back and forth, but the rest of the sock is knit in the round, and switching between the two styles makes a hole where the turn is. The point of knitting the wrap in with the turning stitch is to close the gap where a short row turn has been made. However, on one side of the sock this gap appears before you reach the wrapped stitch, and on the other side, the gap happens after the wrapped stitch. That's because on one side you're knitting forward in relation to knitting in the round, and the other side you're going back. So the cure for the gappiness? When you do that first row in the round after the back and forth short-rowed heel turn, on one side you knit the wrap with the stitch after it, and on the other side you knit the wrap with the stitch before it.

I've no idea if this is the orthodox method, but it sure worked for me. And my first sock is now pretty and non-gappy, I'm very happy with it. I'm just about to reach the same point on its partner, so just in case I'm wrong about all the above, watch out for flying sock needles!

Here endeth the knitting tech talk.
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In the meantime, I've decided I like the look of the Widdershins socks very much and have been scouring the net for more pretty sock yarn. As if I need it, have you seen my stash on Ravelry??!!

A sheepy interlude

The weather's been so miserable here lately that I haven't caught any decent light to take photos of my crafty projects. But the blog's looking a bit sad, so I think it's time for a sheepy interlude...

These three, who joined my flock last autumn, are Buffy, Willow and Cordelia. The pic was taken on a frosty morning in December, and the sheep were running towards me as they thought they might get some food. No such luck for them, as I was preoccupied with the camera. Can you see the disappointed expression on Buffy's face (she's the one closest to the camera)? She's just realised that I'm not carrying a feed bucket after all.

I'm looking forward to working with the fleeces that these ladies are currently growing. They're last year's lambs, so their wool still has a lamby softness to it. They're Texel crosses, I've never tried Texel fleece before, but from the sneaky glances I've taken of this lot, it seems to be fairly crimpy, but fine, and a nice creamy colour. Probably ideal for socks - which is good, as sock knitting is rapidly becoming an obsession for me. More on that soon...