Knitting Ventured

Back in March, I was waxing lyrical about my new obession, spinning.  I’ve finally finished was has been the greatest labour of love I have ever embarked upon in my knitting career, the Hecate stole, made with my own handspun lace-wieght. Obviously to say I was as pleased as a puppy with two tails would be an understatement and the delight has been magnified by 100% because the intended recipient is also full of glee.

Lace knitting is a fairly selfish act, unlike the manfacture of other knitted items, it requires a level of concentration that means slepping down to your nearest stitch and bitch with said item is just not a viable option.Family members become an almost constant trial, because the minute you pick the needles up there will appear a whirling dervish of spouse, children and animals all demanding attention. I have actually wondered whether I remsemble Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings when he goes all “monster face” in Rivendell when he spy’s the ring around Frodo’s neck. I suspect so, if the look on my husband and daughters face this morning when having tinked back the same row 3 times; I finally roared “I’M COUNTING”!

However the act of giving these items mitigates the antisocial behaviour, the joy on peoples faces when they open a parcel full of lacey goodness is worth every second of grumping and harumpfing, it also teaches you not to get attached to items, each shawl I have gifted has come with a real emotional wrench as a thing of beauty passes from my hands to another.

Obviously this general rambling would not be complete unless I showed said item off, I did consider posting individual pictures up and then I remembered Picasa which a fellow Ravelry member recommended a few months back, what a great little tool for any blogger who may want to make an image heavy blog post, it took just a few minutes to download and install and within 10 minutes I had a passable “mosaic” style picture using the collage function ready to include in this post. I suggest people go and try it out, it’s fun and a great way of organising related images for blogs, facebook, forums posts etc.

Only it seems when I am eating my metaphorically hand spun & hand knitted hat!

Following my post regarding the state of British fibre related publications I have been studiously avoiding the magazine racks in Tesco’s, well that isn’t strictly true, I wander past “that” shelf and persuade myself not to look on a fairly regular basis.

Instead Ive been investing my money in knitting and spinning books; when the average magazine costs around £5 and the average book seems to cost about £20, breaking a two magazine a month habit has in a very short while lead to some interesting editions to my book shelf, books which contain information and patterns I am actually interested in and which I shall be reviewing in the very near future.

Anyway I digress, last friday, I performed my mildly masochistic ritual of walking slowley past the craft magazine rack, pretending to avert my eyes, whilst really taking a sneaky peak, after all, you never know. And Something caught my eye.

Oh my, oh my, oh my, who is this superhero? Is it Henry the mild mannered janitor, or is there an editorial team who might actually be listening to the new generation of knitters? …..Could Be!

I did actually wonder if one of the editorial team had actually read my blog because everything in the edition was something that I had mentioned in my rant, ethical knitting, information on fibre types, charity information such as the pennies for hours of pleasure project which is being run in association with Medecins Sans Frontiere, the list goes on, and with the exception of a rather dubious “breakfast” set, the patterns were fresh and wearable. The masterclass was not a rehash of the same tired and basic “How to cast on” or “How to do a knit stitch” techniques, it appears that a level of competancy is assumed, and about bloody time too.

I shall be keeping an eye out for this publication in future, long may they keep the quality up.

Ive been very quiet the last few months, the reason for this is because I have discovered a new passion, spinning. I started by buying a drop spindle set from Forest Fibres and watching a few tutorials on YouTube. I suppose I had a bit of an advantage over most spinning newbies as I have vague recollections of being taught how to drop spindle by one of my school teachers at senior school. I could say I took to it like a duck to water, but that would be a bit of a fib, my first attempt resembled something that would make a rastafarian proud. In fact I am seriously considering making some form of head scarf arrangement and sewing lengths of my first single into it to form fake dreds.

The set fortunately came with a selections of 4 x 50g samples of different “tops” and although my first 50g barely made 35m; but by the time I finished the final top I was getting several hundred metres of singles out of 50g and I was well and truly hooked. I HAD to have a spinning wheel and I was prepared to do just about anything to get one.

Thus followed weeks of frantic stalking on ebay, but something held me back, I was nervous about buying a wheel unseen and untried. I know plenty of people who have done this and been very satisfied, but my inner pessimist kept me from entering into that mad frenzy of bidding that the final hours of an ebay auction normally elicits. No I was going to research this, work out what I wanted and wait dammit until I could try the wheels that made my shortlist.

It wasn’t as hard as I first thought, there are some excellent resources out there in Internet land, and a bazillion people who are more than willing to share their thoughts an opinions and generally enable a prospective fibre freak

Questions that needed to be asked were:

• Do you want a Scotch Tension or Double Drive
• Do you want a wheel that you can upgrade
• Do you want a single or a double treddle
• What kind of yarns are you planning to spin
• What style of wheel do you like
• What is your budget

My choice came down to the Ashford Traveller or the Kromski Sonata both are smallish wheels, that have a good range of ratios as standard but are upgradeable, my preference was the Traveller as I prefer castle style wheels but undetered I took a pleasurable trip across the peaks on a snowy January morning to Winghams to try them both. The Traveller won out but only just, it actually came down to the action of the treddles, the Sonata felt, well just too “springy” to me.

Ive been pretty much addicted ever since and a bare month later I upgraded the traveller with a lace flyer and a stretchy band, today I finished my first lace project which is destined to become this.

I bought 500g of Oat Meal BFL from Winghams, which is fast becoming my daughters favourite place (and mummy’s too), in reality I used only about 250g, so when I am feeling a little masochistic in the future I can do it all over again

Oat Meal Blue Faced Leicster

It took forever to spin this up worsted, but I was being terribly picky about picking out slubs and noils and checking the WPI; that and I did only use the 15:1 ratio on my lace flyer, but I eventually finished with some very pretty singles at about 52-55wpi.

Oat Meal BFL Singles

I changed the ratio to 11:1 to ply the singles up to a 2ply which averages approx 30-32wpi, in weight that equates to 150g of fibre yelding approx 1000yds of heavy laceweight.

1000yds Heavy Laceweight

Lol just another couple of bobbins worth to ply and then I can start the project, umm well maybe, what I forgot when I chose this fibre is that it comes up darker once spun, so I am toying with the idea of breaking out the logwood and adding a pale purple overdye, we shall see.

I’ve been meaning to post about this subject for a while, but everytime I attempt to place fingers to keyboard, words fail me spectacularly. Walk down any magazine section in a supermarket, news agent, or bookstore/stationers and the shelves are packed, jam packed with subject specific periodicals. If I want to buy a computer there are numerous magazines originally entitled such things as “What PC” or “PC Buyer” these periodicals are full to the gunnels with product reviews, comparisons, best buy retailers and in fact everything that you would need to get the most bang for your buck.

And it doesn’t stop with computers, games and other electronic goods, the home and lifestyle periodicals are multitudinous, each brimming with articles, tips and best buys for their discerning readers, and there are sub sects within each of these genres of periodical. For example I am a tree hugging hippy my personal favourite lifestyle/cookery periodical is Country Kitchen, its tag line is “Traditional, Seasonal and Fresh Food”. I am as likely to read about wild food foraging and how to make hawthorn jelly as I am to learn about the latest greatest ground breaking techniques in the search for the idiot proof perfect yorkshire pudding and how to wow dinner party guests for less than a fiver a head.

Practical Hobbies often have more than their fair share of these displays and each sub genre is represented proportionately according to the popularity of the hobby; photography, scuba diving, camping and caravanning, the list goes on and within that list falls the arts and crafts periodicals, I am going to refrain from comments regarding why anybody would want a magazine discussing card making and quilling as it seems to me that punching holes into card and curling strips of paper around pencils and glueing them on the punched out bits of card is totally pointless, oh darn it, I did anyway, oops.

Anyway, moving swiftly on we discover the fiber related magazines, this really is limited to knitting and crochet, although I have discovered that my local Borders do, sporadically, stock Spin Off Magazine (but I will get to that in a minute). There are a number of “Big Players” in the knitting periodical market and in my not so humble opinion they are failing miserably to hit any specific target audience, instead they are trying to be all things to all knitters. So who are the main culprits that leave me wishing for something more from the knitting periodicals available and what makes them so bloody awful.

• Simply Knitting
• Lets Knit
• Knitting

Okay firstly, editors and marketing guru’s of the above publications, please note I am not 7 years old, cheap plastic toys may sell comics but any half serious knitter or crocheter is going to have stitch markers, needle holders, and every gauage of needle or hook going, probably multiples there of and I can guarantee they will be a darn sight better quality than the plastic tat you are attaching to the front covers of your magazines to try and hide the ever diminishing (both in quantity and quality) content by bulking out the plastic wallet the magazine is wrapped in and obscuring the actual content.

And whilst we are on this subject, please do not insult our intelligence by claiming that said “gift” is worth the cover price of the magazine, which is on average a fiver a pop yet is as flimsy as “Take a break”, the gifts are worth a pittance and to be honest in comparison to say Yarn Forward (whose well bound, matt, understated exterior is vastly more appealing to the young and modern target audience of late 20’s to early 30 somethings who are responsible for the “Knitting revival” that your editorial teams keep harping on about – but sadly harder to source in a shop than the proverbial rocking horse poop); so are your magazines.

I do not want to knit toys, tea cozy’s, fruit, christmas decorations or any number of other pointless items that will clutter up my lounge and collect dust and in general are too kitsch to qualify as fashinable in a retro kind of way.

I want to knit/crochet elegant blankets, throws, cushion covers etc. that will hopefully embue my child infested living spaces with perhaps just a smidgen of designer panache, I want to knit clothes that my family will wear and the other mummies at school will coo over asking me where I got whatever it is that I am wearing and I want to feel excessively smug when I shrug and say “Oh this old thing, I made it myself”.

I want to read about Urban Knitting, Community or School Fiber Projects and Charity related events that I can get involved in, I want to know where my nearest guild, towns womens or WI is located, I want proper reviews on the various events that profess to cater for the knit and crochet communities (Stitch n Craft Manchester is a good example – waaay to much stamping card making and quilling for my taste and if I had reviewed it, I would have made it very clear), I want reviews of the LYS’s, workshops that are offered  and other businesses who advertise in the plethora of classified that increasingly seem to bulk out the already flimsy content.

I want to know where my yarn comes from, where to buy organic, how to reduce my yarn miles, where to purchase good quality undyed yarn and read articles such as acid dying with food coloring; interesting things to do (non arigurimi related) with left over half balls of yarn, including a possible swap database or even just a regular desperately seeking column (I think I’ve seen it once maybe in simply knitting).

And finally as this little rant is in danger of exceeding a thousand words any second so I better wrap it up, on the grounds that I cannot find a UK focussed spinning and fiber magazine how about going some way to filling the gap and doing a little feature each month on yarn and yarn creation? Not much to ask now is it?

For some time now I have harboured an irrational pattern lust for a shawl named “Pretty as a Peacock”, which can be found here. Having successfully completed my first Swallowtail, my lacey confidence has grown and this lust is growing day by day. But despite looking almost on a daily basis for the right yarn for best part of two months, the right yarn still hasn’t jumped out and bitten me. Well as a wise man once said, if Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, then the mountain will come to Mohammed, so I picked up some food coloring, some spirit vinegar, some disposable foil roasters from the supermarket and ordered some Zitron Trekking 4ply undyed. I would make the right color.

Now part of the problem is that the pattern calls for a 4 or 5 ply sport weight yarn and a lot of 4plys come as varigated colorways at the moment, I suspect this is as a result of people discovering the joy of home knitted socks and in particular in self striping patterns. All well and good if you are making socks, but a bugger if your’e using 4ply for anything else, the wrong kind of varigated as I am discovering can totally detract from a beautiful lace pattern as easily as it can add to it.

Rowan do a reasonable range of solid 4plys is fairly stock colors, but that is what they are, just this seasons stock colors, nothing more nothing less. All very conservative and mundane to be honest uninspired, and this shawl is anything but. I deserves light and irredescence and vitality, the wearer should feel like a peacock strutting thier stuff, elegant, regal and yet colorful.

When the yarn arrived I will be honest I was disappointed, it looked rough and starchy and not at all what I expected a good sock yarn to look or feel like, but I noticed a littled note on the bag sticker, “this yarn has not been steamed”. Not 100% sure what that actually meant, I let it roll around my head for a few weeks all the time telling myself that the steaming process is what would turn this scratchy looking yarn into something wearable, and I was right, but it still put me off so all the gubbins to dye my peacock yarn sat in my ever growing stash unused and unloved for a while.

I finally decided that I couldn’t ignore the money I had spent, especially as I had found some malabrigo 4ply online that might do the job, but I couldn’t justify forking out for more yarn until I had at least made half an attempt and making my own. So I soaked the skiens for an hour or so in luke warm water with a splash of vinegar.

I then prepared 300mls of cold water, a tablespoon of vinegar and 6mls of red and 1mls of blue Dr. Oetker food dye. I placed the yarn into the roasting tins, one skein per tin and poured over the purple-ish mix, to be honest it barely made a dent in the yarn, just ickly blobs of purple here and there and the dye seemed to exhaust almost on contact so no chance of gently squooshing it to spread the color, so then I added another 100mls of water with 6mls red and 2mls blue and added the deeper purple, the result was better but too purple and still not what I was looking for so I went all guns and added another 200mls of water per tin with just pure blue in it, bingo, just what I was looking for. The tins of course were swilling with water and as I mentioned before the dye exhausted itself almost on contact, as when I poured the excess water out it was clear, yet when I placed some kitchen roll on the yarn no color leeched either. But to be safe, I decided to bake it anyway, after all what could it hurt. So in it went at 120 deg C for about 40 minutes. I then rinsed the skeins and then popped them in a laundry bag and washed them at 30 deg on a woollens setting. And wow! look what I got.

Not bad for a first attempt eh! This has certainly got me thinking that from now on, I will dye my own yarns rather than searching vainly for the right colors, perhaps this should be something to add to my new years resolutions, only buy yarn you have to dye yourself

For sometime now the idea of learning lace knitting has appealed to me; but I have shied away because of the reaction the word “lace” seems to elicit from some people. Lace it seems is the Marmite of the knitting world, you either love it or you hate it.

Undetered, I decided to join a beginners lace group on ravelry and join in with their monthly knit-along, just to see if I would take to it or not, the pattern chosen was the Swallowtail Shawl by Evelyn A. Clark, the pattern is available to download for free here at the designers website.

As I read the pattern I came across the concept of a new stitch, the Nupp (apparently pronounced “Noop”), and whilst the instructions on the pattern were very clear as to how to create this stitch, I figured that it wouldn’t do my any harm what so ever to see what my fellow Ravellers thought of this stitch and perhaps learn from others sage words of wisdom.

What I discovered was fear and trepidation, the Nupp, the holy terror of lace knitting, a stitch to be avoided like the plague, a stitch that makes grown women cry and otherwise gregarious knitters side step perfectly good patterns because of them.  Well of course this intrigued me, as I like a challenge and refuse to be beaten by anything. I would master this stitch or die hanging from my own yarn trying.

So when I reached to point in the project where the nupp repeats started, I girded my loins and prepared for battle;  I was actually quite disappointed, it’s not a hard stitch at all, in fact I found it thoroughly enjoyable to do, there is something about seeing those little bobbles appear, adding texture to your project that is deeply satisfying.

Now this isn’t to say that there is nothing at all to them, they require a knack, but one easily mastered if you follow a few guidelines:

• Knit them loose.
• When you’ve finished the k1 yo k1 yo k1, insert your left hand needle into the stitches as if to purl and just give them a little tug to make sure they are loose enough.
• When you close them off on the purl row, pull the stitches down a little with your finger and thumb so that you can easily insert the needle
• Count that you have the correct number of stitches (3,5,7,9) and haven’t included the outside yo’s before you complete the closing stitch.

And really that is all there is to it, but don’t just take my word for it, there is an excellent tutorial here