handspun handknit

So as I’ve finally started turning out reasonably usable-looking yarn, I’ve also been able to start making things from it – my dreams of making a floaty laceweight wrap in purest handspun camel/silk are still a fair way off, but in the meantime I’ve made a couple of things I’m quite chuffed with.

Firstly, I’m currently working on a drop stitch scarf (very similar to the one that was in spin-off a while back) made from hand-dyed BFL from the lovely john at easyknits.  I met him and his stall of gorgeous offerings at the brighton knitting safari (which I haven’t mentioned at all so far but was fabulously organised by peri, and has also been blogged about by annie here and by wibbo here). This delicious fibre is called ‘harkness green’ (after cap’n jack harkness, no less) and, though I would have loved the colours even if it hadn’t had a geeky name, I have to say for me it adds a little je ne sais quoi

harkness green BFL

I spun it on my wheel, but as I wanted to keep the striping, I then navajo plied it on my spindle as I still can’t quite get my head round the rhythm of doing it on a wheel! Another on my list of things to learn…

navajo plied on spindle

I’m about 2/3rds of the way into the scarf – it shouldn’t take me long to finish really, but I’ve temporarily set it aside to get cracking on xmas knitting. I didn’t think I was going to be doing much this year but have had a couple of late requests – and that happens so rarely I want to make sure I get them done!

scarf in progress - finished, blocked version will look much nicer!

I’ve also knocked up a lengthways garter stitch scarf for a friend for her birthday:

beautifully squooshy

My favourite so far, however, is my swallowtail shawl – I spun this ‘petrol spill’ BFL from the fabulously talented spindlefrog on etsy and plied it with a very similar colourway of hers called ‘dragonfly’:

petrol spill

and I got about 510m of roughly 4-ply weight:

petrol spill plied with dragonfly

and then I made the swallowtail shawl (the pattern can be downloaded free, from evelyn clark’s site). I added 4 repeats of the budding lace (main body of shawl) but then got worried I was going to run out of yarn and started on the lily of the valley bits.

sooooft and squishy!

I skipped the nupps and used beads – partly because I was worried I didn’t have enough yarn, and partly because I’d found the perfect petrol-spill-coloured beads to go with this colour!

old beady

It could maybe have done with being a bit bigger – but it’s the perfect size to wrap around my neck as a scarf, which is what it gets used for anyway. Plus, I had enough yarn left over to have done at least a couple more repeats – typical!

don't worry, the fire doesn't work

Of course, I still have about a billionty mini-skeins sitting around… I think I’ll just keep hanging onto them until I get round to knitting a big crazy blanket of some kind. However, judging by the lack of progress on my sock yarn blankie since I started spinning, this may take a while!

if you have a problem…

if no one else can help… and if you can find them… maybe you can hire – The A-Team.

Ah, classic shows from the 80s. This post has nothing to do with them at all. It’s just that my weekend has been more creative than usual, in a ‘making do with what you have’ way, and it just reminded me of how the A-Team would always create, say, a tank, out of a shopping trolley, some callipers and an umbrella. And welding, there was always lots of welding.

I finished the red scarf, made from the SoHo wool lovely Bruno got me for my birthday, using 3 balls, because I wanted to save one of them to make either a matching hat, or.. something else. Not sure whether it was the stitch pattern that used up the yarn, or whether the yardage is just a bit rubbish, but 3 balls would normally make me a nice long scarf, and this turned out a bit disappointing.

I’m normally too lazy to block scarves, but I decided to take an ultra-aggressive stance with this one, partly because a/ it’s wool, and it just might work, b/ to open up the stitch pattern a bit, and c/ I didn’t want to use another ball and I was bored of knitting this scarf anyway so I had to stop.

So – unblocked, this scarf was maybe 3.5, nearly 4 feet long at most. I soaked it in a shallow bath with a bit of hair conditioner for a good 10 mins or so, to make sure everything was wet, then gently squeezed the excess water from it, and rolled it in a towel for more gentle patting and water removal. For the non-knitters out there, the gentleness is key, or you will end up with a big ball of red felt. I didn’t want to just lay it flat on the bed as I normally would, I wanted to stretch this bugger and keep it stretched till it dried in that shape.

This is where the A-Team bit came in. Ta-daaa! My home-made scarf-lengthenerer.

That is my mum’s old sewing stand thingy with a thick wadding of towel on it (it has inlaid wood on top and didn’t want to bugger it up with any damp), scarf draped over, and – here is where the cunningness comes in! – I wanted to weight the scarf at both ends to stretch it. After a bit of proper thinking, and an examination of the tools available to me, my monkey-brain came up with this – knitting needles in the ends of the scarf (so they weren’t pulled into points), crappy wire coathangers hooked onto the needles, and then the dullest, heaviest books I could find wedged onto the hangers to pull & provide some tension. Not exactly ‘end of series 2 of Battlestar Galactica’ tension… but very effective. So cunning you could pin a tail on it & call it a fox.

Finished scarf – extreme close-up and extreme.. um.. not so close-up.

I will definitely do this again next time I make a scarf! It’s now 5 feet long! My cunning A-Team plan gave me well over a foot of extra length.

*rubs hands together and lights cigar*

Now if only that trick would work for everything…

woo, and indeed hoo!!

I have been checking my Ravelry status obsessively ever since I realised you could do it – and noticed a week or so ago that they seem to have speeded up the invites considerably, inviting a few 100 per day. Considering as far as I know this is just a 2 person operation and it’s only in beta, not even launched yet, I think they’re doing a fantastic job and would shake them both by the hand if I could. However – most important are the statistics below:

• You signed up on July 31, 2007
• You are #22005 on the list.
• 206 people are ahead of you in line.
• 16522 people are behind you in line.
• 56% of the list has been invited so far

206!! 206!! At the rate they’ve been going the last few days I should get my invite later today! Soooo excited! Knowing my luck, getting this excited about it means that it is the perfect time for a server crash or something at their end, but I shall keep my fingers crossed!

Yes, it’s a knitting thing that I’m getting excited about, if you’re not interested in knitting, move along, there’s nothing to see here.

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*edit* I’m IN!!! and soooo much work ahead of me, haha. It’s the most FAB site ever, a true ‘Web 2.0′ application. I’m very excited. Have barely scratched the surface of what you can do with it, and have been photographing and cataloguing stash/projects and so on all evening. My Ravelry name is ‘pie’. No sunshine there – but rest assured her cat hair is lovingly woven into everything I make. Hardly had a chance to look up people and patterns yet… and only a couple of minor errors so far, and with amusing error messages, so still think they’re doing a great job   They also won brownie points in the ‘About’ section for asking me my favourite ‘curse word’ – I thought ‘how cute & american lol’, then realised I was too english to actually put ‘c**t’ (see! I can’t even type it!!) and put ‘bollocks’ instead.