Finished-Object-Friday #9

I have three FO's to share with you this week: two knitted and one spun!

Flowerhead:

Malabrigo Yarn Worsted, colorway Natural

My childhood next-door-neighbor commissioned me to knit her this flowered headband/earwarmer. She sent me a photo of what she was thinking and I set about recreating it. It was a lot of fun to design something on-the-fly, without worrying too much about making sure it was repeatable or that the steps were explain/understand like I do when I am designing for my patterns. For this headband I held the yarn double so it would be extra thick and warm. I increased until it was wide enough, knit straight for a bit, and decreased back down with a few buttonholes thrown in. I knit it in a rib so it would have good stretch and loft and wouldn't curl in on itself much. I followed this cute flower tutorial with a few changes (mostly just increasing more than it describes for a larger, rufflier flower).

Darwin looks so happy to be included in this photoshoot, doesn't he?

I think it came out super cute! I hope the recipient likes it.

Manly Cowl:

BMFA De-Vine, colorway Mossley Manly

 Here is the finished secret cowl that I made for my dear Fiasco for Valentine's Day. He had become a little bit obsessed (for a non-knitter) with this fantastic yarn when I made myself a cowl (to the point where he made visitors feel the fabric of said cowl) so it was clear he needed one of his own!

  

I borrowed elements from my Dissipative cowl design and manly-ed it up a bit: knitted at a larger gauge, made it wider and taller, removed the lace and added a few cable details. I really love how it came out and the color is just perfect. It's a slightly purple-ish grey with streaks of acid green. A little more adventurous than the plain dark greens I usually use for the Fiasco's knitwear but still plenty manly.

The Shire:

This yarn was spun from 70% superwash Merino / 30% SeaCell fiber dyed by The Wacky Windmill in the colorway "The Shire". I ABSOLUTELY ADORE IT. I am not really a 'brown' person, but this skein is so much more than brown. It's so earthy and golden and shining and wonderful and the colors couldn't be prettier.

I split the braid in half so the finished skein would have long color repeats, spun the singles worsted-style counterclockwise from the top, then chain-plied (navajo-plied) each single into a 3-ply yarn. Most of the second bobbin was spun by candlelight when the power went out during the blizzard last weekend, so it had a few more thick spots than the first. All told I ended up with about 182 yards of approximately worsted-weight-ish yarn (I always forget to measure wraps per inch before I skein the yarn). I'm having fun wracking my brain for what this skein should become, what do you think?

Be sure to check out the other FO's by clicking the image below! And have a great Friday. :)

Glorious, Glorious

Friends, yesterday was glorious. The Fiasco was out all day and I spent nearly the entire time relaxing on my own here:

My happy place. Picture me there instead of Calypso.

 Glorious. Don't get me wrong, I love my Fiasco and I love being social and having busy weekends, but I don't think I've had a day to myself since we moved almost two months ago! I needed a day to just zone out, to ignore the chores and the bills and the phone and the computer and even the obligatory knitting. I need to get down with my introverted self and just make something for no reason whatsoever. And it was awesome. I baked some cookies, caught up on about half a dozen episodes of Grey's Anatomy, and I spun my little fingers off.

The Beginning

First, I broke this blue-purple-green gradient braid into three sections and carded and spun each section into singles. I wanted to experiment with chained yarns, which take two plied yarns and then ply them back onto each other. So I turned the blue into a 2-ply yarn and then plied it with some 2-ply white wool I had spun from the fiber that had come with my wheel.

First chained yarn.

 It made a very thick, very springy yarn that I swatched a bit:

Eek! My eyes!

Plying such high-contrast colors together makes a marled yarn that can be a bit difficult on the eyes in certain stitches. For instance, the bottom of that swatch is garter stitch and it pains me, I hate it. The stockinette is a little bit better and the ribbing (I think) looks best of all. I decided not to ply the rest of the braid with white and just wing it. So I spun the purple and green as singles:

So pretty, so quick...

Then I went crazy with the plying. I plied some of the purple with some of the remaining white. I plied the rest of the purple with some of the green. I plied some of the green back on itself and had some of the original blue 2-ply left over.

So many bobbins!

To make a chained yarn you need to make sure your 2-ply yarns have lots and lots of extra twist, so I ran them through the wheel again (you can see how the blue bobbin has a tighter twist than the rest, it had been through twice already) and joined the purple-green and all green yarns into one continuous strand and the purple-white and all blue yarns into another. FINALLY, I plied the two strands of 2-ply yarns together in the opposite direction. So the singles were spun clockwise, the 2-ply yarns were spun counter-clockwise, and the final chained yarn was plied clockwise.

Voila!

Isn't it cool looking? All that plying made for some really interesting color combinations in the final yarn. I especially like the sections that are purple-green-white! Now instead of being overpowering the white is a neat accent. I ended up with about 99 grams/ 116 yards of bulky yarn (7ish wraps per inch) that I think is going to make a fantastic winter hat to coordinate with the new purple coat I received for Christmas. Yay for handspun! Yay for wheels! Yay for alone time on the weekend! :)

Close-up

Have you tried making or knitting with chained yarns before? 

Oh! I almost forgot! The winner of the little sampler of longwool fibers is Ivy from Pumpkin Spins. Email me your address and I'll mail them off straight away!

Secret FO Friday

This is all a bit of a tease, but I have four finished objects this month so far and I can't really show you any of them! They are all for designs but at least one of them will be released shortly. Secret FOs 1 & 2 are for the Afghans for Afghans e-book that Cephalopod Yarns is putting together. I'm not sure about the publication date yet but once I know it, you'll hear about it, because it's going to be a fantastic collection!

1

2

Secret FO #3 is my newest design, to be released on the 22nd as a Malabrigo Quickie pattern!

3

And secret FO #4 is another version of my new pattern, in a different size. I don't have a photo of the FO yet but I can show you what I used to knit it with:

Malabrigo Yarns Twist, colorway Teal Feather and handspun

I used a bit of my first wheel-spun handspun for the contrast color, which I don't think I've shown here yet either:

Handspun 2-ply Merino wool

This was spun from fiber that came with my wheel, I think it is Merino but I can't be sure. I spun two singles semi-woolen (unknowingly on different sized bobbins, with screwed with my tension) and then plied them together. The resulting skein is perfectly fuzzy and lightweight with great bounce. The yarn is quite thick-and-think but it it's roughly the same thickness as the Twist in most places so it worked well in the design, though it only used a little bit so I'll have to figure out what to do with the rest!

Also--fun fact--the photoshoot for the new pattern took place here:

Rhode Island kinda rocks.

Spending a gloriously foggy and freakishly warm winter day on the beach taking photos of knitwear was probably more fun than it should have been! We have the Fiasco to thank for being a good sport and playing along. I can't wait to show you guys the pictures!

Rainbow Bright

Finished yarn! Finished yarn! Yay! I haven't finished a skein of yarn (other than the mini ones from my Spinner's Study) in such a long time. And guys, this one's a beauty.

Yes, it is a giant rainbow-y mix-up (a.k.a. "clown barf"), but I love it. I have no idea what I'll make with it (suggestions welcome) but I do love it.

This is Bugga Fiber sold by Cephalopod Yarns. It is a 70% Superwash Merino / 20% Cashmere / 10% Nylon mix. I have to admit that I don't think I like the Nylon in the mix, or perhaps the superwash-ness of the wool. Whatever it was, there were times when the yarn would slip will spinning and certain sections would overspin and snap. In fact, the yarn snapped three times during plying in some of those extra-brittle sections so I'm glad I was chain plying (3 plies made from a single strand) because I just made three little skeins instead of fretting over a broken ply.

That said, the resulting yarn is truly gorgeous (if I can say so myself). I made certain not to overspin during plying and the result is a springy, soft, squishy skein that I honestly can't wait to use. It came to about 144 yards out of 3.88 ounces at around 11 wraps per inch, making this a light worsted weight yarn.

And the plying! The little mini above was my practice skein for chain plying. I LOVE CHAIN PLYING, GUYS, I REALLY REALLY LOVE IT. It felt so much less fiddly than dealing with separate balls of yarn and it was really much easier than I had expected. I came across this video on somebody's blog (I've read so many recently now that I'm taking part in WIP Wednesdays and the Year of Projects that I forgot where I found it! If it was on your blog, please let me know so I can properly give you a shout-out.) which totally helped me see how the whole process works:

I recommend it! How can I not, when it resulted in this?

I couldn't resist one last glamour shot. :)

If you guys hadn't noticed, I have a little tab at the top of my blog entitled "Spin-tastic!" so you can check out other things I've spun there if you want. What's your favorite method of plying? Got any tips or tricks?

Spring!

Here's just a quickie before bedtime (so early, so sad) to say two things:
1) Spring is here! Truly! So warm, so many birds chirping, so many peepers peeping!
2) My newly-finished yarn looks like spring-in-a-skein and I ADORE IT!

 

Those glorious hanks are 150 yards of an aran-ish weight 2-ply yarn made from a beautifully dyed batt of mixed fibers from Inglenook Fibers:

and an undyed merino/silk blend from Schafenfreude Fibers, 

Glowing with glory!

I love the way the colors play together, all the pinks and lavenders and greens and blues and browns. And the best part is, it's wonderfully soft, not scratchy at all. Yay! I can't wait to knit something with it. What would you make?

I've already started spinning my next batch of fiber:

Bugga Fiber from Cephalopod Yarns, colorway Yubaba

and check out how thin I'm spinning it:

So so excited. I feel like I'm getting pretty good now. In my Fiasco's words: "Wow, you could floss with that!" Apparently that's the new standard for judging the thinness of yarn. :)

Sheep Ate Marigolds

I finished handspun yarn #2!

This is 2 ounces and about 30 yards of 2-ply aran weight 100% Coopworth wool. The roving came in my "Learn to Spin" kit from Golding and was produced by Hidden Valley Farm and Woolen Mill . I really enjoyed spinning the Coopworth. It is not super soft like Merino but the fibers are lustrous and really curly. The resulting yarn has a lot of life and bounce to it and it came out much fluffier and more even than I had expected. I really like it. The colorway I received was named "Sheep Ate Marigolds" which I thought was kind of a strange name but then I thought about it harder: the yarn is mostly brown with streaks of red, yellow, and green in it.

I think my beautiful yarn was inspired by sheep poop! Gives a whole new meaning to "handspun #2"...