SS: Icelandic

I finished spinning up the fifth breed of my Spinner's Study, Cormo:

I really love the feel of this one. The shorter staple length and fineness of the fiber made it a bit difficult to spin (lots of dropping!) and I seem to tend to spin more thinly when the fiber is fine so this skein looks like it has more yardage than the others, but I still loved the feel of it running through my fingers. The Cormo breed is top of my list for keeping on the future farm I dream about.

Here's a family photo of the breeds I've finished so far:

L to R: Polwarth, Finnish, Black Jacob, Bluefaced Leicester, Cormo

I'm about a quarter of the way through, as long as I don't keep adding breeds. :) I really enjoy this little exercise. On to the next!

Photo from the Icelandic Sheep Breeders of North America webpage.

According to the Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook, the Icelandic breed descended from the sheep the Vikings brought with them when they settled in (you guessed it) Iceland around 900 A.D. The breed has developed in isolation since then because they made it illegal to import more sheep. Thus, that makes the Icelandic breed very genetically "pure" which is especially cool evolutionarily-speaking. The breed is a part of the Northern European Short-Tailed Family, like the Finnish wool I spun up earlier.

They are characterized by a naturally short tail, a dual-coated fleece, faces and legs that are free of wool, and apparently very tasty mild-flavored meat. The outercoat consists of long, strong fibers called tog and the undercoat consists of short, soft fibers called thel. Both types of fiber are used for spinning and they can be prepared to be spun together or separately.

The top I have appears to consist entirely of tog, the outer layer. The staple length is long, and can range from 4-18(!) inches. The micron count ranges from 27-31, landing this on the coarser side of the medium range. This is another fiber that feels more hair-like than wool-like, but it is still a true wool (meaning it contains crimp which makes it elastic), not a kemp or guard hair. This fiber drafts extremely easily and in that sense is a pleasure to spin. Despite that, I'm not a huge fan of how it spins up. Too many ends sticking out! Prickly-town, people!

Please excuse my messily-wound cop. I had just dropped it and things got all loose and crazy.

However, this could be a case where changing my spinning style would result in a more likeable yarn. I tend to grasp a handful of fiber, fluff it up with my fingers, fold it in half, and spin woolen-style "from the fold". The F&F Sourcebook suggests spinning the tog fibers worsted-style for increased strength and probably to keep those pesky ends more in line.

As a quick refresher: woolen spinning means that the fibers are not perfectly aligned, they go in all sorts of directions trapping air between them and resulting in a fluffier yarn. Spinning from the fold creates this misalignment of fibers for me. Worsted spinning means that the fibers are lined up nice and straight before spinning and are spun end-to-end with little overlap, producing a denser and potentially smoother yarn.

How do you tend to spin?

Finished-Object-Friday #1

It is rare for me to actually have a Finished Object to share (I'm much better at WIPs) and it almost never happens to fall near a Friday, so I'm pretty excited to participate in my first FO Friday! This post is also about the first project I finished from my Year of Projects goals. (Please excuse the crummy Ipad photos, my camera battery charger went missing and I am anxiously awaiting the new one.)

This is my aptly-titled Shiny Slouch project, also known as the Regina hat designed by Carina Spencer. I can say without a doubt that I love everything about this design, the pattern, and the finished hat. The pattern is well-written, detailed, and provides instructions for knitting the hat in different weights of yarn, of which I am a strong supporter and aim to do in my own patterns. The design is also interesting in and of itslef: an unusual brim, simple shaping, and easy knitting that feels like a surprise when you turn the hat inside out at the end.

I love the way the slipped stitches look over the reverse stockinette background as well as how they come together neatly at the crown. I appreciate a hat with well-constructed and interesting crown decreases.

For my hat I used the The Sanguine Gryphon Codex, which is sadly discontinued. It is a fantastic mix of 52% silk and 48% BFL wool, meaning it has a lovely shine and drape which I highly recommend for this hat. It will be available from The Verdant Gryphon on Monday, August 13th at 9pm. It will likely sell out extremely quickly so I suggest you seriously stalk the yarn if you want it, its fans are many and quite fervent.

I used about half a skein for the hat body and just a small amount for the brim, the whole hat weighs 65 grams. I made a few modifications based on how it was knitting up at the time. I initially knit my brim to about 17" and then picked up 60 stitches and increased to 80. I knit for a few inches before I felt the hat wouldn't be slouchy enough so over a couple of rounds I increased to 90 stitches total. I also knit to about 7.5" before decreasing. I'm very glad I did this even though I have a pretty average-to-small-sized head. The hat is slightly under-slouchy but the silk still helps it drape nicely and I love the way it looks. Other people on Ravelry have mentioned that it is more like a beanie than it is slouchy, so if you want the slouchy look and are in doubt, increase more and knit longer.

Overall: I adore this hat and highly recommend the pattern, which is incredibly offered for free as I would gladly have paid for this one. What's your favorite hat to knit or wear?

Also, don't forget about the little giveaway I'm running right now for some knitting needles in larger sizes, a couple of mini skeins, and a free pattern. Details in this post. I will pick the winner on Sunday. There aren't very many entries yet (leave a comment to be entered) so chances are pretty good!

Check out more FO's here!

And more YoP posts!

Silk Sadness

Sad news, guys, remember these?

Play at Life Fiber Arts silk hankies (a.k.a. mawata)

I bought them to try spinning silk and it turns out... I don't like it.

I tried!

It... just doesn't feel right. It's hard to explain. Drafting silk is difficult, you have to tug pretty hard and pre-draft before you try spinning it (at least, that's what it seems like I need to do). Which is fine, I suppose, though I think what I've learned is I really like the way it feels to draft wool while spinning it and this is not at all like that.

Where's the twist?

I also can't seem to get enough twist into it. See how loosely the single twisted back on itself? That can't be right, can it? I just don't know! I'm thinking I'm going to have to join the Nutmeg Spinner's Guild of Connecticut and try to make it to their next meeting, whenever that might be. This spinner needs help!

Finally, my wool/silk blend Shiny Slouch hat is taking way too long to dry. I want to wear it already:

Patience, patience, I know.

Have any of you had success with spinning silk? Got some tips?

Make-It-Yourself Monday #2

This week I made the most delicious sand ever.

Yup, you heard that right.

Yum!

I came across the recipe on Pinterest. As far as newer social media sites go, I really like Pinterest. The basic idea is that you see something online that you like and then pin it to one of your boards with a comment. That photo then links back to the site and other people can see and share what you've pinned. I find it to be a handy way of keeping track of interesting recipes or yarn or fiber I want to buy/try. You can see my boards here, if you'd like.

Anyway, back to the making. You basically take a whole box of Nilla Wafers and a handful of Oreos and grind them up in your handy dandy food processor:

It is really amazing how much this stuff looks like sand in person.

Then you do unspeakably tasty things to a couple of boxes of Jell-o pudding and layer the cookie dust and pudding inside ridiculously cute sand pails:

Gotta love layers!

And that's it! The recipe can be found on the Ma Nouvelle Mode blog. Pros: really simple and tasty. Cons: not healthy at all. I made it to bring to the party the Fiasco's family threw for his birthday. His little nephew was so grossed out when he thought he was eating a big spoonful of sand! Too cute.

What's your favorite fool-the-innocent-children recipe?

Check out what everyone else is making!

Order From Chaos

I'm still not sure what came over me, but last week after a particularly boring and unproductive day at work I had an uncontrollable urge to completely reorganize my knitting notions. I just had to do something, you know? So I did this:

AAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!

I emptied out the top two drawers of my plastic knitting cabinet, organized every kind of needle I had by size, and bagged them up tidily. I had previously had them separated by type (straights, circulars, DPNs) but in a very unhelpful way, and it was always a pain while knitting a hat to go searching for both the circulars and DPNs of the same size in different places with everything so jumbled up. Now I have straights and circulars bagged in the gallon sizes by category (sock, small, medium, large, extra-large) and within those bags, sets of DPNs are in smaller sandwich-sized plastic bags labeled by size. No more fishing through a mess to find that 4th DPN of a set! I wish I had a prettier/more environmentally-friendly method than use all the plastic bags ever but this will have to do for now. How do you organize your notions?

In the midst of all this organizing I discovered I had duplicates of sizes that I rarely use and won't need. Actually, they were triplicates. I can justify owning duplicates (one set in metal, one set in bamboo) but definitely not triplicates. Nobody sane needs three pairs of size 13 aluminum knitting needles. So that means we are going to have our first every Woolen Diversions give-away!

Pictured above are:

•  a size 15 (10.0mm) 16" bamboo Clover circular needle
• size 13 (9.0mm) 14" aluminum Susan Bates needles
• size 11 (8.0mm) 10" plastic needles
• size 5 (3.75mm) 14" aluminum Boye needles
• a knitting needle inventory card

And just to sweeten the deal a little, part of the giveaway will be:

• a random 6 gram mini of BMFA Socks that Rock
• a random 5 gram mini of Bugga
• one of my patterns

Currently, I only have one pattern for sale but I have several others in the works so if the winner would like to wait for one of those to be available, he/she can do so. There are a few different ways to enter the drawing:

• "like" Shoelaceswticher Designs on Facebook
• "follow" me on Twitter
• click "add to faves" on my designer page on Ravelry
• queue or fave my designs on Ravelry
• discuss one of my patterns or blog posts on either Ravelry or your own blog (be sure to link appropriately!)

I really enjoy writing this blog and my patterns and would like to spread the word about them a little more, with your generous help. If you'd like to give these needles and mini-skeins a new home and receive a free pattern of mine, please leave a comment below letting me know how you've spread the Woolen Diversions / Shoelaceswitcher Designs love! I will do a random drawing next Sunday, August 5th. (And if you spread the love in multiple ways, I'll count that as multiple entries.)

Who's excited?! :)