Spellcaster socks - finished

When Pantone announced the colour of the year for 2024, I realised that I had to get a wiggle on and finish these socks before Viva Magenta stopped being the colour of the year.

I love the colour and the pattern. The problems have been distractions by other projects and a new craft and the fact that spinning a 3-ply yarn by spindle took a long time. (A habit such as #spin15aday could have really helped here.)

The fibre is 'Aries' from the Fibre Hut, a wool/silk mix (which I can no longer see on the Fibre Hut site but is available from World of Wool). It was the closest colour I could find at the time to Viva Magenta. Hopefully the silk will give the yarn some strength. It's 3-ply and I tried to spin the singles more tighly than usual.  

The pattern is Spellcaster Adventure Socks by Clair Wyvern. Many of the pattern choices are made with the roll of a die, so no two pairs will be alike. This is a great idea which I enjoyed very much and I'll look for more such patterns.

I did make a mistake on the second sock, the very last of the triangular patterns isn't the right one. That's not very obvious and I was so keen to get them finished in time for the holiday that I didn't want to rip back and repeat so many rounds. 

A tip for anyone making these socks is that if you roll the 'added chaos' option of knitting the charts upside-down as I did, then the cable crossings as charted don't work. It's kinda noted in the pattern and obvious with hindsight but I didn't spot that when I started. I *think* left crosses have to be right crosses and vice versa, but it makes my head hurt to try to visualise it.  Either way, I didn't reverse the direction of my cables and they didn't really work as intended. I didn't realise this until halfway down the first sock and continued with what I was doing. 

Spindle spinning silk hankies / mawatas

One of my many purchases from Wonderwool Wales 2018 was this beautiful silk from Sealy MacWheely. I only bought a small pack but it goes a long way, Sealy had a scarf on display made from one of these packs.

The silk is in the form of hankies / mawata. You separate the thin layers (each made from a single cocoon, which in turn is in theory a single strand), poke a hole in the middle of the hanky, streeeeeetch it out almost to the thickness you need and add twist. I've long wanted to try stretching and then knitting / crocheting without adding twist, which does work.

In this case I did spin it, and then navajo plied (my first go at n-plying with a spindle, I think). The picture isn't great. It looks a bit neater in real life than in this picture.

If you're interested in trying this, here's Sealy's own video showing everything I've just said.

Review - Hand Spinning - Essential Technical and Creative Skills by Pam Austin

My first impression was that the book undersells itself. The cover certainly could be more eye-catching.

But it's a very well-produced book. 10.5" x 9", glossy, hard-covers with 144 pages and 200 illustrations.

It is aimed at the beginner, with some value for the intermediate spinner too.

Pam runs the Spinning School www.spinningschool.org; she gave me an impromptu lesson in longdraw spinning once at Fibre East and I like her very much.

I associate her with longdraw (woollen) spinning so it's no surprise that there's an emphasis on this technique. It's the first draft that she covers in the book, followed by several others; worsted, short forward, semi-worsted, core-spinning.

I asked myself whether it would be possible to learn to spin using the book and the answer is yes. It begins with an exercise in spinning a small piece of yarn without using a spindle, which helps you to understand how the fibres hold together when twisted and the construction of yarn.

It then proceeds to teach you how to spin using a spindle (which I believe any good teacher would do before going to a wheel) with plenty of pictures.

Much that you'll need to know is covered; the anatomy of a wheel and choosing the right one, recognising a good fleece, other fibres, animal and plant, carding, plying, Andean plying, colour theory, dyeing. It finishes with the spiritual 'Mindfulness and art'. The list of chapters below doesn't tell the full story, for example, carding is well covered; rolags punis, hand carders, flick carder, blending board, drum carders. But this is within chapter 4 and not mentioned in the chapter title.

While imagining myself as a new spinner, I did notice that it may be necessary to skip around a little bit. As I mentioned, the book begins with the first steps toward producing your own yarn. But it's then necessary to move forward several chapters (or read them) before finding plying.

Colour theory has a whole chapter. Dyeing has a chapter too. It covers commercial dyes and some techniques, and then two natural dyeing techniques: indigo and walnuts. Pam explains at the end of the chapter "The techniques in this chapter were chosen for their ease of use and satisfying results."  This desire to convey the magic of the craft is clearly something that Pam feels, and I did feel that running through the book.

"Bewitched and bewildered" is an intriguing chapter title. She says (quite rightly) "It's so easy to become bewitched by beautiful wheels and bewildered by conflicting advice." The chapter aims to help steer you through all of this and make the right decisions for you.

The style is reassuringly formal. Not too matter-of-fact and not too casual. Something that I found satisfying is that each chapter begins "The aim of this chapter is..." and ends "In a nutshell..." with a summary.


Chapters:

Introduction
1. One thread at a time
2. Bewitched and bewildered
3. Essential spinning techniques
4. Sheep fleece: nature's best
5. Fibres for hand spinning
6. Plying and finishing yarn
7. Colour in spinning
8. Dyeing to dye
9. Yarn structure
10. Mindfulness and art
Further reading
Glossary


Natural colours and natural dyeing are part of Pam's outlook but I'm sure that it would have been possible to have conveyed this with a more eye-catching cover. This goes for some of the photographs in the instructional section, which lack a bit of brightness and clarity.

That aside, it's a large, glossy, hardback book It would be a good companion to a new spinner, Pam's attitude as a teacher is evident and she aims to inspire mindfulness, art and creativity in her readers.

I've tried to be objective. I have a copy which I'm giving away in August's Hand Spinning News.

You can buy a copy of the book directly from Pam's site:
http://www.spinningschool.org/product/hand-spinning-essential-technical-and-creative-skills/

Finished project, handspun socks

This is a very long-term project, partly because I've been putting this aside in favour of other projects, and partly because I knitted three socks in order to get a pair.

The first sock I finished was way too long in the foot (you have to start the heel a long while before you'd think) and too long in the leg (I don't like them too short). I'd then used more than half the yarn!

So after pulling out most of that first sock, then carefully halving my yarn, off we went again.

It's a great pattern, Coralicious Socks, I really enjoyed knitting it (luckily). It's toe-up, my favourite way, I love the lace pattern and the 'flap/gusset' heel has this slip-stitch pattern at the back.

I spun the yarn by spindle (which I always love doing, it's therapeutic, and produces really good yarn). It's a luxury blend from picperfic's club, colourway Monet's Pond. There's more variation in the colour than there looks in the pictures.

You can see that there's quite a chunk of lighter colour in the leg of one sock. I think this must have been before I started 'fractal spinning' or splitting the two plies differently to better mix up the colours in the plying.