Back to spinning!

 If you've seen the January '25 issue of HSN then you'll know that I'm quite taken by the Snow Queen Snood.

I'm itching to do some spinning because I've been occupied for months now on a knitting project. It's quite relaxing to do late at night now that I've reached the body, which is long rows of stockinette with a short section of lace at each end. But all the same, it's going to take ages to finish. (Especially if I get distracted by other projects. Monogamous? Me? Never!)

The snood is a Zoom Loom project (or other square pin loom). I'm also keen to use that tool again. It's a quick and fun way to use handspun yarn. 

I had a rummage and found this yarn, left over from my Fulton Shrug. I bought the yarn (undyed) from my friend Jenn at fibreworkshop.co.uk. She studied the Norfolk Horn breed, found local flocks, bought the fleece and had it processed and spun.  It really is beautiful yarn. I asked Freyalyn to dye it for me in teal.  My phone's camera doesn't like the colour and tried to correct it to grey. I've done my best to correct it to something like how it looks in real life.

I also found these nests which are obviously fleece that I've processed myself. I've lost track of where it came from. It may be the last of this fleece but I'm not sure about that. It's not particularly fine and I think it will match the Norfolk Horn quite well if spun to the same thickness. 

I'm not sure whether the quantity I have here is enough. A quick calculation based on 8 yards per Zoom Loom square means that I'll need around 380 yards of yarn altogether (blue and white). I guess I have plenty of the blue, probably not the white. I'll make the yarn and see what I have. It may mean altering the pattern (more of the plain blue squares).

I'm trying to spin longdraw, since the Norfolk Horn yarn is very bouncy. I'm having to pick out some VM as I go. 

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. 

Remedial work to the handspun BBC Micro jumper

 A while ago I finished this project,  

You may think the neck looks a little odd or a little wide. It certainly felt that way to me. The truth is that I ran out of yarn with maybe a a few rounds left to go. I'd used all of the John Arbon fibre and didn't think it worth ordering another 100g just for that tiny bit of extra yarn.

I haven't worn the jumper much, and I think that's because I wasn't entirely happy with it.

One great thing about the John Arbon blends is that they are very consistent. So I was able to order another 100g and it's an exact match. I didn't snap a shot while I was spinning the singles, but here's the plied yarn. 

It's a 4-ply with one of the plies being this pink silk. I probably had enough on the bobbin but still had some of the fibre and enjoyed using my John Brightwell wheel to spin a little more of that. 

And so onto the remedial work.... 

Here's the neck as it was. There are only two or three rounds of 2x2 rib there and it needs a bit more. It was easy to retrieve the woven-in end, undo my final knot and pull out the bind-off giving me a round of live stitches. 

Here's the result. You can see that the new yarn is indistinguishable from the old, and that the neckline looks much better. I decreased a couple of stitches at the point of the V.

 

Finished handspun project, Mango and Family Bottle Sock by Vivienne Morgan

I'm a recent convert to Soda Stream. I was buying big bottles of fizzy water regularly but felt that I was creating plastic waste.  

I like to take one of these bottles walking with me, but the bottles get scuffed while rattling around in the rucksack.

That's where Vivienne Morgan's bottle sock comes in! 

It's like a sock without a heel. She has three bottle sock patterns to choose from. For my first I chose Mango and Family, based on a real-life tortoise, which seems appropriate for my walking. It reminds me of an Aztec design, hence the bold colours I chose. I later felt that they look too Christmassy but hey ho. 

I spun the white yarn especially. I had some white Real Shetland from Adam Curtis. It's very silky and a pleasure to spin.  The green and dark red were handspun yarn from stash, I think these would be Spinzilla or Tour de Fleece spins from a year gone by. 

I spent some time on the early part while waiting for my car MOT at the end of October

The main part of the pattern went very quickly. It was a pleasure to knit. I don't think there were any floats longer than 5 or 6 stitches, so no need for faffing around crossing the yarn. 

I was curious about whether it would be wide enough. In Vivienne's pictures, it looks as if she's using a bottle which is slimmer than mine, so I was ready to add stitches or go up in needle size. But after reaching the body, it did seem about right. It went over the bottle for blocking and now slips on and off easily. 

It's a breeze to knit if you already know stranded colourwork. As Vivienne says, there's no second sock syndrome, although if you're like me, you'll enjoy this so much, you'll immediately want to make another.

Knitwear Designer for the BBC Micro, project part 2

This is a split-personality project. Part 1, in which I produced the pattern using a BBC micro is on my newstuffforoldstuff blog.

I'm continuing here because this is now a spin/knit project.

My goal was to reproduce the pink jumper I pictured in part 1. 

I went for Devonia from John Arbon, which wasn't as pink as I really wanted.  Below are swatches, first on its own, and then with a ply of white mohair to give it a silky sheen and lighten the colour. 

 I rejected that idea because it looks too speckled.  Another difference between the swatches is that the top one is 3-ply and the bottom one 4.  The extra work in spinning four plies is worth it for a thicker and rounder yarn. The fabric is very different. The 3-ply feels limp in comparison. The 4-ply feels chunkier and firmer, more like the jumper that I'm reproducing.

As an experiment (and I didn't hold out much hope) I wanted to try making the fourth ply from something in a definite pink. This 'cyclamen' tussah silk from Katie really is a hot pink. Too strong, I suspected. 

But no! The result is perfect. (One ply of the pink silk, three plies of Devonia.) The pink silk really does blend very well. The result is much more homogenous than with the white ply, and a little more pink than the Devonia by itself. 

I've never swatched quite so much! But I'm glad I did. I love the result we have here. 

So now it's spin, spin spin until I have my jumper's-worth of yarn. 

Finished handspun Earth Mama legwarmers

 This project started life when an inventive and generous person returned a drum carder using packing that she'd made from bags filled with the most beautiful Shetland fleece. Of course I treated this as a gift, and a very welcome one.

Those amazing and long locks are really from a Shetland sheep raised in the very north of Scotland. The prettiest of the flock, she is nicknamed Mrs White Fleece. They are strong and didn't break when snapped between the fingers (this type of fleece has a 'rise' or natural weakness which causes the fleece to moult or at least be capable of being 'rooed' or plucked by hand.)

I like to be intentional and spin for a project. In this case I spun the fleece first. I drumcarded, crudely split and pulled the batts into nests and spun from the end of the 'roving'.

This yielded around 500 yards of yarn. More than enough for socks but not enough for a cardy. By searching patterns for the right yardage and yarn weight, I chose this project - Earth Mama legwarmers by Nat Raedwulf, which as an added bonus is a free pattern.

They didn't take too long to knit because I was keen to wear them. I broke two cable needles along the way. Bad technique rather than bad cable needles.

In this picture they have yet to be blocked, which will even out the stitches a little, and have to have buttons added on the turned-over cuff. (The pattern includes a buttonhole.)

Ever since casting off I have been wearing them. (So they're still not blocked.)  They are incredibly warm and snuggly. They stay up well and I like the way the lower ribbing opens out over your foot.

Amazing Alaska hat pattern with handspun yarn

When I first saw it I knew I had to make one. The pattern is Alaska by Camille Descoteaux

This pattern looks fabulous in a colour-changing yarn paired with a dark solid colour for the silhouette trees. More comments about the pattern after the knitting pictures.

Usually I spin especially for a particular project, but this time I had the perfect yarn. It’s a Freyalyn long gradient I bought at a show and then spun during Spinzilla 2017.

The dark colour was also spun during Spinzilla, possibly not the same year. I think it’s real Shetland from Adam Curtis.

There follows a bunch of pictures of the fibre, the spinning, the finished yarn and 'in progress' shots of  the knitting.

Above is the fibre as I bought it. Below is me preparing it in advance of Spinzilla 2017. I like making 'fauxlags', it's a very fast way to spin. You open up the fibre into a flat sheet and then roll the fibre around a dowel or large needle to form a rolag or puni shape.

I spin these longdraw. Pinch off about an inch while treadling madly and using a high-speed ratio. Pull back about a metre at a time as it gains twist. I spun this pretty fine because I wanted to chain-ply aka navajo-ply

 The navajo plying produces a neat, round yarn. It also concentrates colour and preserves colour changes like these.

 So that's the finished yarn in a photo from 2017.

I began knitting a month ago.

I've not made a pompom for about 45 years.

I found the pattern a delight to knit. The only thing that annoyed me a little is the long floats as you near the end of the colourwork, but I became quite slick at crossing the yarns every 4 stitches to anchor the floats.

Ravelry project here.

Finished handspun Hafgufa mitts

Mostly photos this time. This project started as some alpaca fleece that I've had for some time; some really beautiful fleece in an inky black, and some equally beautiful locks in a creamy white. I carded batts from both and also mixed the two for a third colour, mid-grey.

It spun nicely, I went for a 3-ply but it was still pretty thin. That was almost perfect. I used 2mm needles but still had to adjust the pattern by a few stitches to get the right size.