Be Mine lace socks

I've been distracted from knitting my Twinkle by this lovely fibre from picperfic's luxury fibre club.  I've loved every minute of spinning this wool/silk/yak mix, dyed beautifully in colours which look quite different separately, but which blend together to make a lovely 'Valentine' pink.

The wool/silk/yak sounds perfect for socks, warm and strong. I have the perfect pattern - more on that another time.

Lace sleeves

I love knitting lace so after a long run of st st it's been very hard not to ignore what I'm supposed to be doing (eg work) and sit down with my Twinkle instead.

First sleeve well underway.

Knitted body parts roundup

I've noticed patterns for various body parts over the years and the time has come to gather them together.

Some of these are available as patterns, some are knit, some are crocheted, some are felted.

Where better to start than the heart? This one was created by Kristin Ledgett for Valentine's Day. Pattern is at http://www.knitty.com/ISSUEwinter08/PATTheart.php

Slightly more multimedia, this one even lights up and was made by Tatyana Yanishevsk

[added Aug 2013] this fluffy heart from Sarah Illenberger who makes objects for advertising use

And so to the respiratory system, these lungs were made by Anna Isherwood

Other organs include Gallbladder (this one by AnOptimisticCynic with removable stones...)

.. Kidneys (from Ravelry user erinware)

.. and Womb. The pattern from Knitty is here. This is the first thing I ever made in my own hand dyed and spun wool.

[Added Aug 2013 suggested by Poppy Cottage in the comments] There are a few variants of the booby baby beany for breastfeeding, this one is bySara Hanson

Holding it all up is the spine, this needle felted example from estonia76

[added 12/7/13] Suggested by Sue in the comments, the whole skellington

And helping it all move, the muscles. More pictures of this lovely work here

In charge of all of that is the brain, one here that you can wear on the outside (pattern by Alana Noritake)

.. and an anatomically correct one by Dr Karen Norberg, read about it here

[update Aug 2013] More brain and neurons here from CraftyHedhehog, a project called Neuroscience

[added Aug 2013] Another from Sarah Illenberger

On a microscopic level, some of us may actually have woolly chromasomes

[Added 12/7/13] Not for the squeamish, this is the entire digestive system, part of a knit-along some years ago, follow the links for the pattern:

[added Aug 2013] this digestive system from Sarah Illenberger 

Another digestive system along with brain & nervous system and other organs, this project is called Body Box by Caroline Gates:

More visible bits and pieces include ears.

.. and eyes

This one's a cat toy!

Do you know of any more? Let me know in the comments.

Woolly Wednesday, what's on the go

For the first time in a while I've remembered Woolly Wednesday in time and I have two active projects that have been keeping me from the things I really should be doing instead (like housework and earning money - but life's for the living, hey?)

First is an overdue progress report on my Twinkle Twinkle. This is the first top I've made that works like this - you start knitting the whole body at the lower border and then divide at the armpits (you can see the right-front cast off here and I'm now on the upper back).

Second, this pile of loveliness is Polwarth wool, yak and silk dyed in colours called 'Be Mine'. It's specially dyed by Marianne of Picperfic's Fluff n Stuff for her fibre club, special colours for Valentine's!

Only when spinning did I really see the selection of colours in here from orange through to deep violet. I have the perfect project in mind and really excited by this one.

Spit join, my version

[warning - bodily fluids discussed] I linked to a Craftsy tutorial on the spit join in the most recent Purl Two Together. The spit join is ideal for my current project because I'm using wool (won't work with synthetic materials) I don't want to waste any yarn and I don't like weaving in ends.

I've experimented a bit - I have the opportunity because I made smaller skeins for this project. First of all I used the method given in Stefanie Japel's tutorial, which overlaps the ends. The resulting join is thicker than the yarn itself, which may not be so obvious with a closer knit but I have a very open knit here and the join did show.

So I tried trimming back one ply so that only two plies were overlapping. Once twisted together it's quite a convincing join, even before felting.

Then as per all other spit splice tutorials, spit into your hand and rub the join between your palms to secure it. If you don't go too far with the felting, it retains that 'plied' look. This time the join is really invisible, even with very open stitches.

Here's progress with my Twinkle. After one false start (due to a mistake only spotted several rows later) and the size being a bit big (The knitting was coming a different gauge to my swatch...?) I re-started and now have about 8" of the body done.

Cowell knitting a cowl?

Thanks to Mum for this magazine clipping (and my sister for the heading), apparently the image has done the rounds on Twitter so you may have seen it. 

Sounds like good news, a bit more time knitting and purling and a little less time manufacturing pop stars is good news for everyone I think. The only thing that niggles is that first sentence in the pink box which implies that knitting isn't cool!

Dyeing to cast on

Issue 24 of The Wheel has a lovely article by Libby Kingscote about mixing colours. She uses Ashford's merino / silk mix in vanilla (pure white undyed) and one of her recipes is for a teal. Spun very fine, this would be perfect for my Twinkle.  More about the spinning here.

I made a slightly bluer mix - 3 parts blue to one part yellow.

The variegation that you can see in the last picture is a happy accident. When I first popped the skeins in the dye I forgot to untwist them. I untwisted them but the paler patches remain.

A sunny day to dry them, they're now finishing off with weights to straighten.