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Archive for the ‘fiberarts’ Category

FO: Cabled Topdown Raglan

Posted in knitting on February 12, 2010| 1 Comment »

FO = finished object, in knitting-specific internet speak.

Here is the sweater I have been knitting along with my class, and using to demonstrate different parts of the process along the way.  I washed it yesterday and it has been drying on the wooly board.  Today I will wear it!

Yarn: Rowan Magpie Tweed, 7 skeins.  Needle size 8 (5 mm).  The cable panel on the front and back is from “The New Knitting Stitch Library” by Lesley Stanfield (no longer in print but easily found on Amazon or elsewhere).  I used the same motif for cabled ribs on the bottom edge, sleeve cuffs and neck edge, with a simple rolled stockinette stitch edge as the final finish.

Yesterday was our guild meeting and the annual Fiber Exchange.  We run it kind of like a white elephant (draw numbers, go in turn, but something can be taken away from someone else up to 2 times).  The fiber is for weaving or spinning, although there were other fun things in some of the packages like chocolate!  It is supposed to be nice enough to be used in a project but not expensive or “too nice.”  Mainly leftovers from projects, or bargain finds that are being passed on.  Lots of fun!

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My Wonderful Students

Posted in knitting, Uncategorized on February 10, 2010| 1 Comment »

Last night was the fifth meeting of my top-down raglan class.  Everyone had made great progress and were still full of enthusiasm for the process of designing their own sweater.

Juliet is making a child-size pullover for her friend’s son:

Deb is making a cardigan version with contrasting seed stitch bands:

Laurelle is making a pullover for herself out of wonderful hand-dyed Malabrigo merino yarn:

Darlene is also making a pullover for herself, and she was our least-experienced knitter.  She knew how to knit and purl and had knit a couple of scarves, but that was about it.  Brave woman!  She has learned a lot:

They all like the way you can try the garment on for fit as you go along.  Here, Laurelle had just finished her first sleeve and she liked the length and the fit:

Judith was AWOL but we will catch up with her at the end of the month!

//

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Early Spring

Posted in Methow Valley, spinning on February 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »

It’s been kind of gray and misty around here lately, the snow is melting, the roads are clear, ground is beginning to show – in other words, it is more like March in the Methow, than early February!  Thank you, El Nino… while east coast and midwest seem to be reeling under heavy snows, we are just soggy.

Today we have some sun, though, so I went up the road and caught this picture on the way back down.  As you can see, there is still some snow on the ground up here on Benson Creek.

My friend Diana has a spinning day on the second Monday of each month (including a delicious potluck lunch).  That was yesterday.  There were only four of us but we had a fine time.  Diana had finished spinning the fleece from a Jacob lamb and had 3 skeins of yarn to show for it – hard to believe these all came from the same sheep!  She did a great job of separating out the colors before carding for spinning.  She also had some socks she knit years ago from handspun Jacob wool, so I got a picture.  Aren’t they great?  One pair also had handspun angora from one of her bunnies.

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Spinning Day

Posted in knitting, spinning on January 29, 2010| 3 Comments »

We had a good turnout yesterday at Methow Valley Spinners and Weavers, for our 4th Thursday “focus on spinning” day.  Somehow we had kind of fallen out of the habit of making this 4th meeting of the month truly about spinning, so it was heartening to see all the wheels in motion and a lively discussion of fiber preparations and spinning methods.  There had also been some interest in learning more about crochet finishes so we had a little demo and practice of basic crochet and also Reverse Single Crochet or Crab Stitch.

I am teaching 2 knitting classes now.  The Tuesday night group is learning how to design and knit their own top-down raglan sweater.  Next week is the 4th meeting and everyone seems to be doing well.  I’ll try to get some progress pictures of their sweater next week.  Here is the one I am knitting along with them:

The yarn is some Rowan Magpie Tweed I bought several years ago from a friend who was de-stashing.  It’s nice to see it finally turning into something!  I am quite pleased with the cable pattern down the front and back, and the cabled rib with rolled edge on the sleeve.  I plan to use that around the bottom of the sweater as well, and then work out something along the same lines for the neckline finish.

My other group is on Thursday mornings – they just wanted some help with their projects, and to learn some new skills.  Yesterday I taught them how to do several different kinds of buttonholes.

We’re off to the coast today to start packing up and moving out of our apartment there.  We’ll be moved out by the end of February.  It’s been a wonderful place to come to when we are in the big city, right at the Ballard Locks, but it has become harder to justify the expense given how seldom we are actually there.  Kind of hard to give it up, though…

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Wet but still White

Posted in knitting, outdoors, spinning on January 20, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Greetings from the soggy Methow Valley.   We have had a steady supply of precipitation – if only it would stay about 5 degrees colder… then it would stay as snow.  At least we got a nice 3-4″ over Saturday night, and some of it is still on the ground, but the roads are once again completely clear.  Last week we twice went on a 2-1/2 mile round trip walk up our road, to the end of pavement, which most winters is a treacherously icy affair, best not attempted.

I hear most of the groomed ski trails in the valley are still in decent shape, though.  There was a big national level Nordic ski race here last weekend, the SuperTour, and they had to change the venue in part from the track near Liberty Bell High School to the north summit of Loup Loup (which has a groomed ski trail system of its own).  By all accounts the conditions were good and it went off well.

Not at the championship level ourselves, we were content to ski some of the trails up at Loup Loup South Summit last Sunday.  It was a little slow but not sticky and we were out for at least 2 hours.  Towards the end we had a light snow mixed with rain, so we got pretty wet, but it was great to be out there and doing it!

Yesterday I went with my Tuesday group for a snowshoe outing.  We drove up the Twisp River Road and tried the Buttermilk Sno-Park (not tracked and too icy), another spot at the end of plowing up the south side of the Twisp River (neighbors known to be unfriendly to parking there, were home, and some of our group were nervous…), and finally the end of plowing up the main Twisp River Road.  There we had luck and saw only that some skiers had been in before us.  We had to “break trail” but the surface was firm so it wasn’t too much work.

This was the turn-around spot for some, the beaver ponds and a rather grey outlook:

Twisp River beaver ponds

Four of us continued on to War Creek Campground for a lunch break and turn-around spot.  We figured we did 5 miles round trip, and I was a little tired!  But had a lovely hot soak in the tub on returning home.

On the fiber arts front, I finished my third Jared Flood hat from his “Made in Brooklyn” booklet.  I used my handspun grey Corriedale plus a strand of grey Rowan Kidsilk Haze.  It is wonderfully soft and springy!

I also finished up spinning some dyed wool roving that I bought from Heidi Parra at The Artful Ewe in Port Gamble about 2 years ago.  The roving was dyed mainly green with some areas of brown-into-black, so the color varies subtly along the length of the spun singles.  I wanted to ply it with something else so I could get more yardage, so rummaged around in the spinning fiber boxes and came up some baby camel/merino (50/50 blend).  So here is the final yarn, it is a 2-ply and about fingering weight.  I have 220 gm total or about 1/2 lb of yarn, approx 850 yds and I think it will be knit into a lace shawl.

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Resolutions

Posted in home life, spinning on January 9, 2010| 1 Comment »

I didn’t make any specific New Year’s resolutions, yet the past two weeks have seen us finishing things up, organizing, taking care of things long postponed, and the like.  Not much of this activity was picture-worthy, and so I tended not to post on the blog.  But we are here and busy!

I started teaching a knitting class last Tuesday based on Karen Alfke’s Top-Down Raglan “Unpattern” (with her permission).  I am leading 5 intrepid knitters through the process of designing their own sweater using a yarn of their choice.  Of course, I am knitting one along with them so I have to keep ahead!  I spent most of last Monday getting my class project started, going through some of my sweater design books and preparing handouts for the first class.  Things went well with the first meeting and I think it is going to be a fun and exciting process for everyone.

I also took most of a day last week to catalog a big box of books that were donated to our guild library last fall.  They have been sitting there on the floor of our home office giving me a baleful look for some time now.  It wasn’t a big deal, but I needed to enter them into an Excel sheet and classify them, print out labels and get them ready for shelving.  We are using the Pourrey Cross Textile Classification Schedule developed at Interweave Press to classify our books.  Sometimes it is a challenge to get the right match, but it is better than nothing (and certainly better than trying to develop our own subject classification method).  So on Thursday I took everything up to the meeting and my co-librarian and I shelved everything and generally tidied up the library.  We needed more shelf space so we had to move some things around and then shift all the books over to fill the newly freed-up shelf.

Next project up was going through and organizing most of last year’s Visa charge receipts and pairing them with their statements.  This is in preparation for entering into Quickbooks which I will start tomorrow.  In other words, starting to get our bookwork done so we can take everything to our accountant hopefully by early February.

Rick finished up some laundry room cabinets and installed them at the house up in Mazama a couple of days ago.  That means he is done with that cabinet job, which occupied him for much of 2009.  We are going to try to go up to the house sometime next week and get some pictures.  The owner has asked Rick to build 3 beds for the house and they are still working out the details on that, but that will be his next project in the shop.

He also took the time to build a new out-feed table for the table saw, and repaired the big sprinkler cart that we use to water out in the field during the summer (“finally got that **** thing out of my way in the shop”).

It did snow for several days last week, on and off.  I decided it was time for me to learn how to use the snowblower, so I cleared out the driveway instead of expecting Rick to do it.  That was actually a workout!   Discovered some under-used arm muscles.  We finally got enough snow to put a layer down out on the alfalfa field, and our neighbors pulled the tracking sled around behind a snowmobile to set a ski track.  We went around twice yesterday (40 minutes) and it was great skiing, although a hair thin in places.  We got a light dusting last night so that should improve things a bit.

And finally, I spun up some dusty green merino top to go with some previously spun singles.  These came from a spinning batt given to one of our guild members last summer in Spokane – she passed it on to me as she doesn’t spin.  It was a beautiful batt (94% superfine merino, 4% bamboo, 1% angelina, which gives it the sparkle) in color “Dolly Varden” created by Laurie Sitkiewicz from Anchorage, AK (ewenique@gci.net, no website).  But only 2.5 oz so I wanted to stretch it a bit to get enough yarn to knit with.

merino & trout before plying

I had divided the Trout onto 3 storage bobbins, originally meaning to make a single skein of 3-ply from it, but wound up plying each one of those with 2 strands of the dusty green merino, resulting in 3 nice skeins of yarn.  The sparkle from the Angelina is definitely there, but not overwhelming.

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Minus One

Posted in knitting, Methow Valley, weaving on December 10, 2009| 4 Comments »

That was the temperature when we got up at 7 am – minus one degree F, or over 30 below freezing.  Yikes!  Well it stays warm in the shop and apartment so I guess we got this place insulated pretty well.  It has been clear and sunny and beautiful in the valley, although the continuing lack of snow is making us nervous.

The social event last weekend was the Confluence Gallery‘s annual holiday dinner up at The Barn in Winthrop.  Now that doesn’t sound too elegant, but they decorated it in a cabin theme and it was really quite charming.  The food was great, and this year they skipped the benefit auction so it was easier to socialize and mingle after dinner.  Most of the attendees are volunteers, patrons or artists (or all three) so we have a lot in common.  Rick and I had a great time and posed for our pictures in a sleigh:

I have been weaving up a storm this week, having finished four shawls using a mohair boucle in colors that remind me of a parrot.  It is a handpainted yarn from New Zealand, and the dyer called it “Lollipop”.  It has proven to be a popular color, as I sold two at the weavers’ guild sale, and then two of these longer ones are on order.  So then I did two more to have some for stock.

I also finished a knitting project – it is a wool vest that I started around the first of November.  The pattern is “Veste Everest” by Veronik Avery, from the Fall 2005 Interweave Knits magazine.  I used some yarn I had in stash, a Karabella yarn called “Aurora Melange.”  It is a superwash extrafine merino in marled browns (or at least, I think “irrestringibile” means superwash…) and feels so soft and cushy and springy.  I was worried I wouldn’t have enough after comparing the yardage of what I had with the yardage of the recommended yarn, so even though it is supposed to be a short vest and I am long-waisted, I finished it to the shoulders as written.  At that point I had more than 2 balls of yarn left (out of eight) and it was really way too short.  So I ripped it back to the underarms and added two more repeats of the cable pattern, or another 4 inches, before finishing it again.  Now it is perfect on me, and I still had one whole ball left!  Curious, but there it is.

"Veste Everest" in Karabella "Aurora Melange"

The marled yarn somewhat obscures the cable pattern, but more so in the pictures than when you are looking at it in person.  Not sure why that is, but I took about 6 shots trying to get better light and definition, to no avail.

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Shawl Pins R Us

Posted in fiberarts, woodworking on December 4, 2009| 5 Comments »

We’re back in the valley this week after a nice relaxing Thanksgiving weekend visit to Seattle.  After the actual T-day activities, we had a couple of days to just hang out and be tourists in the city.  The weather was great, meaning dry and even sunny on occasion, which meant we could go for long walks.  We got together with friends, also rented movies and stayed in some evenings, and got lots of sleep.

Back in the valley, it has stayed dry and it is getting quite cold.  We could use some snow around here.  The Weatherwatch column in the paper (Methow Valley News) says it will be coming with the waning of the moon… hope so!

I made a first batch of shawl pins for the guild sale using beads and some wood rings I found at a bead store in Seattle.  Unfortunately, they have run out of the rings and said it was a one-time thing and they would not be getting more.  I had explored some other bead stores while over at the coast for Thanksgiving, and came home with some really pretty semi-precious stones that I wanted to use for the heads of the pins.  But, no rings.

But wait a minute, I am married to a woodworker.  So I asked him a couple of days ago if he thought he could make me some rings that were a little nicer and more interesting than the ones I had purchased.  What a guy – the next thing I knew he was down in the shop up to his ankles in wood chips and had turned out the wood for 108 of them.  108!!  Most of them still need sanding and finishing, but he did finish up enough for me to get some out to the shops on consignment for the holiday shopping season.

And he used some beautiful woods – highly figured maple, lacewood, a very dark and dense walnut from either Paraguay or Peru (he couldn’t remember).

So here’s some of the first batch:

Lacewood with turquoise bead

Walnut with bright green stone bead

Walnut with square red semi-precious bead

Figured maple with semi-precious stone bead

Lacewood with orange semi-precious bead

I also finished two longer shawls, having put the warp on the loom before we left for the holiday.  One was woven with rich brown alpaca for the weft, the other with black alpaca.  I took them up to the galleries today (Ashford Gallery in Winthrop and Confluence Gallery in Twisp) and am planning on starting another pair of longer shawls tomorrow.

Blue & turquoise warp with brown alpaca

Blue & turquoise warp with black alpaca

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Off to The Coast

Posted in weaving on November 24, 2009| Leave a Comment »

We’re off to Seattle (aka “The Coast”) for Thanksgiving with family and visits with friends.  The weather seems to be cooperating so we expect the drive over the passes to go without incident (or accident, that is).  The cats are going along since we will be gone for 5 nights – they usually tolerate the drive without too much complaint, and recognize the apartment once we get there.

So I will leave you with some pictures of our guild meeting room set up for the sale (which went well), and a promise to resume blogging sometime next week.

We had many rugs on display all over the room

Kay Reiber's shawls displayed on loom

towels displayed on a 72-spool rack

the "tableware" table

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Painterly Dyeing

Posted in dyeing on November 18, 2009| 15 Comments »

I finally got around to trying out a dye method I ran across last year in the magazine put out by Ashford Handicrafts Ltd in New Zealand (makers of Ashford spinning wheels, Ashford dyes, etc).  After randomly applying 2-3 colors of acid dyes to a long skein of wool using squeeze bottles, a roller is used to work the dyes into the fiber and create new colors where the dyes blend together.  Then the skein is microwaved or steamed as usual, to set the dye.

I had 17 skeins of 3-ply yarn that I spun up over the course of the last couple of months, using roving that was sent to me by my sister in California.  It came from a friend of hers who raises (or used to raise) sheep but she didn’t seem to know what breed they were.  It isn’t a fine wool, probably more like Romney, so I spun it woolen and then made a 3-ply for knitting.

So this is how I spent the last couple of days.  Jeez, it’s a lot of work just skeining everything, soaking, washing it out afterwards, etc.  But it was a learning experience!

First I re-skeined them into 4-yard skeins (to fit the length of a 6-foot work table) using my warping board:

After soaking them in a vinegar solution, I laid them out on the table and applied dye.  Of course this is the fun part, and also the most challenging part for me.  How do I come up with 3 colors that will play well with each other?  I used some of my dyed samples from last summer’s workshop as a guide, and also just played around with some mixes, trying them out on coffee filters.  I was trying to just have fun and be a little loose about it (not easy for me sometimes) but I did make notes – on the coffee filters!! – about what worked, and what didn’t work as well.

dye applied from squeeze bottles

dyes blended with the roller

The roller came from a paint store and is meant for use in wallpapering.  It has a little texture to the plastic surface, and I would like to find something smoother but still OK with water and dye.  But basically, it did the job.

After steaming, they had to be washed and rinsed, hung to dry – then I re-skeined them yet again into the standard 2-yard skeins that is my standard put-up for handspun.  I plan to sell these at the guild sale this weekend.  Hardly a “money maker” after spinning, plying, washing, and doing all this process to dye it – but I can’t use everything I produce and this was basically a learning experience for me.

They did turn out OK – some better than others – I got more subtle results when I diluted the 1% dyestock solution with equal parts to 3 times as much water.  Major lesson, that.

the finished skeins

I enjoyed this approach so much that I think I will try it on some finer yarns wound for a warp, and maybe some rovings for spinning.

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