Month: February 2009

  My Thing-a-Day item for the 27th and 28th was to work on a pair of socks I am knitting from handspun.  They are toe up and after I turned the heel, I tried it on.  Ugg, too snug!  One small seven row portion of fair isle knitting right before I did the the heel had floats that were too long and didn't stretch like the rest of the sock.  I ripped back to before that section and found a new fair isle pattern to use with smaller floats. I started reknitting at the arrow and two days later I am back to where I was before.  At least the sock feels comfy now!

  For Thing-a-Day today, I had fun playing with a little sample batt from my fiber stash.  I spun the singles on a Schacht Matchless, then wound the singles off onto a nostepinne.  Using both ends of the centerpull ball, I plied it on the Schacht. 

I wound the yarn off onto a niddy-noddy and here is the finished skein, ready to be washed and set.

  My project for Thing-a-Day today has been in the works for quite a long time.  This project was my first try at spinning cotton.  It is a cotton and recycled denim fiber blend.  I spun it on a Bosworth book charkha and after I filled three spindles I wound the singles off together onto a weavers storage bobbin using a bobbin winder.  Here's a photo showing how I set it up (please ignore the current singles on the spindles as they are just things I'm sampling now on the charkha).

 When one spindle ran out of singles on it, I would break off the other two, spin each spindle full again, splice the singles on the spindles to those on the bobbin and wind off again onto the bobbin.  I repeated this cycle until I ran out  of fiber.

The singles had a lot of twist when I wound them off to the bobbin.  I let them stay on the storage bobbin for quite a while until they were 'stale' and I didn't have to fight the active twist and snarls while plying.  To ply the singles, I slipped the drive band off of the bobbin winder and put a little hand weight on its base and used it as a lazy kate.  I plyed all three singles using a folding Lendrum wheel with a plying head.Normally, I wind the yarn off into a skein, wash and set it but this time I decided to wind it off directly into a centerpull ball using a nostepinne

Since cotton yarn has so absolutely no stretch it is very stessful to me to  knit at a tight gauge. To avoid the stess on my hands, I thought I could knit it loosely then wash and dry it using high heat.  Being cotton, maybe the piece would shrink and tighten up the knitting and spare my hands.

Finished knitting and ready to toss in the washer and dryer.  We'll see how the shrinking experiment works…. 

  For TAD today I did just a little spinning on My Country Craftsman wheel, it had a Tencel and Merino blend on it that I am spinning into singles that I'll ply for a sockweight yarn for…Socks!

 My creative thing-a-day for this weekend was to  work on my Painter's vest.  The yarn is from Mountain Colors (I think) purchased on a long ago trip as a souvenir.  I planned and started the vest awhile ago then got sidetracked by other hobbies. 

  I filled another bobbin with this mixed fiber bat.  The bits of silk in it and short pieces of odd fibers make it hard to spin smooth, so I'm going for a textured single with it.  The Journey wheel keeps making this whirring sound, I'll tinker with it when I change bobbins.