shopping and better spinning

I went to Little Barn over the weekend--that's always fun, but I especially went because I wanted to meet ~P~ of Spin, Knit, and Life--it's so cool to talk to someone on the internet and then get to meet them in person!
I considered taking my spinning wheel and joining the spinning bunch, but I had a ton of stuff I wanted to get done, and I just didn't think I could sit still with it all hanging over my head. I did get to pet some beautiful alpaca yarn that was an insanely good deal. As soon as I figure out what to make out of it, you can bet I'll be back and buy some.
As it is, I exercised admirable restraint (laugh if you want) and only bought three things: 8 oz. of BFL in natural white sheep color to go with the active singles I made from the Hoobody fiber way back here (needed and planned), a ball winder, and this hand-dyed roving.


It looked a lot darker and richer before I unfurled it, but I'm still very excited about it. Here's all I know about it: it's 100% wool, hand-dyed by Wild Thing exclusively for Little Barn. (Which type of wool is not specified.)
The ball winder was the most practical purchase--I will definitely need one for the dyeing operation. Unfortunately, it seems to have a manufacturing defect. When you put the clamp in place in its proper position, it ends up being up against the teeth of the cranking mechanism, preventing it from turning. So you have to choose between having it well clamped and but nonfunctional or having it insecurely clamped and still not very smooth. Needless to say, I'm returning it. For as much of a yarn nut as I am, I never actually saw one of these things in person before, so I had no idea how it even worked or was assembled until I got it home and read the directions. It's too bad, but I got something out of the experience anyway. For as much yarn as I intend to dye, I think I will probably be better off springing the extra bucks for a jumbo one. If I had bought a small one that worked, I would have kept it and then probably been wishing for a jumbo one within a few months, so in a way, this has saved me a step.
Also, I'm still playing with my version of long draw. I finished the rest of the merino from Asheville and moved on to some gorgeous purple carded roving that I bought way back at Useful Knowledge. Now I know why people recommend doing this technique with carded fiber--it sure does work a lot better!


I also decided it was time to graduate to the next ratio on my spinning wheel. The choices are 6:1, 12:1, and 14:1--watch that first step, it's a doozy. But I was noticing with the merino that unless I treadled like mad during the parts when the long-draw was actually working, I ended up making air yarn--poofy yarn-shaped fiber fluffs with way too little twist. They'd usually make it onto the bobbin but break during attempts at plying. So for this wool, I switched to 12:1, and that definitely helped. This yarn actually looks like I knew what I was doing!

beginnings

As some of you may have noticed yesterday, there's a new link on the blog: Fire Lizard's Yarn Books. It's basically a collection of all the best yarn books I've read or wanted (with a few classics thrown in like Alden Amos.) As I was setting it up, aside from wishing for loads of cash so I could buy it all, I was struck by how many authors I have a connection with. Some, like the Yarn Harlot and Franklin Habit, I've only read their blogs, although they've become a daily part of my life in that way. But a few I've actually met or exchanged electronic comments with. I met Robyn Chachula at a very interesting seminar that she gave on becoming a yarn industry insider, so I'm happy to include her forthcoming book Blueprint Crochet: Modern Designs for the Visual Crocheter. Of course, I loved The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook even before I met Lynne Vogel and attended her class on spinning with color. And I've exchanged comments with Kathleen Taylor since I won Yarns to Dye For from her blog contest. As I was picking books, it was exciting to offer some that I have a connection to. I guess Ialways thought authors were these mysterious deity-type beings or something, but now I sort of know a bunch of them.
Anyway, I worked some more on the bamboo swatch last night, and I'm really liking every stitch I try. In fact, the swatch is starting to look like the beginnings of a very cute sleeve.


I want the actual sleeves to be a bit longer than this and floopier, but it's a start. Also, I found my little bitty (normal to everyone else) crochet hooks. I can't wait to see what they produce with this yarn.

swatching the bamboo yarn

No spinning last night, but I finally got to play with that bamboo yarn. It may not be super soft, but it is exceedingly drapey. Crocheted up, it's not scratchy or rough at all, as I feared it might be. It feels like it would be very cool against your skin.


I was using the smallest hook in my favorite set, an 8 mm (L-11). I usually use huge hooks to make everything--crochet is so stiff if you use the recommended hook size, plus I usually use pretty bulky yarn. But this yarn is DK weight, and I want to make a summer top out of it, and not one of those tops where you have to wear something else underneath. Therefore, I will need to break out a much smaller hook for at least some of this. (I should have put something else in the picture for scale--it looks smaller in person. The holes in the fabric are small enough to be nice for something like a sleeve, just not a whole shirt.)
I do like this yarn. I think it's going to make a fabulous top.

spinning

I'm still working on the beautiful merino roving I bought in Asheville. It is so soft, I just love it. I was starting to get a little grumpy about the colors, though. There was a patch or two that had some green, which just looked weird in the midst of the mostly pinkish beige background. Here's what the roving looked like.


When all that's showing is the purples and grays, it's gorgeous, but where the green is, the beige looks sickly pink and weird. I almost didn't want to work on it, but I had a little bit left over on one bobbin, so I decided to spin some more. It turned out that the rest of the wool is mostly beige with purple and gray, much prettier than the green part, so I was rewarded. I split off two almost equal pieces--the goal was to add on to the little leftover bit on one bobbin, start with nothing on the other, and end up with it all matching up when I plied. It was a good plan, but I forgot about it halfway through and started each half on an empty bobbin. So now all three of my bobbins contain singles of this yarn and I need to get one empty before I can ply. Sigh. The leftover bit is very little, though. I'm going to try to join it to one of the others before plying. We'll see if I guess correctly as to which is the shorter one. Last time I tried this, I just ended up with twice as much leftover as I started with!
Anyway, I was making some more attempts at long-draw last night, with some better success. I still need to read up on how you're actually supposed to do this, but going from memory of watching others plus some inspiration from a post on Spin, Knit, and Life about spinning from the fold, I'm starting to get it to work. Also, something finally clicked in my mind: the big fat rope phenomenon I was getting happens when the twist works its way over to the end and starts pulling the fibers lengthwise instead of pulling from the side of the roving. The twist had been kind of travelling around and spontaneously grabbing from wherever. Once I broke the roving into short pieces and insisted that it grab from the side, this worked very smoothly. I still had to intervene occasionally with a little inchworm when I got to a weird bit of fiber, but mostly it was just working.




The yarn came out pretty even--certainly better than last time I tried!--and the spinning was free of frustration. It was so exhilarating! I've seen others do this, and it looks like magic. Last night I was the one working the magic. It rocked!

I'm in business

I went to the courthouse at lunch yesterday and filed the paperwork to start my business. Fire Lizard Studios LLC is now a real entity, not just a dream, and I'm a small business owner! Next step: setting up shop on Etsy and getting some products up there. This is so exciting. The ladies at the courthouse were super nice and encouraging, too. Huntsville has a lot going on, but it's still very small-town-y in many ways that make life pleasant. It's a great place to live.
All of the legal stuff about starting the business seemed impossibly overwhelming at first, but I think I've got it under control. The only thing that's not done is setting up an account for county sales tax for my county, and I sent off the paperwork for that today. Even that isn't really super urgent unless my first Etsy customers happen to be from this county.
Well, that's the news. After I took care of that stuff, I felt like queen of the world, but I was ready for a nice, relaxing knitting night. I packed my bag yesterday morning with the two yarns I'm most eager to swatch with: the purple bamboo yarn and the fancy pink organic cotton yarn.



You can't really tell from the picture, but the pink in the organic cotton (Rowan PureLife in Brazilwood) has beautiful subtle variations to it. That's why I bought it.
Anyway, I drove over to knitting night, reached over to grab my yarn bag, and discovered I had left it at home! Duh! I was so mad. I figured I'd stop in and say hi and then just go home and crochet, but I had so much fun talking to everyone, time flew by and before I knew it, Barnes & Noble was closing and throwing us all out. I sat around all evening and did absolutely nothing. The knitters are such a cool group of people, it was a lot of fun. About the only thing that would have made it more fun is some yarn!

weekends were made for yarn

It was a beautiful weekend for yarn. Some people hate it when it rains on Saturday, but I love it. When it's a gorgeous sunny day, I feel like I'm wasting it if I stay inside and do exactly what I want to do (yarn!). When it's raining, I can spin, crochet, or whatever guilt-free.
I've also done a lot of plotting and planning for the business. I'm hoping to get the legal stuff squared away this week if that's physically possible--most of the paperwork gets filed at the courthouse, so I'm hoping that I can just go there and have it processed immediately. That's not how it is if you apply for a marriage license, but starting a business is less rash, so I'm hoping it doesn't come with a required cooling-off period.
Meanwhile, I finished my capelet.


During the pink and gold rows, I was starting to doubt the whole thing, but when I added the wine-colored row, the whole thing really came together, and now I love it again.
Everywhere I've taken it, people have asked me how I picked the colors and yarns to go together, so I'm thinking of designing similar capelets in three different colorways and offering them as kits. I really like the way this one turned out, and it's mostly bulky yarn. I used a huge hook to make a drapey fabric, and that also makes the whole thing quick to make (that is, if you don't interrupt it with two baby blankets, a shawl, a scarf, and a hat, like I have). Etsy, here I come!

socks vs. shawls

Lately I've been thinking a lot about sock yarn. I've decided to focus my business on hand-dyeing and hand-spinning yarn for the time being. I will probably add other areas later, but I tend to pull myself in too many directions at once and confuse myself. Starting a business is complicated enough without doing that. I'm working on all the legal stuff right now, and let me just say blech.
For dyeing, sock yarn is so popular right now, it seems like a good place to start. And last night I had a small epiphany: one of my favorite yarns of all time is actually a sock yarn, though I didn't know it when I bought it.


This is Brooks Farm Yarns Acero. Acero means steel in Spanish, and its metallic look is what made me exceed my yarn budget and buy it. It's a fingering weight yarn, 60% Superwash Wool, 20% Silk, and 20% Viscose. It comes in 4-ounce/420 yard skeins. It is springy and bouncy and gorgeous. I bought it at the Pittsburgh Knit and Crochet Festival as an antidote to my scratchy yellow Red Heart learning-to-knit project, and it is a total joy to crochet with. It's also my first "real" (non-mass-produced, mostly natural material) yarn. Love love love it!


This project has been on the back burner for a good while, but I pulled it out last night and fell in love all over again. It's a shawl.


It was going to be a really big shawl (I bought two skeins), but the more I think about it, I may just finish off the last of this skein (probably another 3 rows or so) and leave it at that.
So I already have an easy pattern that I designed that I can post with my new line of sock yarn for the non-sock folks. Bonus!