Yarn Dreams

Last Sunday was one of those days where I had nothing to do, but the weather was nice and I felt like I should be out enjoying it. It was one of the few non-rainy days last week, and I was afraid it was going to be one of the last nice days of the season. (Although today is looking decent so far.)

My mom had found a little ad in the paper about an “Alpaca Extravaganza!” at my county fairgrounds. (Why the ad was in her paper when she lives in a different county and I didn’t even hear about it… I’m not sure.) So we stopped by.

I just love their sweet little faces. And so soft!

There were some alpacas for sale there. Steve is lucky they didn’t fit into the backseat of my car. Of course I had to get a little fiber:

*No cats were harmed in the making of today’s post. One was mildy annoyed, but cheered up when he saw that there were treats involved.

**I’m really not the kind of person who likes to dress up my cat. Really. This was on sale at Target and I couldn’t resist.

Before I started spinning, I imagined that it would be difficult to actually knit with (and “use up”) the yarns that I spun. In fact, the opposite has been true for me. I love knitting with my handspun yarn, and only worry a little about finding the perfect pattern to use for them.

I’m sure it helps that all of my spinning to this point has produced worsted weight yarn approximate to a skein of Cascade 220. Hats and scarves, anyone?

I wrote about spinning this Spunky Eclectic fiber here in March. I was excited to see how it knitted up, since I didn’t pay any attention to how I split the colors while spinning. I ended up with some great subtle stripes:

Pattern: One Row Handspun Scarf by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (available free here)
Yarn:Handspun Spunky Eclectic Roving in “New Day”, details here
Needles:size 8US bamboo straights
Start/Finish: October 6, 2009/October 13, 2009

Cold. It’s cold here. The heat is on, my wool socks are out, and the cat has been sleeping under the blanket against my side. (Which at least keeps me warm even if I can’t roll over.)

We watched the Iowa vs. Michigan last night on TV and at one point they showed the “feels like” temperature as 24 degrees in Iowa City. After that, I was glad to be home on my couch wearing my Sedum sweater and a blanket instead of at the game. We were at Kinnick last weekend for the Iowa/Arkansas State game and I felt cold sitting there is a 50 degree breeze. (At least the awesomeness of the game would have kept me warm last night.)

We are spending this weekend organizing the garage so we can fit both cars in before the weather really turns bad, cutting down plants in the garden (I’ve have a garden update written for a while that needs to be posted), and decorating for fall/halloween.

Monday is Columbus Day and Steve has the day off work. I am taking the day off since I don’t get it off automatically and we are going to IKEA to buy a new rug for the living room. The wood floor looks nice, but is definitely not cozy enough for the winter. I am challenging myself to only come home from IKEA with the rug and nothing else.

I have been on an upswing of knitting productivity lately. I’ve got at least a half dozen of finished projects I need to post here individually for my own record keeping. I’m afraid I’ve already forgotten some of the things I’ve wanted to say about them. Is it too early to make a new year’s resolution for 2010? I resolve to stay on top of things I want to get done, because it easier stop and take a minute to do something right away than catch up later!

:::dances around:::

It’s done It’s done It’s done It’s done.

Actually, it was done September 6th. I love it.

And I am never making a one piece, top down, bulky yarn, oversize cardigan again. Especially not during the summer.

I feel like I need to say that it actually does fit very well, even though they way I am standing in one photo makes it appear too small and the other a little too big.

I don’t have buttons for it yet, and hope to find some lightweight plastic ones that will blend into the fabric rather than stand out.

Let’s see, what else to say about this. I changed the pattern to make the body of the sweater in stockinette stitch instead of seed stitch. While I love the look of seed stitch, I didn’t think the extra bulk of it in this yarn would be very flattering on me.

I also wish I would have had one more ball of yarn to make the ribbed collar a little longer. Still, it’s very comfy and is going to be perfect to wear this fall for running out to the store or keeping warm at home.

Pattern: Sedum Sweater (on Ravelry)
Yarn: GGH Aspen in Camel
Needles: size 10 US circs and dpns
Started/Finished: May 19, 2009/September 6, 2009

As much as I hate to admit it, Fall has arrived in Chicagoland. This has both bad (weather) and good (football!) points.

It is pretty easy to tell when college football season begins around here. Every time I turn the TV on, it is tuned to ESPN or the Big Ten network. Radios are tuned to AM stations, especially if we are in the car on a Saturday. We stop in front of any TV showing score for a quick update. And I am struggling to keep up with the player’s names and team standings as every other sentence out of my husband’s mouth is football related.

It’s lots of fun. He has plenty of things to say about how ESPN treats the Hawkeyes, and about the polls in general, but I think I am going to let that go here for now.

Since we can no longer make it to Iowa City for all of the Hawkeye home games anymore, we have switched to Illinois State Redbirds season tickets. We meet my family there; my Dad is an alumnus. It is a lot of fun and we get to see some excellent 1-AA football. Also, their marching band is fantastic and it makes this former band geek/drum majorette feel very nostalgic.

(Every time I am on a college campus I have to resist the urge to run to the admissions office and sign up for classes. But as I’ve said – geek.)

Do you remember Reggie?

seen here, trying to steal my watermelon

He was actually named after Reggie the Redbird.

An extra special bonus to attending Redbird games is that we have a 2.5 hour drive each way. That is a lot of quality knitting time while my husband drives. I’ve actually finished a few small projects already – two games into the season.

(And once again I have a serious backlog of FO posts.)

This weekend the Redbirds are away, and we are actually driving to Iowa for a Hawkeye game. This is our first one in… two years I think? I’m very excited. Well, except for the fact that the game starts at 11am, and we have to leave at ridiculous o’clock in the morning to get there in time. Oh well – more car knitting!

I can’t believe a week has gone my since Mom and I were at Stitches Midwest. I am once again so far behind in things I want to write about.

I took Friday off work and stayed in a hotel in Schaumburg (about 45 min from home) for two nights. Friday night was basically just for fun – a girls night with mom – but I stayed Saturday because my husband and I were going to a concert at the Park West in the city and I didn’t want to have to drive home after my class on Saturday, down to the city, back home, and then back to Schaumburg the next day. It worked out really well, and was a nice little escape from the real world for a few days. In fact, by the time work on Monday rolled around the perpetual mental list of things I needed to do that morning was gone from my brain. Wow. It’s a good thing I write everything down!

Unfortunately I don’t have any photos at all of the entire weekend. Lame. I’m gotten so bad about pulling my camera out and taking pictures. I need start that again. I think it’s nice to have a record of even the somewhat mundane things in life.

The two classes I took at Stitches were excellent. I am going to take a few photos of what I learned and talk a little bit about them in a separate post.

We (well, I) did quite a bit of damage at the Stitches market. Since I was there for three days (Friday with Mom, Saturday and Sunday for classes) I kept going back and picking up ‘just one more thing’.

I’m not going to show a photo of the yarn, since much of it is for gifts.

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I feel it necessary to say that I am a little overwhelmed my all of my yarn and projects at the moment. I didn’t mention it here yet but a few months ago I ran across a sort of local yarn store that was going out of business, and had everything 75% off. Ahem.

I have enough yarn now for about 10 sweaters, 25 pairs of socks, and countless other smaller projects. This is the first time it has ever felt like too much and I am looking forward to finishing some of the gift projects and getting them out of here.

I spent part of my weekend combining patterns with yarn and doing a few swatches for the things I want to start soon.

The green is Cascade Sierra, the gray is Plymouth Encore, and the red is Rowan Summer Tweed. The first two are for vests and the Summer Tweed is for a Liesl cardigan. I am constantly pushing long sleeves up at work to keep them out of the way (and out of chemicals/media/burners) so I thought I’d try combos of warm vests with short sleeves to stay warm this winter with less hassle.

The swatches have already been washed and blocked. I know many people don’t swatch at all, much less wash and block them, but my scientific brain can not comprehend how to make a garment that fits without knowing how the yarn is going to act. I am a little disappointed to see that my stitches still look uneven in the Sierra after blocking. This is actually my second time attempting to use this yarn and I just can’t get it to look smooth. Is it the cotton content? Frustrating.

These swatches:

are homework for a seaming class I am taking at Stitches Midwest next weekend. I am really looking forward to this class; my seaming is atrocious and no matter how many times I read instructions on how to do mattress stitch I just don’t get it.

Judging by the swatches, we are going to learn to seam many different types of stitches and edges. Maybe after this I will not shy away from knitting a sweater in pieces instead of top-down all at once. My bulky, heavy, too hot on my lap Sweater of Doom has made me question that method, as convenient as it sounds.

The only thing left to finish on my Sedum cardigan is the collar, which is long and ribbed (har) so it can fold over on itself and be cozy.

I have worked on it every night since last weekend. It doesn’t seem to be getting any bigger.

Arggh! I just want it finished!

As much as I love sweaters that are knit in one piece, having the entire thing in your lap while working on a sleeve or the collar is really a pain. Especially when it is a large cardigan/coat sweater in bulky yarn.

I forgot to mention this on my to do list: dye sock yarn.

I need yellow sock yarn for a knit along I am participating in starting September 1st, but I didn’t have any in my sock yarn stash or the desire to spend money on new yarn. (Isn’t that strange? But I have become inundated with yarn this summer and It’s all a little overwhelming. I’ll write about that sometime in the future.)

I did have a ball of Opal Uni-Color in Natural. Perfect! I picked up a vial of Wilton Icing color in Lemon Yellow at Michaels for $1.70 and was off.

I’ve only even done a little Kool-Aid dying experimentation in 2003. It worked well, aside from the face that I never figured out what to do with the neon variegated, fruit scented yarn I created.

This time is I just used my Crock-pot, wound the yarn in to a hank and dunked it in. (Unfortunately, no photos of the process since I did this at night and it is ridiculously dark in my kitchen.) I was hoping to get more of a kettle dyed, semi-solid color, but there are only a few subtle variations. I probably used too much dye for the yarn, even thought I only put in about a 1/4 teaspoon. Oh well, it’s bright at least! I almost wish I would have gone with the Golden Yellow or Buttercup Yellow dyes. I figure if the finished socks really are too bright, I can try to overdye them with a warmer yellow after they are knit.

And now, I have to resist the call of a new hobby. Because even dying one skein of yarn a solid color has me itching to try more. And, my hubby bought me the book Spin Dye Stitch: How to Create and Use Your Own Yarns for my birthday. I know I’ve said it before, but he’s such an enabler.