WIP Wednesday: February 10, 2016

Sekret Knitting:

• I finished up the second Heroines Club shawl and blocked it.  I even shot photos for it yesterday and my tester is finishing up her version. 
• I'm halfway up sleeve #1 of the current sweater project, and I've cast on for the body.  I had some detail at the bottom hem I needed to fuss with regarding numbers, but that was less painful than I thought it might be (easy in fact), and so I am now cruising along on the body.  This is my focus project for the next couple of weeks. 

Personal Knitting:

• I finished my Dewberry cowl and love it!  It's soft and drapey, and was a quick fun project that used up some handspun.  What's not to love?  My version used a sportweight yarn - the pattern was written for Aran, so it's a bit smaller than the original.  I'm actually thinking I might knit it again in a heavier yarn just because.

• With Dewberry off the needles, I cast on a Quaker Yarn Stretcher with my recently spun Mirro Lake colorway BFL from Three Waters Farm.  I'm a bit farther along since this picture was taken - I knit on this during the Superbowl this weekend, and it's a quick and easy knit as well, so I made a lot of progress on it. 

At the rate I'm going, I'll probably have this finished up this weekend as well, and I've selected a more complex pattern to knit up with a gradient skein of handspun for my next on-the-needles project. 

• I have finished up the March self-striping socks colorway - those will preview on the podcast on Monday.

Spinning Friday: February 5, 2016

I've got 2 finished spins to share with you today!

First up is the December FatCatKnits club fiber, which was a swirl merino (dark and light merino blended together) in the Scarlett and Rhett colorways, the final installment in the Famous Couples Club offering this go-round.

The original roving consisted of two 2.5 oz braids.  The bright one is Scarlett (lots of red, royal blue, emerald green and purple) and the more muted one is Rhett (charcoal, black and a gray-blue).

I spun each of the colorways up into singles and then plied them together to yield a fingering-weight 2-ply with 530 yards/5 oz of yarn.

While I haven't decided for sure the grand plan for this yarn, I do have enough yardage for a decently sized shawl, and I'm eyeing Romi Hill's Artesian as a possibility.  This one will marinate a while while I decide on a final project to try with it.

I also spun up 4 oz of BFL from Three Waters Farm as part of the CTA first-quarter SAL in the CTA Ravelry group.  The colorways Mary Ann dyed up were inspired by 1930s artwork and this colorway is Mirror Lake.  The original braid looked like:

I decided at the front end I wanted to use this colorway for an asymmetrical triangular shawl, something like the Quaker Yarn Stretcher or the like.  When I unbraided the roving, I found I had 3 basically equal sets of color runs so I pulled the braid apart into thirds.  Then I split one of the thirds in half and spun each half into singles, followed by the other third so that I had a shorter run of the colors and a longer run of the colors repeated twice over the length of the singles.  I then plied the 2 plies together to produce a 285 yard/4 oz skein of sportweight. 

The theory is that since this type of shawl starts with shorter rows and increases to longer ones the color blocks will stay more proportionately the same over the course of the increasing/shaping of the shawl.  We'll see if this actually works out in the final project when I get there!

Currently on the wheel, I'm spinning an 8 oz combo spin of some of my oldest fibers - two braids of BFL from FatCatKnits that I'm spinning a ply of each and then will ply these together.  I've gotten the first 4 oz of singles spun so far, and will update progress next week!