Spring be Spranging

    Ye Gods, I wish so badly, now that I've chosen it, that the title was a pun based on me taking up sprang, but no, I'm just terrible at titles and this was the first thing I thought of. I've been busy lately, doing spring cleaning, doubting whether it might be time to wash and put away the woolens (verdict: I've kept out the socks, not least because I have like 3 more repairs to do, ugh! but the mittens are definitely away and the scarves and cowls. Hats are half away, there's some that are really more for deep cold and others that are more transitional that are still out, sweaters are mostly still out, and of course, the bed quilts remain because it's still a bit chilly at night.), It's about time to be planting things to harvest later in the summer, but my windowsills are full of Stuff right now because we're in the process of moving furniture around, so I might miss the window for that this year. "Free" tomatoes and onions and garlic make a nice dent in the grocery bill, but it's not strictly necessary. The kids like it though, my youngest especially loves the plants and personifies them with names and personalities.  

    I'm on some new medications for All The Things Wrong with Me, so the ups and downs of that have been great (🙄) along with juggling Everything Else, but I've been making time for crafts daily, at least 15 minutes partially because like, we do need this stuff, it is a legitimate chore, but also because I will tear my hair out if I don't get a little quiet time in the evenings, and the family knows it lmao.

Crochet

    You know, I went through a phase for the last 5? years, where I just like could not handle crochet, which is weird because I learned how to crochet in like 1st grade, I should be so comfortable with it, but it just... I don't know how to describe it, but my hands said "yuck," basically and I couldn't do it. I'm definitely coming out of that now, because I've been getting a bunch of crochet stuff going, and I'm really enjoying it.

    This is part of a stash busting endeavor I'm engaging in, because my stash has a lot of remnants that are in the awkward stage of "too small to use for a 'proper' project" and "big enough that it would feel like a waste putting it in the scrap blanket." I do need a few new pouches for my purse, the one I'm using is dreadful, look:

    Yuck, right? I was surprised to learn, through his, that apparently those fake leather polyvinyl fabrics do actually have fabric underneath. This looks like a nylon knit. I wonder if they're all like that and just "painted" with plastic, or if some or woven and/or just polyvinyl? Not that I'll be destroying a bunch of pleather to find out, but it's curious, right?

    So, I dove into the stash and paired some yarns together to make a replacement. The first one was 

crochet, obviously. It was inspired by a crochet pouch I saw done in tapestry crochet, which is what lead me to try to work some alternating triangles.

    I wanted to get a little fancy with this pouch, and while the purple portion looks ok (not great, but ok) the white definitely had a rightward lean that brings it to the foreground and takes the eye away from the triangles. I tried a couple times to get the tension right to prevent this from happening, but I quickly got frustrated with it, so I abandoned this idea.

    I figured I was getting a little too fancy with it, and that I would just let the yarn speak for itself. I think it turned out well! I plan to sew a woven lining from my fabric stash and add a zipper to the top. Might also add a woven loop on one end, we'll see.

    Next is a coin pouch for my older kid's lunch money. They're at an age where they can manage this kind of thing themselves, and after looking at inspiration photos, they chose a heart shaped one in their favorite colors: blue and pink. This is the front and back pieces. Once I sew on the lining and the zipper, I will join them together into a complete pouch and work the picot edging in the pink. The zipper will also be pink, to tie it all together.

Quilting

    To be perfectly honest, I've been repairing the quilt just about every day, but the photos aren't exciting to me because I feel like they all look the same, so I stopped photographing it at this point. I'll probably photograph the repair of the weird cut on the back because That will at least look different from all these samey blocks, but for now, the only photo I have is this one.

    I think this was the most damaged block in the lot. The repair wasn't more difficult or anything, all the repairs have been thankfully very straightforward, but this was the most drastic change, I think.

    I don't know, what do you think? Different enough of a result to be interesting? I can't tell anymore, honestly.

Knitting

    Continuing on the stash busting small project drive, I made this kind of 70s inspired pouch.

    As I was holding different skeins together to see what might look good, these too colors seemed very dated to me, and game me the idea for the flower motif. I'm not sure if the dimensionality of the flower shows up well in just two colors, so I might embroider on top after it's blocked to add a little bit of cartoon-y clarity to the motif. This pouch will also be lined from stash with a zipper on top.

Spinning

Still working on the sock yarn, and even though it doesn't feel like it, it is progressing.

    The kids had a dental appointment this week, which meant a lot of hovering nearby to answer questions, provide reassurance, and okay treatment, but also long waiting periods, which means I actually finished that portion of the wool in that visit. This is how much was available at the start of the 3 hour appointment block (!!!) and of course at the end of it, everyone was too tired for a good photo op.

 

    That previous spindle full was finished late last week, and this is where I was at this morning as I waited for my turn at the dentist. Unfortunately, my dental visits are not so productive spinning-wise, but today was a day for cooking beans (as in, from dry beans) and making soup, so there was a lot of hovering at the stove waiting for the watched pot to boil, so I'm actually down to just a few grams of this at the time of writing. I'll probably finish it before I head to bed. That will be all of the first skein's plies. If I finish the spinning of this today, I'll split and diz the top for the next ply. I already emptied the smaller spindle, so it'll be ready to go for tomorrow!

Swatching

    My eldest needs a purse for carrying her phone, her lip gloss, wallet, and all the other stuff a middle schooler carries around to be a rizzler to the skibidis or whatever. I'm not old, I totally know what the kids are up to! 😉 After looking at some inspiration photos, she chose this bag which I agree is super cute! Because she's an on-the-go kind of kiddo, she asked that instead of handles, could I make it with a cross-body strap? Why, of course! The plan for now is to use magnets for closures and I'll probably weave a strap and buy the hardware to make it adjustable. This will, of course, also need a lining, which she will choose at the appropriate time. But that time is long on the horizon, because today I am merely swatching.

    The use of front post stitches is really nice here, it hides the holes on either side of the shells (shown here in the center back to back to show how lacy it would be without the front post stitches). That's not something I would have anticipated, since I never really played around with front post crochet, but this is a really fun texture and I'm excited to get working with it. The pattern is for a 16 inch wide bag, but I'm not sure I have enough yarn for that, so I measured the things she'd want to be carrying, and I think I can get away with a 12 inch bag instead. probably about 12 inches tall as well. I'm also using much thinner yarn than what's called for (DK held double, no thank you!) so I had to reconfigure the numbers. I chained the foundation and worked the first row during a zoom call today, so I'll have something to show soon.

Mending

    I found these two socks that have trouble spots, and I haven't started on them, but I probably will tomorrow.

    This one is nuts to me, because this heel is already a page 1 rewrite. This is a brand new heel. I am ship of Theseus-ing these socks right now.

    So I guess I'm at the point where I'll be patching the reconstructed heel to make this mirror facing a mirror continue on down. 

    Another ship of Theseus sock, with the patch getting threadbare, which I will be patching in the coming days. The recursivness of these repairs is giving me a headache. Good night.

April Showers something something

    It's Parent-Teacher conference season, plus a bunch of appointments had to be done back to back for the last week and boy am I tired at this point. It's been rainy, and windy, and cold after an unseasonably warm jag, so everybody's just been down in the dumps. This post is things I got done from like the 9th and 10th, but never got around to posting.

Spinning

    I finished up the alpaca plying I had been working on, and the BFL I had dyed is dry, so I divided the top into three roughly equal parts, and began spinning.

    I love how this dye job turned out, because the fiber presents many colors, depending on which the lighting conditions are. In this image, I was sitting right by a window at around noon, and the color is a beautifully luminous purple. The variation in dye saturation provides a range of colors from lavender all the way to a deep, shadowy grape color. But, indoors and in the afternoon, you get a whole different color story.

    Indoors, you definitely get a much more bruisy looking feel to it. The deeper purples are there, but the medium purples lean redder and the lighter purples have taken on more of a neutral grey tone. I don't have a photo of it yet, but in certain indoor lighting, it even seems to lean brown, and not purple at all! It provides a lot more interest in the spinning, because as the day progresses, it's like I'm spinning a whole new fiber! Also, both the distaff on the right and the full spindle on the left contain 36 grams of fiber. Isn't it crazy how much adding twist compacts the fiber?

    I found this lil guy under the coffee table. I honestly have no idea how this little 9 gram ball of singles got away from me while plying, but I wound it up so that I could ply it back on itself, and I will be taking photos of that later on, after I measure it and all that.

Mending

    I walked into the kitchen and felt the floor under me even though I was wearing socks, so I knew it was time to patch these up. If you look closely, there's actually two places where one or two of the yarn's plies  had completely worn away, and it was down to just a thread holding the sock together. Seems like I caught it just in time!

    Look at all that space you can see inside the sock in these rows! Isn't that crazy? I know I'm wearing the snot out of these socks, but knowing it and seeing it live in front of you is a different thing. I had considered re-knitting this heel, but I just really didn't want to and felt a really strong desire to duplicate stitch instead, so I did.

    I know a lot of people hate sewing, but I find the rhythm of the process really soothing and meditative. I think this took me a couple hours because it's a fairly big repair, but it didn't feel tedious at all, I had a good time. I put on a few videos from my YouTube "watch later" playlist that I'd been meaning to get to, and had myself what Dan Friesen would call a Me'vening. 

Quilting

    I don't remember exactly what days each of these blocks got repaired, so I'm not even going to try and break it down that way. Here's a bunch of blocks that got done in the last couple weeks:

    Going into this one, I knew I'd have to use... blind stitch? I don't think I've actually read what this stitch is called. I searched it up to be sure, and it seems like it's called the ladder stitch more often, but some people called it the blind stitch too, so I don't know, maybe I heard it called that. But it creates an invisible from the side seam, so I figured that was the best method to tackle this. Since that involves creating a new seam allowance on an area, that already has been steamed, I expected a decent amount of puckering, but this is a function over form kind of moment, so I just bit the bullet. However, I was pretty pleasantly surprised with the results:

    I was genuinely shocked this turned out as good as it did. I really thought the tension on both sides would cause puckering or gapping, if not here, then on their other sides, but no. It looks pretty normal all around. I definitely can't continue doing this indefinitely if the seam breaks in that same way again, but good to know you get at least one freebie!

    Like, look at that! That looks pretty stinkin' good! I mean, I guess I don't know what I was expecting, because that's the stitch I'm using all over this blanket to repair it, because for most of the motifs that was the original stitch used to piece it together, but I guess I just never thought about it, I don't know. But I'm pretty proud of how well it turned out!

    Then I had a more run of the mill repair. I'm not sure what it is about the circles that caused them to be the weak point in this blanket. I guess I don't know enough about quilts in general to figure out the reason, but it feels like it should be just as likely for the rest of the thread in the quilt to come apart as this bit. I don't know. I forgot to take a picture of it repaired, but I've repaired this kind of fault so many times at this point that I feel like if I'd just reposted a photo of the same motif it wouldn't even be noticable, so I imagine it's probably fine that I didn't photograph it.

Swatching

    I saw a pattern for a really cute fingerless mitten, and wanted to see if I knew how to replicate some of the things I saw. This doesn't match it exactly, but I made some of what felt like improvements to me, so that's partially by design. Unfortunately, it wasn't a style me or my spouse would wear, so I asked my eldest if they'd wear it. They said no, and the frilly gauzy part on the end of the mitten is really impractical for kids still at an age where they need reminders not to eat their boogers, so as a final project, the idea is scrapped, but I don't feel like it was a waste of time. I had a lot of fun figuring out how to accomplish what I envisioned, so I think of it like enrichment for the animals at the zoo. A little non-threatening adversity is good once and a while.

Crochet

    I have this zippered pouch that a friend of mine got from Ipsy; actually, I have a handful of more of them, because she doesn't really use pouches like that, but she got one every month she was subscribed, so she passed them on for me, because I use them to hold the little doo-dads in my purse. That was something like 6 or 7 years ago, and the leather on one of them is peeling away to reveal a thing knitted jersey type fabric underneath, and that's the pouch I store my knitting needles and crochet hooks and whatnot in, so that is not gonna fly lol. So I started this crochet pouch, which I'll later line with some quilting cotton I have in my stash, and then I'll cannibalize the zipper from the Ipsy pouch and sew it to the lining. Easy-peasy. I'm actually done with the crochet part already, but I don't have the photos altogether right now, so this is where I'm ending the post.

Rainy, gloomy days

    This past weekend has been a dark, wet mess. One of my children, who is in love with the swing set at school has been absolutely devastated by this weather - it's too wet to play outside on the slippery, metal play equipment, which has meant recess in the gym?!?! There are no swings there! And since the gym "only has everything boring" that has meant that they've come home with a lot more energy than usual, keeping me busy in the evenings. Saturday and Sunday's rain ruined our weekend routine of going to the park as well, which means a lot more running and stomping and "but that's not faaaaiiiir" this weekend as well. But this Tuesday morning has dawned clear (but cold!) which means, thankfully, this bout of cabin fever is over, and I can find sometime to sit down and talk about the crafts I've been doing in between "yes, I understand that running indoors is fun, but maybe the downstairs neighbors don't agree?" and "what if we use timers to decide whose turn to choose videos is next?"

Quilting

    I have an arrow pointing to the damage I saw immediately when I laid out the blanket, but somehow I didn't see the damage in the bottom left quadrant and right quadrant (which I can see very clearly in this photo!) until after I started sewing, so that was a bit of a surprise for me.

    I did this one on Friday morning, and I had been meaning to do at least one other on the same day, but I was running late that day (the gloomy weather had me dragging ass too, not just the littles!) so I ended up only working on this one.

    Saturday, I worked on this block. It presented an interesting challenge.

    It seems my Nonne had made a cutting error while piecing this block, and the circle was a bit short, and would not be able to overlay the square properly in order to be tacked down. So, in this area, she had it attaching to the square instead. I love that even from beyond the grave, I'm able to learn from her by studying her work. Were I in this situation, I would have thought I'd have to recut the piece, and if I didn't have extra fabric, this would have caused me some small crisis, but the solution is simple and elegant and once I got it finished, you can only see the difference close up; I certainly never noticed it in the last 15 years until I embarked on this repair session. 

    This repair was slightly complicated by the fact that some of the threads of the fabric have worn away. I had to refold the fabric and attach it further in, which made the repair pucker a bit, which I didn't like, but there weren't really any viable alternatives. A patch would disrupt the patterning, as would darning, and leaving it unrepaired would weaken the areas around it, so to me, having a bit of puckering is worthwhile for the results.

    Up close, it's way more noticable than I would like, but it's not very often that my work is inspected this closely.

    From a normal viewing distance, you can see that it really isn't visible at all. Monday the lighting was bad, so I didn't take photos of the block I worked on, and so far on Tuesday I haven't gotten any quilting done because I had a morning appointment to get to. Maybe I'll do some this afternoon, if the light is good.

Spinning

    The name of the spinning game the last few days has been plying, which means I have a decent amount to show, because plying goes fast.

    I started out with this ball, about 44 grams of natural alpaca fiber, and at first, I couldn't find the whorl I had wanted to use, so I figured because plying goes so quick, may as well just do the beginning in-hand. But that was getting annoying and hurting my wrist, so I dug out another whorl and added it on for the beginning few grams.

    This is not too long before I took the whorl off I finished this plying Saturday night, and skeined it up Sunday morning:

    It came out to about 125 yards, 2 plied on itself, so that's a light fingering to lace weight. Since I have a few other skeins of this fiber in progress, I'm half planning a sweater, maybe a round colorwork yoke, out of it. The natural grey alpaca definitely won't be enough on it's own (probably 300-400 yards maximum; a sweater in my size needs about 1000 yards) but it would look nice highlighted on the yoke. I just need to figure out what the background yarn will be and what pattern I'd like on the yoke. More things to mull over in the next few weeks.

    This is the most recent photo of this skein I have so far, but I finished plying it last night. Will get it off the spindle and onto the niddy probably sometime this afternoon, where I can get a yardage estimate. Then I'll wash it with a few other winter items I'm washing before putting away (it hasn't been cold enough for mittens, for example, so I'm planning to wash them and put them in plastic before the moths finish waking up for the year. It's probably also about 50 g and about 100 yards. I know density-wise, that would make it seem like the yarn must be much thicker, but there just isn't a ton of air in the yarn, and quite a lot more twist than commercially available yarns, so that impacts the yardage per gram.

Knitting

    In the quieter hours, when the rabble rousers could be convinced to settle down with a movie, I got a pretty decent amount of the next blanket strips done.

    This photo was taken Saturday afternoon, and was at the point that I realized this strip was more than 12 inches long. It's about halfway through that ball of yellow yarn, as well. From this point, I only have 2 more yarns set aside for the blanket, so if I finish this before I finish my next yarn (which is seeming likely) I'm going to have to find something else to be my take-along project. Looks like I'm going to need to spend some time looking through my queue for smaller projects...

    This photo was taken yesterday afternoon, and it's already another foot longer. At last measure, it was 32 inches, which is very close to about halfway. For some reason, the first half always feels like a slog, but once I get over that halfway point, it seems like it's finished as soon as I blink, I'm not sure why. I wonder how long it'll get before I put it away for a few weeks?

Dyeing

    The second top is finished and I'm in love!

    I love that unexpected pop of blue on the bottom, but I'm certain it will be greatly diluted in the actual yarn. Despite following the same dye formula, temperature, time in the oven, etc. the second one came out darker than the first, as you can see in this side-by-side comparison:

    Best I can figure is that our stove is quite old, and sometimes malfunctions (doesn't get hot enough on some burners to boil water, even though it's at the highest setting, etc.) and so perhaps on the first run, the oven wasn't as hot as the second (or perhaps hotter? I'm genuinely unsure which condition would lead to lead dye striking. I think the former, though) but either way, they're clearly coordinated, and so I think one ply from each skein will come from the other as a way to blend them even further. They'll still be a bit different, but close enough, I think. And if not, if the yarn from the fiber on the right is still too much paler than the other, I can always put the finished yarn in a pot with a very very little bit of dye to help tint it closer.

    Last night, before bed, I portioned out a third of the fiber (about 36 grams) and dizzed it to help open up any compaction and help break up any pooled bits to the best of my ability. It has a beautiful warm brown look to it in the sun, with pops of ocean blue here and there. However, indoor lighting makes it look more like a purple, sort of like paler grape kool aid. It's not what I was going for, but it's such a fun color anyway that I can't be mad. I'm really enjoying spinning it up and I can't wait to see how it looks finished.

Throwback Thursday - Distaff Basics

 

    About two years ago, maybe a bit more, I was asked how I make and use my handheld distaves, so I wrote this up with some photos showing how I use my oldest spindle, which I still use today, even though at one point I managed to snap it in half (😳), but I glued it back together and it's still working exactly as well as ever. 🤷 Anyway, here's the distaff I use most of the time I'm spinning:

    It’s 1/4 if a dowel I bought from home Depot for like 85 cents, so I guess this part cost me like 22 cents. It’s about a foot long, and the ends are pointed just because the help yourself saw at Home Depot was kind of dull, so the edges weren’t very neat and I didn’t like how they looked. And since this dowel is around the same size as a pencil sharpener, it was easy to shape them this way. It started out straighter, but its kind of curved over time from being held and its more comfortable now than almost 3 years ago when i first started using it. I now have a couple other distaves I've made, but this the one I turn to most often, because it's already shaped well to my hand over prolonged use.

    To dress it I just start like winding a cop on a spindle and basically keep loading it on like a spindle until it’s full. I know some people like thicker tops/rovings, but I like to strip it down to about finger-width because it flows better. I’ve drafted across the top from my distaff before, but its kind of annoying in my opinion. Then again, I'm usually spinning finer yarns; your ideal fiber thickness does depend a bit on your ideal finished single. If your fiber supply is thinner than the single you'd like to spin, you're going to have a bad time. You also don't want to pre-draft to the ideal finished diameter because once you add spin, a good amount of the air is pressed out and of course the diameter decreases in turn. So it's a dance of getting close to ideal width, but wide enough that you can still edit the single before adding spin. 

    This is how I hold it/ draft, though if there’s a slub or something the first 3 fingers help and it’s only the bottom two holding the stick. My hand moves back and forth from this position to the one with the first three fingers helping pretty freely. Sometimes I rotate the spindle in my fingers bit by bit to keep the roving flowing freely, and at other times, I'll unloop a strand of fiber and work that bit by bit; it mostly depends on how quickly I'm able to draft this particular fiber.

Hope that helps somebody!

Whirlwind Wednesday

    I had multiple appointments today, so I organized my day around getting the quilting done right away, because it's the only thing I can't take with me.

    I was in a rush, so I forgot to take after photos, but here's the first block I worked on. As I was working on it, I noticed that there was some loosening in the upper right quad too, so I fixed that at the same time while I was there.

    Basically this whole corner was disconnected, and again I forgot to take after photos. This block completed the second "row" (of 7) on this blanket, so it's moving along at a decent pace.

    Didn't get too much done on the blanket, but that's fine, it's not a pressing need, plus the strips are a great summer project: small, portable, and not prone to heating your lap as you work on it. Plus I'll have a good amount of garnetted yarn to add to it after this year's Tour de Fleece, so I'm in no rush to finish it.

    This was my starting point in the morning, and while I can feel the difference in the weight of it in my hands, I'm not certain the difference is visible?

    Either way, I think I'll probably finish this single tomorrow, and then it'll start it's rest period and I'll ply up the darker grey that I'd been working on before. The second wool to dye is still soaking, but hopefully I'll find time to get it in the oven tomorrow so I can be one step closer to spinning the yarn for my socks, too!