A Tale of Two Yarns

I have calmed down considerably since I nearly had a breakdown a few days ago over my inability to knit with gossamer weight yarn. On the left is the offending material, on the right is the lace weight yarn that I knit with all the time.



There is a pretty big difference in the two.



Try as I might, I could not wrap my fingers around this thread masquerading as yarn.



Since admitting defeat, I have managed to make good progress on the pattern. One day it will be a Print O' the Wave stole designed by Eunny Jang and the pattern can be found free here.
I have not given up on the $30 ball of lovely gossamer. I am just going to play with it for a while to see if I can teach my fingers how to deal with it. It will be a shawl someday, just not today.

The Start of Something Big

My freshly spun Wool of the Andes is going to become a vest. A Crepidula to be exact. I found the pattern here on Beyenburgerin's Weblog. When you are working with handspun that looks like handspun it takes a while to find a pattern that suits it. It requires a pattern that won't end up looking like just plain old bad knitting. As happy as I am knitting along on this, I do realize that I will run out of my handspun, hand dyed yarn long before I run out of vest. This means trying once again to match something that is pretty much unmatchable.

Waste Not Want Not

First let me say that I am NOT some miracle of nature. Those of you who know me, know that today I am in the hospital getting my gallbladder yanked out. The projects you will see this week were all posted in advance. The only thing I will be doing this week is laying on the couch watching everything in my Netflix Instant Queue. I may disappear later in the week as my posts run out, but as soon as I can I will be back with lots of big messes to share.

Last week, in anticipation of cooler weather and my recuperation time, I went ahead and made a GIANT mess on the deck washing all of the rejected unwashed wool I had stashed away for who knows what reason. I didn't give it a real washing- just a dunk in boiled water to kill whatever may be living in it. I also wanted to keep as much of the grease in it as possible to add to its insulating properties.



We have a small colony of feral kitties that have little winter huts to shelter in. Normally we fill them with straw but I had the idea of lining the inner boxes with nice, warm wool this year. What I didn't check was the weather report before I got started and didn't realize we were heading for a week long monsoon. All that smelly wool is still in the house where it is doing its best to NOT dry.

Epic Failure

I am not an inexperienced lace knitter. I know the tricks. I know the pitfalls. A while back, I spent a small fortune ($30) on a lovely ball of gossamer weight yarn and attempted to cast on a small shawl using what I would consider an easy pattern.



After the third attempt at getting to row 2, my temper got the best of me and with a not so gentle yank of the offending yarn to frog it, managed to snap my size 1 Harmony needle in half. Poor thing. It was the nasty old yarn I was trying to break-not the needles. You have to be out of your mind to knit with stuff as skinny as this. It defies being told what to do by yarn markers. It makes stitches that you knit and purl together disappear. You can't even get a good stitch count when yarnovers are involved. AND you CAN'T tink back. This is the biggest yarn fit I have thrown in quite a while. I'm going to put it in timeout for a while and worry about it later.

Wool of the Andes

I finally finished spinning all of the Knit Picks Wool of the Andes fiber.



I really didn't think too hard about how I wanted the colors to come out. I split the 100 grams in half, spun them separately and then plied them together. I was hoping that the chartreuse would get toned down a bit with the introduction of another color. It did, in most places.



After a good soak, I am sad to say that it is still very scratchy wool. It is destined for outerwear. It can't go around the neck or on the head. It has to go over layers so I am thinking this may just be the start of something big.

Just Fine

Working with fine wool is still a problem for me. The less you handle it before spinning the better. Using a grip, I fashioned a sort of hackle out of my mini combs and then dizzed a fine strand of continuous wool that was pretty nepp free from my newly washed brown Merino.




So far so good, until I began to spin it. I set my wheel up on the deck and settled in for a nice afternoon. However, in order to get enough twist, I had to peddle like a maniac. I need to mention that it was another 90 plus degree day here in the Nation's Capitol so I gave up and went back inside.

That's All There Is

This is what remains of the giant fleece. As much as I picked through it looking for anything usable, I was still left with a lot of stuff that was just junk. I hate to toss it but I have learned my lesson in trying to salvage every single strand. Garbage in. Garbage out. Besides, my sheepy friend here is more than likely busy growing more wool for me at this very moment. There will be plenty more to go around come spring.