What Housework?

Sophie's sweater is not finished

So my husband is sharing his. All that's left is the ribbing around the bottom and she's good to go.

The weather here has been fabulous. Cool mornings, warm afternoons. Hard to dress for, but gorgeous nonetheless. Here, just as a way of balancing the complaining I'm going to do in a few months' time, are a couple of pictures of out back, taken this morning.

And this one is from yesterday, which started off cloudy:

In fiber news, A Piece of Vermont has been updated to include these superwash sock yarns:

I also have 5 merino sock yarns going up today or tomorrow. I have to say, I have created my new favorite colorway:

Maybe it seems a little washed out there. How about this:

It's got red and blue and purple and orange all mixed together and yummy and I doubt I could ever re-create it. It isn't on the website yet, but soon.

What I really want to talk about is spinning. I've got so much damn stuff to include in this post that, once again, I'm going to have to put off some things for another day. But as a nice segue into my spinning stuff, I would like you to check out KitKatKnit's post about this antique spinning wheel. It looked like any other antique spinning wheel when I first saw the picture. But then I read back a post (waayy behind on Bloglines). This wheel has a history. And I think this is why I find spinning so fascinating. Sitting at a wheel, even a new one, somehow ties you into history because it's like you're channeling all the people before you who spun. It's an activity that is entirely foreign to most people on the planet today (not the cool ones, but everyone else), and yet EVERY woman just a few generations ago and way before that knew how to spin, had to spin, relied on spinning for knitting and needlework and weaving and everything. Not a hobby. A necessity. An essential part of daily life for thousands of years, practically gone in a century. I just think that why many people take up spinning and find it so satisfying is that it reveals a hidden part of us that is still there in our unconscious. The rhythm, the sounds, the smells of spinning were all present in our ancestors' lives and I think they're still in us at some level.

Anyway.

I am amassing a lovely pile of fluffy black/brown combed locks and I cannot resist the urge to try spinning them as is, without carding. I have this fantasy of spinning this entire fleece (in this lifetime, no less) and if so, I better get started. But that means clearing the wheel of other stuff. So last night, my daughter and I got out the ball winder and cleared up 4 bobbins (one is still on the wheel):

Here we have 4 balls of singles: 2 hand-dyed merino, one undyed from the same roving, and tiny one of unknown history. But nice.

I had planned to spin up more of the dyed merino and make a wrap or something. But now I'm thinking, with the white, perhaps a two-color project (mittens? hat?) might be in order. When? Who knows? I spend more time on the computer than I do on fiber projects, and although I've switched to continental I can no longer knit and read at the same time. I think an issue for me is that I don't like TV anymore. I hate knitting or spinning in silence and for some reason the TV is a better companion for me than the radio. But since I find most TV so stupid lately, I'd rather just go read blogs. Real productive.

I'm thinking I should take my knitting out to the turkey house and hang with the birds, who are not settling in very quickly. Maybe they'd find knitting relaxing, too. They are nervous and pacing. Ginnie keeps reminding me that she gets one phone call, and Buster has been singing Gospel hymns and blues ballads. Here he is pining for the open fields, visible through one of the skylights:

Here's Ginnie asking to speak to a lawyer:

Our intention is to let them run free once they figure out where home is, in another week or two. Right now they are terrified of us. Even though Mark built them a temporary outdoor run, it takes them till dinnertime to get up the courage to go out there. And last night the guy came to mow the lawn, which freaked them out, and then just before dark, a neighbor farmer came to mow our fields, which come right up to the run. There was much gobbling and hysteria. Poor things. At least the chickens have gotten used to them.

Yarn p*rn alert

Get it while it lasts:

I know what you're thinking: Why, that's not handpainted yarn. You'd be right. What that is, in fact, is handspun yarn. It's gorgeous, and it's for sale at  A Piece of Vermont.

Want a closer look?

Yum. Yum. Yum.

And this isn't just any old handspun (as if there were such a thing). This is 8 skeins (totalling some 3 pounds) of Romney lambswool, spun up by my friend Donna, also known as Donna-Who-Taught-Me-To-Spin, Donna-Whose-Chickens-Provided-the-Eggs-That-Became-My-Two-Beautiful-Chicks, or, if you prefer, Donna-Whose-Daughter-Is-Probably-Going-To-Marry-My-Stepson-Someday. The fiber is from her own flock of sheep, born and raised right here in Vermont (that goes for Donna as well).

I love this yarn so much that I went a little crazy this week and bought this:

Yeah, it's a fleece (more on this development below). Well, Jessalu got a brown fleece last weekend, and Donna spun hers up into something delightful, and I just couldn't resist. The above fleece is a very large one, which I am told is Border Leicester. A lock? Why sure:

I just need to scour it, pick it, card it (Donna is also known as "Donna-Who-Lets-Me-Use-Her-Drum-Carder), spin it, ply it, and knit it and I will have a sweater for my husband. Should be done in a week or two, right? As for patterns, I am particularly intrigued by Avast, from the latest Knitty. Never mind that I am drowning in unfinished objects: one pair of handspun socks, a very bulky raglan for myself, some hand-dyed mohair/wool spindling, and of course my latest merino/tencel spindling. And have we forgotten the hand-dyed merino that has sat untouched on the wheel for the past six months? Let's not discuss that.

Because I have another knitting project, borne of necessity. Look at this pathetic creature:

It's poor Sophie. Sopher-doodles. Sophe-Sophe-Sugarloaf. The poor overly-shaved girl is FREEZING. And what did I run across at the library last night?

Of course I had to cast on immediately, only my stash is still at the old house. I managed to scrounge up this plain old worsted weight wool on a bookshelf and got right to work. I think winter white will be very fetching against Sophie's nearly hairless skin.

Back to the brown fleece above. How did I come into that? Originally, I was going to visit my friend Beth, who raises sheep, to buy a few of her white fleeces for the continuing saga of creating yarns from Vermont fibers (no, I still have not received my mill order from June). Since I last saw her, Beth did a few things like get married, build a house, have a couple of kids, and acquire all kinds of animals, including a bunch of sheep. And I thought I've been busy.

Here are Beth and her beautiful boys.

And here are the sheep, who declined to come in for a photo op.

They're the white specks in the far middle. It's the best I could do. I did manage to pick up 5 of their fleeces, which if I recall are various combinations of Romney, Corriedale, and something else I can't remember:

There were a few dark brown fleeces and I couldn't resist getting one for myself. I chose the Border Leicester just because I couldn't decide. I was actually quite taken with a Navajo Churro fleece, which I think is the one below (it was actually brown, not gray):

It was amazingly soft and had a very interesting crimp, more fuzzy than defined. But I had this idea that Navajo Churro fleeces are used for rugs and would be very rough. This one I swear was not. I still have the option of trading in the Border Leicester (also suprisingly soft) for the Navajo Churro. Any recommendations?

(For non-fiber people, forgive the above photos, which you probably find boring. I just feel that there is no feeling quite like reaching into a raw fleece and feeling its cushy lanolin-y goodness. I keep walking by my new fleece just to smell it. I'm not ashamed of this.)

This post is getting long and I haven't even touched on a bunch of other things, but I'll quit here. Per several requests, I'm throwing in some gratuitous poultry shots. See Elsie here? She was the new baby in June, and now she's a big girl with a big personality. She's not afraid of anything and will stand next to the dog to rummage through the compost heap when the other girls are squawking in fear and trepidation. She'll start laying in a few weeks, I think.

Good ol' Helen:

Xena and her growing baby. Any bets on gender?

Big Daisy and Janet:

And, for no reason in particular, sunrise over the animal barn:

The turkey house will be finished this weekend (pictures to come) and the turkeys will be arriving next Friday. The woman who is selling them to us also sells Shetland sheep. We will not come home with sheep. We will not come home with sheep. We will not come home with sheep.

I hope.

You asked

Some of you have asked about dyeing self-striping yarn. The technique in Yarns to Dye For calls for placing two stationary objects 15 to 30 feet apart and winding a giant skein of yarn around them. That sounds like an awful lot of footwork to me.

You do need a big skein to make self-striping yarn, because the length of the skein determines the length of the repeat. If you use a regular skein of yarn, which may be, say, 72 inches around, you'd have a hard time getting much in the way of striping. If you laid the skein on a table and dyed it, you could get two stripe colors, each 36 inches long. Or 4 stripe colors, each 18 inches long. But that wouldn't make a very long stripe once it was knitted up. So reskeining is the key.

I poked around online and followed the lead of others who apparently also decided that walking in 30-foot circles all day is not a lot of fun. I built a warping board. Actually, I built two. Here's the first one, which makes a 22-foot long skein:

It's basically just a peg board (made with a piece of wood I found in the basement and a couple of dowels cut into smaller pieces. I drilled holes in the board and glued in the pegs. There are two extra pegs on the left hand side, which are necessary because the yarn does have to make a continuous loop. I start at the top left peg and zig zag the yarn across the board. When I get to the bottom, I carry it around to the left of those two extra pegs and start again at the top.

I made a second warping board that's a lot bigger to make wider stripes in more colors. I don't always use all the pegs. Here it is in action yesterday:

In this case, I'm reskeining yarn that was already skeined on the warping board and dyed in stripes. Now I have to put it BACK on the warping board and wind it off into a more manageable size skein:

The final result:

Stripes!

I'm not convinced that the warping board is even the best way to go about striping yarn. It takes forever to warp it. Then you have to tie it off in 10 or 12 places so that it doesn't tangle (a tangled 60-foot skein is almost impossible to sort out, especially when it's wet). I won't go into the whole dyeing process here, but maybe I'll take pictures one of these days.

I have dyed up all the yarn I currently have in stock. I was holding onto it for a wholesale order but the shop owner is on vacation, so I think I'll just post most of it for sale at A Piece of Vermont, maybe later today. Here's a teaser:

Here, by the way, is the first sock of a pair, knitted by my friend Stacey's mom using our yarn:

And, in non-knitting news, here is an unusual egg laid this morning by Portia, our "foofy-headed chicken":

Weird, huh?

Speaking of chickens, although I have 6 and they give just the right number of eggs for our house, I have caved and ordered two day-old chicks for May. I used to have a wonderful Easter Egger named Dorothy who laid lovely bluish-green eggs. She died suddenly of unknown causes (no fowl play suspected ah ah ah) and I miss the colored eggs. So come May, there will be two new Easter Eggers in the house. The colored eggs won't appear until September or October, but it's worth the wait. The chicks can look very different from one another, I suppose because "Easter Eggers" are kind of an Araucana mutt chicken. But Dorothy was adorable and had big "muff" cheeks. I'm afraid I don't have a photo of her, so I'll leave you with an old photo of Janet, Georgia Rae, and the late but beloved Patricia having a nice dust bath.

Oh, I like this

When I dye a yarn that looks like one color from a distance but breaks up into dozens of totally different hues up close, I am happy. I was in a rush and didn't try hard enough to capture the exposure/light/whatever properly in this picture, but I hope the variations come across. From far away, this looks like a standard grayish green-blue. But it's got pink and yellow in it, too. (This is another reason why I don't dye/sell standard colorways. I could never reproduce all those colors from skein to skein. And I'd get bored trying.)

Here's the latest batch of yarn I'm about to put online. (Actually, I'll probably save a couple for wholesale.) The quick pick I took doesn't do them justice. I mean, the skein that I took the above shot from is the one on the far left. Can you even tell?

I didn't think so.

Why, you might ask, are these not skinny-striped skeins, like I had planned on making? They're coming, they're coming. The combination of a column due,  a child on vacation, and a half-dozen likely playmates out of state on vacation, has really put a cramp in my dyeing this week.

The knitting, however, is cruising. My daughter has been falling asleep before me for a change, so for two nights I've stayed up and knitted and watched the Olympics. The crazy thing is, I almost think I could finish this sweater by tomorrow and wear it Saturday. I only have 5 or 6 more inches of 3x1 ribbing. I want to wear it out rather than around the house because Tubey has these slightly belled sleeves. Not the kind suited for scrubbing toilets or washing dishes. Much more appropriate for sitting in a gym for 12 hours watching wrestling. The sane side of me says, "Finish the last rows AT the tournament." But the smart side of me says, "You won't know when you get to the last rows unless you try the thing on, which you can't do AT the tournament."

And another little part of me says, hey, you have a new niece and a new nephew due in the world pretty soon, and the nephew is going to require a baby shower. Hurry up and finish Tubey so you can get cracking on a hip but sweet baby sweater. (I rarely knit for nieces and nephews because it's all I can do to keep up with my own family, and besides, my in-laws breed like hamsters; I'd never make it.)

So, aside from the Tubey dilemma: Anyone know of a hip but sweet sweater pattern for a baby boy?

Before and after

As you may recall from my last post, this yarn was just about to go into the steamer for heat setting.

Here is the finished product,440 yards of fingering-weight merino that will be setting forth on a journey to Heather some time this afternoon, in exchange for this very cool bracelet. I'm so excited.

I have been knitting, very slowly, and have finally turned the heel on my first jaywalker sock:

It occurred to me, however, around 7:00 last night, that at this rate, I will have no time for knitting Christmas presents (these babies are for me!). So I dropped my tiny needles and grabbed some spare Lamb's Pride worsted and some 10.5s, the better to get started on some Fuzzy Feet for my SIL. I am not part of the Fuzzy Feet KAL, seeing as my participation in the Samus KAL has been to get the body and cuffs done and then ignore it for a month. Maybe I'm not the KAL type. I don't know.

Funny that I have now turned the heel on my first Fuzzy Foot in the course of one short evening, where the jaywalker has been inching along for many days. Big needles + thick yarn = easy progress. A nice change.

In the news concerning A Piece of Vermont, We had another craft fair this past weekend, in which we learned that craft fairs are not a good place for us. Actually, we did better than another vendor, who made $6 for the day. We even had money left over after buying ourselves lunch. But if you looked at our hourly rate, it probably violated international fair-wage laws to have us even show up at this thing. No more craft fairs.

However: I called the local paper today to see about having a little promotion for our next venture, which is to rent an empty downtown storefront for a 3-day craft fair (if we must call it that) the weekend before Christmas. We have 10 other vendors participating, all with very nice stuff, including woodblock prints, photographs, beaded jewelry, etc. Anyway, just when it looked like we were out of PR luck unless we were willing to--heaven forbid--buy ad space, I got talking to my editor, for whom I write my humor column. He said we have a story here, something about a downtown business opportunity or some such thing. So come Monday, we'll have some free publicity. Yay. We are hoping that this venue (that is, a relatively upscale downtown area overrun with desperate last-minute shoppers) will pan out for us.

I finally put some new yarns up on the website, including this self-striping sock yarn, which I am calling candy cane:

Wouldn't a pair of peppermint-striped socks be adorable? If it doesn't sell right off, I may have to snag it for myself.

I really should be doing 32 things on my to-do list right now, rather than playing on the blog. But I just had to share a little of what is going on around here. My only problem right now is Christmas, which is falling at an inconvenient time of year. I vote for February. I'll be ready by then.

And a good time was had by all

Last night was our home party, or whatever the hell you're supposed to call it, at our friend Heidi-the-Beaded-Jewelry-Artist's. We invited a bunch of friends to come hang out, drink wine, and look at our various crafty items. There was much milling about and talking.  No spiel, no demonstrations, and no order forms. Just a relaxing holiday-type party. With stuff, incidentally, for sale.

I am terrible at taking photos of events like this, partly because my camera is broken and requires 3 hands to keep it from turning itself off all the time and parly because I am always worried I am making people uncomfortable. So here's what I've got:

Here are some of our hand-dyed clothes. I say "our," but my partner Stacey is the one who's been doing all the dyeing of late, which kind of explains her red thumb and the red sole of her right foot. Everyone was chatting and drinking and snacking and admiring the scarves and then one person casually reached up and pulled the green scarf (left edge of photo) from the chandelier, sparking a flurry of scarf-grabbing. It was like the critical moment in a spoons game when suddenly everyone realizes one spoon is gone. Here's one of our inspired scarf racks:

And more clothes:

(If you are intrigued by the scarves, let me know if you'd like to see them online. If we could keep them in stock, they'd be available on the website already.)

One young consumer even offered to model her new notch-neck tee, just for the blog's sake:

I felt I ought to get a shot of our kind hostess, setting up her stuff. First, the picture I promised I wouldn't put on the blog (oops):

Here's the nearly anonymous but less offensive shot I meant to use:

There was, of course, plenty of yarn, scattered in baskets around the house. Here's a sample:

Reaction was favorable, but four knitters scheduled to attend all came up missing, so I had fewer prospects going in. Hopefully, those who bought yarn are going to come back to me begging for more. One can only hope.

The clothes and scarves were a hit; in fact, we have orders for custom sizes and colors that total more than we sold last night. I'm off right now to show a sample to a customer from our first craft show. Then I need to pick up a graphing calculator for my stepson, who takes the SATs Saturday. And, with a heavy heart, I need to pick up my daughter's brand-new eyeglasses, which she will be wearing probably from here on in. Three months, anyway, to address the beginnings of, and hopefully prevent, a lazy eye. I'm sad. But I digress.

This morning I finished the last of my undyed yarn, to better prepare for the craft show Saturday. If I have time tomorrow, and I plan to, I will be shuffling my inventory a little bit, putting some new stuff up at A Piece of Vermont and taking some down to go with me to the craft fair.

In the meantime, take a look at one of the dye jobs I did today:

I can only imagine what it will end up looking like. Probably much more homogeneous than it does now. It's just that I've spent a lot of time looking at piles of wet yarn lately, and I'm always intrigued by the color combinations. I'll post a finished shot in my next entry. Are you just frantic with anticipation?

I bet.

Getting a bit crazy around here

It's no wonder I've only managed about 4 rows of the jaywalker sock:

I've been busy. But at least you can see the beginnings of the zig-zag pattern. I like the way it looks with the striped yarn.

The last of the self-striping bulky yarns are ready for our party tomorrow night:

I have 4 skeins of sock yarn waiting to be dyed but I had this pesky humor column due today and I just barely got it submitted. (As I've said before, I obviously save the humor for my column and not my blog. Read this if you want a funny blog.)

Our website is coming along nicely although I need to update it with some new yarns. Tomorrow, I swear. The clothing side of the business is doing very well locally. We've had to take orders for many items because we can't keep up with demand. There are worse problems. We just need a little more time. After the holidays, we'll concentrate on the website because the local shows will be over.

And now, I must run. I hope to have the jaywalker socks done before summer. A lofty goal at this rate.

Jaywalker undone

Do you recognize this item?

This is what is left of my first Jaywalker sock, a la Grumperina. I had been looking for a pattern to show off my self-striping yarn and I thought this might do the trick. And it did.

Until I realized I had picked up a couple of extra stitches along the way and could not, for the life of me, find from whence they had appeared. I only had a couple inches of pattern done, but damn it looked pretty good. So now, I will start again from the ribbing. (I also need to acquaint myself with some nifty sock cast-on method. I use the long-tail and it works, but I think it's not the best for socks. )

I have dyed a few more striped yarns. These are bulky 100% wool, which will not be posted for sale just yet. We have a local show on Wednesday and these will be put into bags with a simple hat pattern for kits. I'm loving the colors, though. The last, though blurry, is actually 7 distinct shades of yellow and orange, for a very cheerful, fresh-squeezed kind of stripey yarn.

I am coming off a strangely maudlin Thanksgiving. It is 2 years to the week that my grandmother died and 3 years (within 2 weeks) that my mother died, and although I held up well last year, for some reason I went down hard this year. Anyone who has lost a maternal figure in their lives can understand how hard it is when you are used to having someone dote on you. Now I'm the one in charge of the food and the event and everything and no one (not even my darling but hardly maternal husband) is there to take care of me. That said, I do have a wonderful stepmother, and we did visit her on Friday and Saturday and had a wonderful time. Without her, I would be truly alone (in the maternal relative sense). It's hard for me.

Now we're home and I'm suddenly possessed by a de-cluttering demon. I'm sick of looking at the same old crap sitting in the same old place waiting to be given a proper home, be it the trash or a closet or a recycling bin. I'm just taking a quick break for the blog and then it's back to the upstairs hallway to at least re-package my 2 shetland fleeces that currently reside in a giant feed back outside my bedroom door. Where they've been since August. It's time to transfer them to a giant Rubbermaid bin and at least stack them in a closet somewhere. Maybe even labeled.

Back to work.

The husband comes through

Fact: My husband has been driving me crazy lately. He's stressed out with work and has shown a measure of disdain) in my crafty venture. Granted, a lot of it is jealousy. He wants to be doing woodworking instead of running his own construction business and it's taken weeks for him to settle down and not be so scornful of my ideas just because he's not part of them at the moment. Men are babies. Did you know that?

But gradually he has started showing some interest in the craft fair (and the intriguing idea of him making handmade niddy-noddies and such for the website), and at last he seems to want me to succeed. (Took long enough.) Anyway, at dinner last night I explained that I had one more batch of dyeing before the Saturday craft fair: 15 50g skeins of merino sock yarn. I pulled one out of the box and discovered that it wasn't in skein form, but in a center pull hank. Great for knitting, terrible for dyeing. I sighed and said I was not in the mood to wind 15 skeins of yarn, albeit small ones, by hand onto a niddy noddy just for this craft fair, since I'm short on time as it is. Keep in mind I have a skein winder coming in the mail but it's not here yet.

The Husband abruptly disappeared into the basement and I heard power tools humming. He came upstairs with ideas, then retreated for modifications. The first was just a long wooden arm with pegs at both ends to fit in front of the bobbin on my spinning wheel. We tried to make a skein with foot power. But it didn't work so hot. So he attached it to an electric drill. Too powerful. Finally, he added a cross piece and came up with this:

It's a prototype hand-cranked yarn winder, powered by part of a fishing reel:

And it flies! The arms are not quite long enough to make a good-size skein (I'd like a 60-inch circumference, like my niddy-noddy), but it winds a 50g skein in under one minute. He says he's going to make me a modified one (with longer arms) out of cherry. The man is an enigma, but he's a clever one.

And here, without further delay, is a preview of my four latest self-striping bulky yarns:

It's hard to envision them as stripes, but I can totally see the second one from the left as a girl's hat. Sherbet colors. I forgot to photograph the sock yarns. Use your imagination. I'm off to dye.

One down, one to go

Behold the first of a pair (I hope):

This is the result of my self-striping yarn experiment, with which I am having so much fun. (More colorways tomorrow; I forgot to take pictures.) Take note from the distended look of the instep decreases that this particular sock is actually too small for me, which I realized early on in the process, but which is okay. I plan to give these away anyway, and really they're just samples for the craft fair. (One will be in progress during the fair. Knitting in Public is good.)

The good news is that our little yarn/clothing business is getting a lot of buzz in our little town. We've been asked for business cards, we've had offers for wholesale from two different businesses, and my habit of Knitting in Public has generated great interest in the hand-dyed yarns, particularly the self-striping for hats and socks. We have some great promotional ideas (such as the annual Festival of Wreaths, a local fundraiser in which individuals and businesses decorate hundreds of wreaths, of various themes, for a massive exhibit). We'll be doing one for A Piece of Vermont (our business!) with hand-dyed socks and tiny balls of yarn and such.

On the down side, making self-striping yarn, especially 440 yards of sock yarn, is a time-consuming process, made the harder by a crappy skein winder or swift or whatever you call it, which has broken twice in two days. I have a new one on order (since it's not something you can buy locally) but it won't be here in time for the craft fair Saturday so it looks like I'll be spending a lot of time with yarn wrapped around my bent knees. Add to that my tendency to rush through things and let me tell you: Getting 440 yards of dk weight yarn in a tangle is not an easy thing to rectify. There is much swearing.

I have had some requests from friends of friends for the self-striping yarn for hats so that is on the schedule for today. And lots of skein winding. Lots. And while I wind and wind and wind, I'll be thinking, what's worse? Not selling any of our stuff this weekend and getting discouraged? Or selling all of it and not having enough inventory to sell more in time for the next fair and the website? This is what comes from leaping into a venture without careful planning.

Planning is for sissies. (An attitude that explains why most of my FOs don't fit.)