Knitguy

So now that I’ve dug myself from under the rock that I was under I got a chance to go to Twisted yesterday and my god….the cache that I came home with…

But first:

That is what I woke up to yesterday. There’s maybe half an inch of snow, but really - really?! Mother Nature apparently has really lost her mind, either that or global warming is to Mother Nature as a keg is to a frat house.

Before any of you Portland people get to excited, no Twisted is not selling fiber. I met up with one of my friends at Twisted and bought about 2 and a quarter (or half - I need to re-weigh it) pounds of brown merino from her. She bought the fleece at one of the fiber festivals in the NW and sent it off for processing. I’m going to spin it for yarn for a sweater. It’s for the Jan-March spin-a-long on the Spinner Central Ravelry group.

I also bought a quarter pound of amazingly soft romney that she also bought at a NW fiber festival and sent off for processing.

I also bought

A skein of medium weight Socks That Rock in the Alina colorway.

And four skeins of Noro Silk Garden for the Noro Scarf ala Jared Flood.

Then when I got home my 8oz of fiber from the Allspunup Jan/Feb fiber club came! It’s a 70/30 superwash merino/alpaca blend. And that, dear readers, marks my best fiber day ever.

.I somehow slipped into the rabbit hole that is the end of the semester mixed with coming back home mixed with being lazy at home which lead to a sheer lack of posting, but I’m back! My flight from New York to Portland was ok. We were 45 min late getting out of the gate because the plane had originated in Las Vegas where they were having their once in 30 years snow, but we made up about half an hour in the air. I also got home a day before the start of the first major snow storm in New York as I decided to leave a day early (thank god).

We also go snowed in - that’s what we get for living in the West Hills. There’s actually still some snow piled up on the sides of the streets but we were snowed in from around the 18th through the 26th. My mom, because she works for Portland General Electric (PGE), had to be in at work all of those days save for Christmas and Boxing Day (at least I think she had Boxing Day off) so she stayed down town for three days. PGE ended up reserving rooms for everyone who couldn’t make it home.

So on to Daring Bakers (don’t worry - fiber stuff is coming up soon). This month’s challenge is brought to us by the adventurous Hilda from Saffron and Blueberry and Marion from Il en Faut Peu Pour Etre Heureux. They have chosen a French Yule Log by Flore from Florilege Gourmand.

This is one of my two yule logs, I used two small loaf pans as molds. This month’s challenge was deffinatly the most complext that I’ve taken part in. There are components - Dacquoise Biscuit, Mousse, Ganache Insert, Praline Crisp Insert, Creme Brulee Insert, and the Icing. The original dacquoise was made out of almond flour but I decided to go for hazelnut as I love, love, love hazelnuts. I also realized that while I had made the ganache, I had forgotten to to put it in the yule log. Of course I realized this after I put it in the freezer. I had originally decided that I would just make truffles and put them on top of the yule log, but of course when I took the ganache out of the fridge it was really stiff so I decided to just warm it up and cover both logs with it a if it was the icing. It actually ended up working really well, setting up quickly at room temperature after I had poured it on. By that time the icing had cooled and I poured that over top of it.

This is the yarn that I spun for my grandma for Christmas this year. I ended up getting it this past Saturday because we were stuck at home before hand and I hand intended on going over to Knit/Purl to buy fibere for it. It yarn dyed by Abstract Fiber (Etsy and Knit/Purl) and is 4oz of 50% alpaca, 30% merino, and 20% silk. It ended up being 130 yards and is a worsted weight. I’m also prepping all of the cormo that I have for the Jan-March cabled sweater yarn (yarn for a cabled sweater, not cabled yarn) spin along. I’m also buying 2 pounds of mill processed merino from a friend of mine tomorrow as I don’t think I’m going to have enough of the cormo. I’m probably going to end up doing 2 plys of cormo and one of the merino through out.

So as I’m sure you may have suspected, I’ve been really busy over the past month or so (well longer than that actually) and beween me deciding to give up on National Blog Posting Month after missing that one day and my life being crazy, I just haven’t posted.

That is 4 oz of Allspunup (surprise surprise). It spun up to a very dense 3-ply at 173 yards. Its around DK weight and right now I have a swatch knit up on US3 needles on my table. It’ll probably turn into socks (of course).

And this was spun up from the Ashland Bay merino that I bought at The Yarn Tree some odd weeks ago. I asked a friend of mine who also spins for ideas and she suggested that I do a singles yarn. Now I haven’t spun a singles yarn in…I guess almost a year primarly because I mainly spin sock yarn and a singles yarn doesn’t really do super well knitted up into socks (and I tend to be somewhat hard on socks). So yea, this was the result after washing and reskeining. The ends actually felted together when I was finishing it. I  felted it a bit on purpose (and I’m glad I did) and after spending 15 or so minutes attempting to find the ends, I gave up and just cut it. It ended up being 290 yards at 12wpi. Its either going to be turned into fingerless gloves or a Koolhaas hat (though I already have one in brown handspun….).

The same day that I washed the singles and the Allspunup, also washed this 50/50 yak merino blend. Its a 3-ply at 280 yards and fingering weight. I’m going to buy another 4 or 8 oz spin it up, and knit it all into this scarf.

I also went to Downtown Yarns a few weeks ago to get yarn for the Woven Bands Pullover that is in the currently Interweave Knits. I had origionally bought the yarn at Jimmy Beans but they were out of stock and I was impacient and thus…None the less, while Downtown Yarns isn’t a store of spinning bliss, they do have some Fleece Artist (and some Lopi like unspun yarn in 100g cakes) so what did I do, buy 50 grams of Fleece Artist wensleydale sliver. Its lovely.

Oh but there’s more…I bought some Zen String merino top in the Malkah colorway from the Loopy Ewe last weekend with the credit that I had on my paypal account (I had to return a Ravelry T-shirt because it was too big).

What? Knitting? So that’s where I was this weekend on my Woven Bands Pullover. I’m about half way done right now and its going really quickly. Unfortunatly my row and stitch guage is amazingly off so I’m having to do more math than I wanted to but its working out fine thus far. I also lengthened the sleeves because the designer designed this with 3/4 length sleeves which I’m really not in favor of.

Here’s a close up of the linen stitch section of the arm. I think what I really like about this sweater is the simplicity in its design elements. The linen stitch is the only real texture that the sweater has, and its obviously not striped either. It really makes for a nice simplistic design that I think looks good on a lot of people. That being said, the construction of this sweater isn’t very typical (or at least I don’t think it is, I could be very wrong and feel free to point that out if I am). It’s knit horizontally from the right to the left. You start with the right arm, cast on additional stitches for the front and back sides (with in a row of each other), split for the neck working the front and the back seperatly, connect the to together again, and then knit the left arm. Oh and this is also knit flat so the schematic looks like a some what misshapen red cross symbol. While I generally crave non-traditional constructions (ie. Cat Bordhi’s designs), this horizontal construction made my guage problem a frustrating one because it wasn’t as clear cut to me on how to deal with it. That being said - I did deal with it and it looks like it’ll fit fine. I’m mainly worried about it not being long enough, but after measuring it countless times I think it’ll work out fine.

Its that time of the month again (and no, not that time) - Daring Bakers posting day! This month’s challenge is Caramel Cake with Caramelized Butter Frosting by Shuna Fish Lydon and was hosted by Dolores of Culinary Curiosity, Alex of Blondie and Brownie, Jenny of Fory into Food, and Natalie of Gluten-a-Go-Go. My cake looks a lot lighter than some of the other partipents because I accidently didn’t carmalize the carmel syrup enough (there was no temp. listed which was probably why) but I still really liked it. It was really really moist and stayed that way even after it was cut into. I let my housemates (all 15 of them) go at it as well (they didn’t all get a piece) and one of them said it was the best cake she had ever had. I also made the carmels (which were optional this time) and they were amazing, absolutly amazing. I cut the recipe in half becuase it yielded something like 64 one inch carmels, but they were so good, so so good (the housemates didn’t get to try those).

As hinted at in the title of this post, yesterday was my wheel’s birthday. I bought it last year on the day after Thanksgiving in a little town just outside of Oxford, England while I was there visiting friends. I went from this:

to this

to this

In the span of one year (the last one is my second latest yarn). I’m actually really backed up on pictures I need to take. I got my package of Zen Fiber Garden hand dyed fine merino top (that is amazing), spun up some more Allspunup, and today I bought yarn for the Woven Bands Pullover in the Winter Interweave Knits as well as some fiber.

Yesterday I decided that I needed some retail therapy (which I do surprisingly seldomly) and decided that it was high time that I make it over to The Yarn Tree over in Williamsburg Brooklyn as the first time I tried going they were closed and then I just never had time to go any time else because of their weird but useful hours and my schedule. So I went and it was amazing - their yarn selection is so/so (though they are having a sale on some Koigu, $9 a skein, there were four or five colors that were on sail when I was there, non of which I liked) and I was sad to see that they didn’t really have a place for people to sit and knit, but they have an entire room full of fiber! Boxes and boxes of fiber. Most of it is undyed but they also have Ashland Bay merino and merino/silk. Some of the more notable things were the Buffalo Gold roving, silk cocoons, baby camel/tussah silk top, scoured mohair locks, the 50/30/20 alpaca/merino/tussah silk blend, and some Chasing Rainbow Dyeworks stuff.

That’s 4oz of the Ashland Bay merino in what I think is the forest colorway but I really can’t remember. It was funny because they had the dyed merino from them in bags that were in large boxes on the floor (they also had a loom in the room which took up a lot of space) and I stood there for at least five minutes trying to figure out if I should get that above or this really lovely deap purple colored top.

On the left is 4oz the alpaca/merino/tussah blend and on the right is 4oz of BFL. My plan with some of it is to make a 3 ply sock yarn, 1 ply of the alpaca blend and two out of the BFL (one of my favorite fibers to spin), then I’ll probably kettle dye it.

I also got 8 oz of border leicester locks which, while they said they are scouered, still have a lot of lanolin in them, the Knitting Languages book (knitting terms translated from a number of different languages), and a really little niddy noddy for sample skeins (which means I now have 3 niddy noddies). They also had gorgious drop spindles but I restrained myself.

Then, as I was checking out, who did I see but my really good friend Kate who I hadn’t seen in something like two and a half years. It was so amazingly random but so wonderful. She and her girlfriend were yarn shopping so I hung around with them while they did that, then we went to Brooklyn Industries, then out to coffee and finally we had Thai. I eventually made it home around 1:30am but it really made for a wonderful day

Noooo!!! I totally forgot to post on the 22nd for Nablopomo! I was doing so well and now, gone. That being said I’ll probably complete the rest of the month and I’m tempted to say that it’s still Saturday because I haven’t gone to bed.

In reality what happened is that I went to The Yarn Tree (a yarn store in Williamsburg Brooklyn) to get fiber and then I ran into a really really good friend that I hadn’t seen in two and a half years and then we had coffee for something like two or three hours, then went out for dinner. I got home at around 1:15am or so. I actually realized that I hadn’t posted when I was in at Union Square waiting for the 4/5/6 train(s) to go up to Grand Central. That being said - be prepared for a very good post tomorrow, lots of fiber, lots and lots of fiber! And by tomorrow, I mean later today.

So this won’t be at all exciting and for that I’m sorry.
I just got back from the city and while I wouldn’t say that it was at all fun, it was at least productive. I had a therapist appt on the upper east side which was kind of intense and then picked up a perscription.
Right now I’m sitting in one of the auditorums at my school waiting for a show that I thought was at 8 but in realty is at 10 to start. I think I’m going to go home for a bit and come back in something like 3 hours but we’ll see, we’ll see.

This is what I was up to this afternoon before Japanese. I spun up the 2 oz of the 50/50 merino silk blend from Chasing Rainbows Dyeworks that I bought at Rheinbeck. Sadly this picture doesn’t show it of that well, but the blues in this skein are amazing. They are so dark and rich. They actually don’t contrast that well with the green which is a tealy swamp like color and not that rich. The green actually reminds me a lot of the green that came out when I dyed some merino this summer.

This yarn is about 90 yards and somewhere around 12 wip. Sadly not long enough to knit the Deep Forest Mittens with but I’ll find something else for this little skein. If all else fails I do have yarn to knit those mittens out of so not all is lost.

Look it grew! The mead scarf is about 11 inches now and wow was the light balance on my camera being nice to me when I was taking pictures of it about 10 mintues ago. I’m also really happy about the way the it’s showing off the colors of the yarn, I really like how the yarn came out in regards to my spinning (and of course Allspunup’s dyeing). It’s knitting up fairly quickly for it’s gauge and I’m hoping to have it finished by the time I come back from Thanksgiving break. I’m going up to Lowell Mass. with Jacki to stay at her house this year which should be really nice. Unfortunately by the time we leave it’ll be dark outside and this pattern is just finicky enough to require that I look at it while knitting (damn lace) so I need to start a sock either this weekend or Monday for the four hour drive.

Also, oh my gosh, it’s so cold! It’s been in the low 30s all day, though Weather.com is reporting that it “feels” like its been in the low 20s/high teens. My mittens (and my pea coat) proved very helpful this afternoon when I walked down to Bronxville (it’s a 20 minute walk or so) to do some errands, though the wind was killer. I’m also glad I knit another Red Light Special as it’s my warmest hat right now. Actually the weather is causing me to go back and forth on wether or not I want to knit socks or fair-isle gloves next. I think the socks may win, if only because it’s a more portable project but we’ll see.

I’ve had a few good mail days this week. Yesterday I got a Ravelry package (I bought a pack of stickers, a bag, and a T-Shirt that is too big) and today I got the batts that I bought from Fiber Monster last week (during my crazy shopping spree. I’m expecting two more packages). They are a blueface leicester, colonial wool, alpaca, and tussah silk blend and they feel so wonderful. I think I might knit gloves or mittens out of them (at least that was the plan when I saw them on Etsy). I’m actually really intersted in how the colors will look after it’s spun up. I almost never spin batts because most of the time when I’m looking at them I don’t think to pull them into rovings as I really can’t deal with really wide batts so this should be intersting. I’m looking forward to it.