Anne made me do it

I think where I started to go horribly wrong at the Knitter's Fair was probably when I bought the Japanese stitch books, because they cost a bomb and the only way to justify that is to say Price Doesn't Matter, which is dangerous thinking when surrounded by fiber.

Shortly after that purchase I found myself at a booth where Koigu was on sale.  I've been obsessing about Koigu since I found the sample Minions (that is a link to Heather Sebastian's blog, btw, because everything she designs is obsession-worthy) at PassionKnit, a sort-of-local yarn store, and I couldn't help looking at all the colours in front of me, and drooling.  But honestly.  How do you choose?  And there was a siren call to my right, so I sort of drifted that way and found a lot of super yummy fiber from Briar Rose.  After some agonizing I chose this:

and then hugged it while I walked around the booth some more.  This was another big mistake because when you are hugging fiber you know you are not going to put it back on the hangy-uppy-thingy no matter what other lusciousness you find, and what I mostly found was a big long table of samples I instantly recognized as Anne Hanson's work.

Now, if I had had time to breathe in the previous week I would have kept up with my favourite blogs and known that Anne was going to be at the Shall We Knit? booth and also at the shop later in the week for classes.  I didn't.  So when I looked down and saw a familiar-from-blog-pictures figure getting things out from under the table I said exactly what popped out of my head, which was, "I thought this was a lot of Anne Hanson samples not to have Anne Hanson with them."

Well.  We got chatting, in part about the fiber I was hugging.  Anne seemed to feel that while Blue-Faced Leicester is very nice, I might like the Polwarth even more.  And of course, having spun with both and having just been torn between them two moments before, I said that if she kept up that sort of talk I was going to have to buy both and it would be her fault.   "Let's look at colours!" she said.

Which is how I got this, too.

All that led to more shenanigans with my wallet, but I gotta go, so I'll tell you more about it another day soon.  In the meantime you can read Anne's posting about the Fair - she's got pictures of a lot of what I've described, including part of the magical Viola booth, complete with Emily!

(Emily knit the sweater she's wearing with some of her own yarns of course, in about a million colours - she did even the start and end of the stripe transitions with individual balls of yarn chosen specifically for their gradualness.  It is a fabulous piece of work.)

I have mawata and I'm not afraid to use it

My mawata, aka silk hankies, from Helena's shop arrived last Friday, looking compact and adorable:

and being a little daunting.

As in, when I unrolled the stack to take more pictures, they kept catching on my hands, which was a big clue that playing with silk hankies is going to be very different from the rest of my knitting adventures.

Clearly research was in order.

I found a website describing with pictures how to work from a cap (which is pretty much just a different shape from a hanky, but follows the same principle), a more detailed blog post with - okay, seriously gorgeous and colourful - pictures of drafting a hanky from the centre outward, and another blog post with a description of how to draft a hanky from the corners so as to avoid having the silk hurt or even cut your fingers.  Yep, it's that strong.

I also found a YouTube video of the process, the hanky portion of which begins around the 3:35 mark...

... and a lot of other sites as well.  The upshot is, the silk is very catchy for everybody and not just me; the most sensible suggestions included exfoliating with sugar and olive oil, wearing surgical gloves, or throwing caution to the wind.

** Reality Check **
Whoever has the willpower to moisturize before playing with silk hankies has my admiration, and ditto anybody who can put the texture of a surgical glove above that of silk. I just let the stuff catch, and a good thing too as I found out while drafting one hanky too close to the remaining stack that the silk will also catch on itself.  How annoying would that be, if I'd put all those barriers up between me and the silk only to have to detangle anyway?


And now on to what I'm actually going to do with these.  Ha!  there was method in the madness of knitting fingerless gloves when I was supposed to be doing the Secret Pattern - I want to make a pair with the silk, and I wanted to be sure I understood the pattern before the hankies arrived because I can guarantee I will mess up the drafting and anything else that's required.

My particular stack of hankies included a few that are straight pink, a few more that have a deep rose in the middle, and quite a lot that are pink on one half and green on the other. I decided to use the pink for cuffs and drafted it first (Friday night, too late for pictures)... and then I knit a cuff because did I mention I have little to no self control?

I think even that terrible nighttime picture up there shows some of the glistenings of the silk. The hankies look fuzzy, but when you draw out the fibers they positively gleam.  It's quite amazing.

The deep pink might come at the end as a border if I run out of silk...

... and I'm thinking the bulk of the hand will be the pink and green.  I read that you can get more of a blended colour effect by drafting from the corners rather than from the middle so I tried both, and found that while the corner trick does make it less hurty on the hand, the center trick didn't hurt my hands much at all. Also I got the same colour result either way.  This probably means I'm doing something wrong, but I'm okay with that.

How addictive this stuff is: just taking it outside to photograph, I couldn't stop myself from doing a little more drafting.

It's so easy to do - and sadly, to overdo.  But why complain?  It's not every day you get to work with fiber and a project that are both completely irresistible.

(at least, it'd better not be every day, because I do have a deadline... luckily, the Secret Pattern uses yarn that's equally irresistible.)

Fiber, it's good for you

Somebody said the craziest thing to me last night:

"I not getting you yarn for Christmas! I don't want you knitting on Christmas Day."

Apparently I have been giving the impression - how, I can't imagine - that knitting is something I do frantically at the last minute for a gift or a contract or to wear yesterday and not while relaxing or being sociable.

But my reaction was to stare out at a bleak mental landscape in which Christmas Day does not afford me a single moment to sit down and relax and be sociable. Ack!

I recovered and smiled and nodded and thought "you're quite right, I should spin instead."

Speaking of which, my last installment in the Twisted Fiber Art fiber club arrived yesterday and I am in love:

It is called Maple and is making me so happy just from looking at and touching it.

The package also contained a sample of the other colourway for this month, in superwash Blue-Faced Leicester:

and that one, whoa. After supper I set it on the palm of my hand and it stuck there, tingling. I literally spent the next half hour not able to put it down. I love the colours, but the way the fiber feels is amazing. So I'm ordering some of that, for sure.

(and while I'm at it, maybe even some yarn, ha!)

Fleeced

Such an exciting week in spite of a few setbacks on the Giant Urgent Project front

(and the whole e-mail virus thing that kept slinking back yesterday in spite of my antivirus software continually spotting and eradicating it, grrr.)

This is mainly due to a continued influx of new things, really to quite a large degree for somebody not spending money on yarn until a big hunk of physiotherapy is complete and paid for.

First off, I got my November installment of the Twisted Fiber Art fiber club and, ohhhhh,

it's um really just so far beyond, whoa, I want to spin this

NOW

and can't.

I mentioned the Giant Urgent Project, right? Yeah. H'mmmmm.

There was a little bonus tucked into the same envelope:

and yes, it's soft. Softer than it looks even.

I think perhaps we should take a moment to admire what a responsible person I am to keep my professional responsibilities a priority under the circumstances, don't you? And maybe have a motivational cookie as well.


Or not, because I did take Monday evening off to go to the Royal Winter Fair, a huge agricultural fest that just amazes me for drawing so many people into the city to live at the Exhibition grounds for 10 days while showing their (astonishingly gorgeous) animals and/or staffing a booth.

(my favourite in the latter category showcased the wonderfulness of canola and featured not only Carol, a super nice lady with a quilt shop in Saskatchewan, but also a big bin of canola seeds with construction truck toys to drive through it all. Canola seeds feel so far beyond wonderful in your hand, Carol and I agreed they should be sold in bags for therapeutic use. )

I'm not a horsey person at all, either, so it's a constant revelation to walk through booth after booth of tremendously expensive equestrian gear and to watch the horses all groomed up and strutting and even pulling elaborate carriages. Sort of How The Other Half Lives, except that the first time I went I hadn't realized such a Half lived at all.

But mostly it's the living at the Ex thing that gets me. Not everybody does it - I think mostly only when you're looking after animals - but even if you're just covering the opening hours that's a long haul. Even this time, I heard so many people saying to each other, 'Good thing it's only 10 days!' as they bought another bag of kettle corn (and having brought home a bag myself I have to agree, because if I was in any closer proximity to that stuff there would be trouble.) It's like a surreal world there, away from natural light and breezes and grasses, all the animals resting on giant piles of hay in open areas for school groups to come through and learn about. 10 days of it must be so weird.

Weird but also fun, and not least because it's like any other Fair where things get judged and awarded ribbons. Things like wool, in a much more raw form than what I got from Twisted.

I loved this summary of what makes wool so wonderful - you can click on the image if you want to read it too:

but also, I loved looking at a huge pile of fleeces. I know in theory that there are all kinds of breeds out there, but even so it was amazing to see this big a variety of colours and textures.

I took a closeup of the winners, but I would need to know a lot more about wool before I could tell you what made them even more outstanding than the others; from this distance, they all look purely delicious.

Not kettle corn delicious, but still. Yummy!

Like clockwork

All the way back in July I noticed I had three different yarns that looked as though they were made for each other, and I haven't stopped thinking about them ever since. I even moved two of them off my desk to stop thinking, and it didn't work. I just keep looking for ways to combine them.

Then last week I had a call from Helena - a real live in-person phone call with voice and everything! Which is so amazing, because I almost never get to meet in person friends I've met online. I mean, I've known Kathi for probably 13 years now and we've never so much as Skyped.

The point is, Helena asked me if I'd got my fiber yet from the Twisted fiber club I joined, and I said No, and she said everybody else seemed to be getting it so I would soon, and I did the next day and it is absolutely ooooohhh wow amazing

and I was so distracted by that, it took me about three days to say

wait a minnit. I didn't know Helena joined the fiber club too. And how did she know everybody had their fiber already?

At which point I realized there must be a group on Ravelry for people who love Twisted Fiber Art yarns and fiber. So I found it and joined it and read some posts and

Whoa.

Some extraordinarily wonderful person mentioned in passing that she is knitting Stephen West's Clockwork with two complementary Twisted yarns, in Playful.

Playful being the weight of the graduated stripe in Ember that matches the weight of the matching red Precieux I had tried using in the crazy long scarf I took to my conference last week and was thinking about frogging.

I did take a day or two to think this over - well, maybe I mean hours but it felt like days - before buying the pattern and casting on and getting going, even though there are a lot of things I should be doing instead, not least vacuuming. And even though the point of Clockwork seems to be a good contrast, of which the matchiness of the reds reduces the impact, I am loving how it is coming out.


Knitting this pattern is not unlike sitting within arm's reach of a tin full of freshly-baked shortbread cookies, some with chocolate chips, some without, not that this particular analogy is especially vivid for me in any way, ahem. It's so easy, and each new bit is so satisfying, it is just really really hard to stop and work on something else with an actual deadline.

Enabling

This weekend I did a little knitting and a lot of yarny reorganization, which was painful because I could probably have finished a sock in the time I spent doing it. Still, things were getting out of hand in the craft cupboard and even more so on the sewing table where I pile up my works-in-progress. It was time.

It was also time to sort through the piles of said works and decide what I was going to finish in the yarn and needle size selected, and what needed to get frogged in favour of different materials.

As a result of all that effort I have just four projects in progress on the sewing table, and one of them is now done and drying. The other three are
the lattice hat I still have to make other sizes for
the long-suffering Carrot cardi and
the Soaker socks

I just started trying the Baby Surprise Jacket again, but that is living upstairs for now so I can kind of not count it until it's a further along.

See? That leaves me with just four projects underway. Totally do-able. I feel much less overwhelmed. What really lifted the whelming burden though was Trish coming by today to pick up some of the yarn I decided to give away.

From my perspective, this exchange is perfect. It totally alleviates my guilt about not having knit with stuff I like but just can't seem to use, while giving Trish some new yarn she doesn't have to feel guilty about spending a whack of cash on should she decide to overdye it or ignore it for a long time herself.

Trish has a slightly different take and was muttering 'enabler' as she directed the bag out the door. She runs rather short on time and long on queue herself and to be fair, probably didn't need all that yarn and the ideas it produced at this exact moment.

As she and my guilty conscience were leaving, I noticed my mail had arrived and that there was a rather large envelope sticking out from the middle of it: yarn!

Or more specifically, fiber!


It's from Ilona, who had some llama/Jacob blend in her stash she thought I might like, which Trish and I both did very much because MAN is that stuff soft.

Enablers: we're everywhere!

A happy place for yarn

One of my favourite recent yarn purchases was the cashmere blend laceweight my friend Emily dyed when she first started making yarn available, and my absolute favourite part of the Knitter's Fair was spotting Emily's booth there.

Not that it was easy, because so many people were buzzing around it - I recognized Emily herself before I could even make out her sign. On my second pass, it was still squeezing room only.

People are figuring out how awesome Emily is at what she does.

I had to buy some things


even though I already had two bags full of fleece
and I was running late for my ride home
and Emily has a shop on Etsy as well
so it was easy to think of just having a peek and shopping online later.

The roving is called Elephant, and makes me think not of giant grey animals but of snuggly stuffed ones that keep you company on a day when you are home sick and reading something fantastic while wrapped in blankets.

My cousin, on the other hand, sees a rocky beach worn smooth by decades of tides.

Emily has great colour sense, even when she's doing subtle shifts of shade. And her base yarns? whooooaaaa. But there's something warmly nostalgic about the mix of the two that I just love, so that even looking at it I just feel better.

I get the same reaction every time I see the logo she designed.


When I was buying Elephant, I spotted a few of these project bags with her logo printed on the side with sweet flowery fabric handles and linings and just had to have one, so that no matter what I'm knitting or spinning with I can admire it.

(almost) speechless with Joy

Remember yesterday I said I might have another excitement to share? Well, say hello to my new best friend:


(and excuse me while I dance around the room for a moment.)

It's all very sudden, as is true for most of my irresponsible purchases. I started yesterday in the usual way - ignoring the dishes and flipping through various favourite web sites and blogs - and then I spotted a posting of a little-used spinning wheel for sale at a price significantly lower than retail.

Leaving aside the timing of this, just days after I bought an insane amount of fiber it would take me months of dedicated spindling to get through, it so happens that the model offered, the Ashford Joy with a single treadle, is the exact one I had settled on as the wheel I would buy if I could justify one.

According to my research on this question, here's how you're supposed to decide on a spinning wheel: try out as many wheels as you can because they are all different and some are a better ergonomic fit for you personally or, alternatively, may prevent you from spinning the size of yarn you had in mind, etc. Also, think about what you want to do with it - will you travel with it? will you spin six hours a day making yarn for sale? will it sit out in your living room or be stored when not in use?

My criteria are so limiting, I didn't bother with any of that.

I needed something that's small when in use and smaller when it's tucked away into a closet, ideally something a friend already uses so I can get advice quickly.

Period.

Since Kathleen Taylor is the only longtime spinner I know who works regularly on a wheel, and since she happily uses the very compact Ashford Joy with a single treadle, I decided this would (simply have to) be the perfect wheel for me in every way, assuming I ever stumbled across a used one. I would have to go without new yarn and fiber for a long time to spring for new, and I don't quite know whether I could cope with that. Springs might start flying out of my ears or something.

So most of yesterday went to scurrying around the house waiting to hear whether somebody else had leapt on this offer before me, and then figuring out how to get to it to collect it, and then collecting it.

Once I had it I decided I might as well go for broke, more literally than is good for me, and choose some special fiber to celebrate it. And of all the fiber I've spun on the spindle, my favourite has been hand-dyed merino from Fleece Artist, which fortunately my favourite closest LYS, The Naked Sheep, keeps in stock. I love my Soaker socks-in-progress so much I went with a similar colourway.

I'm not spinning with that yet - I'm sticking with some super inexpensive undyed wool it's okay to make mistakes with. And believe me, I will be making them. I still haven't figured out how to get the fiber to twist before it gets onto the bobbin thingy, though after I put the wheel away last night Kathi explained it has something to do with just not letting go of the fiber till it's twisted (why didn't I think of that?)

Okay, so this experiment might possibly go horribly wrong and I might be one of those rare people who haven't got the knack for a wheel. But maybe it won't. And even if I don't get to eat out for two or three months - I've got my own spinning wheel to find out with. Hurrah!

Super dreamy farm yarn

One of my favourite things about knit shopping is finding tools or fibers or yarn I absolutely love and never knew about before. Last night I was playing with the new stuff from the Knitter's Fair and decided the Knit Bridge can wait, but Stoddart Family Farm can't.

See, I was walking innocently past this very colourful booth making a mental note of the roving that cascaded down a display on one side but mostly blinking madly at the yarn while reminding myself that

I Do Not Need More Yarn

when suddenly I found myself standing in front of said yarn telling Silvia, who has now joined the very select group of my heroes, how beautiful her colours are. And then two magical things occurred:

A/ Silvia explained that she hadn't been happy with the colours she'd been getting from plant dyes - important since I was missing the beginning of the seminar on plant dyeing to drool on Silvia's yarn and was therefore able to stop thinking about having to tear myself away - because she found the boiling process made the yarn less soft. This of course made me touch the yarn, something you will of course realize spelled instant doom, and to note that in fact the yarn was pretty awesomely soft - even with mohair in it. More on this in a moment.

B/ While petting the yarn and listening intently to Silvia's explanation of the solution she's opted for in order to best treat her organic materials in a way that maintains their quality while producing amazing colours, I spotted a label marked 'Boot Sock.' Yes. Sold.

Okay, here's my thing about mohair, which you can skip by just scrolling down to the pictures:

I had an older brother who died when I was fifteen, but until that happened

(and afterward, actually, since he was on a holiday when he died and had mailed a bunch of things he'd bought for us to my parents' place so he wouldn't have to cart them back on the plane and they kept on arriving unannounced in the weeks after his funeral - torture)

he was always coming up with the coolest presents. As you can imagine, they were even more precious after he was gone, and I still have mine. Except for a lacy pale pink mohair scarf he found for me when I was just barely old enough to start appreciating such things.

The thing with mohair is that it can be scratchy. Especially if, being a student buying a present for your small sister, you go for mohair you can afford. And my mohair scarf was completely crazy-making - I mean, beyond itchy. So I loved it because it was grownup and special and Bob had chosen it for me and he was dead, and I hated it because it was so uncomfortable and I never knew how to wear it anyway. Eventually this back and forth got so bad I just sort of lost it once I was a student myself and moving around all the time. But I'm still conflicted about mohair. I react much more strongly to seeing it in a label than I do silk, for example, even though Bob once sent several lengths of patterned silk from China for the women in our family to sew into summer dresses using a long-sleeved pattern we all blindly agreed on.

(which is how I know that silk is super hot in summer, incidentally, and why I don't buy silk summer dresses now unless they are sleeveless.)

Last year I tried knitting with mohair blends and found one I love, Vesper Merino Mohair from Knitterly Things, of course - one of my sources for all things lovable. I used it for my blue Candy Wrapper scarflet and it's not the least bit itchy even on a bare neck. But I thought that was just Julia being gifted, which is probably also a factor, until Saturday.

And now we're back to present-day. You ready for what came home with me? Well, it started with this:

because I couldn't decide between these two colours and eventually realized I didn't have to, and then while Silvia chatted with somebody else I succumbed to this:


which didn't make it to a skein photo because about 10 minutes after I got home I wound it into two balls of equal weight for socks, and now it looks more like this:


Heavier yarn makes a sock go so much faster: I think I am in love.

But I did not stop there. Remember the roving? It's the same fiber content as the yarn, and I decided that these pieces might look really good with that Fair Isle hat I mentioned yesterday:


Last night after some sock time I decided to try out the new spindle, which is why I can tell you that the fiber spins up like a dream and looks like this:

Beautiful, yes? and you can buy it all online. I am totally making a bunch of mohair socks to wear with my boots this winter - the only question is, which colour should choose next?

Why I should never shop alone

Whew! I'm still trying to catch my breath from the Kitchener-Waterloo Knitter's Fair, and also to find places for everything I brought home.

Seriously, I thought I would shop so much less since I wasn't meeting up with Karen and her crew this time - you know, the more eyes you have, the more must-have stuff you spot, right? Not so. It turns out that when I am alone I am even more likely to chat with people I don't already know, and whether it's somebody with a great thing to sell or somebody with a great insight into buying, I am always interested.

Which sort of explains why I went to the Fair hoping to pick up a little more fiber to spin, and came home with this:


I just couldn't help myself.

Let's start in the top left corner with the fiber I spotted immediately after passing and then walking back to a booth selling undyed 100% cashmere fiber for $44 a bag. I know this was a good deal, and if it hadn't been my very first stop of the day I would have gone for it, but at the time I still had self-restraint and remembered the beautiful blue $3 cashmere sweater sitting on my dryer waiting to be unraveled or sewn with. Plus I don't think my spinning skills are really ready for cashmere. Yet.

The point is, when you've walked away from a chance like that and toward Pygora Fiber mixed with just enough merino wool for memory and it feels like heaven and costs in the $25 range, you're going to say Yes Please, immediately. (isn't it beautifully white? And seriously, so soft. I can't wait to get working with it.)

While I was paying for the Pygora, the first lot of door prize winners was announced and guess who was in the mix? Yes! And as one so often hears in such situations, I never ever win things, so it was extra exciting. I chose a gift certificate for The Yarn Source and spent a happy hour browsing my way toward its booth, where I found the colourful bump of fiber across the front of the basket. It's a whopping 250g of Polwarth, and I love these colours, and I got wonderful advice while paying for the part of it that the gift certificate didn't cover:

If I tear it into long strips (and don't break them), then label and bag them such that I start spinning from the same place in every strip, and ply them the same way, I will get self-striping yarn.

I am absolutely going to try this, and if I botch horribly I will still have something beautifully variegated, so it will still be okay.

Here I must pause and point out that while I did walk away from The Yarn Source at this time, I also went back, so as to buy this Tabachek spindle:


I've been wanting a spindle with extra detail on the bottom for better traction when I start it spinning, and this one just feels wonderful. I am really, really happy to have it. By which I mean it is an effort to be typing this right now and not sitting in a pile of fiber with it.

I guess we're going counterclockwise so I will tell you next about the yellow-hued fiber, which blends mostly wool with a little Husky fur. Now, I've read about the whole idea of yarn blended with dog fur but not having a dog myself I have not been overwhelmed by any urgency to try it. Until I visited the Frog Pond Collective's booth, that is, and was shown samples of how dog fur puffs out after blocking.

Let's just say it's pretty. Also, very soft. And also, apparently, incredibly warm. Sold.

One of the last places I visited, because it was the second last booth on my circuit and not because I wasn't looking for it, was Wellington Fibres. If you go to Ontario knitting shows you'll know Wellington - they always have a compelling display of small, nondescript brown boxes with enticingly beautiful clouds of colour peeping out of the top. Of course, not being a spinner, I always just gawked and walked, but now that I know how to work a spindle I really wanted a box of my own. In the end I chose not a box but a ziploc bag of happiness - the exact shade of green I want for the handspun Fair Isle hat I plan to make when I finally come up with enough smooth yarn for it. The label says 'carded wool'; my hand says 'soft'. I don't know when I'll find out what the spindle says, because, um, that is a lot of fiber in that basket.

And it's still not everything! But it's enough for one day, I think. I'll tell you more tomorrow, and maybe even post my pictures of the Knit Bridge. Ha!