Sweater’s finished!

Yay.

We were vaguely discussing “What is heaven?” on one of the mailing lists I’m on, and I was amused to find that one person’s description of heaven (“to be alone, with nothing particular to do, for hours on end”) was mostly my description of hell. I like to cram as much as possible into each day, and I really enjoy feeling “full” (in the life-sense, not the belly-sense) when I go to bed.

I picked up Elaine’s Spin-X centrifuge dryer yesterday morning after breezing through Whole Foods. (Note to self – WF is not ridiculously crowded on Saturdays before 10 AM. It’s still busy but not painfully slow.) Anyway, I recently bought a covered Romney, a whopping 7 pound fleece, and I was holding off washing it until I could get my mitts on the Spin-X. That thing is amazing. I covet it mightily. Look how much fleece I could wash in one afternoon!

Don’t let the lack of depth in the photo fool you. I have covered 7/8 of a large dining table (seating capacity of 6) with several inches of wool. What’s even better – the Spin-X got so much of the water out, it’ll be dry within 24 hours. With my washing machine spin cycle, this amount of fleece usually needs upward of 2 days to dry, even in the winter.

While I was doing the wool washing, I wrote the last few thank you notes to guests who had come to our wedding. They’re finished! Thank God! Now my mom and I can both rest a little easier at night, eh?

I’ve also been remiss in not showing pictures of a nearly completed project. I started the Elizabeth sweater (1st picture at the top of the page) sans beads late last winter. (Prev. entries are here and here.) I set it aside with all of the wedding hullaballoo. Now that the commotion has come and gone, I was ready to start it up again. I knit the entire upper back, found I’d followed the directions for the wrong size, ripped it out again (ripping Kid Silk Haze, a fuzzy stitch-interlocking yarn, is HARD), started reknitting, realized I had in fact made it the right way the first time (ARGH!), and then finished both halves of the bodice without any further incidents. I hope. I haven’t actually tried it on to find out if I’ve done something else wrong because, quite frankly, I’m afraid to find out. Here’s what we have so far:

Ready for a seaming party

Let’s see, what’s next… I picked up a most wonderful container of “Organic Red Flame Raisins” from Whole Foods. These are clearly the biggest (~1 cm long!) and most luscious raisins I’ve ever seen in my life. After I tried a mouthful, I knew I had to make oatmeal raisin cookies. Looooove oatmeal raisin cookies. Recipe is here. The fine people at the Quaker Oats Comapny categorize this as a “lower fat” recipe on the web page. TWO sticks of butter is lower fat… Bwahahahaha… Oh, but they are good.

I made a nice dinner last night, too. I roasted a small chicken with lemon slices and herbes de Provence (recipe here), and it was served with a side of smashed potatoes (recipe in a recent Cook’s Illustrated) and sauteed green beans.

The potatoes are easy to fix – 2 lbs of small red bliss potatoes, scrubbed and boiled until they are soft. (Matt likes garlic with his potatoes, and I threw in about 5 chopped cloves to simmer at the same time.) Drain, reserving 1/2 c of liquid. Crush the potatoes with a wooden spoon. Mix 4 T of butter (I used 2) and 4 oz of cream cheese (I used neufchatel) until smooth, then stir that into the potatoes. Add reserved potato water as needed to the right consistency (I never use the entire 1/2 c), and add salt and pepper to taste.

The green beans are even easier. Don’t start these until the chicken is out of the oven – it needs a bit of resting time to get the juices back into the flesh. Prep green beans to 1 inch pieces. Saute in olive oil and crushed garlic (I used 2 cloves on approximately 1/2 a pound of beans), squeeze a few lemon slices (extra slices leftover from the lemon I put in the roast chicken). Add a little bit of water as needed, cook until desired tenderness.

In between all of those comings and goings, I cleaned the entire first floor of the house, scrubbed the bathroom, sorted the mail and paid the bills, carded a bunch of cotton punis (photos later), and was so exhausted by 9:30, I couldn’t even stay awake long enough to peruse the latest Pottery Barn catalog. Ah, what a great day!

James says, “Don’t be fooled. Sleeping all day is great, too.”

At the Maryland sheep and wool show in 2002, I bought a lovely Bosworth charkha, attache style. My friend Glynis and I had made a deal – we would both buy something expensive (her a gorgeous wool cloak, me the charkha), or we would both not buy anything. If I recall correctly, it was decided (like many other big decisions in my life) by a coin toss.

Ain’t she purdy?

I happily took it home and sat in front of it for a few hours. Around that time, I discovered something disturbing. I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was a terrible cotton spinner. I mean, horrible. My drafting was inconsistent, and my yarn ran from near invisible to fingering weight in a matter of an armslength. I spent about ten hours (over the last two years) trying to draft finer and more consistent singles, but I never improved. It was enough to put me off of the charkha for a long time. (I’d like to say – there’s nothing wrong with the wheel. The fault is entirely in me.)

While I’m embarrassed to show hard evidence of my total lack of skill, here’s a closeup of the spindle. This was spun last night.

(cringe, cringe)

Nevertheless, I am determined to get better at this. Elaine has a great tutorial on rolling punis (mini cotton rolags) here, and she has a class handout on how to spin with a charkha here (.pdf file). I’ve read both over and over in an attempt to turn words into action. I’m slowly getting a feel for when there’s too much twist during drafting, but I never have any confidence in the amount of “polishing” twist that I’m supposed to be putting in. I also wonder if the cotton I’m using is just a shoddy preparation (there are bits of boll covering or other vegetation sprinkled throughout), and I’m telling myself that’s what’s preventing me from really drafting a smooth yarn. Yeah. Of course it is.

Now, for some more delicious thoughts – applesauce!

I love homemade applesauce. Love love love it. It’s so easy to do if you have a food mill. Quarter a pound of apples – no need to peel or core them. Simmer in water until they are tender. Push them through a food mill (all skin, seeds, stems stay behind). Add a little water to give it the right consistency, follow with sugar and cinnamon to taste. I like to keep one or two apples behind, I peel and core them with my fancy-schmancy apple peeler, cut them to small chunks, and cook them in the sauce until they’re softened but still have some body. Cook yourself a bowl of oatmeal, throw in a big dollop of applesauce and a fistful of raisins, and you have yourself one awesome breakfast.

I stumbled across a really nice cherry wood yarn winder on ebay some weeks ago, got lucky, and won it. It’s so cool.

Maybe you can’t tell by the photo, but this is an enormous piece of equipment. (Ha ha ha…) It’s several feet long and built like a barrel. It winds skeins that are 1 1/2 yards around, the barrel lifts out of the base for easy skein removal, and even with 5 x 50 g skeins of yarn, you can see that it looks rather empty. (I’m preparing to wash more yarn for Dad’s Christmas sweater.)

I’m planning to use the winder primarily to get finished yarn off of the spinning wheel bobbin. It is much faster, especially compared with a niddy noddy. Using it for actual yarn blocking is probably not a good idea, seeing as wood and water don’t mix well. I’m trying to figure out some way to use it for winding 50 g hanks (right now, I wind it with a n-n and put it on a balance every so often), but I don’t have any good ideas.

…and made a Bucket-o-chic! I sort of wish I had known this was a one day project, as I probably would have made one earlier. The pattern was clear and easy to understand, it took about four hours to knit up. The pattern author has a FAQ with hints on yarn, blocking, fulling, etc.

I used Classic Elite Lush. I bought the yarn during a Knitpicks sale, I think it was 50% off. I bought three skeins before I found out it would shed like the dickens. I kept finding bits of fuzz in my mouth and nose as I knitted with it. I hoped making a fulled garment would help control the fabric.

It took about thirty minutes in the laundry machine (hot water, detergent, two pairs of jeans) before it was the right size. I blocked it overnight on a plastic food container but otherwise didn’t do anything to finish it.

Before

After

Matt thinks it needs some kind of embellishment. I’m considering a small jumble of crochet flowers… but I’ll have to overcome my distaste for crochet first. (It makes my hand turn into a cripple claw.)

Bucket-o-cool! And hey – I’m wearing my new alpaca coat, too.

(Alternate title: “How to Rescue a Poor Dye Job”)

In addition to the purple stuff shown earlier, Claudia brought me eleven ounces of a wool/mohair blend from a different vendor at Rhinebeck. It was a lovely green colorway with a “Forest Floor” sort of feel to it – various shades of green, with tiny bits of brown, yellow, and blue.

I started spinning the first ball of roving and found it was really hard to draft. (Grrr…) I spent some time teasing apart semi-felted fibers and predrafting, thinking this was going to be a long eleven ounces. However, I first began to suspect something was seriously wrong after I spun for a half hour and saw my hands beginning to turn GREEN.

HULK SMASH!

I wrote to the kind folks on DyeHappy, and with their advice, I decided to finish spinning the yarn and then work on permanently setting the color. Despite the initial drafting difficulty, fibers in other parts smoothly slid past each other, and I had no difficulty spinning it. I spun all of it into approximately worsted weight singles and set up a citrate bath to fix the color, just as I had done earlier this week.

Here’s what the water looked like immediately after I put the yarn in the bath. (The water was just beginning to simmer at that point.) I had to use the flash for this picture, otherwise it wouldn’t come out at all. Honestly, the color was a lot darker in person.

Look at all of the unbound dye!

I cooked it for 45 minutes to exhaust the dyebath, and it cooled overnight.

Looks exhausted to me

When I pulled the yarn from the pot, I was astonished to see a lot of color in the water. It turned out to be very fine particles of teal silt-like stuff. I hadn’t seen it in the last ladle shot because I had sampled the bath above the yarn. I let it settle in the pot, then tilted it very quickly to take this picture.

People on Dyehappy thought it might be some kind of precipitate formed by a reaction between the dye and some mineral component in my tap water. They also suggested it could be dirt left after a poor scouring job that got dyed along with the fleece. In any case, I think that there was a lot of excess or unbound dye in the fiber, and the hot acidic bath definitely helped take care of that problem. Now I just had to get all of these weird particles out of the yarn, and it would be nothing but roses. It took 30 minutes of careful rinsing before the water ran clear.

Yay!

The yarn dried, I reskeined it, and here you have it – 6 x 50 g skeins of 50/50 mohair/wool, worsted weight singles!

To my eye, the color saturation is not noticeably changed from the original roving. (I didn’t take any photos to compare it.) I’m also very pleased with how it turned out. Just as a final check, I took a few inches of the finished yarn, wet it in a cup of hot, soapy water, and blotted it on a white paper towel. Although the water in the cup took a faint blue tinge, I was happy to see no color transferred to the paper. Success!

I decided to chronicle every step of this spinning project because I hope it will be helpful to other people, should they run into the same situation. Was it worth the extra effort to save the yarn? Yes. But you won’t see me buying fiber from this vendor again.

You may remember that Claudia was my personal shopper at the Rhinebeck sheep and wool show this year. I gave her a fistful of dollars, and she returned with a little over a pound of wool/mohair blends from two different vendors. (She also brought back most of the cash!) Thank you, Claudia!

This first batch of roving was very pretty, spun up well, and was mostly unremarkable until I washed it. Once it hit the warm water mixed with a squeeze of shampoo, it bled and bled and bled some more. After a half hour of washing, it was still letting off a lot of dye. I ended up simmering it for 45 minutes with a healthy serving of citrate to fix the loose dye, and that seems to have solved the problem. When I rinsed out the dyebath water, the yarn behaved. I did email the vendor about the problem. She apologized and noted that I was the first customer ever to have this happen (or the first to mention it to her, at any rate).

The yarn felted a little bit after the repeated washing, simmering, and rinsing, but it was all right in the end. It feels somewhat coarse, unfortunately. If I’m super-conscientious (riiight), I’ll remember to buy some instant leave-in conditioner and will give it a light spritzing to remove some of the dryness.

The yarn is on the windowsill in my attempt to capture the real color as much as possible. There are 4 x 50 g skeins, plus about 10 g leftover.