Goats!

I solemnly swear that I am not going to come home with a baby goat anytime soon.  Really.  Seriously.  Instead, I’m living that side of the fibery life through someone with their very own fiber farm.  I arrive, I help, I come back home and pass out from exhaustion.

It seems we were so helpful at the last goat shearing event, that the owners of the fiber farm invited us back to help out with shearing the last of the goats in residence.  Yay!  So we bundled up in layers – it was threatening rain, of course – packed our hot caffeinated beverages, and headed over to the farm.

Cathy got some good photos of me in action.  Getting dirty is a gorgeous job.  (Not so much.)

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We were having a heart to heart (nose to nose) talk about the importance of keeping one’s ears and eyes out of the way of the scissors while I was trimming his face.  Look at those beautiful ringlets!  This one grew a nice spinning fleece.  For the goat labeled “doesn’t like people,” he was amazingly friendly during most of his health and beauty time.  Really, he just didn’t like being caught, hauled up onto a table, and subjected to the electric shears.  The whole thing is very undignified!

Meanwhile…

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Curious fuzzy nose meets exposed sensitive skin of the back.  Hey, that tickles!

My new trick to learn this outing was to try holding one of the girls upside down while the shearers trimmed up the legs and sensitive areas.  This lady was the best for this training session, since she immediately settled down when we flipped her.  She was so relaxed at one point that she almost fell asleep!

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Not everyone got this relaxed while on the table.  I got really good at dodging those back hooves while wielding the scissors in the ticklish inner thighs and lower belly.  Yes, even goats have tickle spots.

You know we’re coming back to help out at the spring shearing, right?

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Hopefully then we’ll get to cuddle some baby goats!  Most of the ladies we handled were getting ready for their date with the guys.  The owners are hoping for several births next spring.

(I will not adopt a baby goat.  I will not adopt a baby goat…)

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Fiber Fusion Northwest

‘Tis the season for fiber festivals and craft fairs.  This is my favorite time of year.  The summer heat starts to break, the rains start up again, the leaves start to turn, the wool sweaters, hats, and shawls come out of storage.  Sigh.  Until this week it hasn’t been quite cool enough at night to build a fire in the fireplace, but I’m ready for that too.

Last weekend I attended the Fiber Fusion Northwest fiber festival in Monroe, Washington.  This one is still relatively young and growing, and hasn’t reached the size and draw of the big Oregon festivals, but it is definitely worth attending.  This year they filled up the event spaces, and spilled over into some new areas.  And they graduated to needing two food trucks to feed everyone on Saturday.  (Plus a separate coffee stand – you can’t expect a food truck to do proper coffee for Seattlites.)  Then there was a great list of class offerings!  In true fibery spirit, the most popular ones sold out amazingly fast.  Next year, I’ll be on the watch.

The main events on Saturday are shopping in the Marketplace (complete with a large space for spinning and knitting if you need to take a break), the fleece judging, and the fiber arts judging.  Unless you’re taking a class, of course.  The breezeway was stocked with a sampling of our favorite fiber animals – llamas, alpacas, two different sheep breeds, goats, and angora rabbits.  There were free, drop-in fiber demonstrations scheduled throughout the day for both days as well.

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Every year around this time there is a massive fiber festival going on in New York state.  Maybe you’ve heard of it?  The New York State Sheep and Wool Festival – or Rhinebeck, as it’s more popularly known.  All the cool kids and knitwear designers go there every year.  The popular thing to do when attending is to wear your brand-new, just completed hand knits.  Now, I don’t expect to get to go to Rhinebeck anytime soon.  But Fiber Fusion is local, fun, and happens the same weekend.  So I did the next best thing to being at Rhinebeck.  I wore my brand-new, just completed, hand knit cabled sweater to shop at Fiber Fusion on Saturday.  It received many lovely complements, fibery folk being quick to spot a handknit in the wild.  I even was strongly encouraged to write up the pattern and publish it.  I was positively glowing by the end of the day.

Of course I visited the booths of some of my favorite vendors.  I’ll spare you the details now – you’ll see their goodies as I knit or spin them up.  I participated in the raffle and the easy scavenger hunt.  I ate good food, and made friends with the sheep and alpaca.  I admired the fiber arts submissions (maybe I should enter something next year?) and the fleeces for sale.  I sat in on an alpaca spinning demonstration (until then I was a little nervous about spinning alpaca), and a fleece judging.  And I was happily exhausted by the end of the day.

On Sunday I got up early to go back to the festival for an all-day class on natural dyeing with Janis Thompson from the Eugene Textile Center.  I had managed to grab the last seat in this class at registration.  So glad I did!  It was a whirlwind tour of the basics of fiber prep for the dyeing process, and then into the kitchen to dip various materials into the different dye baths simmering on the stove.  It may be using natural materials, but there’s some science involved too.

We made a rainbow that day.  I had previously thought that natural dyes only produced muted colors, and that you had to use acid dyes to produce the vibrant hues that a lot of folks love.  But…  Look at all of those vibrant colors!

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We were so excited to hang the panels up to dry.  After lunch the panels were cut into strips – one strip for each of us – and we created the color cards of the samples we had made that day so we would have a reference for future experiments.  She pointed us to reference materials and additional resources if we want to expand our knowledge beyond this basic introduction and experiment further.  Yep!  I’m game for more science experiments.

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After class I wandered around in the breezeway for a bit, stopping to watch the professional shearer do his work on the BFL and Shetland sheep on display there.  I am in awe at how the sheep just sat there in that awkward position and let him buzz off their fluff.  Also in awe at how quickly he completed his work – someone timed him at just five minutes for the big BFL sheep.  Wow.

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All that excitement calls for a nap.  Where’s my couch and cozy woolen blanket?

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Spinning for a Sweater – Plying and the Finished Yarn

Plying those 12 bobbins of singles was quick (ish) work.  In one industrious evening, staying up late to cross the finish line, I plied everything up into two large hanks of yarn.  I was too excited about how it was going to stop at one full bobbin!

From this:

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To this:

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Dad’s skein winder came in handy yet again.  These were really big, full jumbo bobbins!  And they made really big hanks of yarn.

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The next day I put them into a hot soapy bath to set the twist and wash away the lanolin and grime from the fiber milling machines.  My fingertips were coated with stuff after each spinning session, so I knew the yarn would be a little grimy.  Lets just say the bathwater was not pleasant after each soak.  But the finished yarn was!  So soft and springy!  The sun cooperated for a bit, so I hung the yarn out to dry in the (relatively) warm breeze.

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Here’s the finished yarn.  Isn’t it a lovely neutral?  (I can hear Mom groaning from 1000 miles away.)  No, I don’t wear neutrals exclusively.  But if I’m going to spend all of this time to spin and knit a sweater, I want it to hang around for more than a couple of years.  Right?  Right.  So, no trendy colors in this particular project.  The final yardage count comes in at 738 yards of DK weight yarn.

Ready to get knitting then?  Not quite yet.  The yarn turned out exactly like I planned… except in one of the critical areas.  The yardage is not as much as I hoped and needed for the particular sweater pattern I had picked out.  Apparently I need some practice with estimating fiber quantities for spinning projects.  File that in the Lessons Learned folder.

What to do, since I’ve got about half of the amount of yarn needed for my sweater?  My goal was ~1500 yards.  1) I could supplement with another yarn, making the sweater multi-toned or multi-colored.  2) I could pick a different sweater pattern, based on the yardage I have.  3) I could spin more yarn.  In this case, I picked the third option.  The mill where this fiber was processed is local, and I knew they would be at the local fiber festival this past weekend.  So I popped into their booth, did a quick spot check for color, and acquired an additional 12 ounces of fiber.  Crossing my fingers that I can replicate my work to produce two more hanks that will match closely enough to the first two that they can be used in the same project.

Whew!  Ready to do it all over again?  Not yet.  I think I need a palette cleanser first.  Next up, more fiber festival adventures and an exploration of color.

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Getting Started – Spinning for a Sweater

Now that the marathon of the cabled sweater project is over, it’s time to get started on the large spinning project I was telling you about a few weeks ago.  To recap, I have 12 ounces of a heathered grey and brown BFL that I’m hoping will give me enough finished yardage to knit myself a lovely midweight cardigan pattern that I’ve had my eye on for a while.  In that earlier post I had spun up a sample skein of 3-ply yarn and knit a swatch that (fortunately!) matched the gauge of the target cardigan pattern.

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To get started I took the bumps of prepared fiber and weighed it on my kitchen scale.  Then I divided the number of grams by 12 – which is the number of bobbins I want to spin.  # of total grams / 12 = # of grams of fiber for each bobbin

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12 bobbins should give me plenty of options to mix them up while plying, so as to avoid having sections that are thicker or thinner.  The goal is for the plied yarn to be as consistent as possible, even if each days’ spinning is not.  A 3-ply yarn using a bobbin each from day 1, 3, and 5 should look consistent with a 3-ply yarn using a bobbin each from day 2, 4, and 6.  That’s what the experts tell me anyway.

So I took the big bumps of fiber and split them into 12 smaller bumps of fiber, weighing them out on the kitchen scale to match the number of grams given in the formula above.

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Then I got started spinning.  Each completed bobbin was numbered as it came off the wheel.  When I ran out of the bobbins that came with my wheel, I wound off the singles onto storage bobbins and transferred the numbers over to keep track of the order the singles were created.  These numbers will help me mix things up when it comes time to ply the singles into the finished yarn.

I discovered that I could spin a bobbin in a few hours in front of the TV after dinner.  Weekends allow for longer spinning, so I could spin three or four then.  In just a little over a week I have this lovely pile of 12 bobbins of singles.

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That went much faster than I expected!  What do you think?  Can I get these all plied up in a week as well?

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Completed Cabled Sweater

It’s done!  Not only is it done, but it has been washed and worn out in public.  The knitters gave it a big thumbs up, so I was glowing the whole night.  Here are the final photos for your inspection.

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The back is worked exactly like the front, so the whole sweater is a snuggly cabled hug.  The yarn I chose is a soft wool with a little silk content.  The fabric is cushy without being too warm and drapey without being too loose.  I’m considering this yarn/pattern pairing a definite success.

What do you think?  Could you see yourself snuggling into this sweater on a blustery winter day?

For the knitters:

  • Pattern: my own, inspired by an old sweater knocking around in my closet for the last 10+ years, read about how it got started here
  • Yarn: Abstract Fiber Rothko, colorway Silver
  • Ravelry project page: here

 

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Cabled Sweater Body

I love knitting worsted weight sweaters.  Why?  Because they go so quickly!  In a couple of knit nights, I have this…

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Then in a few more days I have this…

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(Wow, that photo is blurry!  I think I need to clean my camera lens.)

All that’s left is to sew the sleeves into the armholes of the sweater body, then pick up and knit the generous cowl collar.

Since it’s been so long between writing up the pattern for this sweater and knitting it again, I’ve been following the pattern religiously.  I’ve only had to add a few notes to make it easier to follow.  Yay for being able to understand what was in my head nine months ago!

Now, to tackle those sleeve seams.

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Cable Crossing Correction

In my last post, I told you about my plans for correcting a wrongly crossed cable in the sleeve of my sweater-in-progress.  First I thought I’d try just unraveling the columns of stitches for the incorrect crossing, fix the crossing, then knit them back up again.  If that didn’t work, I would just pull out all of the knitting above the point of the incorrect crossing and knit the entire upper part of the sleeve again.

How did it go, you ask?  Pretty well!  Let me show you what I did.  (Warning: Some people may be sickened by the following.  Especially new knitters and those opposed to ripping out their own hard work.  Continue at your own risk.  It might help to have a glass of wine handy.)

I located the column of four stitches (half of the 4×4 cable crossing) that I wanted to target and followed them up the sleeve to the bind off row.  I then picked out the bind off and put these stitches back onto the needles.

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That’s the four target stitches on the needle in the middle, with the surrounding stitches held on the other two needles in the background.

Deep breath!  Here’s where things start to make some folks a little woozy.

I then removed the middle needle and reinserted it at a point a little further down the column of stitches – being careful to capture those same four stitches.  I carefully unraveled the rows above the new needle location.

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See how the loose yarn is kept just to those four stitches, all the way up the column?  That’s the plan!  It’s because I still have the surrounding stitches locked into place by the needles in the background – the surrounding stitches won’t unravel as long as those stitches are held in place.

I kept moving the middle needle, reinserting it a bit further down the column of four stitches, and unraveling the stitches above until I got to the spot where the stitches crossed the wrong way in the cable.

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Looks like a noodly mess, right?  No worries, though, things are working perfectly.

At this point, I corrected the crossing and began knitting my way back up the column of four stitches.  I triple checked every cable crossing I came to, just to make sure that I wasn’t correcting one mistake only to make another.  When I got back up to the top, I bound off the stitches again.

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There you have it!  Not so bad, was it?  The new stitches are just a tad wonky, but should even out in blocking without too much trouble.  I am pretty happy with how (relatively) easy that was to fix!

Now if I can just keep from mis-crossing any of the cables in the sweater body…

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To Fix or Not to Fix?

Some of you may be wondering about the frequency of my posts this week.  Yes, I’ve been posting more often than usual.  To be honest, it’s because I’ve been bedridden for most of the week and attempting to break up the monotony of sitting in one place for the majority of the day.  No, it’s not life-threatening.  I caught a cold that morphed into an ear infection.  Some of you may also remember the last time I caught a cold and was in bed for the better part of a week – I knocked out a sweater.  Well this time might not be that different.  (Wait and see!)

Here are my two finished sleeves on the cabled pullover project.  One sleeve is showing you the pattern along the top side of the arm, the other is showing you the pattern along the underside of the arm.

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Do you see something funny?  There in the upper part of the “top side” sleeve.

Here, let me zoom in a bit.

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Now do you see it?

That, my friends, is a wrongly crossed cable.  Smack in the middle of my bicep.  It should look just like the one right next to it, but doesn’t.  I blame the medicine head.

But all swearing and blaming aside, what to do about it now?  Well I can’t just leave it there!  Call me a perfectionist all you like, but this is the final copy of my favorite sweater that I’ve been waiting to wear for something like 5-10 years.  There is no way I’m going to wear it out into the world with a wonky cable right there like a patch on my arm.  No way!

Cringe if you like, I’m going to rip back and fix it.  Or rather, I’m going to try dropping down just within those few columns of stitches to fix it, and if that doesn’t work I’ll rip back the whole top of the sleeve and knit it back up again.  The nature of interlacing cables being what it is, I’m not sure that the first method won’t end up with me ripping the whole thing out anyway just to get to those eight stitches on that one row.  There are Knitters (with a capital K) who would suggest cutting and grafting to fix this kind of issue, but I am not one of those brave souls.

So I’m diving in, down the stitch columns.  Cross your fingers for me.

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Bring on the Clouds

Happy Fall, everyone!  I don’t know about you, but I’ve been ready for fall weather for weeks now.  Cooler temperatures, crisp breezes, cloudy skies, and RAIN.  Yep, we’re doing a jig every time it rains now.  Bring on the clouds.

On that note, here’s a look at the completed Bring on the Clouds socks.  The striping is wonderful, and even managed to get back to something regular after the heel turn messed with the patterning.  The skein was heavy, so I ended up with enough yardage to work them into knee socks.  I’m so much in love with these that they may become my new favorite everyday boot socks.

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  • Pattern: my basic toe up sock, slip stitch toes and heels, a few increases at the calf, deep ribbing at the top
  • Yarn: Blue Moon Fiber Arts, Socks That Rock Lightweight, colorway Tonalite
  • Ravelry Project Page here

What else am I knitting for fall?  A few posts ago I introduced you to the drape front cardigan.  That project is tripping right along, since it is a simple knit in easy stitches.  It would be take-along knitting if it fit in the purse, but since it doesn’t I’ve been knitting on it while watching TV and at Knit Night.

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I also resurrected the cabled sweater project.  You know, the one I blogged about back at the beginning of this year.  I want to get the final version finished before the really cool weather arrives.  Before it went into hibernation I had completed the first sleeve and the cuff of the second sleeve.  It’ll be short work to knock out the second sleeve – the rows are so quick at this larger gauge!

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Since the sock needles were empty and I needed a purse project, I cast on for a pair of socks for Husband.  Sunny, aren’t they?  He has no issue wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt in this color in the dead of the dreary grey winter, but he looked at these skeptically when I showed them to him.  Maybe socks are different?  I’m trying out a different heel construction for this pair to see whether they fit better than the previous pairs.  We’ll see if he wears them when I’m finished.

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So bring on the cooler weather.  I’ll be ready.

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Tagging Along

Last week I tagged along with Husband on a business trip to San Francisco.  This time I resolved to hit a bunch of the museums that I didn’t have time for on the last trip.  Here’s a look at my week in pictures.

First up, Alcatraz.  (Click the photos to embiggen.)

Golden Gate Bridge from the bay.

Golden Gate Bridge from the bay.

Looking back at the downtown skyline.

Looking back at the downtown skyline.

Alcatraz

Alcatraz

A typical jail cell at Alcatraz Prison.

A typical jail cell at Alcatraz Prison.

 

Academy of Sciences, Golden Gate Park

A closeup view of the green roof.

A closeup view of the green roof.

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Looking at the Academy of Sciences from the top of the tower at the deYoung Museum.

Looking at the Academy of Sciences from the top of the tower at the deYoung Museum.

 

Stow Lake, Strawberry Hill, and Huntington Falls, Golden Gate Park

Paddleboating in Stow Lake.

Paddleboating in Stow Lake.

View of Golden Gate Bridge from the top of Strawberry Hill.

View of Golden Gate Bridge from the top of Strawberry Hill.

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Huntington Falls

Huntington Falls

 

Ocean Beach

Ocean Beach looking north to Lands End.

Ocean Beach looking north to Lands End.

Ocean Beach looking south.

Ocean Beach looking south.

 

San Francisco Botanical Garden, Golden Gate Park

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Cable Car Museum

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Haas-Lilienthal House

Shrouded for painting work outside, but open for the usual guided tours inside.

Shrouded for painting work outside, but open for the usual guided tours inside.

 

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