Jodi’s Yarn Blog

Holly Spring Homespun, merino wool and nylon.

Leyburn socks! For my mom. These are on my feet, though.

Four ounces of wool/bamboo from Creatively Dyed

1.3 oz Butterflygirl Designs spindle, and at this point, Holly named the fiber Chocolate Mint.

290 yards total

Jaime sent some wool/alpaca my way…

Spin spin… (.5 ounce resin spindle from Butterfly Girl Designs on Etsy)

This is soooo unbelievably soft. 452 yards total

I got a batt of superwash merino from a destash on Ravelry (actually, I got several, *blush*) and couldn’t wait to spin it up. So I did!

I just love the colors.

I pulled it out to spin one morning when I’d been having an especially stressful few days, and as the sun rose outside, I noticed the fiber was the exact same color and texture as the clouds.

At first I was irritated, because it wasn’t drafting as smoothly as I’d have liked, but I didn’t want to stay in a bad mood. I decided to accept it and let it be whatever it wanted to be

I wanted to try three-ply, true three-ply rather than chain-ply, so I divided it into six sections, thinking I’d make two skeins. I got all six TP rolls ready, and realized that my yarn fit the quarterly challenge on the Spindlers group. (Ravelry.) But it had to be 200 yards at least, as well as fit the themes. (Soft, calming, and monotone.)

Hmm! Well, I could…just join them together when they run out, and make one big skein. Because with a three-ply, I was pretty sure i wouldn’t hit 200 yards per skein. Knowing it was going to be a tight fit, I meant to put a CD over the whorl to give it a little extra room. But I forgot.

Oops. That thing was heavy. But I measured it, washed it, and hung it to dry.

And then…

It got tangled. My pretty, stress-free calming yarn got tangled.

The way it’s draped over the chair makes it look worse than it really is. I got most of it untangled and wound up again. I think I only snipped about 5-10 yards. The little ball on the left is the snipped bits. The rest is the leftovers from plying. About 27 yards total, chain plied from the leftovers on the TP bobbins.

But here’s the big skein, roughly 270-275 yards of three-ply merino.

It’s sunning itself to get the last of the water out.

I started these forever ago, shortly after I learned how to spin. I finally managed to finish them…and they don’t quite fit me. They’re just a little too snug around the toes, so I gave them to my mother-in-law to see if they fit her any better. (I suspect they’ll be a little too big. She’s a full US size smaller than me. Oh well. If she can’t wear them, I’ll find someone who can.)

The yarn is Claudia Handpainted, colorway Midnight, and the pattern is from Interweave Knits: Seduction Socks. (Careful, PDF on that link.)

Probably should have gone with a solid color on these, to let the pattern show up, but oh well. No going back now. And they’re soft.

Will I ever knit again? Yes, I will. I’m working on a sock now, I swear, but for now, I have more spun yarn. This is the Birch Trees colorway from Mainewoodsyarn, in Corriedale wool, 4 oz.

Spinning on my .8 oz spindle.

It went really fast. Probably because I did little but spin; it drafted so nicely and I never had a problem with it. Took forever to ply, though. I ended up with 546 yards of light fingering weight yarn. It’ll make a nice little pair of socks.

And a closeup, because I like the way the colors plied together.

I have another braid of this kind of wool from this place. I’m looking forward to making sock yarn out of it, too.

When will I ever knit again, you may ask yourself? I don’t know. I have part of a shirt, one sock…and I haven’t touched them in a long time. Too busy with my spindles.

A while ago I got this from Butterflygirl Designs. Glacier Lake and .8 oz Italian Resin Leaf spindle. 70% superwash merino, 20% bamboo, 10% nylon firestar, and less than 1% angelina. 3.4 oz of fiber.

This spindle doesn’t have a notch, and I didn’t think it would matter at first, but eventually the yarn started sliding around the whorl. I got a tiny cop of yarn before I got frustrated and took it off, plied it, and started a new one. There’s a handy way of using your yarn as a notch — don’t take it off the hook, just put it over the whorl and then start wrapping — and that’ll catch the yarn so it won’t slip as you spin. Worked much better.

Then I decided, rather than folding them in half, to ply two cops together to see how much I could get. I don’t have a lazy kate (thing used to hold bobbins while you ply), so I got…my handy dandy paper towel holder.

Hey, it works. But, while I was plying, there were some…incidents. Stewie loves the spindle, and I had to move everything into the ferret room so I could have the not-lazy kate up high enough to unwind the yarn at a good angle.

Then Kippy wanted to admire the big skein.

In the end, I got this:

502 yards of mostly lace yarn.

This isn’t a completed project - it’s going to take a long while - but here is what I’ve been working on.

About a pound (!!!) of Starlight Plum (superwash merino wool and alpaca) from dyepot.com. It spins up nicely.

The first cop was really, really full.

I didn’t do the second one quite so full, mostly because I got distracted with other fiber and neglected this one. (I used to be monogamous with my projects, but these days…) I stuck the first one on a paper towel core and spun the second one, and then attached them in order to chain ply them.

Basically, you make a long chain with your single, and then it turns on itself. Poof! (Crochet people, this is just like making a bunch of chain stitches, but longer loops, and with your fingers, and very twisty.) You start with a slip knot, pull a loop through the loop, and pull more loops until you reach the end. I suspect this is easier with a wheel. With a spindle, you have to stop and wind on every so often, and you have to make sure the spindle keeps going in the right direction. I had to resort to nudging it with my foot a lot. You can only go as long as your arms.

Stewie (ferret) also made this difficult. He attacked the spindle so much I had to leave the ferret room. Then Kippy was after the strand of singles around the paper towel core (hey, they make good bobbins), and then I realized I probably should have vacuumed before dragging the fresh yarn all around the floor because I picked up some cat fur while I was out there…

But I got it. A very, very full plying spindle.

And off the spindle, ready for its bath. I love how stiff it looks here, but later…

It bled a little in the bathwater.

And the finished yarn:

Closeup!

119 yards. I have no idea how much it weighs; I don’t have a scale for light stuff. Looks a tad bit lighter than worsted weight, but I’ll have to do a real WPI test to see for sure.

I…signed up for a spindle and fiber club with Butterfly Girl on Etsy. For the first month, she sent this:

Rose Garden fiber - Merino wool and Bamboo, 50/50%, and a murano foil glass flower spindle. I started immediately.

I ran into a few problems along the way, this being my first time to spin anything so slick, and on a top whorl spindle. The yarn fell off the shaft a couple of times when I dropped the whole thing. (Note to self: do not drop.) It kind of got things messy, but I persisted and made my first hank.

I think it came out somewhere around 103 yards, and is about DK weight after plying. (The same way as before, wrapping it around my hand. The first hank took four hours to ply.)

I finished the second hank the other day. It took just as long to ply, and was even thinner than the first. 147 yards.

I see a pair of tiny, gorgeous fingerless mitts in my future. Oh yes….

And I’ve already started on the next project.

My first toes-up socks! I’m so pleased. I used almost the entire skein of yarn on each sock. I only stopped because I reached my calf muscle and would have had to do increases for shaping and then there’d be slipping down… I wouldn’t have had enough to go all the way over my calves.

These are from Vogue Knitting: THE ULTIMATE SOCK BOOK. It’s…pretty ultimate. There are some really neat patterns in there. (I’m already at work on another one!) I had dubbed these the Fussiest Socks Ever (knit 3 together, anyone? *dies*) But then I met the next pair of socks. So these might have to be content with second place in the fussy contest.

The yarn is my favorite kind, Claudia Handpainted. This is one Jeff surprised me with one day, called Buckeye. He went to the yarn store (which is no longer open, alas) all by himself and picked it out for me. I’m quite fond of the way it striped up.