sweetgeorgia

Candy Spun

Have you seen Rachel spinning away at the airport on her Joy? I love it! Here’s my Joy with the new Polwarth that I dyed a few weeks back:

Ooh, and a close-up! See the Woolee Winder? I love that too! Hello, not moving yarn from flyer hook to hook!

I’m spinning thin singles with this but haven’t decided if I want to ply it. If I leave it as singles, they will be sock-weight-ish. If I navajo-ply it, I’ll get worsted-weight. I’d like to ply it on itself but I can’t figure out Andean plying. I heard of another method of making a 2-ply: winding the singles into a centre-pull ball, then plying using the two ends of the ball — but I also heard this can get messy. Hmm. Maybe I’ll keep it as flashy, colourful singles that will make stripes when knit up.

Lucky Sleeves

Yes, the right front piece was frogged…but only up to the point where I start decreasing… Phew! But I am putting the front pieces on hold while I work on the sleeves. Here are both sleeves in progress, together of course. And look — I’m using a row counter! It’s the cheap twisty kind, not the cool, but $12 CDN, kacha-kacha counter.

No Harlot

The closest the Harlot will get to Vancouver is Seattle’s Weaving Works. See the Harlot Book Tour and how there aren’t any Canadian cities west of Toronto? Sucks sucks sucks.

…although, this does allow me to plan yet another yarn shopping trip to Seattle.

On my list of things to pick up from Weaving Works: soy silk and ingeo (corn) fibre, more wool fibre and maybe some mohair, a set of Louet double combs, and some Koigu. I can’t believe I left their wall of Koigu PPPM untouched… there were just too many pretty colourways, I couldn’t decide… sad excuse — the situation must be rectified.

Unlucky

Somewhere between “decrease every row” and “decrease every other row” I got lost. When you put down a project for a few days and try to come back to it, it’s easy to forget where you were and what you were supposed to be doing…the result? My unlucky cardi right front:

Yeah, I screwed up the decreases on the front edge of the right front piece. Yeah, I’m going to frog the entire thing. Ah, but captured here is the sheer ugliness of unblocked cotton. Lumpy, bumpy and ugly.

Thankfully, this ugly, splitty cotton (Elann’s Endless Summer Lara) blocks out beautifully into a smooth fabric. There are a few mistakes on the back piece too — I missed one of the “leaves” in a clover leaf motif and at one point, I misaligned the row of motifs thereby altering the alignment of all future motifs. Whatever. You can’t tell from the photo, right? Right, so I’m not re-knitting it.

Sixteen Swatches

All sixteen Level 1 swatches are done and blocked! Most are tagged except for the OXO Cable and the Two-Colour swatch, but here they are:

Yes, even though weaving in 38 ends and blocking 16 individual swatches takes a long time and is incredibly boring, writing up the documentation is even more so. Ah, but I shall be done soon.