sweetgeorgia

Coal Harbour Socks

I’m having a most miserable week… so tired all the time but feeling very wired. I keep asking myself, “Have I had too much coffee? Have I had enough coffee? Am I hungry? Am I full?”… I just can’t tell anymore. This could all be attributed to the fact that the office two doors down from me is being renovated and the constant drilling is driving me insane. There is sawdust everywhere which has made the whole floor smell like a hamster cage.

There’s also some low-level craziness around here as Jet Li and Jason Statham are filming in and around our building and also at Brioche bakery & café across the street. In fact, if you walk by the café today you’ll probably see the funky little bamboo shutters and the little Chinese entrance they added to the front of the café. Very odd. It’s kind of disappointing that with the renovation of the suite on my floor, the production people opted to use a different floor for one of the scenes… otherwise, there’d be Jet Li fighting evil in front of my door!

Anyway.

Maybe I will feel better today because I am wearing new socks.

These socks are so new that I haven’t even darned in the two ends yet. I put them on this morning for their photo shoot and they were so comfy, I just couldn’t take them off (plus we were running late) but maybe I can bring myself to weave in the ends tonight. Richard was very amused watching me take pictures of my feet.

Coal Harbour Socks

• Pattern: Wendy’s Generic Toe-Up Pattern
• Yarn: SweetGeorgia Yarns Superwash Sock in “Coal Harbour”
• Needles: US 1 / 2.5 mm Addi Turbos
• Notes: No changes to Wendy’s pattern. I knit a 6 inch leg and still had 18g of each skein leftover. So if I had more patience, I could have knit a way longer leg. I was also a little impatient with the foot, so I could have knit about 1/2″ more foot before starting the short-row heel.

And in Sweet Shop news, the next big shop update will be Thursday, April 6th at 12 noon PST! There will be about 20 skeins of Superwash Sock, 35 skeins of Speed Demon and 10 skeins of Handpainted Sock yarn. Of course, I am still working out kinks with this new setup and I really appreciate everybody’s wonderful feedback and suggestions. One of the changes is that once yarns are sold out, they won’t appear in the product listings anymore — this way, you only see the stuff that’s available. Yay. There’s a new page that shows all the sold out yarns only.

Ok. I’m off to get more coffee from the film set… I think.

I never thought it would happen to me.

Second sock syndrome. It must be a reflection of my tendency to be distracted by pretty things.

Here I am mid-sock. Four potential pairs of socks and nothing to wear. From the left, there is the Friday Harbour socks that I started in August, the Jaywalkers in River, some handspun socks knit toe-up, and a fresh new toe-up sock in the new sock yarn that I’m dyeing.

I’m using Wendy’s super fabulous toe-up sock pattern with 60 stitches around on 2.5 mm needles (US 1). It’s going super fast too — I knit almost the entire foot while watching Brokeback Mountain. Hopefully, if I keep this pace I’ll have an actual pair of socks to wear next week. I’m knitting toe-up because I want to see how much length I can get out of each skein… Then next time I can knit top-down and be more confident that I won’t run out of yarn by the time I get to the toe. I prefer the toes on top-down socks…

I’m all fidgety now after seeing Anna Maria’s Pomatomus sock and Lavender’s Pomatomus socks. Yummy. Must have new sock(s).

Finally, I did promise to update the shop this week with those new yummy superwash sock yarns… and I did… You can find them on the new SweetGeorgia Yarns online shop. Many of the yarns are already sold (you guys are fabulous — I love you all) but I will be dyeing again this weekend (since FibreFest in Abbotsford is next weekend).

Happy Thursday!

So handspun it hurts

Use your handspun. It’s the only way you can determine if your spinning is any good. I read that somewhere and it’s stuck in the back of my mind all the time now.

Last May, I bought 1/2 lb of Ashland Bay merino roving from Penelope Fibre. It sat in the stash for a few weeks because I was intimidated by it and worried that I might ruin it. I sucked up the courage to start spinning it laceweight. Finally, in January, I finished all the spinning and started knitting the Lotus Blossom Shawl.

This is my real first, large-scale handspun and handknit project… and here it is off the needles:

Lotus Blossom Shawl

• Pattern: from Fiddlesticks Knitting, designed by Dorothy Siemens
• Yarn: Handspun Laceweight Merino (I have about half of my spinning leftover! So I must have used about 100 g)
• Needles: US 6 / 4.0 mm Addi Turbos
• Changes: I used a smaller needle size just because I didn’t have any other needles handy, so I had to knit chart 2 twice to give the shawl extra length
• Finished Measurements: 70″ x 35″ (definitely smaller than the pattern specs, just slightly bigger than my blocking board).

What are things that people always say about spinning laceweight… the singles need lots of twist to hold the finer diameter, take all the tension off so that you can get lots of twist in, blah blah blah. This handspun is irregular in grist because I spun it over such a long period of time, was still getting a hang of spinning fine and also because I switched wheels part way through! But in some places, I think the yarn had so much twist that it became wirey and dense. If I were to do it again, I would spin it all a little softer.

This leads me to sampling. What a good idea. It’s like knitting a gauge swatch (which we always do, right?!). How does the fabric feel knit at that tension with those needles. How about going up a needle size, going down a size? Is the fabric too dense? Too drapey? When your knitting with commercial yarns, the yarn itself is taken out of the equation — it’s your job to just pick the most appropriate needle size for that yarn (ok, I’m oversimplifying). But when you are making the yarn, you need to look at how your yarn works up as fabric and if it is appropriate — will it be hardwearing? Will it pill or fuzz? All those variables are under your control now. So, spin a little bit, knit a little bit. See if you like it.

That’s what I’ve done with this new project:

There’s about 2 oz of Cashmere/Silk 50/50 top that I bought from Deep Color Studio this past November… Again, nervous about spinning it up and ruining it. So I tore off a little piece and spun it up laceweight using my new highspeed bobbins and whorl (I’m using 19.5:1 for spinning singles “from the fold” and 17.5:1 for plying). I washed the yarn and have started knitting it up in Evelyn Clark’s “Trellis Scarf” pattern from the Spring IK magazine. I figured if I liked it, I could keep going. If I didn’t like it, I could just go back and modify how I’m spinning it. As it turns out, I like it.

With a little luck…

Ah, so the plan today is to clear off all the work on my desk so that I can go home and dye all weekend, guilt-free. Wish me luck. The dye plan tomorrow is tons of sock yarn, some new soft and silky kid mohair yarns and some BFL… plus more Gotland.

Here’s the sock yarn I’m working on now… It’s a new base yarn that is 100% superwash merino and comes in 50 g skeins of about 175 yards. So that would be two skeins for a pair of socks. I’m dyeing a few of my original colourways, a few random colourways and a handful of mostly solid colours. With any luck, I’ll be able to post these all in the shop next week (these will be $11 per skein). Again, wish me some of that good ol’ Irish luck.

The Gotland that I’m dyeing tomorrow was mordanted last night in 15% alum at about 175-180F for about an hour (I don’t remember… I was watching The O.C.). I’m letting it sit for a bit (sort of a wool spa) so that the mordant has more time to work. Reasoning? I want to get a good mid-value, vibrant purple using Logwood.

Logwood can be used as wood shavings from the Hematoxylon Campechianum tree, but you have to extract the dye from the wood by soaking the wood chips overnight and boiling (over and over). Alternatively, Maiwa sells an extract that you can use directly in the dye pot. Easy peasy.

On Wednesday, March 1, our spinning/dyeing class at Place des Arts (in Coquitlam, and by the way is taking registrations for spring session now…) mordanted about a pound of wool. My contribution was a big lump of Border Leicester from Willowcrest Farm on Salt Spring Island. I took the mordanted wool home and let it sit, unrinsed in the fridge for a week until the next class. Then on March 8, we dropped the mordanted wool in a pot of Logwood extract. I don’t know if we used too much dye powder or if this was the mordant being super effective, but we got “almost black”.

On Saturday, March 10, for my own blanket project, I took about a pound of raw Gotland and washed and mordanted it quickly. Since I’m too impatient for two-step processes, I basically mordanted first thing in the morning and let it cool 20 minutes before plunging the fleece into a 1% Logwood extract bath. So, there wasn’t too much time for the wool to “cure” before the dyebath. What’s that saying, “good things come to people who wait” or something? Yeah, don’t know that one.

You can see the colour is quite a light lilac/lavender purple colour. Nicely varied through the wool. I quite like it, but take a look at the photo below for comparison…

On the left is the “almost black” purple that I got from the Border Leicester in class (one week curing with mordant, unknown amount of Logwood extract). On the right is the pale lavender purple that I got on the Gotland. Big, huge difference, no? Well, it’s nice to know the wide range of tones you can get from a simple sawdust!

So, tomorrow morning, the next batch of Gotland will go in a dyepot with the leftover Logwood dye bath plus the leftover Cochineal dye bath with an additional 2% Logwood dye powder. I’m aiming to get something quite at bit darker but also slightly shifted off this purple. Even though it’s a natural dye, this purple is so strangely vibrant that it looks synthetic. I think I can understand how purple became the colour of royalty… it seems so foreign and electric.

Happy, lucky Friday!

Dyeing for June

For the past few weeks, I’ve been planning to title this post “Cold Sweat”. Maybe because I remember that David Carson-esque magazine spread from a surf magazine featured in Riding Giants. More likely it was because dyeing for June was one of the most intimidating, yet exciting, experiences so far in my fibery adventures…

June was one of the very first people to respond when this flailing beginning spinner posted about her first yarn. Her writing made learning about spinning so accessible — her discussions on the use of storage bobbins, fleece washing, and that amazing handspun wedding shawl — well, inspiring to say the least. So when she asked me to dye some of her first handspun, well, it freaked me out.

All that dyeing of silk and wool/silk that I did recently? That was all to practice for dyeing June’s handspun. I had nightmares before dye day and was actually shaking a little during the dye process (or maybe that was just coffee). But it was so worth it. Go take a look at her close-ups… yeah, that’s her “beginner” handspun. And super soft and squishy too. Absolutely beautiful handspun yarn.

And here it is with my not-so-scary dye job:

Thanks June!