WIP | Through The Yarny Curtain

Emergency Knitting, Again

Over the last several years, I’ve spent a lot of time doing emergency knitting. I’ve knit at the vet while one cat or another was having an emergency exam or procedure. I’ve knit in hospital rooms, while visiting with a friend or family member. I’ve knit at home or in the homes of family members, while keeping a quiet vigil during a loved ones’ last days.

Managing during difficult situations is one of the oft-cited benefits of knitting. Knitting is the perfect thing to keep your hands and, depending on the project and what you need, your mind occupied. The repetitive motion of the needles is soothing and the quiet click the needles make as they slide past each other is a white noise. You feel like you are doing something, which helps stave off the desperate realization that sometimes there is nothing that you can do. Knitting takes off just a little bit of that edge and allows you to be more present in whatever challenging circumstance you face.

Yesterday, I found myself picking out emergency knitting projects. We got the call that we knew would come sometime in the not too distant future. My mother-in-law passed away. We were able to find a flight for late in the day and we flew up to New Jersey. We don’t know yet how long we’ll be here.

This is a little bit different than the other times I’ve picked out emergency knitting projects. I had a little time to contemplate which projects to bring — I didn’t have to just grab whatever WIP I could find on short notice. I don’t know how long I’ll be here, so I don’t know how much time I will need to fill with knitting. I expect that most of the knitting I get done, will probably be done in the evening or other down times, as a way to relax. I won’t be knitting while exhausted or knitting in dark spaces, so I could bring more complicated knitting rather than a plain stockinette project.

All of this added up to lace. It takes a while and is perfect for occupying the mind when you need a distraction. Plus, I have several lace WIPs in varying degrees of difficulty, so I can make progress on reducing my pile of WIPs and account for different levels of concentration. I ended up bringing 3 projects, all of them lace shawl WIPs.

Begonia Swirl

The first project I packed for this trip is Begonia Swirl. If you’ve read my blog for a while, you’ll know that I’ve knit this before. A friend of mine borrowed it and accidentally felted it. A few months later, I bought the yarn to reknit it. I’m not sure exactly when I cast on, but according to my January 15, 2016 blog post, it was months before that. I’ve done significant knitting on it since then, but it has been months since I picked it up. Here’s how it looks right now.

This project was a good choice under the circumstances. It’s a straightforward pattern, mostly stockinette. I do have to count stitches as I knit, since I did not put in stitch markers to separate sections, but if I mess up it is easy to figure out where I am.

Morrigan

This shawl is one that I have never blogged about and I never created a Ravelry project for it. I cast it on in August 2015, knit about half of it and haven’t looked at it since. The pattern is Morrigan by Beata Jezek (Ravelry link) and I’m knitting it with Nerd Girl Yarns Stellar, a laceweight yarn that is 75% Merino, 20% Silk, and 5% silver-toned Stellina, in the Colorway Merlin. I picked the pattern because Morrigan and Merlin are both part of the King Arthur mythology. It’s not a difficult lace pattern, but of the projects I brought with me, this is the one that requires the most focus to knit because it is not a primarily stockinette pattern.

Linea

The final project is a shawl I started in mid-2107 and I have neither written a blog post about it nor added it to my Ravelry projects. This one is Linea by LaVisch Designs (Ravelry link). I am knitting it with Baah La Jolla (100% Superwash Merino) in Brazilian Emerald.

I sometimes test knit for LaVisch Designs and she earburns me to her Ravelry group whenever she has a new test knit available. This pattern is not one that I test knit; I bought the pattern after it was released.

Linea is a pretty basic knit and certainly the easiest of any of the projects I brought with me. One of my goals for 2017 was to knit some larger shawls. Linea is written for one skein of fingeringweight yarn, but I plan to use two skeins. I will increase the number of repeats of the body pattern until I think I have just enough to do the large border and bind off. I’m currently 3/4 of the way through the first skein.

Problem Solving

In October 2016, I went to the Southeastern Animal Fiber Festival (SAFF) with several friends. A subset of those who went are members of the monthly spinning group I attend. We found a good deal on an unfinished Kromski Fantasia and split the cost so that we could have a spinning wheel to use for teaching people to spin when they stop by our group or for members of our group to borrow to learn to wheel spin. I brought the wheel home to finish it.

I decided to finish the wheel with Danish Oil. I also decided to apply Danish Oil to my 15″ Schacht Cricket Rigid Heddle Loom. I started working on both in December 2016. I applied clear Danish oil to the wheel and dark walnut to the loom. I applied three coats, waiting at least 24 hours between coats and making sure that they were dry to the touch before applying the next coat. I was trying to finish them before Orlando Distaff Day 2017, which was on the first Saturday of 2017. I signed up to do a wheel assembly demo and planned to bring all the parts of the Fantasia with me and assemble it at the event.

Early on the Friday morning before Distaff Day, I applied the fourth and final coat of Danish Oil. That Friday night and into Saturday morning it POURED. We’d had no rain for weeks and it felt like the sky had saved all the rain we should have gotten and dumped it all at once. The pieces of the loom and wheel were on the workbench out in the garage, which is where I’d been working on this project. The garage is not climate control. When I got up on Saturday morning, the loom and wheel were both tacky to the touch. In fact, they were tackier than they had been when I applied the fourth coat on Friday morning. Obviously, there was no way I could bring them to Distaff Day!

I left the loom and wheel on the workbench for 3 or 4 weeks. They were still tacky. I brought them into the house, and laid them out around the house on any spare flat surface. I figured they would dry better in the climate-controlled house. Every month or so, I checked the pieces and they were still tacky, though it did seem as though they were slowly improving.

In the spring and summer of 2017, I took some woodworking classes, including one on finishing wood projects. I asked the teachers about my problem. They shook their heads. In all likelihood, the reason for this problem was that the earlier coats weren’t cured as well as I thought they were. I could continue to let the pieces to sit. I could try to wipe them down with mineral spirits, which is the solvent for Danish Oil.

Since the fall of 2017 was so crazy here — Hurricane Irma left us with no power and no water / water restrictions for a week, my mother-in-law’s health declining, my husband getting laid off — I did not think about the loom and wheel pieces at all. When I checked them in late December, for the first time in months, I discovered that they were slightly sticky, but not so much so that you could see my fingerprint on the surface. I decided to try wiping them down with mineral spirits to see what happened. I did just the pieces of the stand for the rigid heddle loom. I figured that was the easiest thing to replace if the mineral spirits ruined the pieces rather than improving them. I wiped the pieces down three times, letting the pieces dry in between. Then I had something else to do and forgot about them.

When we came home from our Christmas in New Jersey, my husband finished the project he’d left on the workbench when he unexpectedly left 3 weeks earlier. Then he asked me what projects I have to do. Due to the high humidity of our summers, woodworking is a winter task here and he knew that I’d been saving up some projects, waiting for the weather to co-operate. I checked the three pieces of the loom stand and found that they were no longer sticky. The mineral spirits worked! For the past two days, I’ve been working on the remaining loom pieces and the wheel pieces.

This morning, I wiped down the pieces with mineral spirits for the fourth time. The repeated coats of mineral spirits seem to be doing their work! It’s been humid the last two days and I think that this has caused more of the oil to come to the surface. Despite this, the pieces are clearly improving and becoming less sticky overall. For some of the pieces, this fourth coat should be the last coat I need to apply. I will need to flip a couple of the pieces over so I can do the back. My previous despair and fear that I’d ruined two expensive pieces of equipment have given way to hope. I think this is going to work!

WIP Wednesday: January 3, 2018

This week, I’m sharing my two active projects. I have a lot of WIPs / UFOs that are sitting around, waiting for me to get to them. As part of the inventory that I blogged about on Monday, I will be making sure Ravelry is up-to-date with those projects.

SassyBee Orchid

My current spinning project is two batts of SassyBee Orchid on Polwarth.

SassyBee Fibers (this is a link to her FB page as her website isn’t active) is a vendor at The Fiber Event in Greencastle, Indiana, which I have attended for the last 3 or 4 years. I love her batts and I have a pile of them. In fact, all the batts in the suitcase full of batts, pictured in Monday’s post about inventory, are SassyBee batts. In addition, one of the big bins in the big pile of bins is full of SassyBee batts. They are so beautiful, but I had not spun any of them. In fact, I had never spun from a batt at all. On the first Friday in December, I spent the day spinning as a demo during the Weavers of Orlando Annual Holiday Sale. My wheel was empty, so I grabbed a SassyBee batt and spun that the entire day. I’ve spun a little more on it since, but not a lot due to the holidays. I’m about 3/4 of the way through the first batt.

Mesa

Last year, my LYS had an Anzula trunk show. This cape (available on Ravelry) was one of the sample items Anzula brought with them as part of the show. I tried it on and loved it. I also thought my mother would love it. I bought the yarn and the pattern and intended to finish it for her birthday in March. Then for Mother’s Day in May. Then for Christmas. I only have about 10 rows of knitting left, then I have to weave in the ends, sew on buttons, and block it.

A Year of Projects: 2016, Week 1

I have not yet written crafting goals for 2016. November and December were pretty crazy around here! First was my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday on Thanksgiving Day. Then there was the Weavers of Orlando Annual Sale, followed the next weekend by the Holiday Party. Then we had Christmas festivities with my family. On December 28, I flew to Indiana to play matron of honor for Stacy’s wedding on January 2. Chris flew up on December 31 so we got to spend New Year’s Eve together. We just flew home this afternoon, to a cooler and wetter Florida than I left last Monday. Stacy’s reception was held in a building at the same fairgrounds that hosts The Fiber Event. It was so strange to be in that building without seeing rows of lovely fiber, yarn, and tools for sale!

This past week has been busy as the wedding preparations including baking 680 cookies and a 5-tier wedding cake! Stacy, her mother, her aunt, her sister-in-law, and I baked the cookies last Wednesday. Fortunately, we had the use of Stacy’s parents’ church kitchen, which had a commercial oven that could fit 150 cookies at once. We baked all 680 cookies in only 3.5 hours!

Here I am putting the last batch in the oven!

After baking cookies, we started on the cakes. I was the lead decorator and giver of orders, as I have been decorating cakes since I was 12! I made the cakes and the lemon curd. Stacy made the chocolate ganache and all the buttercream and mixed lemon buttercream and raspberry buttercream.

I may have used this cookbook once or twice.

Her mother and aunt cut out fondant Christmas trees and painted them with powdered food coloring. I showed Stacy’s sister-in-law how to pipe miniature Christmas trees and she cranked out 250 of them, while Stacy’s mother went behind her putting the little stars on top of each tree.

Stacy’s brother cut the dowel rods that help support each tier (using a pipe cutter borrowed from a cousin) and her father cut and sharpened the dowel rod that goes from the top to bottom through all the tiers. When it came time to stack all the cakes, Chris helped me line up my edges correctly. At every step of the way, Stacy and I discussed colors and placement of pieces. This is the first time I’ve made a cake in such a collaborative fashion. It was so much fun, and I love the result!

Now that the wedding is over and I’m home, it’s time to look ahead and lay out my goals for 2016.

Taking Stock

Before I start making ambitious plans for myself, I wanted to look back at 2015, to see what I finished and what remains unfinished. I’m working on a slide show of all the projects I finished this year, and I will publish that later this week. Today, I’m making a list of all my WIPs. It’s a scary list, even though it only includes projects I’ve actually started, not everything in my mental queue!

Knitting WIPs

Projects started in 2015

TKGA Master Knitter, Level 1
- This week I will start working on addressing my gauge issue
Splash Socks (started in April 2015)
Tier Scarf (started in June 2015)
Miranda Shawl (started in July 2015)
Bubbles Baby Blanket (started in July 2015)
Morrigan Shawl (started in August 2015)
Begonia Swirl Shawl Redux (started in August 2015)
Finishing
- I still have all the sweaters I got from S. They need to be seamed and blocked. I believe there’s 10 or 11 projects right there!

Projects started prior to 2015

Dishcloth Advent Calendar
- I need to knit or crochet 18 each of 25 different patterns. This is a list of the knitted dishcloths I’ve finished.
- 18 leaves
- 18 tribble scrubbies
- 18 waffle stitch
- 4 brick pattern
- 16 illusion heart
- 4 random designs (1 each of 4 different patterns)
Traveling Scarf
Evenstar
Baby Blue Monster

Crochet WIPs

Granny Square Blanket (started in 2014)
Skulls and Roses Scarves (started in October 2015)
Dishcloth Advent Calendar
- I need to knit or crochet 18 each of 25 different patterns. This is a list of the crochet dishcloths I’ve finished.
- 18 hyperbolic
- 9 ladderstitch
- 4 or 5 diagonal (corner to corner)

Spinning WIPs

Camel Down / Silk Blend (started in September 2015)
Three Feet of Sheep (started in August 2015)
One pound of BFL (started in November 2015)

Weaving WIPs

Since the only loom I’ve been using is my rigid heddle, I only have one weaving project in process! I started this scarf on December 5, 2015 while at the Weavers of Orlando Annual Sale, so that I could demo weave. I talked to many people throughout the days of the sale and did a fair bit of weaving. I haven’t had time to work on it since.

In addition to this project, I now have the storage unit full of weaving things to sort. This includes minor repairs to one loom (the 36″ Harrisville) and probably a complete refinish of a second loom (the 48″ Macomber). I’m hoping to the the storage unit cleaned out by mid-February, though the refinishing job will most likely take longer than that.

Dyeing

Dyeing doesn’t really have WIPs as something is either dyed or it isn’t. But this is a list of dyeing projects I’ve been meaning to do but haven’t.

Dye Maple Leaf Shawls (pending since December 2014)
Dye Triangles (pending since August 2014)
water source / pH experiment (pending since early 2015)

I’m not sure if this is actually all my WIPs. It’s everything I could find laying about or listed in my Ravelry project pages, but I’m sure I missed more.

Tour de Fleece 2015, Stage 10

My continuing mission is to ~~seek out new life and new civilizations~~ um, I mean spin one color of 3 Feet of Sheep each day. Today I spun through my one color and about 40% of the next color. Unfortunately, my Tour de Fleece will be cut even shorter than I expected. Chris’s uncle passed away early this morning and we will be going to the funeral. This means I now have at least three more days with no spinning. I do hope to finish 3 Feet of Sheep by the end of the month, even though it will be outside the usual Tour de Fleece time frame.

As usual, the picture on the left is my bobbin at the beginning of the day and the picture on the right is my bobbin at the end of the day.

I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far. This fiber continues to spin up faster and thicker than the cormo. I can’t wait to see it finished!