The Hilltop Fibreworker

February 13, 2010

Knitting Olympics Day 1

Filed under: Knitting, Spinning, Strategies — Elizabeth @ 2:34 pm

Last night Christine and I watched the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics together.  She cast on for her Knitting Olympics Project and I started spinning the yarn for mine. My Olympic goal is to finish a pair of Sky Architecture socks from Cat Bordhi’s New Pathways book starting from roving.  Part of doing this is a promise to myself that I will spin or knit instead of playing silly games on my iPhone.

Just like in the real Olympics I had a few technical glitches to overcome in the form of equipment failure (the orifice bearing of my favourite wheel snapped off the maiden) and program changes (the fibre I chose did not work out as planned).  The wheel problem was solved temporarily by borrowing the orifice bearing from Chrisine’s traddy.  Hopefully, her DH can glue mine back together today and it will hold together until I can get a replacement part.  Once I got the wheel going I found the fibre I had taken to Christine’s to do my socks with didn’t please me at all.  Digging in my bag I realized I had some other fibre that I had been spindling with that would do for socks.  Quick program change and I was on my way.  I got 1/2 the singles done by the time Gretzy got the outside torch lit (at nearly midnight EST!).

My plan today is to spin the rest of the singles and hopefully get it plied so that knitting can start tomorrow.  Other plans include finishing my InDepth Study revisions (due in the mail on Monday) and digging the house out of the mess it has gotten buried under in the last few weeks as life got away from me.  I’m trying a strategy that sometimes helps me keep on task – setting a timer and focusing on one task for 20min, when the timer goes off I go to the next task and spend 20min on that, lather, rinse, repeat… By rotating through the tasks I hope I’ll get all of them done by the end of the day.

December 19, 2009

Fractal Colours

Filed under: Dyeing, Fibre, Spinning — Elizabeth @ 9:57 pm

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Here is the array of colourways I did for the OVFA December Canadian Fiber Box.  My dye setup lets me do 3 sets of rovings at a time – so I did a range of colourways for the box.  I should be able to recreate most of them, though I am just finishing up some old dyes and 2 of them were behaving a bit strangely.  Hopefully, I can match them with the new set.  The base fibre is Corriedale, soft on your feet, but with enough strength to make socks that wear well.

Fractal roving spread out

Fractal roving spread out

This is what the roving looks like all spread out.  There are two skeins of roving in each set.  One has long stripes of colour and the other has short stripes.  When you spin it up you can control how the lengths of colour interact.  For socks I spin it such that each short stripe of colour makes about 1 row in one of the plies while each long stripe of colour provides a background for 2 repeats of the short stripe sequence in the other ply.  I did a tutorial showing the steps to make this happen a while back and Heidi posted it here for me (I will learn to do this myself, promise!).

I’ll be doing more over the next while, as Heather rather cleaned me out.  Working for the school board gives me 2 weeks off over Christmas, so once the holiday rush is over I should have some time to make more of these.  Doing them is rather addictive, really.

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