Achievement Unlocked!

Studying for a test . . .

Not very exciting. . .

I've been knitting the hat while I read the class notes. This means I am really cooking on the hat.



Little Elephants! Adorable explosion. The logo is coming along nicely too. just not as adorable as little white elephants.
 
Of course I ran out of yarn, so I need to pick up some more black to finish this.

Maybe it won't be done this week. I also need to get some more time in on beatnik. I did 2 rows yesterday after I ran out of yarn. I'll have to get some more done tonight and tomorrow. It is swap night tomorrow at the LYS, so I will be able to pick up the yarn, and more . . .

The cables probably photograph better in natural light, which is sorely lacking in December.

Big News!

I learned how to spin Thursday night. I made my own freaking yarn, with my hands. I spun half of the top I got. I am not sure if I want to try new things with the other half.

It is very thick, and the singles are very energetic. I am still trying to figure out how drafting works. Occasionally it worked and oftentimes it did not. YouTube here I come! These videos made sense.

I do get letting twist enter. I am still working on spinning continuously. I did most of my first skein as park and draft.

And, by the magic of writing a blog post across a couple of days I had much more success with the second half.

I took the second half, and ripped it into fourths.

From there, I predrafted it by gently holding the yarn and pulling feeling the fibers slide past one another. I was trying to figure out what drafting felt like. I held the yarn more than a stable width apart and went one direction, until I got to the end, and then went back. I got more confident as I went.

I then spun the singles, grafting each quarter on to the last.

So at the end this meant I had one long single. I rewrapped it onto the spindle so I could let it rest over night.

 This morning I wound the singles into a single pull ball.

And then I plied from both ends.

The beginning end was pretty rough, the ending end was quite neat.

All in all I got 28.5 yards out of my 4 ounces of fiber. 14 of the 2 ply and 14.5 of the crazypants thick and thin. I am probably going to combine it with the biggo to make an infinity cowl. It is super bulky, so maybe I will use the biggo doubled.


I figured out how much yarn I had by using my brand new niddy noddy. I followed the instructions here, How to build your own Niddy Noddy because, well, the math was wrong for the other versions I found via google. The length of the skein is the square root of (shaft squared plus arm squared plus arm squared) times 4. That is not the same as the length of the shaft times 2.

I made 2 shafts, one for 1 yard skeins and one for 2 yard  skeins. It would be super duper easy to make a 1 and a 1/2 yard one. It is just a matter of switching out the shaft. I just counted how many times I went around, and then tied off the yarn and slipped it off.

It should be helpful for other things too, like figuring out how much yarn I have left, and frogging things. If I continue to spin, then I can wind skeins.

On the fractal front I made a really cool one.

This was for the 1-2-3-4 . . . challenge. It is easier to write the pattern than explain the rules.

1 Spherical,
1 Spherical, 2 Linear,
1 Spherical, 2 Linear, 3 Disk

For every transform you add it need to have all of the variations of the last one, plus one more, that is a value of one more than the previous. I tried another one, which wasn't that good, so I am happy this one worked. I bright gradient, a fusion of fractal styles, and a little wild to go around.

That's all for now, take care guys!

Molly : )