The Thrifty Knitter

I love my February sweater.

Pattern: Generic top-down raglan with my custom chart. 1×1 ribbing on collar, cuffs, and hem.

Yarn: 8 skeins Vera Videnovich 2-ply sport natural dark brown corriedale and 1 skein silver corriedale; 3/4 ounce handspun made from about 2/5 Skinny fur (the sweater’s namesake) blended with 3/5 Art Club Malt Balls combed top (RambouilletXCormoXCorriedale).

Notes: I thought this was going to be a tight sweater, but it grew a bit in the wash (and also on the needles–the colorwork was so tight that I found myself with way more fabric than expected once I worked down the torso). Now it’s a really comfy, roomy sweater, but thanks to the waist and hip shaping, it’s not all clunky and baggy, just nice and roomy and cush. I’m even into the overlong sleeves. The hip shaping was done with raglan-type increases, which are an elegant way to increase quickly for big hips. The stitching at the wrist and hem used the Skinny fur yarn.

What I learned: Next time I do stranded colorwork, I’ll definitely use longer needles. The stitching on the sleeve, spread out on 16″ circulars, is worlds better than the main work, bunched up on 24″ circulars. If I made an other sweater where the pattern started a little way down from the neck like this, I’d probably use a provisional cast-on and work my way up from the design after the fact, to better match the overall tension. Using longer needles may make that a non-issue, but I’d rather be safe than sorry. This worked out okay because of the irregular nature of handspun, but in a smoother yarn, the looser tension about the yoke would probably annoy me enough that I would have had to tear it back. Also: start with more yarn.

3 more superwash batts at artclub.etsy.com. Anything in the red range is so hard to photograph. It may just be my camera. Does anyone have a digital camera that’s true to color on reds?

Made a bunch of batts today, all really saturated color. Light was kind of weird when I took the pictures, but here they are. They’re for sale at artclub.etsy.com

And this was the January Cuckoo for Cuckoobatts club batt. Mostly merino, a little hand-dyed medium wool, and glossy black mohair.

As I was finishing up my Skinny Cat sweater, I found a little glassine bag of some old slicker-brushed fur of Skinny’s that I had saved from back before I started using the Furminator (which gets too much of the coarse top coat). I only had around a third of an ounce, so I blended it with a bit more than half Malt Balls, which to my delight was almost the exact color.Wish I had plied a little tighter for a slightly thicker yarn–this was a little thinner than the Vera Videnovich 2-ply sport I’m using–but the cat down gave it a halo that kind of filled in the gaps & the knitted yarn gave a pretty consistent gauge. The color was also incredibly close to the original silver corriedale I used for the sweater’s pattern, but much more soft & bouncy (Malt Balls was a RamouilletX). I got a tiny ball, just enough to knit “Beloved Friend” just above the cuff and to add a little pattern just above the hem. Kind of corny, but he was my beloved friend, so there. I have some undercoat fur from Kiki (my now-gone canine companion of 15 years) that I think will find its way into a memorial sweater, too. Herman’s (other past cherished doggie) fur was too scratchy for yarn (more like quills, really), but I can work her into it, maybe, by making it black (Herman) and coppery red (Kiki).

The finished Skinny Cat sweater is drying now. I’m afraid the sleeves might’ve grown a bit too much in the wash. I’d made them a little long in the cozy sweater way, but I hope I didn’t make orangutan sleeves for my tyrannosaurus arms. We’ll see in the morning.

Last week, I decided to search out all my neglected fiber and get it all made into combed tops at Zeilinger.

It’s kinda hard to let go of a lot of it. There’s a lot of special colors and fibers I’m going to have to blend together, because their tops minimums are kinda high. It’s also an expensive process, more than just buying new commercial fiber, but I’m just in love with the combed tops Zeilinger makes. They’re just so much nicer to spin than mass-produced commercial tops, and you get exciting blends.

(A lot of what I’m getting combed is fiber I’ve already paid to have processed, but just wasn’t happy with. If I were one of those brave, honest people, I could calculate the madly high rate I’m paying all told, what with the original cost of the fiber, shipping to me, shipping to and from the original processor, their processing fees, shipping to and from Zeilinger, their processing, and the fiber loss… Yikes. But last time I sent unhappy rovings to Zeilinger for tops, I learned a wonderful secret: that you can, in fact, polish a turd. That makes it a lot harder to just cut my losses. Plus the combing eliminates every speck of VM & neps, which means that even if I get way more than I need, I can always use the fiber as a luscious base for fine batts. How deft is my rationalization?)

Here’s what I’ve got in mind right now…

2 luxury local blends:

Local natural darks blend: mostly Alpacas in Wildcat Hollow goodness, with some Ewephoria llama. This one’s because the Wildcat colors are so beautiful separately, but I did a test carding in roughly the proportions I’ll be blending, and it’s pretty amazingly beautiful, a medium-dark heathered brown. This will have everything from black and dark brown to some coppery stuff and dark charcoal/brown llama. And I won’t miss monkey-grooming hay out of that cottony alpaca fiber.

Local natural white blend: tons of  Wildcat Hollow alpaca, plus Ewephoria llama and merino X.

1 mostly-local natural gray blend:

Mostly in the gray family and more subdued natural browns, ranging from medium wools to softer Romney, softer still llama, and a little moorit merino. Lots of soft local yum, and a lot of lighter colored odds and ends I just haven’t gotten around to using. I’m hoping for sturdy, bouncy, and fairly soft.

2 dyed blends:

Greenies: dyed greens and some blues. This will be a soft bouncy mix of rambouillet, cormo & merino X, with maybe some medium wool for strength, and maybe some alpaca, too.

Violet blues: A stronger, lustrous mix, medium wools, kid mohair, Romney & some odds & ends. This will have dyed white for vibrancy and dyed nautral colored fiber for deep color.

And if I have enough fiber to pull off one last batch, a mostly-local creamy white blend with alpaca, mohair, and wool, for dreamy dyeing.

In knitting news, Vera sent the last of the Skinny Cat yarn! Yay! I’ve finished one sleeve will will probably have my February sweater done and done by the end of the week. Hurrah!

I’m well pleased with this one. It’s warm and comfy and fits just like a cosy sweater should, neither tight nor baggy, and plenty long to avoid ass cleavage. Here I demonstrate it’s comfort by doing the twist.

Pattern: Just a generic top-down raglan, my favorite mindless sweater

Yarn: Nashua Wooly Stripes, Rolling Thunder, 8 balls

What I Learned: If you’re not sure what collar you want because you’re not sure if you have enough yarn for the style you want (hoodie, in this case, and no, I didn’t), then use a provisional cast-on, so you don’t have to hand-pick out 70 stitches from a yarn that already tends to deteriorate with unnecessary wear.

It turns out I can’t rip back my mermaid sweater to reshape it. The hairy single is just too sticky now that it’s been washed and I can’t unravel it without utterly destroying the yarn. So I must learn to live with the pooch. Pooches.  I can’t figure out a way to take it in that won’t look just as lumpy in another way. So there it is. I’m a calling it.

January Sweater: Mermaid.

Pattern: Modified Faux Fair Isle from Spin to Knit by Shannon Okey. Imperfect waist shaping added.

Yarn: 1 hank Spincycle Yarns Mermaid Hair (merino/kid mohair novelty) + 4 balls Diamond Carioca

Notes: The hips are exactly where they should be and fit perfectly (I used raglan-style increases), but I started the waist decreases way too late, resulting in an annoying pooch above the waist on either side. If I could rip it back, I’d start the waist a 3 inches sooner and taper it more gradually.

What I learned: Don’t wash a hairy single until you’re sure it’s how you want it, because you won’t be able to frog it later. I guess I knew that in theory; I’d just never actually needed to try it. But I’ve already benefited from this mistake. I went ahead and frogged the hip shaping in my Wooly Stripes raglan, instead of trying to see how the shaping fared after a wash, my instinct.

I’ve ripped it back to before the shaping and I’m just going to knit it straight down. The overall fit is relaxed enough that the increases aren’t necessary.

This is the second time I’ve ripped increases. The first time, I made it even wider, 8 increase rows (the top one only has 3–it just looks wider from the angle), which, when I actually  took it off the needles, looked like I was expecting to wear a bustle with it. So I ripped that back to just 3 increases, but those aren’t even necessary, even though they only add about 3″ overall. I’m going to knit it almost straight down, adding 3 increase rows very gradually–but each row will only increase one stitch at either side instead of 2, so it will add just a little over an inch.

Yesterday, we had a big Spinsters’ Club group, 15 people altogether! We all brought fiber and divvied it up into 15 little  piles and everyone made pot luck batts. We’re all going to spin them up and see what kinds of different yarn we get.

Here’s mine:

And here’s the carding in progress:

Jennifer’s batt turned out really cool, very muted and subtle on one side & super bright on the other.

And Marilyn brought cupcakes from Daddy Cakes:

And Jennifer brought homemade marshmallows dipped in chocolate, which were amazing, but I was so hopped up on sugar and coffee, I forgot to get a picture.

I’ve got a dozen crock-pots simmering away up in the home ec room, cooking up 10 pounds of colored wool top for the carding station at Yarn School! Wheeeeee!

I’m already totally excited about Yarn School. I got some bag samples in the mail today. I’m trying to pick one for this year’s sessions. Ron talked me into doing a new bag each year. I was going to use the extra bags from last year (the minimum order was pretty high), but I think instead I’ll just sell them cheap & get new ones so last year’s students get a new bag. The ’07 ones were undated, awfully cute, and they’re the perfect size for a project bag, so I’m sure they’ll get snapped up if I price them right.

I think I’m going with a green bag this year. Eco-green, not color green–although the sample I got is a retina-searing fluorescent green. I did request it, but I was hoping for a warmer acid green (it was called “Toxic Green,” which could go either way, and swatches online are all but meaningless), so cfolor-wise, I’ll probably go with black again (black & yellow are the school colors). Generally speaking, I really want to try to pick the green option whenever I can, so I’m looking at some totes made out of woven recycled plastic. They have the look and feel of canvas–some like a lightweight ripstop nylon canvas, some more like a heavy duck canvas. Of course, the ones that are 100% post-consumer are very spendy, so those are probably out of the running for goodie bags, though I am considering getting some fancier Yarn School bags to sell this year.

I just had a delicious brie & apple sandwich for dinner, and I’m sipping on a beer and contemplating what the rest of the evening has in store for me.  Definitely some knitting, as the end of January is fast approaching and I still haven’t officially finished a sweater. I did, technically, finish one, but I’m unhappy with the waist shaping, so to call it January, I have to rip back most of the torso and reknit it so it doesn’t pooch at the sides.

See? The shaping was kind of an afterthought.

Here’s what it causes:

I have enough naturally occurring lumps and bumps. I don’t need to add any through poor knitting. I had this fantasy that it would cure itself after I washed it, but that was, in fact, only a fantasy. On the bright side, washing it did make the sleeves a bit longer, which is happy.

Bored of my endless stack of raglans, I started to tackle my big box of ancient UFOs this week, starting with an old tank from knit.1. I had finished the whole back (it’s only 2 pieces) and then lost interest. But I’ve taken up the cause again, which is good, because it should go nicely with my ugly denim/strawberry Y’all suck skirt.

I’m off to go be productive and avoid mirrors (I’m dressed like a bag lady and I look about a hundred today, so whenever I catch a glimpse, it takes the wind out of my sails).