Spinning Silk Hankies

I bought these 25g packs of silk hankies as a spinning experiment :)

I laid out a few bits of gladwrap, and pulled apart the hankies into 12 stacks. (There were 3-5 hankies in each stack, but super-thin). I painted these with a mix of dye, vinegar and detergent.

Used yellow, teal and green from my dye kit. The hankies were light and clingy, and difficult to deal with. I later discovered that it's easier to dye the stack and then separate them! Next time...

I rolled up the gladwrap, and microwaved them, then hung them on a makeshift line to dry.

They came out a bit, crunchy, but I couldn't think how to rinse them. As for spinning, it was difficult to pull the fibres apart, to stretch them out for spinning. My hands hurt from the effort after a few hankies. Then I thought to Google for instructions, and found some good advice in Knitty.

The singles were very nubbley (from the thicker edges, perhaps) and thick and thin. But this silk has an amazing strength! You can stretch it until it looks like a dozen cobwebs, let a bit of twist up your fibre to give it strength, and it doesn't hardly ever break! My 25g of silk spun 414m of singles. I navajo-plied it, which is 3ply, but if I had 2plied it (as is usual for laceweight) it would have *been laceweight*, which is my record thinnest, I think.

So silk hankies are not my favorite thing. I didn't like the slubby, uneven finished product, the singles were undertwisted, and my hands can still remember the ache. But it is only my first attempt. I'll be trying this again one day.

Pretty fluff

I may have been to Kathy's Fibres again, and raided the shop...



Strelitzia and Envy. I've spun these both before, and wanted to do it again ;)




BFL and mohair mix, which is apparently a good combo for a strong sock yarn.

Jasmine immediately claimed this one...

...and this one!

Vineyard

Silk hankies

I also got some BFL and mohair and angora, just for carding together and experimenting. But I'm looking forward to trying some spinning with silk hankies. Apparently you just pull them apart and spin them into silk yarn.

Live Below the Line is going well. I'm up to day 6 of ten. The first few days are the hardest, so I'm over that, at least. The rest of the LBTLers in Australia started the official 5 days today, so good luck to them.

To be honest, I'm not sure the effort is worth it, for me. I'm not one to ask friends for money, so I'm doing it for only $30 (if you don't include the birthday money I put into it, which is really me sponsoring myself). I've sponsored other people more than that. I've had the experience (46 days-worth after this), but I'm helping people more by just giving money, frankly.

Bet I get sucked back into it next time, though. Hehe. The experience is worthwhile.

Well, tonight I get more pumpkin risotto! Woohoo :)

edited to add: I just checked my LBtL page, and two people have anonymously donated $120 between them... Should have checked before whinging, hey? I think I'll be back next year! Hehehe!

Tomorrow

Tomorrow is May 2, and I'm started the Live Below the Line challenge for ten days. Here's my list of specials and bargains and cheap stuff!

2.00 Day-old brown bread x2 loaves

0.80 Near due-date milk, 1 litre
2.40 Pasta sauce, 3x450g
1.00 Tomato soup concentrate, 1 can
1.08 Pumpkin 1.2kg
1.00 rice 1kg
1.15 pasta 1kg
1.00 potato (frozen mashed) 1kg
0.45 plain flour (damaged bag) 1kg
0.40 french onion soup mix 25g (makes 1L)
1.30 lemon juice 250ml
2.49 eggs, 12
1.58 butter 250g
1.15 gravy powder (to make 4L)
1.09 raw sugar 1kg
-------
18.89

1.11 leftover for cheap... fruit? a banana, mandarin and apple?
 
My plan is toast and eggs for breaky, soup or potato/gravy or pancakes/lemon/sugar for lunch, and pasta/sauce/veges for dinners. I have lemon for hot and cold non-water ;) and ... not much else, really. But there are a lot of bargains here! I have to make and freeze my pancakes today (because the milk will be over it's due date tomorrow).

All but the bread and pumpkin, I think

 
Here's my link, should you feel like sponsoring me. Though if you know someone doing the challenge, you should certainly support them. Or sign up! The actual challenge is only 5 days.

The Tour de Sock

I've joined a new Ravelry knitting group called the "Tour de Sock". It's a challenge and a fundraiser that started last year.

If you want to play, you pay a fee of $7.50 (all profits to M.S.F.) Then you join a team (if you want to) and wait for the starting bell on June 1. There are six stages, lasting about 9 days. At the start of the stage, you use your password to acquire the secret pattern :) and then knit like the wind. First finished gets maximum points, and anyone who finishes in the time limit gets at least one point. There are prizes, etc, but it's mainly just fun, and everyone will get the six patterns.

I joined up before I realized that you can't just knit any six socks you like. When I saw the sock patterns from last year I had a little seizure. lol! I don't even think I can knit plain socks in 9 days!

I quickly joined up with a team of "Hogwarts friends" from the Harry Potter game. There are a lot of us there so far (40, at the moment) and my team mates are Andryl, Lambchop00, Seakame and Hokieknitter. The team plan is to have fun, because none of us are particularly confident about being that fast. Hokieknitter did a test run, just to see how many stitches she could knit in 2 hours. I thought that plan was brilliant, and since I had exactly one week until the start of the next "term" of the HP game, I decided to do a test.

I'm going to try and knit a pair of socks in one week. I have to use the standard 2.5mm needles and fingering weight/4ply yarn. And I'm going to count the hours.

Tonight I cast on the two toes and knit 3000 stitches in 4 hours. Doesn't look like much, does it?!

From what I remember of the few fingering-weight socks I've made, I need about 50 rows of foot and 50 rows of leg. These are 60st around, so 100 more rows is 12000 more stitches.

But it's possible. I mean, that's 4 more nights of knitting like tonight, and another night for the heels.

The Tour de Sock socks are going to be more complex, but I'll have 9 or 10 days.

The TdS ends just before the Olympics (and I'm in a Ravelympics team, too! Haha!) so that works out well. This does coincide with the Tour de Fleece, but that's not so much a competition as a "let's all have a spin together for fun". I also have Jasmine's birthday jumper to make, and an OWL jumper for me... but...

Knit All the Things.

(P.S. Finished another Milo)

Cute little things!

48 hours

I was heading off to night shift on Monday night, when I suddenly realized I had no knitting to take. My Fargyles were done (well, 95% done) and I didn't want to take any other WIPs (though I don't have too many.) I quickly grabbed a skein of Malabrigo Rios and a little 4.5mm circular.

It was an easy night shift. I had to do hourly checks, and keep an eye on one patient. The nurse in charge said I could play on the internet or have a bit of sleep in between, but I had to stay there in the room all night. So I searched patterns on Ravelry, things that I could make with one skein of Rios.

In the end, I settled on making a little Milo for the unborn niece/nephew (BabyN). I wound up my skein into a ball, wrote out the pattern so I could turn off the computer, and started knitting just after midnight.

This is as far as I got. LOL. I did the garter stitch top of the Milo, and left work just before casting off the edges of the arms. I kept falling asleep in my chair! I'd open my eyes ten minutes later with my needle half-way through a stitch. But I do love how this multicolored yarn looks in garter stitch. When I was knitting, with my back to a half-opened door for light, the colors looked all grey and brown, because it was so dark. It was a nice surprise, in the morning, to find a nice green handful of knitting with bumps of yellow and purple and blue all through it.

I slept on Tuesday morning, and got some more garter stitch done that evening. But when I got to the stockinette section, where my stitch count would be the same each row, it was clear that the colors were going to start pooling.

I rewound my ball into a cake, and started knitting a row or two from each end of the yarn.

On Wednesday morning, I decided to buy myself a knitting day. Once a month, I shout the kids to a big indoor playground called Funbugs. They play, and I knit. I took my new Alice Starmore book, and picked some colorwork patterns with BWM Luxury 10ply in Stone.

By Wednesday night, around midnight, I'd finished knitting a broken-rib cuff with a super-stretchy-for-fat-nappies cast off. I put it inside out over a 1.25kg milo tin, and sprayed it to make it damp.

Hehehe.

I'm happy with the outside, too. Not too girly for a boy, or vice versa, and it broke up any color pooling like lead in a stained glass window.

This is my first Malabrigo project. It's soft and beautiful, and I'll be knitting with it more. I have 3.4 more skeins :)

This month

...I have been fixing the Ginny

and knitting more Fargyles

(sock 2 is 95% complete... I'll finish it in May for points ...hehehe)

I also may have started a little bitty Milo, size 3 months.

New yarn:

It's time to start saving for Bendi, but first, I had to buy myself some birthday yarn.

This is Lorna's Laces limited edition colorway for April. It's called Wonderstone, and I bought a skein of Solemate. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm hoping it will turn into longer-lasting socks. Plan to make some socks with it next month, if I have time, but I might use the green stuff I bought first.

Apparently Wonderstone had a magic influence on me, because the other ones I bought were these:

hehehe.
Also got a bit of  Toast and Natural

I've updated all my stash on Ravelry. It took a while :)

Oh, yeah. Also got a present from Kelly (sister) who holidayed in Iceland lately, and found me some local goods!

and a prize from the HPKCHC game

 Nine skeins!! of this green, which is Jo Sharp Silkroad DK tweed in a color called "Beanshoot". Nine!

Well, I'd better get to bed. It's 3am. Night shifts on Saturday and Monday but not Sunday or Tuesday (tonight) have messed with my brain a bit. :)

OWL number 3

In the Harry Potter Books, an OWL is an exam, also known as Ordinary Wizarding Levels. For the knitting game I'm playing, you don't have to be in fifth year, but you have to choose a subject and follow the prompts (listed here), write a proposal and wait for it to be accepted by the (volunteer) OWL examiners :)

It has to be a challenge, and it's supposed to take a good 8 weeks, so when I chose Transfiguration Option 3, I decided just spinning up a small garment's worth of yarn wouldn't take me long enough. Sure enough, I was finished by the end of January, I think. I didn't do much of this in February (none... hehe) so I had to get to work this month. Luckily I finished it with a few days to spare.

Remember this roll of merino?

It got dyed with a mix of my new Ashford dyes,

spun up into 600m of three-ply

And knitted up into the Back to School U-neck Vest. I made some alterations here.

Also added in some sneaky hip increases here :)

And it fits. It would look better a little longer, but I had 3g of yarn left at the end.

Since then, I've had a break from rib-rib-rib-rib-ribbing and done some more spinning. This is Kathy's Fibre in Strelitzia.

Also won a prize for my Potions homework in Feb, and Kreachr (on Rav) sent me this across the Tasman... 126g of New Zealand merino in a color called Johnathon. Very appley :)

I finished knitting Ginevra's Pullover, washed it and pinned it flat to dry. While that was drying I wove the collar insert.

But I haven't been able to make it work to my satisfaction. In fact, fixing this is going to be an April project (as there is no Harry Potter game on in April; it's a holiday month.)

Plans for April
Finish 99% of my Vivian
Finish Les Miserables
Fix Ginevra's pullover
Plan the next OWL.

Plans for this week.
Finish the tube socks.

Kissy Update: he's been weaned and kicked out of the enclosed yard. He's been wandering around with his "cousins" ever since, but he'll still race over for a pat if you go outside :)