Fiber Week in Review: March 2-8

Knitting: I finished the Palamon Hat with plenty of yarn leftover, so the hat and cowl can indeed be done from two skeins of King Arthur.

Pre-blocking picture. Blocking helps to even out that cabled section a bit more.

I think I worked on the baby blanket a tiny bit at the beginning of the week, but that wasn't my focus this week. Instead, I cast on with my Lancelot base in the Morgan le Fay colorway to do a sample of Lyonet for my DFW Fiber Fest booth. I got a little further along than this picture shows (almost two repeats of the pattern). It's been almost a year since I designed this pattern and I forgot how fun it is! And the yarn is super squishy, so I'm really enjoying working on the hat.

My other knitting for the week was swatching for some design ideas, so I'll save discussion of that for the Designing section below.

Spinning: I did some spinning this week! I looked through my fiber stash and originally thought that I would go for something with a lot of color. But this fiber jumped out at me:

It's alpaca and bamboo and is so soft. I got it during the DFW Yarn Crawl in 2013 when I visited the Fiberlady stop. It was a fun visit because I got to see the back of the shop with the machine that makes the yarn. Very neat!

I didn't do a ton of spinning, but I did spin for at least 15 minutes on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So if I can do 15 minutes each day, I'll feel much happier about my spinning life. I'd love to do more, but I think making it a special part of each day is better than having one day every so often where I just spin all day. Here's my progress after Sunday's spinning:

The plan is to do a 2-ply. And it wants to spin up pretty fine so I'm thinking it'll be a fingering or even light fingering after plying (although the alpaca will probably puff up). I'm doing a short forward draw to make it more smooth overall (the bamboo seems to want that).



Stash Enhancement: Again, nothing here as I'm saving for DFW Fiber Fest. I did have a realization this week--I can dye yarn for my own projects. If I want to make a sweater, I could dye my own yarn for the sweater. I don't know why that didn't fully sink in until this week, but it was a neat realization!

Designing: I have had a shawl idea running through the back of my mind for a couple of weeks. I picked out yarn from stash for it and even have a name for it already and was planning to start it this week. But then I watched the Craftsy class on short rows (the new longer one, not the free one) and I've become smitten, especially with German short rows. My mind started flashing through a lot of different ideas, and I decided to focus on one (which is a shawl idea) for now. But then I was looking at various options for edgings and found five that I loved. I couldn't decide.

So that's when I had "the idea"--I'm now planning out a five-shawl collection that uses short rows for shaping and knitted on borders. Each will be in a different weight of yarn (well, I'm not going to do lace or bulky, so there will be a repeat, probably the fingering weight) and some will be one color and others will have two (or maybe three) colors. I've done swatches for two of the five so far and have picked out yarn for one. I'm really excited about this and looking forward to how it all comes together. Oh, and I already have a name for the collection and for each of the five patterns. But it's a secret for now.

I also have another unrelated to the collection but still using short rows idea for a shawl, so that's also in the back of my mind. So I guess that makes seven shawl ideas that I'm excited about and want to work on. Yikes! I'm sure I'll throw in another cowl or hat in there to break up all the shawls, but I'm having lots of fun thoughts about designing!

The blue/white on the bottom is the yarn for the first shawl idea that got bypassed for the shawl collection idea. It is Kauni Effecktgarn and the original skeining made it look like just blues so I was a little surprised when I caked it to see so much white. The top skeins (JulieSpins) together are for one of the shawl collection ideas.

Dyeing:  Still dyeing up a storm for DFW Fiber Fest, although I'm slowing down a little so I don't get too overrun with reskeining and labeling. I'm actually all caught up on reskeining and just have a few labels left to go. Of course, there's yarn still drying and yarn still dyeing or to dye, but it feels good not to have a huge backlog like I had built up. Just 1-1/2 weeks until booth setup, so I also need to create signs and get all the booth details situated. The fiber fest is sneaking up on me so it'll be here before I know it! If you're anywhere near the Dallas area, I hope you'll make it to the fiber fest and come by my booth to say hi.