Knitting: I did finish the Puplicious Socks before leaving for the retreat. I love them and got to wear them at the retreat. Yarn is from Brazen Stitchery.
I had dyed my first skein of self-striping sock yarn so that's what I took with me to the retreat. It has two stripes: grey and blue. They are actually the same grey and blue (Uther and Igraine) that I use for the Don't Blink Illusion kit. This colorway on the self-striping sock yarn will be Once and Future. I knit on the first sock all through the retreat and almost finished it there, but did finish it when I got back home. I haven't decided yet if this is going to be a sample sock for my booth (so one I won't be able to wear) or if I want to knit the second sock and wear them. Well, I know that I want to wear them but having a sample for my booth seems to be the wiser option. We'll see.
In the meantime, while I'm making my decision, I started a new pair of socks with some self-striping yarn from Fishknits that I picked up during DFW Fiber Fest. I haven't gotten very far on these yet.
The other project I worked on during the retreat, and finished right after getting home, was my new sample for my Lyones Cowl in my Lancelot base (Morgan le Fay colorway). I'm getting new pictures taken of some of my patterns and I wanted to change the color of the Lyones and Lyonet from yellow to red. I'd already knit Lyonet, so finishing Lyones means the set is complete.
The other major thing I've been working on this week is a new design. And this is the first item in a collection, so I'm going to be working on this collection a lot in the next two months. But I want to keep it semi-secret, so the pictures I post will be more teaser pictures than detailed ones.
And I think I never posted a finished picture of my Dorigen Cowl. I got it done just before the retreat but didn't get pictures until today. And since my son saw I was taking pictures, he wanted to be in them, so here's one with him and Dorigen.
Spinning: The spinning wheel has been gathering dust again, but yesterday I brushed it off and did about 15-20 minutes of spinning. Ah. Relaxation. I keep telling myself that I need to make time for just that 15 minutes a day (surely I can do that), but I keep being "busy." But I love the feeling of spinning so I really truly need to make it happen just a little each day.
Stash Enhancement: After everything I got at the retreat, there's no way I can do more stash enhancement for a while! I actually may need to do a little stash dehancement.
Designing: The Chauntecleer Cowl is current with test knitters and I need to send it to the tech editor soon. I also need to get some pictures taken. But I'm looking to release that pattern in about 3 weeks.
Although I have a lot of other ideas for things I want to design, my current focus is on a collection of 5 patterns. I've discussed the production of this project with Stitch Definition and have set up a production schedule (sounds so fancy!) to get all of the tech editing, layout, photography, and everything else taken care of. I need to have the patterns and samples to the tech editor and photographer in mid-June so that gives me just under two months to get those done. I'm almost finished with the first one and have the other four sketched out. But because I want to keep this project a little bit under wraps, there might be some quiet on the designing front for a while. But even if I'm not talking much about it, I'm still very much busy doing it!
And I've still got the baby blanket going. Just not much progress on it this week.
Dyeing: I have two projects I've been working on with dyeing this week. The first is to dye the yarn for the collection I'm working on so I did a bit of that (but have a little more to go). But the big news in dyeing is the self-striping sock yarn.
I totally get now why dyers love to hate self-striping yarn. It's pretty darn awesome, but it's also a pain in the ass. A giant pain because you're working with a giant skein. I've been using a warping board to set up the giant skein, which takes a while but isn't to terrible to set up. I do rather dislike putting in all the ties just because it takes quite a while (and you want a lot of ties because if this giant skein gets tangled, it's hard to recover. The actual dyeing isn't too bad. But then there's getting the yarn from the giant skein back into a regular-sized skein. Here's the true pain for me.
I tried putting it back on the warping board the first time I reskeined. I think it took me almost two hours to get it reskeined. Yeah, two hours. I've heard that some people use a warping reel to reskein but I don't currently have one of those. So I decided to try just putting the loop on the floor and gently winding into a ball. That way mostly working but I got the bright idea to use my ball winder and put it on that. But it was hard to keep tension on the winder and when I was about a quarter of the way through, I got the yarn wrapped around the gears of the ball winder. I tried to remove the yarn but it was pretty well enmeshed into the gears. I wanted to cry. I almost did. But I did a little breathing and tried to calm down and figure out how to save the yarn.
I tried removing the stem part from the base. Not happening. I noticed some screws on the bottom of the base and thought that if I removed those, I might be able to take it apart and get to the yarn. The screws were a little difficult to get out but I finally got them out--only to discover that they didn't actually allow the unit to be taken apart so I'd done all that work and still couldn't get to the yarn. More deep breathing. I finally got the yarn almost removed but couldn't figure out how to get the last two loops off. It looked like the only way to do it was to actually take the yarn through the gears. I was worried that I would damage the yarn but couldn't see any other way of going it, so I gently worked the yarn out through the gears--and it worked! I'm glad this was a sock yarn with nylon in it as I'm sure that helped to protect the yarn a bit. I examined that area of the yarn really closely and couldn't tell any difference or any defect. So I went back to winding. And hopefully put my ball winder back together correctly.
I now have two more skeins of the Once and Future self-striping ready to go (shop update planned for this Thursday evening. Join the mailing list to get specific updates). And I have another colorway currently drying (I think it's dry and I'm just avoiding the reskeining part--not sure what method I'll try this time). If you want to see that colorway before it hits the shop, join the mailing list. Otherwise, I'll post about it next week here.
As of right now, my self-striping sock yarn will have two colors. I've borrowed a 4 1/2 yard warping board from a friend and it's really only large enough to get a loop for two colors (adding more colors would mean very short repeats and I'd prefer not to do that). So it looks like I need a bigger warping board or warping reel to make bigger skeins so I can add additional colors.
I'm using a yarn base that is fingering weight with 75% merino and 25% nylon. I really wanted the heavy nylon content to help make these socks wear well. I was a little worried that the yarn might not be very soft, but after finishing the first sock and putting it on my foot, I am very very pleasantly surprised and happy. It feels super soft! I also picked a yarn with 4 plies (I saw so much sock yarn with just 2 plies) because I wanted to stitch definition to be good. This base will be the Merlin base (because self-striping yarn is magic--perhaps a little cheesy, but I like it!).
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