On the Stash

[Note: I just found this post, which I wrote some time in November, and reflects the nonchalance of maternity leave, when one actually has time to do things like go through one's stash.]

I have far too big a yarn stash. It's not as big as those of some knitters who have entire rooms full of yarn and fiber, but it's big enough that I have enough yarn for many more sweaters and socks than I can reasonably be expected to knit in the next decade. Or, let's admit it, two decades.

So I'm trying not to buy yarn. However, I got into my head that I wanted to make Baby R an Anemone Hat. This hat calls for Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted, a superwash wool I've long been coveting.

I will not, I said to myself, buy yarn. I surely have some form of superwash worsted-weight wool that I can use. And I went into the basement to see what I could come up with.

What I found:
- A box of acrylic baby yarn my mother gave me years ago.
- Some wonderful variegated alpaca I've been planning for the last 5 years to combine with black alpaca for a patterned sweater.
- Cones of mystery yarn my mother once bought for her now-defunct knitting machine, which I just can't bear to throw away because think of the shawls I could make out of them.
- A box of Peaches and Creme cotton I bought this summer when I caught the Peaches and Creme fever on hearing it was being discontinued. I thought I would weave dozens of dishcloths. Haven't even finished the first one, and the cotton is too thick to weave comfortably on my loom. I had vague plans for a bath mat, which I should perhaps take steps to realize.
- Silk my mother gave me that I'm planning to use for Emerald Seas. (A lot of my stash seems to come from my mother, who clearly passed on the stash gene.)
- Several sweater lots of alpaca and Lopi Light and a really wonderful gray wool, many of them purchased at various Smiley's Yarn Sales. I still plan to make those sweaters, too - that would be the Icelandic sweater, the Inishmore, the Fjalar Sweater, and the list goes on.
- Leftovers from a range of baby blankets, socks, and other projects from over the years.
- Assorted individual skeins I bought on impulse to test - like the Blue Sky Alpacas Organic Cotton I bought with the idea of making a sweater for my husband. It was a little too pricey for a simple cotton sweater, but I recently found another use for that cotton:
(NB: there are two hats because the hat I made when I followed the pattern was large enough to fit my 6-year-old niece. Rather than rip it out, I simply made another, smaller, baby-sized one.)

But no worsted weight superwash -- until, among those assorted skeins, I spotted a center-pull ball. I pulled the ball band out of the middle of the ball and found that, yes, it was a single skein of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted superwash wool, exactly what the pattern called for.

I like to think that on some level I remembered it was down there. But I wouldn't swear I did.

[NB: In the three or so months since I wrote this post, I have not yet managed to knit the Anemone Hat.]

Loom-ing problems

Here's a post I seem to have written in July, but never got around to posting.

Last Christmas, I finally lowered my defenses and allowed my husband to get me a loom.

It seemed inevitable, not least because my husband, who has become enamored of all my fiber-related gadgets, has been eager to get me one for a couple of years. And I thought it would be a good idea, seeing as how I'm drowning in fiber and weaving, as we all know, uses up yarn much more quickly than knitting does.

It does, that is, if you actually do it.

Weaving has made me realize anew why knitting is a craft that appeals to me. You can be spontaneous in knitting. You can fudge knitting. And if you mess up, you can rip it out and start again.

Weaving, on the other hand, requires organization. It requires advance planning, working out all your measurements: how wide? how long? how many strands of yarn in the warp? It requires warping. Can we talk warping? It took me two days and I had yarn stretched out over the whole length of the living room. Then I missed one strand. Then I wasn't sure I loved the colors. No recourse, when you're weaving, unless you want to abandon the whole project.



Weaving reminds me of sewing. I was never a good sewer. It requires a kind of detail and fussiness that I've never naturally been good at. With knitting, I can work to master the details and feel a sense of accomplishment. With sewing, I feel there are people who are just naturally better at this kind of thing than I am.

I also confess to a prejudice against the woven product. I mean, how many scarves, table runners, placemats and dish towels does a person need? This is patently foolish since I feel not at all limited when turning out socks and shawls and hats ad nauseam as a knitter, but psychologically the possibility of the occasional sweater offers a vent and a way to avoid the threat of repetition.



When I originally wrote this, I was still working on a weaving project that I started in January and finished in July. I have to grudgingly admit that I kind of liked it when I was finished -- enough that we actually use it (despite its raggedy beginner edges). And I was really proud of my fringe.



I promptly warped the loom with thick cotton to make dish towels.



I got about two inches away from finishing my first dish towel -- and put the loom aside for another 3 months.

I sort of admit that I may weave some things that I like, particularly when I start using thinner yarn - the thick wool and cotton I used in my first two projects make weaving rather slow going.

But I'm not sure it's about to replace spinning and knitting in my craft pantheon - and I'm not sure how much time I'll have to pursue it.

Though I have conceived a project to weave cushion covers for our IKEA dining room chairs, using some twine-tough heathery tweed yarn in two contrasting colors, that definitely has potential.

Postal blues

I have a friend who is a brilliant silk artist.

She started out painting silk scarves as a hobby. Now, she does glorious hand-painted mandalas. I can't copy the pictures from her website, but I promise you it's well worth going and browsing for a while. (The site is in German text, but my friend speaks English like a native; I'm not sure why she's never gone bilingual with it.)

Over the years, as she has honed her talents, she has given me at least half a dozen stunning scarves. I blogged one of them here. But I also have elephants, seals, floral patterns, abstractions: a cornucopia of beautiful silkiness.

One day last summer, I looked at some fiber in the spinning pile, and realized that it wanted to be a shawl or scarf for my friend. (Never make a gift for someone unless the fiber tells you that's what it wants to be.)



The fiber came out in her colors. I got about 325 yards of chain-ply from three ounces of merino-mohair blend (Spunky Eclectic, once again, colorway "Flowering Weeds").
This being me, I started spinning in early June, thinking I might get it done for her birthday at the end of the month.

I finished knitting the shawl in October.



Before blocking. Note how little of the yarn is left over: it came out just exactly right.



During blocking.



After blocking.

The pattern is Ishbel, by Ysolda Teague. And I wish I had taken some better photos of it. But I blocked it, and then waited another month or so to weave in the two ends (would hate to rush anything), and then I just wanted to get it in the mail.

I sent it in mid-December, thinking that she might possibly have it in time for Christmas. Though I am usually pretty scattered about Christmas and gifts (I am great at thinking of nice things I would like to send people, and not very good about carrying through on my plans), I did manage to get a few things in the mail this year. Even a couple of Christmas cards, though only a couple.

Of course everything takes ages to arrive internationally, especially over the holidays. Still, thanks began to trickle in from people. But earlier this week, I realized I'd never heard from my friend. And after some thought - you hate to push someone to acknowledge a gift they might not have liked! - I wrote her on Facebook to ask if she had gotten a package from me.

Wouldn't you know: it never arrived.

She, being an optimist, assured me that she sent a friend in Florida a package at the start of December, and he only just got it this week. So we hope it went surface mail, and might show up in a week or two.

But wouldn't it just figure that when I finally get around to acting on a nice instinct and making something for someone who has made me so many nice things over the years, it vanishes without a trace...

UPDATE, Jan 31: All it took was a little griping for the postal gods to take note! It arrived today, about seven weeks after I mailed it, with the airmail sticker still on it. And the recipient was very happy.

Ripped (out)

I have spent months letting potential blog posts drift across my mind like those zips at the bottom of cable news channels, adding a layer of ephemeral complexity to an already overcrowded prospect.

I am finally, though, moved to commit words to screen out of sheer frustration. After years of functioning as a reasonably competent knitter, I seem to be losing my ability to complete the simplest of tasks.

It began with these socks. Slippery Socks, from Knitty.com.



These were conceived as a house present for a friend who brought me to her country house last fall. (LAST fall. That would be 2009.) While I was there she admired, extravagantly, the hand-knit socks I was wearing. So what better house present could there be than a pair of socks, made in autumn-leaf colors to commemorate our weekend of "leaf-peeping?"

Now, I have been known to knock off a pair of socks in a matter of weeks. See my last post. I can even knit socks faster than I can photograph them, as evidenced by this image of a half-knitted, toeless sock that was actually completed six months ago and has been in regular rotation since.



And these "leaf-peeping" socks were moving along swimmingly. Only, I realized, as I made my way up the leg of the first (toe-up) sock, that they might be a little big. I tried them on and realized that they were a little big ON ME, and would therefore be able to do double duty as a sleeping bag for my petite friend.

I responded as I usually do. I put the unfinished sock in the corner for a number of months, as punishment.

Some time THIS fall (we're talking 2010 now), I finally ripped it back to the toe and started a whole new sock in a whole new pattern: Leyburn socks, which I'd been wanting to make for a long time. (I liked the way the Slippery looked, but I found the pattern a little fiddly.)



Well and good. Yet somehow, I ended up having to rip out these socks several times.
The first sock was too big, again. Ripped back, reknit. Then I started the second sock. Messed up the heel. Ripped back, reknit. Realized I had left out some pattern increases. Ripped back, reknit. Realized I had left those increases out of the first sock, too. Ripped back, reknit.

I got into a veritably manic state about these socks. I wondered if they would ever be finished, or if I would be condemned to continue knitting them for the next ten years.



Finally, they're done. I think one of them is still too big. And the floats look awfully loose. They might benefit from a spin in the washing machine. But I have entered the "it's-the-thought-that-counts" stage. This represents a terrible loss of knitter's pride. Obviously I have reached a new low. But I did a great job on the packaging.



So, those socks are all ready to send off. And this weekend I was faced with the prospect of wrapping up other unfinished objects, and catching up on spinning. Logically enough, I woke up on Saturday morning suddenly inflamed - perhaps "consumed" is a better word - with the realization that I had, in my stash, the perfect yarn with which to make a sweater I've had my eye on: Debbie Bliss's Divided Front Tunic. Somehow it takes several weeks for ideas to percolate in the brain until the notion of "yarn-being-saved-for-sweater" and "sweater-I-want-to-knit" bump up against each other and prompt the chemical reaction that leads to immediate, willful casting on -- without even swatching. (Cue ominous music.)

I knit all Saturday morning. Then I calculated the yardage and realized that if I knit the pattern in the size I'd chosen, I wouldn't have enough yarn to finish.

So I ripped out my work from Saturday, and cast on again, one size smaller. Still without thinking to MEASURE what I'd ripped out.

By the end of Sunday, I had about 10 inches of the back. At which point I actually looked at it and thought it seemed generously proportioned, even for a loose-fitting garment. When I measured, I discovered that I was so far from getting gauge that my sweater was not a size M, but a size XXXL.

I will not let myself be defeated. I want to wear this sweater while the weather is still cold. So I am pledged, today, to rip it out again and hope that the third time is the charm.
But I long for the days when I simply sat down and knit, and made things that fit.

Monkeying around

Some time in April, I saw a post on Ravelry asking if anybody would be willing to make socks in exchange for sock yarn.

Anyone who knows me in the real world knows that the last thing I have time to do is make socks. Plus, I have several things on my needles for other people. One of them has lingered there for two years.

So, of course, "I can do that," I thought.

Funnily enough it was a kind of "aha" moment. I still think of myself as a beginning knitter, a newcomer to the hobby. Not as someone who can knock off a pair of socks in a couple of weeks. But this, I knew I could do. And I was invigorated by the prospect of knitting for a knitter, for someone who would really get it.

The clincher was that she and I have the same size feet (as in, large). It's so much easier to knit socks when you can try them on. (One of my projects that's languishing on the needles is a pair of socks I started for a friend; after I finished one foot, I discovered that the sock fit me, and would therefore be far too big for my friend. I will probably just start over.)

The person requesting this is a talented dyer who wanted a pair of socks knit with her own yarn to wear to a fiber show, and didn't have time to knit them up herself.

The result: I got to knit a pair of Monkey socks with some really lovely hand-dyed yarn in a wonderful spring-like palette, with every stitch a little fleck of a different color.



I finished one sock and then learned I had to find a new place to live. In a month. Which I did. But it meant the second sock was right down to the wire. I finished it on a plane flight, and express-mailed it to make sure it would get there in time.



In the haste of finishing, I overlooked one small detail. I miscounted the number of pattern repeats on the second sock. I knit an extra one. When I realized this I almost cried. It was too late to rip it out and fix it. Knitter's dilemma: do you tell the recipient or not? I decided not to. Somehow I felt it would tarnish the socks for her if she knew they were different sizes. And after all, knitting stretches; both socks fit me perfectly well. I have opted to let her know this way: Angela, if you ever see this blog, my apologies for the mistake, and the deception. I promise if I ever knit you socks again, they will be perfect. But think of this as the endearing detail that lets you remember they're hand-knit.

It would behoove me to post pictures of the gorgeous yarn I got in return for doing this project. Unfortunately, it's in a packing box, along with the rest of my life, on its way to my new home.

But I did get a picture of the new sock with a Monkey sock I made about three years ago out of Koigu PPM. The pair has held up really well, and given me a real appreciation for this pattern. (The new socks were knit with size 1 needles - 7 pattern repeats for the leg and foot, where the old ones, on size 2 needles, took 6. But both fit equally well.)

Memorial

I cast on for Bitterroot on a Wednesday night, although (because?) I had other things on the needles I needed to finish.

On Thursday I learned that the son of close friends was killed in the earthquake in Haiti.



Funny I never finished this post, which has been lingering in my "edit" box for months, perhaps because it touched on weightier subjects than I really felt like going into.

It was clear to me, though, that the shawl was meant to go to my friends as a remembrance of the child they lost, or simply as a hug. It seemed all the more predestined when I took another look at the epigraph that opens the pattern, which is about a grieving mother.



Knitting it was certainly a way to work through my emotions about it. And the yarn reminded me of the person who died: bright and vivid and unusual, knitting up like a flame.



What struck me particularly was the way that the uneven, handspun yarn knit up into a fabric that was much stronger than the sum of its parts: all the thick and thin bits evened out into a shawl that was strong and bright. Something there about the way that memory glosses over life's unevennesses until we're left with something much firmer than it seemed at the time, and the ups and downs that once seemed so important (my yarn is breaking!) don't really matter. A parable of human relationships.



This shawl was a big part of my winter, and then was finished, and transformed from its chrysalis-like unblocked state into a wide-winged butterfly, and sent off to my friends, who said (perhaps tactfully) that it did bring comfort.

Edited to add: I see that this post went up with the date I originally started it: January 22. Today is June 3. That's indicative of the speed of my knitting life these days.

My Sock Summit

Viewing all the sock yarns that were submitted on Ravelry's "Dye for Glory" page (alas, since taken down, but here are the winners) sent me into some kind of psychedelic haze markedly similar to that induced by the ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs. I left my greedy perusal of the 201 yarns on that site with a sense of exhaustion, itchy fingers, exhilaration, addiction, and a need to knit socks.

Now, of course, I have sock yarns. A lot of them. In fact, I issued to myself a temporary sock-yarn-buying moratorium (along with the theoretical moratorium on acquiring spinning fiber that I keep threatening to make a reality by suspending my fiber club memberships. Thank heaven I'm too much of a procrastinator to act on that one).

But there I was a week or so later, in the yarn shop in Kirkby-Lonsdale, which seemed to me to have come up in the world considerably since I was last there. This was because 1. they had Peruvian yarns in addition to their Brigantia (they're my sole source for the latter) and 2. the nice lady behind the counter, who was knitting a sock, was on Ravelry. Now, how can you resist a fellow sock-knitter on Ravelry?

Ergo: my sock summit.



Not that I've started actually knitting a sock with it, you understand. We're still at the petting stage while I forge away on Belinda and on the several pounds of raw Swaledale fleece my stepfather bought me as a surprise present. (Gotta love those surprise presents.)

Surface Tension (Backlog)

[I post rarely enough that you'd think I wouldn't forget to post something I've already written, but here this is: written two weeks ago, saved, and abandoned. So I'm posting it now. Waste not, want not.]

Here's my current debate: whether or not to knit the wrap that is such an integral part of Surface.

The wrap was one of the things that drew me to the pattern in the first place. And I've already cast on for the darn thing. But here are my reservations:

- I'm not sure I will have enough yarn.

- I'm not sure whether, once completed, it is actually going to look all that great. I have pored over the pictures in the vain hope of figuring out what it is like actually to move in a sweater with an extra wrap buttoned around your shoulders. Does it scoot up when you move your arms? Can you wear a coat over it? Does it strain the buttons out of alignment (which it appears to do in one of the pictures), or ruck up the collar?

(I should note that at this juncture I am not 100% sure the sweater is going to look all that great either. It's lying on the floor drying as I write. It's certainly the best finishing job I've ever done, and I'm inordinately proud of it, if you didn't figure that out from my last rather conceited post on the topic, but I remain uncertain as to whether it cuts across my body at its least flattering point. Even my husband has come to share my anxious anticipation, or at least he is nice enough to say that he does.)

- I am concerned that this sweater, densely knit, is already going to be one of the warmest garments in my possession. Every time I try it on it seems almost suffocating (of course, it is the month of July, which doesn't help). I realize that in winter I may sing a different tune, but the idea of adding an extra layer of insulation seems tantamount to gilding the lily.

- The wrap represents a huge amount of knitting, and it seems a shame to go through all that for a garment that, if completed and found wanting, will not be very useful for anything else.

All this sounds like talking myself out of it. The issue is critical at the moment because I'm packing for a month away and I have to figure out what knitting to take. Queries to Ravelry on the shawl topic have been inconclusive.

Edited to add: I didn't bring the yarn with me. And I haven't regretted it. The callus on the back of my right ring finger caused by forcing the needle through all those p4togs may, however, be with me always.

New Day, New Wheel

This yarn is called "New Day" (from Spunky Eclectic). I call it "Eye Candy."
I first looked at it and thought, "Orange." But when I spun it up it turned into streams of butterscotch and toffee, lines of spun sugar like French pastry chefs make into baskets on top of their desserts, caramel and toffee and the inside of a Butterfinger bar. I wrote on Ravelry, but I'll say again, that spinning it did for my eyes and fingers what eating all those delicious sweet things would have done for my tongue. Except that I didn't feel sick afterwards.

And I wasn't planning to spin it up at all. But then I got, wait for it, my new wheel.
My new Lendrum DT, my Christmas present, for which I'd been on the waiting list since December, arrived in mid-March (I think I was really lucky only to have to wait a couple of months). And when I pulled it from its box and assembled it (such an elegant well-planned and well-made thing; two screws, basically, and you're ready to go), I wanted to spin some appropriate fiber, and there was my new Spunky Club installment sitting right there, appropriately called "New Day" to mark a new beginning.



When I began plying I briefly considered changing the name of the yarn to "Spice Market." Maybe it was because the lighting was different, but I started thinking of tumeric and curry powder and cardamom and cloves and saffron as I blended all the colors together.

But "Eye Candy" won out when I noticed a strong family resemblance between it and a newly-opened box of Girl Scout cookies. (Samoas, of course.)





Meanwhile, I outed myself as a spinner at work. It says something about me, I'm not sure what, that I freely post in a public place about my spinning and yet I've been extremely shy about telling people who know me in person. But I made it pretty public now. I think for most people the idea seems so weird that it's not even worth commenting on; it's as if someone said, "In her spare time she enjoys taking walks on Mars."

Size matters, redux

I have been spinning for nearly 2 years now, but sometimes I suspect that I have no idea what I'm doing.

Example: I see on Ravelry a gorgeous specimen of a Morning Surf Scarf, out of the Spunky fiber club's August 08 installment, Thermograph. So I decide I want to spin fat singles and make one just like it.
So I spin these.



I've said it before: my idea of "fat" in spinning seems to be like an teenage girl's idea of "fat" in body weight.

Then, I cast on. Those singles seem awfully thin, so I cast on a lot of stitches. As a result, rather than a slender scarf, I get this.



Still, it's knitting up pretty nicely. But then I panic, because I've finished the first 2 oz of my 4-oz hank of fiber, and the scarf clearly isn't going to be long enough. So I quickly engineer a trade on Ravelry to get more of the fiber. At the same time, I spin the other 2 oz.

Clearly my concern about running out of fiber affected my spinning. Because while the first 2 oz yielded about 250 yards, the second 2 oz yielded about 500 yards. Even I can't call them "fat singles" any more.



And the scarf keeps groooowwwinggg.



Then, a little late in the game, I decide to test-block a swatch. Which grows from a little over 3 inches in length to 4.5 inches in length. Since I now have 5 feet of unblocked scarf, this gives rise to concern about the length of the finished product. I'm putting off the final blocking, in fact, because I'm scared.

Meanwhile, I have another 4 oz of Thermograph sitting there minding its own business. I decide to change gears and spin up a chunky yarn for this cowl. I decide to chain-ply it to preserve the colors. I need about 150 yards, and as I spin I keep thinking, "spin chunky! spin chunky!"

Well, I did.


Here's what I got: under 50 yards of super-bulky 3-ply yarn.



The thing is, I don't even care that I don't have enough for the cowl I wanted to make, because it may be my favorite yarn I've ever spun.

Elephants

I had a vow in January not to start anything new until I finished up what was already on my plate.

Here's all I have to show for that.



The great thing about these scarves is that they photograph so well. In person, however, I fear that my elephants look a bit like anteaters. Since the recipient is 3 years old, I am hoping that her critical faculties are not yet finely honed enough to take exception to this zoological abomination. Or, I hope she likes anteaters.

Meanwhile, I chafe at my self-imposed restriction by spending my time, not finishing my four other WIP's, but planning out all the zillion projects I will start when they're done. (Does swatching count as "starting something new"? Does spinning? Of such questions are the Talmudic debates of the fiberholic engendered.)

Here, for instance, is something pretty that arrived in the mail.



(Organic merino, colorway "Twilight" from Spunky Eclectic.)

In praise of asymmetry

This summer I bought some plain-Jane grey fingering-weight yarn so I could make myself a pair of socks from Cat Bordhi's much-praised New Pathways for Sock Knitters.

The first one fit OK. But it was, like most socks I make, a little loose. So I took a daring step. I made the second one in the next size smaller.

It felt like heresy. After all, everything is supposed to match. But I reasoned that I would never know if the smaller size fit me better unless I tried, and I could always rip out the one that didn't fit.

Lo and behold, the smaller size fit much better. The discovery was liberating. It cast all of those slightly baggy handknit socks in a new light. Maybe my feet aren't as big as I think? Maybe I like a snugger sock than most patterns allow for?

But it was also liberating in that I had no desire to rip out the bigger sock. I had knit a lot of nice memories into that sock (starting with the yarn, which I bought at this wonderful store).

And this in turn freed me from the obligation to have everything match. I have long tried to reconcile my basically improvisatory nature with my anal-knitter side: the side we all need if we are going to get, say, the two fronts of a cardigan to match. I thought the anal knitter was somehow good for me. Well, this just in: my inner anal knitter has left the building.

Take the next thing I knit: these felted clogs. I made a mistake knitting the first one. As a result, the foot opening is bigger than it's supposed to be. Came time to knit the second one. Should I duplicate the mistake? Or should I rip back the first one and fix it?

My new persona, Deliciously Bad Knitter, did neither. I knit the second one "right" to see which one I liked better.
Deliciously Bad Knitter (DBK) not only relishes the sense of transgression this involves. She is learning more. More about sizes. More about preferences. More about experimentation. I kind of like the clog I knit "wrong," which is easier to slip on and off. Does it bother me that the two clogs are slightly different? Not a bit.



There's no stopping me now. DBK is actually an antidote to the very anal-knitter, or anal-spinner, side of me that spun several hundred yards of merino fiber into fingering-weight wool on a hand spindle this summer, improvising a Lazy Kate with two dowels stuck through a laundry basket, much to the wonderment of my parents, who were on vacation with us for a week.



After finishing up that lot (I didn't think to snap a picture of the laundry basket, probably because my hands were otherwise occupied, I had this.



At which point DBK took over. It wasn't really deliberate. It was karma.



Now, these socks are pretty much the same size. Followed the same pattern (Tibetan socks, "Coriolis" architecture, from Cat Bordhi's book; not that you can see much of the patterning detail with this yarn). But symmetry?

I call them "Night and Day," because the colors evoke another unequal pairing: two things that always go together, but that don't, technically, "match."



But they are my all-time favorite knitted socks. So far.

Rough Fell

On the hoof.

In the shed.

In the bath.

Got fiber?

And back in its natural habitat.



This breed is not necessarily a handspinner's best friend. The rougher outer fibers (which I spun up) create something that feels like packing twine.

But there is something incredibly cool about turning fiber from the sheep you see around you every day into yarn you can actually knit with.
And it should make a perfect rug.

(Admission: the sheep in the first picture is not literally the same sheep from which I got my fiber. But it came from within a mile of this sheep.)

Color in Spinning

Creative chaos is the name of the game around here.
This is what happens when you love to buy fiber but have very little time to spin.

Color in spinning is a fascinating topic. I've read a book or two, but learning by doing seems to be the best way to go.

For instance, I would not have predicted that this yarn, which seems pretty uniform in color



would turn into this strongly striped scarf.





Nor would I have thought that this roving (an anonymous merino-tencel or perhaps even merino-silk blend I got at Rhinebeck)



would blend with another fiber that looked all graphite-colored to become this scarf.



This is made of 3 different yarns - one two-ply graphite (Nuit Noire from Zen String), one with one ply of each fiber, and one two-ply with the Rhinebeck roving. Extra credit to anyone who can tell which part of the scarf is which.