Can’t remember when

I last posted or knit. But I have been spinning some every day, and taking long walks in the rain, when I am not moving pans and buckets around in the spindle shop to catch the roof leaks as I work. There is a wet weather creek that runs right beside the shop, and so all of this months spindles were made to the accompaniment of cascading water, rushing and gurgling.

The rain rain rain came down down down
In rushing, rising riv'lets,
'Til the river crept out of it's bed
And crept right into Piglet's!

-The Sherman Brothers for Disney Pooh film

And no, I did not get washed away, but thanks y’all for asking.

  I have been in a sort of quiet and dark place, waiting for the sun. The garden would be doing good if the rabbits weren’t eating it, and after the drought years am most appreciative for the rain.

I have been working on a couple of new spindle designs (interchangeable with the current models) and tinkering with a plying device.

 

This one might be a trick to identify, you most likely notice it in the fall, not usually now.

Read more...

Blossom Base

Cherry Blossom Spindolyn Pouch…..Or some sort of title like that. I finished this early last week, but blogging time is hard to find between putting in taters and ducking thunderstorms.

The great thing about new tools and accessories is the way you get so excited about using them that you sometimes grab something nearby to try them out with, and it wasn’t necessarily a material you had planned to use at that time or in that way, and it turns you in a new and sometimes good direction…(or sometimes not!)

It was like this with this pink spray dyed handspun and as I mentioned in my previous post, to be more true to the cherry blossom, it should have been a pentagon base…but oh well

Anyway, below is a little pattern for this spiral hexagon base. …..(If you need to see a photo tutorial of spiral circular knitting, there is a great one shared here by Kyoko on her blog Cotton and Cloud.)

Spiral Hexagon Spindolyn Pouch

Yarn: light worsted weight (heavy dk weight) handspun

Gauge: 5.5 sts/inch on 4 double pointed needles (US 5) gauge not critical.

• Cast on 6 stitches on one needle. K 1 row.
• Divide these 6 stitches onto 3 needles.

(ok, now, the above is not the way other folks do this, but I did it this way to make it easier, because no one is going to be looking at the bottom of this pouch, if you are going to be looking at that bottom of your pouch, then you will probably want to do the traditional thing, which would be to cast onn6 stitches over 3 needles, and knit one round, making sure not to twist stitches on the needle.)

• Now commence with the spiral as follows: YO, K1, repeat one round. You know have 12 sts on your three needles.
• Second round: YO, K2
• YO, K3, and so forth, you won’t have to count each row, if you watch for the YO on the previous row, and when it arrives, do your YO, on the stitch just before the YO on the previous row.

This makes a tight and fast spiral, and when you get it it as big as you would like for the bottom of your spindle pouch, you will stop the spiral increases. Mine is about 4-5 inches across.

• Count the number of stitches you have between each of the YO’s you knit in the last row or your spiral increases, and call this stitch count N=________
• On the next row, knit this N_____ stitches, YO, SSK
• Knit 3 rows as above, but on each round, make the YO one stich before its location on the previous row (this makes the spiral continue to slant, even though it is still the same number of stitches)

Now we will begin the spiral decreases to narrow the pouch down to its little neck.

• Knit N_________ stitches, SSK, YO, SSK
• Knit N____minus 1 stitches, SSK, YO, SSK
• Continue in this manner until our pouch neck is as narrow as you would like it (but big enough to still put your spindolyn inside!)
• Knit straight for 6 rows
• K1 P1 for 6 rows
• Picot Bind Off (you can find illustrated instructions for a Picot Bind Off in this handy Knitty article by Theresa Vinson Stenersen)

Ok then, you have this spiral pouch, and if you put the bean bag beads right in it, they might fall through your yarn overs…so, I have found that a putting the beads/beans in a knee high stocking (pantyhose type) contains the beads. This little pouch held about 1/3 of a cup of beads dumped into a knee high nylon stocking, tied off at the top with a knot.

Getting this evasive snake shape of beads stuffed into the pouch can be done, you just have to be patient. Once it is in there, work it around to the outsides of the pouch in a donut shape, then shove your spindolyn base down inside and tada! kick back and spin!

Read more...

Cherry Blossom Knitting

It was actually the cherry blossoms blooming that reminded me of the color of that spray dyed yarn, and made me hunt it up and start knitting on it..they way so one thing leads to another, when you are not knitting with a plan, but just “comfort knitting”

I started another spindolyn bean bag pouch, out of the cherry blossom colored yarn. It is a spiral hexagon, but to really match the cherry blossoms, it should have been a pentagon spiral..but as usual, I just picked up needles and started knitting and didn’t think it through first.

I am up the sides now, and it is a little poochy for a pouchy, yes, I should have made it a pentagon…next time.

But I love cherry blossom time, never-the-less.

Here is a picture a week back, before the tree was in full bloom, in the background you can see one of the hills that flank the holler, and my shop, before Saturdays storm blew the storm door clean off of it (silly pun, but kinda too bad, because a storm door is the only kinda door it had)

And of course, I had to try and get a lamb with cherry blossom picture, to go with the mule with cherry blossom and goat with cherry blossom….

Cherry blossoms last a full 2 weeks, the honey bees working them over while you work to get your taters and onions and sugar snap peas in the ground, if you are late with them.

Then the bees leave and they drift to the ground in showers of delicate petals, clinging to tools and wheelbarrows and car windows and by then, bright green baby tree leaves will be everywhere and then it will be really, truly, spring. But right now, the bees are still buzzing, and last night was pretty good frost.

Read more...

An ungreen thing

It was an impulse buy, from a discount rack, at a discount craft store. I normally don’t succumb to impulse buys, because the thread I dangle from will not support them and groceries in the same week.

But, I was in the big city (Nashville) which is a rare thing, waiting in the parking lot of a musical instrument store for the boys to make their cable purchase (modern musicianship requires an amazing variety of cables) and there was this Hobby Lobby next door. Coming home from the big city without even a tiny souvenir seems a bit too spartan, but normally it is something like a box of stevia for sweetening, or something for the garden from Lowes that I can’t get locally.

I wandered through the entire store and as usual couldn’t find anything that I couldn’t live without, till I saw the “spray on” dye. Yep, it is in a spray can like paint, and you spray it on t-shirts and tote bags and such. How ungreen and wasteful is this? You can mix up dye and sponge it on the surface with the same results without the waste of the metal and manufacturing of the can…with a mixture of much guilt and much glee I brought it home.

It is intended for cotton, of course, but I threw down an old skein of worsted weight handspun romney lamb two ply onto a piece of newspaper and sprayed one side of it and one side of a matching sample square of knitting.

I let it dry a few days (got sidetracked on to something else) and then washed them both vigorously, fully expecting the dye to wash out, but it did not. Then I unraveled the knitting and compared it to the skein, the color repeats where about what you would expect, the knitted piece was short repeats of pink and white, the skein was long repeats. But the surprise was, it was nice! Soft hand, pretty, color (cranberry, I think it was) Could it be obtained in another way? sure, was this insanely quick and easy? sure. Kinda like the difference between a home cooked meal and going through the drive through. Not something you would normally confess or encourage, but it was interesting.

I balled them both up and took this photo to document the color, then set them aside, till now.

Read more...

hops and hemp (and fiber, too)

Hey Beadnik! your hops guess was a good one, because that was going to be my next “guess this photo”

Here it is, coming up self seeded in the pots by my outdoor shower.

Now, I have always read that hops are difficult to get started, but that has not been my experience. These came from the Whitewater River in South Eastern Indiana. Hops grows wild all over the river banks there. Introduced by the early German settlers, I would imagine. This would be the rampant, wild type, not the fancy, highly sought after beer making varietal types. When I lived in Metamora, I had a large (and exclusively) container grown garden, having no yard to speak of. I had hops in a pot growing up the porch railing. When I brought some of the potted perennials back down to Tennessee with me, the hops seeds, prolific and hidden in the dirt, came along too.

Each year I train them up the posts of the outdoor shower and collect, dry and jar some of the hops (female flower cones, called strobiles) for tea for when you can’t sleep. I emphasize the training part, cause these rampant, weedy vines are very scratchy, and they can cut you, cut you bad, if they nod over onto your naked body while you are showering.

You are probably asking what this has to do with fiber. Well, hops and hemp are in the same family (Cannabaceae) and both are paper making candidates. Home scale paper making is is one of those arts that appeals to fiber people, but others get that little wrinkle in the middle of their forehead and have to wonder why…

Anyway, I am back on hemp and during research stumbled on this interesting page from the hemp museum on the chronology of paper making. I found the notes that “by the 1860’s America used more paper than france and england combined” really revealing as well as that in this time period 88% of the content of paper was still made from recycled rags. If you are like me and into chronologies, this is fascinating stuff…

Read more...

buds and blooms

I was just about to post these three photos, all in one post…to give the extra hint to the extra credit question of “what is this spring bud”…

The first one posted with its hemp cowl,

the second one a week later, (notice I haven’t had time to knit the hemp yet)

and the last one, with its rain soaked  flower buds..

But then Cyndy guessed it, without the the final photo hint! Yep, the common lilac.

Today, at 4.00 pm in the afternoon, the sun came out. First time in weeks and weeks. I stood awestruck like some alien on a newfound planet,  stopped in my tracks by the colors that have been missing all winter. One minute of sunshine can bring a million colors out of a single gray, muddy and winter weary hillside. Sigh. I can make it through now.

Read more...