So much fiber, so little time

Mostly done!

I just finished the last row of the shawl body! Now I'll thread a lifeline into it and start the edging. Maybe I'll be able to deliver it early next week, assuming, of course, that I can translate my scrawled notes into a coherent pattern.

Four more Keeshond hats are up for auction right now. The bidding is a little sluggish but should pick up as the auction comes to a close.

Thanks for the toe condolences :) It looks really ugly and will undoubtedly get worse as the bruise works through the technicolor cycle, but it doesn't hurt either at rest or while walking.

Self-destruct sequence

Yesterday was a dangerous day. It started with me slipping and falling onto my left foot with my toes curled under. I now have a rather bruised and slightly sprained big toe. Then just an hour later, I cut a finger with a knife. I tried very hard not to hurt myself for the rest of the day.

That meant I knitted almost to the end of the thirteenth repeat, where I'll thread a lifeline. I shouldn't need it, though, since there are 28.5 g of yarn (out of 100) still in the ball.

Meanwhile, I'm going to use my beautiful braising pot to make a batch of lentil soup, and maybe I'll force the mixer to do a loaf of bread. Just the thing for a snowy day!

Requiem for a bread machine

My faithful Zojirushi is dead. I suspected this the last time I tried to use it but hoped I had just seated the paddle and bucket incorrectly. Nope! It went completely belly-up on the bialys. Oh well, Zo was nine or ten years old, and it certainly had a rough life. I have kneaded many loaves with it and also used it for pasta dough*, a far more demanding job. However, the bialys are safe - I dumped the ingredients into the stand mixer with the dough hook. Unfortunately, while the mixer does a great job on soda bread, it's not sturdy enough for frequent yeast bread making.

Shawl update: it's currently 11 repeats long, and I'm hoping to work another repeat today. I would really like to finish it this week.

*Recipe for pasta
1 cup durum flour
1/2 cup semolina flour
2 eggs
1 tbsp olive oil

Put in bucket of bread machine on dough cycle. Keep a spray bottle of water handy to moisten the dough lightly if necessary, but only use enough water to form a very stiff but smooth ball of dough. Let it knead to the end of the cycle. Wrap the ball of dough in plastic to rest until you're ready to roll it out.

Apropos of nothing

Whenever that Kirstie Alley commercial with the soundtrack "It's Raining Men" comes on, I get an overwhelming urge to take up skeet shooting:

PULL!

BOOM!

Ahhhh!

(We now return to your regularly scheduled fiber blog.)

Waaah!

I spent about two hours this morning tinking the shawl because a stitch had dropped, and while it might not fall far in a wool yarn, a dropped silk stitch can worm its way downwards in a hurry. Fortunately, I only had to tink two complete rows to find a spot where I could unpick a short section to make the repair. Now I'm back to where I was when I left off last night.

(OK, OK, the yarn is Andrea from Schaefer Yarn in the color "Mary Breckinridge".)

Knitting onwards

The shawl is 8 repeats (of 14 total) long, which represents about 1/3 of the total stitches to knit. It's going quickly enough, although I do need more movies to watch while knitting. Currently, I'm going through I, Claudius again.

I've also upgraded Fiberworks PCW to version 4.1 and need to explore the new features. The yarns for the dish towels have moved from the stash to the cone holder under the warping board, so I'm that much closer to starting them.

And I've been seized by an urge to cook. My neighbor just gave me a beautiful hand-thrown braising pot she got in Chile. It's brushed with oil and seasoning in a slow oven right now, and I'm going to braise chicken and peppers later on. I also want to bake bialys either today or tomorrow.

Bee-yoo-ti-ful yarn

While I can't show you the shawl until it's on the company's website, I just had to show off the yarn. It's beautiful to look at and to work with.

The biggest problem I have in writing patterns is turning my right brain output into words - another reason why I almost never try to teach anyone to spin: that is a process that has never been verbal for me! For this pattern, I'm scrawling abbreviated notes onto the printed chart and then typing them up later into a somewhat fuller version.

I can explain weaving better, but that's probably because it relies far less on one's kinesthetic sense, except for adjusting warp tension. In fact, I was actually explaining the process just this morning while getting my hair cut. I think I was more or less successful, at least when you consider that I had no visual aids or even hand gestures :)

How a geek designs

Because the design restriction for this project is to use just one skein of yarn, Math Geek Knitter

1. measured the yardage of the sample skein;
2. knitted the sample to the end of the yarn;
3. computed the number of stitches;
4. estimated the total number of stitches one skein will give.
   

Swatch #1 failed the shawl size test, so I charted a whole new pattern and repeated the process. Swatch #2 uses slightly less yarn (more holes in the lace) and will produce a shawl just barely large enough by my standards, with a small amount of yarn left over.

And I have the spreadsheet to prove it :) but I'll probably insert a lifeline at the end of the penultimate repeat just to be safe.

Swatching

My hands are finally smooth enough to work with the silk yarn, and I have begun swatching. So far, so good: the yarn is beautiful, and it's also pleasant to work with.

The double helix hat was a hit. The color matches my friend's coat almost exactly, which is a very happy accident. I certainly didn't dye it with that in mind!

Mad as a hatter

Here's the double helix hat based on June's cable. My friend will definitely be the envy of all the geneticists in her lab. Unfortunately, it's hard to photograph the details without sunlight, and we haven't seen the sun here in ages.

And this is another Keesmere hat for the next auction. I'm also going to add a few of the felted hats that I made a while ago.

It only took five days to need to rebuild Ixchel, a new low even for Mickeysoft. Fortunately, since I only installed two programs, and I did save the drafts, it wasn't as annoying as it could have been.