For your spinning pleasure, new hand dyed superwash merino tops. Loving the gradients!
I put Tiger Club in the mail on Saturday morning (squees are appearing on Ravelry!), and spent the rest of the weekend on the bathroom project. Somehow I didn’t take a picture of the thing torn down to the studs, but that keeps me from boring you to tears, right? Anyway, here is our progress on the new look.
Things I learned…..cement board is heavy. Despite assurances that it cuts and snaps just like drywall, it does not. Always be sure the line you are measuring from is, indeed, straight to begin with. Despite comments that thinset can be difficult to get the right consistency, I had no trouble. And best of all…..Mr. Tiger and I can work on a project together without a fight.
I thought we would be clever and have the tub sprayed white before we put the surround on, but the spray people assured me that we should finish everything up first. So, we’ll have our bathroom all done in a weekend or two…..except for the pink tub which will get sprayed later in April.
I’ll be very glad to see the backside of this project. This room was avowed to be the first remodeled when we moved in, yet here it is nearly 5 years later. I find it amusing, but that’s the way it all worked out.
Off to work on a fiber update, and dinner…..fried rice tonight, and choir practice.
Last month, I showed you my lovely stack of boxes full of fibery good stuff…..well it is time to show you a preview of what was in the largest two boxes, since it is the March FotM. I (of course) immediately opened one of the boxes, and out poofed this:
Here’s a close up of the loveliness. This is Michigan raised, and processed just for The Painted Tiger at Zeilinger’s. It is fabulous (yes, I grabbed some and sat down to spin RIGHT AWAY!!), and I’m so excited to send this fiber out for club this month. Not in Tiger Club? I did order plenty, so look for this new wool to appear in the shop in April.
While the new wool has been stewing up in the dyepots, Mr. Tiger and I have been working on this project over his spring break. See that lovely 50’s turquoise tile?
Yup, it was all around the tub, and we removed it. As projects go, we’ve hit a snag, and the walls are currently sitting open to dry out instead of the new and improved shower being there. Oh well, I’m going to see if the tub spraying place can come by this week and make my lovely dusty pink tub a nice sparkling white. It’d be easier to do it before we start putting things back together. Thankfully the other bathroom has a shower, so we don’t have to rush things.
When I get a chance, I’ve been working on this lovely merino/bamboo/nylon blend I bought at Wisconsin Sheep and Wool. It is turquoise and sage entitled ‘Mountain Mist’. I originally planned a 3 ply sock, and have been tearing bits off the end to spin from the fold.
The more I watch the color blend and go by, the more I want to preserve this color structure, and I want it to go further. So the current plan is to spin it all up, dye something solid to coordinate or enhance it, and knit a shawl, perhaps in entrelac to show off the undulating color changes. Will I wear a shawl? I dunno, so the plan my change again. Suggestions for project or color to ply this with are welcome!
And I’ll leave you with one of our marvelous neighborhood friends. This hawk and mate nest in our neighborhood, and posed nicely for me the other day.
Time for February Reveal! Here is Spiced Chai on Bengal and Shetland:
Here’s a bit I’ve spun up….
There has been a request for more of the Shetland, if anyone in the club is interested let me know….a full batch per my recipe is one pound, if there are 2 interested in 8oz or 4 in 4oz, I’d be happy to run another batch.
There are a few more days (until the 15th) to sign up to get Tiger Club for March. The fiber hails from Michigan sheep, and was processed just for me by a smaller mill…..you know it will be special!
Well, this may be a bit fashionably late, but I finally have some MCN (that’s superwash merino, cashmere, and nylon sock yarn) up in the shop in 5 scrumptious colors. It is as soft as you imagine, and will make stunning socks, mitts, hats, scarves, you name it! The rest of the update is Tiger Twist. Squishy as always!
The colors I’ve started with are kettle variegated, and would look amazing woven up on a rigid heddle loom. Whip out your Cricket and get some scarves put away for next Christmas’ giving!
This here is what I did with my President’s Day weekend! RiverChor (the community choir I sing with) was part of the 100th birthday celebration for Ronald Reagan in his childhood town of Dixon, Illinois. We sang a half hour set, then Eureka College Chamber Singers did a set. After intermission, the Dixon Municipal Band performed several selections. Finally, we all massed together (and added the Rockford Choral Union) on a commissioned piece. Composer Dr. David Holesinger was on hand to conduct “Reagan of Illinois”. We performed the entire concert twice on Saturday, and I really enjoyed the performance time, plus the down time in between to get to know my fellow choir members better.
This week, I’m busy dyeing up club (ack, why does February have to be so short?!?!!), and catching up on things….including sleep. We had all enjoyed coming out of hibernation with the lovely sunny warm weather, but the snow and damp and cold are back, so it can be hard to get moving sometimes! For those occasions, a nice warm beverage can help, and that is just what Tiger Club members will receive for their February shipment……tease, tease!
Well, I had hoped to triumphantly show you at least one finished mawata silk glove in this post, but I just haven’t had the time to work on this that I thought I would have……so this will have to do for now!
I have been dyeing up silk hankies to add to the site, they take longer than you would think…..that silk just does not like to get wet, and then it loves to sluuuuuuuuurp up the dye! Here’s the newly added hankies, some sets, some singles.
I’ve been a busy bee, so watch soon for a sock yarn update….I have Tiger Twist and a new MCN yarn for you. And don’t forget….you have until the 15th to sign up for the February Tiger Club! Wouldn’t that be a great thing to receive from your Valentine? 😉
Have you ever seen a sun dog? It’s a halo around the sun when there’s an atmospheric flurry of ice crystals, but they show up much better when the sun is low in the sky. We had one this morning, and I thought you’d like to see it!
Join me on a photo tutorial of making gloves from Mawata Silk Hankies! This project is inspired by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s silk mittens, as you can read about in yesterday’s blog post. Here are 4 hand dyed hankies, about 1 ounce or 30 grams total, two in shades of green, and two in shades of tan and brown. Yes, I tried to match the yarn that will be a woven scarf thing….eventually….when I’ve lost my fear of the ‘big’ loom.
So what do you do with a silk hankie? In order to knit with the hankie, you must go through much the same process required to spin them. The first step is to peel off one layer. A hankie is actually about 12 cocoons that have been stretched over a frame. You want just one cocoon at a time. If you look at the edges, it is generally pretty easy to see the separate layers. Be sure you have the top one, and peel it off.
Now that you have one layer of the hankie, using the fingers of both hands, poke a hole through the center of it. You may have discovered by now that silk is very sticky and snaggy…….if you are having a lot of trouble, you might like to do this with smooth gloves on (like dishwashing), or treat yourself to a scrub made of olive oil and salt or sugar. Anyway, poke your hole, then pull it into a circle with both hands. (My other hand is taking pictures, yours can just pull!)
You will continue to pull the circle out, thinner and thinner. Keep your hands about a foot and a half apart, pull until the silk moves a few inches, then move your hands around the circle a bit, and repeat. You’ll go around a bunch of times. Some places will be thicker than others and need more attenuating. Just keep at it. This can be hard on the hands, the silk can be tough to pull, especially if your hands are too close together. If you pull too hard and it breaks, your first one is free……you’ll need to break the circle eventually anyway! In hand knitting, extra breaks are no big deal, just join them when knitting. For doing this on the knitting machine, though, you will prefer as few joins as possible.
For my gloves, I didn’t want a stripey look, so I’m combining my colors to make something more subtly striping and tweedy. To do this, I’m pulling two hankies of different colors together at the same time. I’m using the lighter green with the darker brown, and the dark green with the tan. I want to repeat the patterning on the second glove, so I am pulling two layers from each hankie and setting the second hankies aside in an organized-ish stack as I go.
I found that attenuating the hankies went faster (and with less hand-hurting) if I pulled each separately until it was about half to three-quarters the length I wanted and only pulled them together for the last bit. This also let me concentrate on the thicker bits and made a more even ‘yarn’. I did some experimental swatching earlier, and came up with a thickness I liked. I’m shooting for a fingering weight yarn, and pulling the hankies out to about 20 feet (7-ish yards) in length is about right. If you are using one strand at a time, you would need to pull it only half as much.
To save myself from painfully disentangling fluff and getting snagged on everything in my studio, I stored my attenuated silk hankies on cones. TP tubes would actually work better, you want to feed this off the side while knitting…..letting it unwind from the top leads to snags and snarls. I also learned that if I put a slight bit of twist in the ‘yarn’ as I wrapped it on the cone, I would have much less trouble feeding it off later. To give myself a break from attenuating and bending over the machine, I alternated the yarn making and knitting. You can certainly do all your attenuating ahead of time, but I suggest keeping the layers of stretched hankies separate on your storage devices….insert a layer of tissue or wrap, it will make undoing it later much easier.
Now on to the knitting machine. This is my Brother 930 with matching ribber, set up to do 1×1 ribbing. I’m using a glove pattern from this ‘free’ pattern generator (if you decide to use it, do please donate….I’m quite happy so far with my pattern. There are hand knit patterns there, also.) I used some leftover sock yarn to get some knitting on the machine, then a row of ravel cord. The picture below is taking the ribber carriage across by itself to drop the ribber stitches. This will make it easy to pull the cord out later and a have a perfect ‘broken toe’ cast on.
After this, knit one row on zero tension, set the main bed to slip, knit one row, then return the carriage to knit and set both carriages to T5 (or whatever you are using from your swatching). The thought of this rustic yarn in the tension device gave me the heebie-jeebies, so yes….I become the yarn feed for this project. Besides being sure the silk is coming off the cone smoothly, you must be careful to pull the silk up as you change directions so you don’t get accidental loops on each side. It behaves quite well….when kept under tension.
Another trick is pulling the needles to be knit out, on every row. While swatching, I had a problem with a dropped stitch and realized how impossible a task such a thing would be to latch up. So the goal is to not have any dropped stitches. This is the best way to ensure that every stitch knits off, every time.
What do you do when you reach an end? Fold each part back onto itself, clasped in a Russian Join. You can twist the old end back and forth on itself a bit to get it to hold long enough to get knit in.
This is a slub and some noils. You will see these from time to time. If they aren’t too large, just let them knit in, it won’t hurt anything. (Exhibit A of why we are pulling the needles out on every row!)
Huzzah, I’ve finished the ribbing! The pattern gives details on how to knit off half the stitches so you can scrap them off and rehang them, but I got out my handy-dandy garter bar, since it is faster and less fussy. Below, you can see the stitches on the left that I need to move to the needles on the ribber bed on the lower right. (And hey, you can see the ribbing! Yay!)
After pulling the stitches onto the garter bar, I did some careful gymnastics and got it turned and facing the other direction, now just a quick pull of the stitches down onto the ribber bed…..
And it is time to say goodbye to the glove again for awhile. I’m sad about this disadvantage of machine knitting, but glad I’ll have the gloves finished sooner.
From that point, I continued following the pattern up to where it calls for scrapping off the finger stitches. Again, not thrilled with scrapping and re-hanging, especially with this not-fully-formed yarn, so I decided to knit the stitches by hand with scrap yarn, pulling them to non-working. To fit the extra ‘between the finger’ stitches in, I needed to move the index finger stitches over a few, but I’d prefer that than to lose my work so far. Here we are….all ready for that index finger. I hope to finish this first glove tomorrow.
I’ll admit, I don’t always keep up on the knitting community, especially now that I’ve discovered spinning and weaving. During my Ravelry forum wanderings yesterday, something caught my eye. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (aka the Yarn Harlot), blogged about some lovely mittens she had made. Cushy fluffy hand ovens, she says. Oh yeah, I need me some of that.
What did she make these wondrous things from? Silk Hankies! Oh, those are for spinning or felting, you may say. Not so! You can simply attenuate them (fancy talk for sticking your hands in the center and pulling out, then pulling gently around the circle until the silk is the thickness you want), and then….get this…..just simply KNIT or CROCHET with it, NO TWIST REQUIRED!!! Can you tell my mind was blown at the thought of owning SILK things for my hands? Yeah.
The trick, or catch? I just can’t bring myself to simply ‘copy’ and make mittens. I must be contrary and/or non-crowd following. So…..I’m going to make gloves, and I’m going to try to do it on my knitting machine….because after all, it is going to be below zero next week, and I want those hand-ovens NAO already!
As it happens, I have Mawata silk hankies here, I’ve been dyeing them various solid colors over the past week, and am greatly amused at my good fortune in timing. I’ll be listing what I have tomorrow, and furiously dyeing up the rest, just in case you want to make your own silk mittens.
I have a skein each of brown and green Tiger Cub that I snagged when I discontinued that yarn, because although I didn’t care for it so much as socks, it makes a nice scarf yarn. I’m going to weave a houndtooth wide scarf/shawl thingy from them. I took these over to my little pile of dyed silk hankies, and pulled out 4 that coordinated in color.
I weighed them out, and it’s 30 grams, what Stephanie used for hers. Since I’m shooting for gloves (and my hands are bigger), I’m going to attenuate my hankies much further than ‘sorta light worsted weight’. In fact, I’m going to go much further than that, since I want to hold two colors together to knit them. I don’t want stripey gloves, but a nice amalgam of the 4 hankies. My plan will be to peel two hankies every time I take one, and set the second aside for glove 2, that way if I run out, at least they will both stop near the same point, and I can do the fingers in a different color without it looking too weird.
So now, my to-do list consists of researching glove patterns for my Brother 930, and tomorrow I’m going to stretch and swatch some other hankies I have to get a better idea of how it will all work. Plus I need to do a good olive oil/sugar scrub on my hands…..silk likes to stick to even the slightest roughness, so smoother hands will make the whole process go more smoothly (ha!).
Have an exciting project lined up for the weekend? I’d love to hear about it…. stop by on Facebook or Ravelry!
