Second Chance Spider Part 2

Organizing the bag...

From my first attempt to knit October is for Spinners, I learned the hard way that working with 4 balls of yarn at a time can get tricky real quick. The strands tangle around each other and make a tangled mess if you're not careful.

This time, it was my goal to prevent that from happening in order to make the chances of successfully finishing the project just a little better. I set about doing that by organizing my knitting bag very carefully in the process of setting up for the knit.

First, I had my four yarn balls. Each one was, by sheer coincidence, just a bit bigger than the one before it. This led me to assign each ball a number, with 4 being the smallest ball and 1 being the largest. After I had wound each ball, I took little sandwich-sized Ziploc baggies and wrote a number on each one, then put the corresponding ball in the baggie. Then I took each baggie and safety pinned it to the lining of my knitting bag in order. I wasn't sure it would work, but I had to try something to keep my precious harvest from becoming an unusable, tangled mess.

Then I made sure I had all of my needles tucked into the bag. I decided to use circs for this project because I honestly hate most of my straight needles (most of them are way too long for my preferences), so I selected the appropriate sizes and tucked the lot into one of the pockets of my bag. Then I made sure I had all my other little odds and ends tucked into another pocket.

Last but not least, I printed out my pattern and tucked it into the bag alongside my Stitch n' Bitch book, which is like my go-to guide if I run into something I'm not sure how to do.

Did it work?

Oh hell yes.

As of this posting, I'm 133 rows in, past the spider itself and into the lace. The lace is a bit trickier than I had anticipated, but that owes more to my own lack of attention span than to the difficulty of the pattern. I'm hoping I can get about another 30 rows done today. * fingers crossed *

Second Chance Spider Part 1

I haven't always been a relatively fearless knitter. In fact, I was afraid to even try knitting in the round until this time last year.

Up until I made my Pink Ice Cream Mitts, all I knitted were scarves. After I made those gloves and a few others, I felt confident I could handle anything in spite of the fact that I'd not yet tried to do a great many knitting techniques.

Spurred on by my new-found bravado, I ordered some Skacel Merino Lace and set about trying to knit October is for Spinners sometime last November. I tried hard to make it work for a month or more before I realized it just wasn't coming out right and gave up. Why wasn't it working out? For starters, the "laceweight" yarn I was using was extremely lightweight. More like cobweb than anything else I've ever encountered. This made the gauge waaaay too open and airy for the twisted stitch pattern that forms the spider to ever take shape properly.

The second point of failure was my knitting skills. They just weren't up to the task at the time. I lacked the full understanding of how stitch patterns work, how lace works, how cables work. My patience wasn't so great either, so I found myself wanting to fly through it in a hurry. That doesn't work so well, now that I think of it.

So The Spider hit the Frog Pond, and I've been too scared of it ever since to bother with it....

Until I recycled that first sweater.

That first sweater, the grey Ralph Lauren Polo cabled sweater, decided that it wanted to be The Spider as I was unraveling the first sleeve. It said, "Wouldn't I be beautiful all knit up into that scarf? Wouldn't I be soft? Wouldn't I be lovely?" I said, "Yes, as a matter of fact, you would. Let's do this thing."*

And that was that. So the whole time I was unraveling the rest of the sweater, wrapping the harvested yarn into hanks, steaming the kinks from the hanks and winding the straightened hanks into center-pull balls (BALLS! Not EGGS!! Yaaaay!), I was imagining how lovely this damned intimidating spider was going to be once it was all finished.

I cast it on yesterday, after an interesting and in-depth preparation process that will hopefully streamline this whole process. That process will be the subject of my next post.

_{* Yes, I realize it makes me seem a bit crazy, what with talking yarn and me talking back to it. Just to assure you that I'm not completely and totally off my rocker (at least not in a bad way), I'm adding the little disclaimer that the above conversation is metaphoric. :P}

Hot and Steamy

I'm nearing the end of the process of making my recycled yarn reusable. Finally!

Having successfully unraveled my first sweater and wound the harvested yarn into nice neat little hanks, I set about trying to relax the kinks from the yarn being knit up into the original sweater.

I researched a little before choosing my method. The most common method I came across was soaking and weighting, which involves soaking the yarn in hot water for about an hour, then hanging the hanks up to dry while weighted down with something (most often cans of food from the pantry). I didn't particularly want to use this method because 1) it's a soggy mess and 2) from what I've read, it takes a couple days for the yarn to dry. I don't like soggy messes and I have absolutely no patience to wait for the yarn to dry, so this method was definitely out.

The other method I came across was steaming. My first thought was, "What am I gonna steam this with?", but then I read a post in a Ravelry thread that mentioned using a tea kettle. Perfect.

I set to steaming my yarn pretty quickly after that, and have now gotten all but one hank steamed straight, dried and twisted into hanks. Once the sun goes down tonight, I'm gonna steam up the last one so I can cast on the project I've decided on for my precious harvest...

October is for Spinners. This will be my second attempt at what I think of as The Spider. Hopefully this time around, my skills will be up to par.

The Niddy-Noddy

My niddy-noddy finally came. I am stoked. I've already used it to hank up one of the balls from my merino/angora reclamation and I absolutely love it. It threw me for a bit of a loop just how tiny this little niddy-noddy is. It came in a teeny little bubble mailer, unassembled, with directions for assembly and use. The longest piece of it is about 6" long. I thought, "Well how is this gonna work? It's so small I won't be able to weigh down the yarn." But I went ahead with it anyway.

It took me about 5 minutes to figure out how to wrap the yarn around it, but once I got going, it made perfect sense. Its small size makes it sooo easy to wrap the hanks quickly. I'm absolutely thrilled.

In addition to loving my niddy-noddy, I've been learning about dyeing yarn and/or fiber with KoolAid. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm itching to. There are a couple of sacrificial sweaters in my frogpile that could do with overdyeing because they're currently hideous. Tomorrow might be the day to play with that. *plots*

Waiting...

In addition to being an isolated fiber junkie (there's not a LYS within 50 miles of my house!), I'm also a bit of a bargain hunter. As a direct result of this combination, I often find myself purchasing my fiber-related supplies from eBay.

Currently, I'm waiting for my niddy-noddy and three sets of bamboo circs. The circs will take a while, since they're coming from China. The niddy-noddy should be here in a few days. Meanwhile, I'm going crazy waiting for it.

I'm waiting to hank up my pretty recycled yarn and un-crinkle it. Dammit. :|

Recycled

So, as of about ten seconds ago, I officially finished frogging my first "recycled" sweater. My thumb aches from wrapping yarn around it all weekend into center-pull balls, but it's worth it not to have my precious harvest all tangled up. I ended up with four good-sized center-pull eggs (my hand-wound yarn balls always end up egg-shaped for some reason), one medium-sized ball, three small balls and two teeny tiny ones, along with a fistful of waste yarn (strands that broke, strands that were part of weird shaping spots and strands from teh segment I had to cut out because there was an embroidered logo that I just couldn't pluck out).

When my niddy-noddy gets here, I'm gonna hank it all up and de-ramenify it. Then, it will become an October is for Spinners scarf.

My next victim will be the blue merino, now that I have a seam ripper and a clue.

As for knitting, once I get my recycled yarn tucked away for the night, I'm going to ball up my gorgeous Miss Piggy sock yarn from Wild Hare Fiber Studio tonight so I can cast on for Sunday Swing Socks. I think the pattern is just busy enough to keep the knitting interesting while not overwhelming the handpainted yarn.

All in all, today has been a good fiber day for me. :)

Indecision

Since finishing my last project, my gorgeous but slightly-incorrect BlackRose Socks, I've been unable to decide what I want to knit next. I have a bunch of yarn in my stash and a ton of patterns in my Ravelry queue, but nothing seems to tickle my fancy enough to pick up the sticks and go to it.

Is it knitter's block?

Whatever this thing is that's causing me to stop dead in my tracks before I even cast on a project, it's making me fucking cranky and I don't like it.

Meanwhile, I ordered a pretty little niddy-noddy today for very, very little money. Don't worry, Hubby. I'll find somewhere to put it. :P