A Fleece

There is a long standing joke in my family that if you give me a sheep I can make you a sweater. Never has that been more true then recently.

Sadly a member of the Phat Fiber community is having financial difficulties (here is her shop if you'd like to support her) and she therefore started selling off some of her fleeces and I bought a lovely Leicester Longwool fleece that after skirting was about 3.3 lds.

Clean locks

Since Ben is currently on a motorcycle adventure to Death Valley (with a sworn oath he'll come back alive) I decided that this was the perfect time to wash the fleece and start to process it.

I have already washed it by giving it a really hot bath in my washing machine with some dish detergent (no agitation, just a hot water soak for 30 minutes) and then a rinse of another hot bath for 30 minutes. Normally I rinse a fleece about 3-4 times but as this was fairly clean this only needed a bath and a rinse.

half the fleece drying on an elevated screen door with a fan
blowing over it in my kitchen

I then searched up and down the house for my flick carder. I rearranged my entire office, cleaned the closet, cleaned out drawers, dumped out boxes and to this moment I cannot find it. So I went and got a dog brush as they can do in a pinch.

I have now begun the painstaking process of opening up each lock of wool.

Clean, open locks ready to spin.

Something few of you may know is that Leicester Longwool sheep are actually an endangered breed of sheep (less then 500 breeding females registered) and is a cross breed of Leicester, Lincoln, and Ryeland sheep. It has a wonderful crimp to its wool, the color is very creamy and lustrous. However, because the staple of the wool is up to 7" in places I cannot put it through my drum carder and my hand carders are not fine enough for it I need to use a flick carder to open up each end of the lock before spinning it.

It may take me all week to get this fleece processed and I have plan to spin it into a 3-ply DK weight yarn for the Calligraphy Cardigan my heart so wants.

100th Post!

This is it! This is number 100!

I have been waiting and waiting to do this blog because it's umber 100!

Now what could be worth my 100th blog? Well I originally wanted to release the Søt Baby Sweater, but its not done yet, and honestly I've had a few issues with it that I'm not sure when its going to be done.

So instead I'd like to introduce you to a piece of equipment that will soon be sharing its fruit with you, my new knitting machine:

This lovely machine was given to me this past week and I've been learning the ins and outs of it to the point that I can say you'll soon be seeing self striping yarn and yarns with nice long color transitions:

This colorway is called Cherry Blossom and was inspired by the cherry blossom trees that are in front of each house on my street. I'll only be doing a small release of this colorway as I have a limited amount of yarn and tons of ideas. But you'll soon be seeing alot more of these yarns in the future!

A New Knitter

My best friends are made up of craftiness. Courtney can sew, Anna can do nearly anything like cast metal, knit, weave, make paper and draw (she has this degree in art so you should get the idea), and now our friend Stina is learning to knit.

Stina is a wonderful woman that has flaming read hair, does table top role playing, magic, reads all kinds of books, loves to wear heels and if you need an interesting word for something, she's your lady.

To just give you an idea of how cool she is, this picture of her and Anna won Kim Harrison's contest last year for depicting Rachel and Ivy from the Hollows series:

Stina and Anna

With the two around me I never feel like a fiber geek, but as an artist and as someone who does lots of research. So you can imagine my excitement when Stina said she wanted to knit this past summer.

As many of use knitters know getting people into knitting can be hard. We have to carefully draw them in. I think its kinda like fishing. You have to have the right bait for a certain fish and then you have to hook them so fast they don't know what happened.

I last year spent a lot of time on the Wavy Lace Capelet for Stina. Anna had found the pattern when we were at the bookstore she works at and I had taken all that month's knitting magazines to look through while we drank coffee. Its bonding time for us and how I got Anna to start knitting since she loves her magazines. Well Anna found the pattern and we both loved it, but I was unsure who to knit it for till Anna exclaimed in a strike of brilliance that Stina needed it. I agreed and started hunting for the perfect yarn. When I was working Mountain View I had a bit of time on Wednesdays between school and work and hung out at Uncommon Threads. Well wouldn't you know it, they were having a sale the next time I walked in and one of the perks was that if you bought the remaining of a colorway you got it at an eve better discount! I scored some wool and tencel in a deep green that Anna and I thought would go gorgeously with her hair.

I knit it, found the perfect buttons and presented it to her as a late Christmas gift. It looks great and I think was the perfect bait because she asked Anna to teach her how to crotchet and for me to teach her how to knit.

So for her birthday I gave her yarn and the pattern for the Wound Up, with the sworn promise the she can call me day or night to help her with a knitting problem.

Happy Birthday Stina and welcome to the club!

Mønster Mean What?

I've just finished knitting the Mønster til djævlehu. Which means "Pattern for Devils". Its the hat pattern from Babyhue og Sokker (which means "Baby Hat and Socks"):

I get a kick out of the fact that mønster means pattern in Norwegian/Danish. I really could not giggle any harder. I mean how many times have we all sworn at a pattern and knew deep down inside that the pattern was sent from hell. Well its because patterns are mønstre. I also love that this baby hat is for devils.

Feel free to laugh nervously as I giggle myself to madness.

The original pattern can be found here and my English translation, that has been rewritten to be worked in the round, can be found here.

Also, some of you might have noticed that the original pattern is listed as being written in Danish, however, Danish and Norwegian are very similar languages. Which is handy because by learning one you are learning most of the other. Scandinavia and the World do a really good job of showing you who speaks what in the Nordic countries in this strip.

13,000 yards to the pound

For those that know me on Ravelry or Facebook you might have caught wind that some crazy lady is looking for a yarn that is about 28 meters per gram.

That lady would be me.

You see I've been looking to start a couple of projects in such fine lace that one of them is a king size bedspread and when I'm done with it, it will weight less then a pound.

Well I finally found the yarn! I've ordered about 1.3 lbs of it and the book for the Rose of England.

Now you might say that I'm demented ::cough:: JM ::cough::, or you might have felt that I'm a dpn short of a full set, but I feel that I'm up to this challenge. I think it may take me about 2-3 years to finish this shawl but you need to keep in mind that this is not something I'll be using every day and wearing. Its an heirloom I plan on leaving to my kids someday so that they will have proof of how crazy I really was:

Thanks to TheresaKnits of Ravelry for the photo

Growing Up Norwegian

Today I was cold. Ben thought that opening all the windows downstairs would help warm it up, but once I started complaining that it was cold, and went to get a sweater, he realized that I get cold easily and closed all the windows.

This is actually a common occurrence in our home and somewhat of a joke as my genome is one that is firmly planted in Scandinavia and I was raised in a Norwegian family. Alas however, I am always cold.

It got me thinking, my family has only been in the country for 3 generations and I have family photos of my great grandmother swathed in knit wear. Really it was not that long ago that I would have been really screwed if I did not know how to knit.

When I mean screwed I mean that today Oslo reached a peak temperature of 27°F and it snowed. 27°F is below freezing and from my time living in Colorado I can tell you that if you had sneezed while outside today in Oslo your snot would have frozen in your nose.

This proves to me that the fact that at 5 years old, when I was given my first knitting and crochet lesson from my grandma, that knitting was not only tradition, but might have been mandatory for my grandmother. The love of fiber crafts completely skipped my mother though.

Not only was fiber arts a tradition in the family, but I also was part of the Santa Lucia celebrations at my local Viking Hall till the age of 13:

I'm left center. My aunt is top right and
mostly cut off

Every year my family went to the Santa Lucia festival and everyone bought loads of raffle tickets, because the ladies of the hall would all donate something handmade, or a tradition Scandinavian item for the raffle. We all hoped for quilts, sweaters, food, or anything else that was beyond my mother's skill. One year I even won the Christmas Tree (imagine my mother's surprise when I came home with a tree).

I think this was where my desire to learn to knit fair isle comes from. I remember looking at the sweaters and mittens and knowing that someone had made them, but not believing it as it seemed impossible that someone could make these things without computers or machines.

Now that I'm much older, and have tons of research on my side, I'm beginning to dive into traditional fair isle.

Most knitters might knit a coffee cozy to test stranded knitting but I decided that if I'm going to master this then I might as well dive into the deep end and start knitting a sweater that includes steeking and learn some Norwegian so that I can start to read Norwegian patterns.

The goal this year is to master fair isle knitting and to order the Gold Bohus kit from the Bohsläns Museum:

That sweater will be mine and just to show dedication to it I've started to translate the Babyhue og sokker as my first step in learning Norwegian/Danish.

Minerva 1.2

Almost 2 years ago I welcomed my first brand new laptop into my life and named it Minerva 1.0. Subsequently it turned out to just be pile of junk and was determined a lemon so they gave me another one, Minerva 1.2.

Minerva 1.2 and I have been through a total of 1.5 years of school, many moves, ups and downs, but now its time to say good bye to her.

It started with just a small bruise on her monitor, then I noticed that it had a similar flaw to her predecessor (a blind spot on the space key), a small chip after I'd dropped her on the stairs, but now the video card is starting to short out and my extended warranty is about to expire.

This will sadly be the last post I write on her.

I'm completely sure of this as when I brought it in to get taken a look at the young woman at Best Buy giggled after I read the laundry list of what was wrong with Minerva 1.2 and asked how long it would take to get fixed. I was informed that they would just replace it, but it would take 4-6 weeks for them to verify that. She then laughed while looking at my original receipt and said it was a good thing I got the extended warranty. I found none of this funny as she began to pull out the paperwork for us to send it in there and then. I told her I was not ready and I had to back up my information before I sent it in.

Today the external hard drive I ordered (I named him William Defoe because he's stamped with WD on top) arrived and I've been feeling sick ever since.

This little black box is suppose to be the new carrier and guardian of my information and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Actually I can tell you how I feel about it. I don't trust it. I'm so horrible with technology and electronics that its a running joke in my family and when something acts up in the house Ben will always ask what I did (we tend to go through a lot of light bulbs and he blames me).

So now I'm transferring my information onto this little black box that claims to be large enough to hold everything (it claims to be 1.5 terabytes)

Please join me in a moment of silence as we all say good-bye to Minerva 1.2

She was the best of companions

Minerva 1.2 (William is next to my coffee cup)