Tiresome Paper Dreams

I wish I could say I’ve been more productive this last week. I finally finished the Kate socks. They look so good. I can construe why the designer didn’t carry the pattern past the cuff of the sock. The stitch pattern wants to twist so it makes getting it on a bit of a chore. The colors came out beautifully.

The new Yarn Pirate bamboo blend yarn is heavenly. I’ve been trying to knit some “lighter” socks to wear to bed in the warmer months - merino/tencel, seacell and bamboo seem to fit the bill.

The Coral Beach skein came out nicely. My only complaint is it turned my fingers blue spinning it.

I fixed the plying on my Creatively Dyed skein. It looks 10,000 times better. Thanks for the tip Amariaj (she has GORGEOUS handspun in her flickr stream).

Then I moved onto Butterscotch goodness. I dyed up this carded corriedale wool. It’s not superwash.

I don’t love the feel of this one. It’s a bit scratchy like Lopi. It was easy to spin though and is my best handspun yet. I tried really hard to control the size of the singles to make them more even.

I started two pairs of socks (which is so unlike me to be a WIP whore). I wanted to knit some of my handspun up. This is from the Seasick roving I dyed up. I’m spinning at about a worsted weight as my size 5 needles seem too small. These socks are dense! If I have enough yarn to do a pair, they are destined for my mom. I know for sure there isn’t enough for my size 8.5 feet.

The other pair is some Sea Yarn from Creatively Dyed. I don’t know which color it is as the label was missing when I bought it last month. I’m using a stitch pattern from the Lace & Eyelets book from Interweave. I had to frog back to the ribbed cuff as the pattern looked like blobs of lace holes and not the swatch picture. It took my very savy mom to point out that the starting points should be different on each row - which they weren’t the way the pattern is displayed in the book. We charted out the whole thing to figure out why the repeat wasn’t working. I think the * is in the wrong place on the whole pattern. Normally you can drop off the stitches outside a * for knitting in the round and it works just fine. I’m debating emailing Interweave. Now that the pattern is fixed, it looks great. I’ll show it off when I further along.

Total shop pimpage here but please go check out Yarn Zombie’s new etsy shop, Gaslight Dyeworks. The fiber balls are lush and exceptional. I’m saving the set she gave me for when I am an expert spinning spider.

Well I guess I was more productive than I thought. I have a sack of yarn to dye up that I’ve been putting off. I finally feel motivated to do some work. I have a couple of new colorways I’ve been kicking around in my head that may get cast up today. I’ve been enjoying my new Kooks CD so I’ll probably pop that in while I’m laying out the stripes.