Socks!

Walk-like-an-Egyptian style.

Sooo happy with how these came out. They're toe-up, with regular flap heels. I mentioned that I ripped them both back from mostly-done all the way down to the ankle, and that was *definitely* the right choice. I went from knitting on 0's to 1's a bit above the ankle, and from 1's to 2's around the bottom of the calf. There were a few increases, then decreases, at the back of the calf, then I went back down to 1's on the inside of the picot hem. No elastic needed, they're *perfect*. I really want to bring them home with me, but it's going to be pretty warm for wooly kneesocks.

The striped part contains exactly one ball of Regia per sock, and the heels, toes, and hem on top used about a half-ball of Lang Jawoll all together. If you wanted all one color, a third ball of Regia would probably be enough for most sizes.

It just needs to cool off enough for me to wear these, now. I have a navy skirt that is their mostly likely companion in the fall and spring, and in the winter I'll just wear them under pants, on days that I don't quite want to wear long underwear.

A quick "what am I knitting" post, since I actually have been doing fibery stuff lately.

Green Sweater: The one I've done a bunch of design-themed entries about. Both sleeves are done, with very different sleeve caps, and are basted in. I wanted to be able to compare the two directly because I thought that the right choice would be obvious in a side-by-side comparison, since one sleeve cap is about 50% wider than the other.

But the sweater insists on being a hassle by not making one sleeve cap obviously horrible. they do look slightly different, when I'm looking carefully; the wider one makes the sweater look a little slouchier, the narrower one makes the lines a little cleaner. But I'm worried that the narrower one will be to narrow with an actual long-sleeved shirt underneath. But I've also been too lazy to try it on with a long-sleeved shirt underneath, which tells you my level of excitement with the project. It also needs a neck, and I feel about picking up stitches the way most knitters feel about finishing. Bleah.

Total time needed to finish: less than a week. A good productive weekend would probably do it. Also, I way overestimated the yarn on this, but I don't know how--it's a 40-inch circumference sweater, but I've got two untouched skeins of yarn left. Crazy.

Striped toe-up kneesocks: Using the sock yarn in the lower left corner in this pic, with heels, toes, and top edging that uses the plain dark green next to it. This yarn, Regia Mini Ringel, I love it so much. It does really interesting striping things, and now one of the women at a local knitting group I've started to go to wants to knit socks for the first time, purely to use this yarn.

I had both kneesocks about 80% knitted when I finally tried them on (both were still on the needles in a yarn-maximizing strategy--if I had any leftover from one ball I was going to use it up on the other sock). Tragedy--they *barely* fit over my foot, and though they were technically fine through the leg, I knew I'd avoid wearing them if I had to pull like Cinderella's stepsisters to fit them on in the morning.

Here's the thing: I like knitting the foot of socks on size 0 US needles because my dainty hooves can feel purl bumps when I knit socks on 1's or 2's. But size 0's also make a very stiff fabric. So I ripped both socks back to the ankle and switched to size 1's, because purl bumps against my leg don't bother me. As I got to my calf, I switched to 2's, and then added a few increases farther up. Success! They don't look floppy and baggy, but they have enough give that I can fit my foot, and the fabric feels nicer. I'm more-or-less back to the point when I ripped out last week, mid-calf on sock #2. Once I use up the stripey yarn, I'm going to do a smallish picot hem with the plain green yarn. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to sew some elastic into the tops, I'll probably putter around the house with almost-done socks for an hour or so (the last row held loosely with yarn), to find if they fall down when left to their own devices. But I'm really looking forward to wearing these, they're perfect for this time of year.

Time needed to finish: A full week of dedicated bus-knitting, and an evening of wearing them about. They may take longer if I need elastic, since I'll need to go find a place that has it, but I'd like to bring them when I go home for a few days.

Blue Fair-Isle Sweater: Poor blue Fair Isle, I haven't worked on it in ages, and I've hardly thought of it, either. I'm starting to think about more complex projects again so I might pick it up once I finish the green sweater and those socks. It needs most of a sleeve and a button band. I'm definitely going to finish it before I work on any of the other complicated things I'm thinking about. Time needed to finish it: maybe a month? Significant, but not so bad considering it's been sitting around forlornly for a year and a half. I need to clear that space in my yarn bin.

New Shiny Thing That Has Caught My Brain: An idea for that award-winning reddish-purple laceweight, which has defied all other ideas so far. Since this one has stuck, it must mean it's the right one.

For a few days, I've been thinking about this entry, by someone who does beautiful things with beads and wire. Anyway, in that entry she talks about how much she loves it when art inspires different art. But since artists have no money but lots of talent-wealth, she's worked out this really neat system of bartering with People With Talent that fall in love with one of her pieces, and get inspired by it, but can't afford to buy it.

She's done this with writers, mostly, getting short stories or poems in exchange, but it got me thinking: what would that cross-pollination look like between two visual media? I'd spent a lot of time looking at this hair doodle a few weeks ago, which I could technically have afforded but which would've caused me a lot of stress to buy at that particular moment, August being what it was. It has some other home now, which is just as well, but the linked thoughts of cross-pollination, and that pretty thing, and turning beads into knitting floated around in my mind for a few days. The whole thing slid into place as I was falling asleep on Saturday night, and mostly I'm just glad I remembered it the next day.

I'll be using that laceweight merino, which is a similar color to those little beads, and I have a lace design sketched out. It's not a very intense pattern, so I think this might be my bus-knitting project in the near future. But I'm really pleased with my own brain, and I really like the pattern idea, and I think it'll go well in this Theoretical Pattern Collection that I'll publish on lulu someday. (Actually, there's two Theoretical Pattern Collections--one upon the motif of "Very Silly", the other (mostly) serious lace. But as of right now, each collection only has, er, two patterns. So it'll really be a long time before anyone sees that.)

So, yarn design.

I've been giving some thought to the fiber I showed in the last entry. I talked with Madam a bit on the way back from the Sheep and Wool Festival about what weight of yarn would be best, what she might use the fiber for, and how separate she'd like for the colors to look. A scarflike, possibly lacy thing with fingering-or-so weight was the most likely contender, and she liked the idea of the colors being distinct but not with real sharp transitions. If she'd wanted the colorway to be perfectly preserved, I would have gone with singles or a Navajo ply plan. But this gives me the chance to play a bit more.

Question #1: How wide do I want the stripes to be? I started with the fiber version of a back-of-the-envelope calculation. This practice swatchy bit

used about half the amount of fiber in a typical colorway "unit" of the dyed yarn. It also happens to be about one gram of fiber (1/25-ish of the one ounce of plain fiber I bought), so I can make an estimation of how big a scarf/shawl can be made from the four ounces of dyed soysilk.

I think this is a good amount of fiber to go into a single stripe. It's wide enough to be identifiable, but not so wide that a knitted piece won't have big crazy blocks of color. A single ply which used this much fiber would have a stripe that's twice as wide, so breaking the fiber into between, oh, 2 and 5 pieces should do it. Exactly what I do will depend on how the undyed fiber responds on the rest of my test-spin, and of course there might be a bit of variation as I go. A bit more fiber might split off in one place, in another, it wisps down to nothing. I figure that type of variability is what makes handspun yarn interesting.

As for the theoretical size of the final object, my conservative estimate would be that 4 ounces will yield about 500 square inches of mildly lacy knitting worked on 3's. That's a good-sized scarf, or a teeny little triangular shoulder shawl.

Question #2: How do I want to arrange the colors?

I kind of lied in the last section, when I said that one bit of fiber would make a stripe of a certain length. It would, if I were spinning a singles yarn, or if I was plying with a plain color. But with two colors, unless things line up *perfectly*, there are going to be more color variations than that--the bits in between one section and another will be an in-between color. I've seen some examples of this on other spinner's blogs--things line up perfectly for a few hundred yards, then they get all scrambly, and it just looks *wrong*. I'm not a good enough spinner to get things to line up perfectly, and I'm not anal enough to break the singles and re-attach every once in a while to get things to line up. But what I *can* do is change the rates at which each ply changes color, so things look intentional.

Looky here at the magic of MS Paint.

The left side is roving #1. The right side is roving #2. The color sequence goes as it does in this picture, starting from the upper right corner:

In between the two is the theoretical colorway of the yarn, assuming that I was able to spin such that each color changed in exactly the same place. A ply of one color and a ply of the other end up roughly as something halfway between the two. Here's a swatch I've done with a very different colorway, and you can see how one of the plies gets lighter somewhere in the middle of the bottom section.

But! Rather than spin both directly from the roving, I can strip the roving into thinner pieces, as I mentioned. If I pulled roving #2 roughly in half, the resulting colorway would look like this:

The stripes are shorter even though one ply is doing exactly the same thing. If you split the original roving into even smaller pieces, you can see a neat effect--the ply spun from the multi-split roving still makes stripey things, while the ply spun from the unsplit roving controls the overall tone but without looking like big wide stripes, so that in this situation, there'd be a section within which there'd be a lot of blue-ish variations, a wide stripe of greenish variations, a wide stripe of darker variations, etc. There was a really cool article about this in this summer's issue of Spin-Off which took me about a month to understand, but it boils down to having a ply of frequently-shifting colors, and a ply of rarely-shifting colors.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to do that with this yarn. The end result, to me, makes the varigation less jarring, and guarantees that when I don't line things up perfectly that the result doesn't look wrong next to a section where things are lined up. The greater degree of color variation appeals to me as well. So that's what I'm a-gonna do.

For now I'm still practicing with the undyed fiber. It's still putting up a bit of a fight. It's like there needs to be no twist anywhere, at all, for the fiber to move the slightest amount. Makes a strong yarn when it's done, but it's not very friendly to draft.

"Oh, I don't care about what you *won* at the festival. What did you *buy*?"

Not much, really. I have plenty of yarn and fiber for myself, and I haven't been using it up nearly fast enough lately. I considered getting a spindle, but I hadn't brought much money with me and wasn't in the mood to use my credit card. (If you're interested in a really neat spindle, get in touch with Handspun by Stefania and ask about the polymer whorl spindles--this is what I plan to do as a gift for myself when my next paper goes out. They spin nicer than any wooden spindle I've seen, and have some really pretty patterns. I missed the name of the maker somehow, though.)

One thing I did get was part of a repayment to Madam for some stuff she's given me.

Four ounces of handdyed soy silk, and one ounce of less-expensive undyed soy silk for me to practice on. I'll be spinning it up for her as a fingering-to-lace weight yarn as part of the repayment plan. I get to play with a new fiber that doesn't have to stay in the house, Madam gets to knit more bluey-greeny lace, everyone's happy.

I don't usually take pictures of purchases, but with handdyed stuff you can't just find a picture online (oh wait yes I can, it's the color "greens"). Plus, sometime soon I'm going to write about yarn design and it'll help to have that picture to refer to.

I was in a playful mood last night, so I took a small bit of the white fiber, spindle-spun it without too much eye for consistency, and knit it. I wanted to see what the fiber looked like, check how it spins, washes, and wears.

Soysilk is an extruded fiber that's made from the waste left over from tofu-making, according to the Internet. There's a bunch of fibers that fall into that type of "manmade from natural materials" category--soy(soysilk), corn(ingeo), woodpulp(tencel), bamboo(doesn't have another name I know of offhand). I haven't spun with any of them but from what I've seen of them as commercial yarns, they're all shiny, pretty soft, machine-washable, and easy to dye.

When spinning it up, I noticed that the top has a kind of odd behavior. Fibers tend to stick to each other, up to a certain point, but then completely give way. Wool does that if you're new to it and are holding it too firmly, but I found that the soy silk had a very narrow range of tension at which it was controllable. It'll probably just be a matter of me getting used to it; I remember having a similar problem when I first worked with alpaca. For now I'm keeping with a very short draft. I think it might actually be easier to spin on the wheel, because I can set the tension to a very gentle pull, and because I don't have to hold the fiber in position at all, just support it. Those two things should make it easier to draft.

The resulting yarn was fingering weight-ish, was *very* strong (I couldn't break the singles), and knit up a bit like cotton, not much give. Very similar overall to the bit of tencel I've played with. Because of its strength it'd probably be workable as a fairly loose single. I'd heard bad things about ingeo in very hot water, and so I made a point of running the swatch directly under super hot water, but didn't see any deformation (although the wet swatch smelled a little funny). After messing around with the swatch some, it's fuzzed a bit but less so than the silk I'm working on. The lace itself was pretty crisp, and the fabric is nicely drapey. No pattern there, by the way, I was just playing around.

Overall, okay stuff. I don't think it'll be my new OMG favorite, but it's pretty, and will give me some new skills. Sometime soon, I'll talk about my plans for spinning up the dyed stuff.



The competition at the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festivalwasn't real anonymous--the judge had mostly made her decisions, but then talked personally to each person that was their about their yarn. I asked about the alpaca first, and she sort of looked me up and down and said "and *how* long have you been spinning?" Except for one child, I was the youngest entrant by a good 15 years, I think. She really liked the alpaca, said "blue" to a notetaker, who wrote that on the judging card before crossing it off and putting "2nd" later (not remotely upset about that; the fiber from the winner in that class looked hand-prepped, though I think my spinning was a little more even).

Two of my friends were with me and were sort of hepping me up more than I thought I'd be, so when she got out the best in show ribbon for my little laceweight I believe I jumped up and down and clapped my hands like the foolish child I am.

Mostly, it was just neat to talk to some other spinners. Except for online, I don't get much of that. So I grinned like a fool for a while and answered questions, and got to be a big fiber geek (in fact, I'd planned on wearing my shirt that says "Dorkiest Girl Alive", but it was in the laundry). There were some beautiful yarns, to look at, too--a spindle-spun two ply that the spinner had dyed herself, gorgeous oranges, pinks, and purples all through. There was the winner in the wheelspun multi-ply class that I mentioned, that was dark blue alpaca and (I think) lighter and darker blue silk noily bits. There were some deliciously springy natural-colored wools. And, there was me. The person with the big frickin' ribbon.

It was all a lot of fun. My jaw is tired from all the smiling.

Robin asked about my pesto recipe in the comments yesterday, and I started to respond but it was getting really lengthy so I decided to promote it to blog entry status.

I play it mostly by ear, but refer to the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook for general amounts. It's pretty similar to the way I do peanut sauce, actually--get some stuff from a few different categories together and see what happens. What I end up with sometimes can only loosely be called "pesto", in that it is green and mooshy, but it still tastes good.

Here's the general categories. The way this works is, take at least one thing from each category. Chop the things very roughly, then put into a blender or food processor (our food processor is a teeny 2-cup, 2-speed dealie like this one, but it works for things like this, and hummus). Blend it around until it's pretty mushy, or you get bored, or it looks nice. Serve with food. If you make a super-batch, it freezes pretty well too.

Categories:

Green stuff: Three measurement systems--go with whichever is easiest. About two loosely-packed cups = about one firmly-packed cup = about a half pound (prior to washing, stem removal, etc).

-Fresh basil's the classic one, with a bit of parsley, at a ratio of, oh, 4:1? Do yourself a favor and don't buy those teeny herb packets at a regular grocery store. They're really expensive, there's like 1/2 ounce per package, and for some reason I've found them to be weak-flavored sometimes. Wait until you have a basil plant that's overtaking its boundaries, or a friend's is, or you find a big bag for 4$ at a vegetable stand. This is the time of year that all of these things are happening, somewhere. Remove the stems, even chopped to bits they're still *there*, making life less pleasant.

-Need some filler? Spinach works. Swiss chard works (I've only tested it in small doses though). Other greens that aren't too watery-crunchy should work, though I'd be cautious about strongly-flavored ones. Again, remove the stems. Spinach etc. works especially well with garlic scapes (I'll talk about them below). And it's year-round cheap compared to fresh herbs.

-Other herbs: I haven't played around too much, but I imagine that a mostly-parsley pesto would be good (maybe 50/50 parsley/spinach). Mint could be interesting--it'd basically be tabbouleh flavoring, right?

Garlic: If fresh bulb garlic, a clove, two if you swing that way. Chop roughly before putting it in the food processor.

If you can find garlic scapes, they're super-delicious. You'll only see them in early, early spring, and only then if your local farmer is smart enough not to throw them away (and isn't so smart that he sold them to the chichi restaurant down the street). One or two of them chopped roughly with some greens, mmm.

And, horrors! Garlic powder works fine too. That's all I had on Tuesday.

And, not quite garlic, but if you have leftover green onions lying around they won't hurt anything. Big onions would be too much though.

Protein: Nuts, or cheese, or nuts AND cheese. A quarter cup or so.

Pine nuts are the traditional addition. I need no excuse to eat pine nuts, so I usually use them if I have them. You can put them in raw, or toast them. To toast, put them, dry, in a pan, turn the pan to medium-low, and watch carefully because they'll burn in two seconds if you look away. I let them get golden-brown.

Other (unsalted) nuts work. My cookbook says walnuts or almonds. Cashews could be neat.

If you're adding cheese, use a hard one. Parmesean, Romano, that kind of thing.

Salt: A pinch if you used a salty cheese. If not, two pinches.

Other flavors: If the pesto isn't already basil- or garlic-heavy it might need something else, but maybe not. If I do add spices, I do that after I've blended everything and tasted. I've done black pepper, red pepper, a squirt of lemon juice (to keep the leaves mostly-green), extra dried basil, some sage I had in the freezer. But not all at once.

Liquid: Olive oil, or else some other oil that's not too strongly flavored. A tablespoon, maybe? Enough to allow things to move around. And about the same amount of water, again, enough to turn it into a sauce and not a pile of leaves.

Farmer's market dinners are the best (no pictures, I was too busy jamming it all down my gullet).

I always try to go to the farmer's market with an open mind. There's always something that's beautiful, cheap, and at its most flavorful, and I figure my job is to find it and decide what will go with it. There's a pasta shop and a grocery store between the Tuesday market and my house, so I can pick up any extras along the way.

I really love the Tuesday market, too. The Saturday one here goes the whole way around the Capitol Building--it's huge, and justifiably famous, but you get to feel like cattle as you slowly go around the square because it's always packed. The Tuesday one is on my way home from work, and it's much smaller (probably 1/50th the size), but it has all the basics--bread, cheese, honey, a few veggie stalls, a meat guy. I can either wander or zip through with a plan, depending on my mood.

Yesterday the king of the show was basil--a half pound for a couple of dollars. It was a little frumpy from the rain, and the price reflected that. So, not going to use it as a garnish. Pesto it is.

I got a few other veggies, bought fresh pasta, tiny fresh local mozzarella, and pine nuts at the pasta shop. For dinner we had some fantastic pesto with some sliced mozzarella on pasta, and a nice salad. I seem to do my best food work on a weeknight, in 30 minutes, with no previous planning. Funny how that goes.

Why do I procrastinate? Crossing a thing off my list is always so much nicer than worrying about it, or remembering it in the middle of the night with that stomach-thud of guilt. My to-do list has never looked so clean. September! Four days in you're already everything I've asked of you. Really, it's all my doing, but I'll thank you anyhow.

I swear that doing physical things and doing mental things are linked. The last couple of weeks, I just couldn't get stuff done; my writing was sloggy, there were a bunch of little paperworky things I needed to do but kept avoiding, and I'd sit at my desk all day, go home, and lay on the couch all night, worrying. I wasn't even accomplishing *sleep* very well.

This weekend, I did a bunch of active stuff--had a good capoeira class on Friday and a fun performance on Sunday, went on two little adventures with J (one by bike, one by car), took a long walk. Baked a quiche with Swiss chard and onion while J attacked some mold on our bathroom ceiling. Rode my bike to work today, which I'd gotten away from after my crash in July.

And then, hey, my brain was ready too--I got a ton of those niggly paperwork things done Friday, more today, and started a little experiment that will address a problem reviewers might have with one of my papers. Got a last-minute thing done for my boss.

Everything is so intertwined that it's hard to say what's causing what. Did the active weekend I had planned mean that I got more stuff done at work, or vice versa? Did I just happen to wander my way out of a mini-depression? Is it the change of weather? It's still hot but at least we're not going to flood. Is the fun stuff I have planned for the next month and a half helping? It's not hurting, but I knew about most of it last week too.

I'm not going to analyze it too deeply. I have too many things to add to, then cross off, my list.