I belong to the Spunky Eclectic Fiber Club. I get 4 oz of a different fiber every month.

I love to squirrel away a few months worth of fiber and then see what goes together for some color blending.

Here’s my latest combo. The colors are called Beans (Romney) and Changes(Falkland).

From this:

Beans & Changes

to this:

350 yards of yum

a little closer:

As long as there is brown I am happy

a bit of knitting:

Sweater, please!

The yarn knits up great at 4 stitches to the inch, and could happily squeeze down to 4.5. The Falkland was quite soft and took away all of the prickles of the Romney.

Now I’m looking for a couple of others that would go well with this one. I love stash archeology.

Anyone else stash spinning?

I can’t think of a better way to start the week than to giveaway beautiful things!

Today I have a copy of California Revival Knits by Stephannie Tallent.  Have you seen the patterns in it yet? I’m loving the Wrought Mitts and Cardigan.

California Revival Knits

I also have an Elemental Affects yarn pack to make the stunning Peacock Mitts.

Beautiful Peacock Mitts

Thanks to Cooperative Press and Elemental Affects for donating today’s prizes!

One person will win both the book and the yarn pack.

The usual rules apply for our giveaway: Leave a comment on this post before midnight, eastern time, on Wednesday, May 23, 2012. 1 comment will be chosen at random to answer a skill testing question.

If he/she answers correctly, they will win our prize! Good luck, everyone!

(If you have won a prize from us already this year please give another knitter a chance and leave your name out of the hat. Thanks!)

Let the world see you knit!

The weather has finally turned in our favor here in the northeast of North America, which puts us in the right mindset to knit outdoors. And just in time to start thinking about World Wide Knit in Public Day. This year, it’s not just a day – it’s a week! Events will run between June 9th and 17th, in cities all over the world. The Toronto crew is planning a big day at Speaker’s Corner at Nathan Philips Square.  A list of events around the world is here.

Knitlympic fever is heating up in the UK: a piece from the Telegraph in the UK about the book ‘Knitlympics: Knit Your Favourite Athletes’ by Carol Meldrum. Bonus link to a free pattern for Jessica Ennis, complete with Stella McCartney designed gear.

A related piece from the NY Times’ blog about the thorny issue of copyright at it relates to crafting, specifically to do with protection of the Olympic rings image.

The coffee is great, too!

A great profile of Toronto yarn shop (and Amy’s LYS) The Purple Purl in working.com, focusing on the realities of running the business.

Fab!

Knitter Courtney Zurcher created a fun yarny installation and offered learn to knit classes as part of the Big Omaha 2012 conference on innovation and entrepreneurship, held last week.

Kickstarter project for a neat yarn storage device, invented by a Product Design student to help out his girlfriend with her knitting. Even if you’re not looking to support these types of projects, it’s fun to read about the inspiration and the design process.

Yarnbombers struck Norwich City Hall. Fantastic lamp post styling!

Excellent yarn shop name of the week: The Sheep’s Stockings.

Twice a year my spinning gang hits the road and goes to spin at a family cabin four hours north of where we live.

We spin and knit, watch movies and eat a lot. We relax and focus on a hobby we all love.

Last weekend we went. It was beautiful and sunny, we even spent some time spinning lakeside.

Lake view

With no work or family constraints I got a lot of spinning done – almost a pound of fiber. I spun randomly filling bobbins with what appealed to me at the time. Of course I brought three times as many projects than I could possibly accomplish.

A little Spunky Eclectic

The spinning part of my brain feels relaxed now and I feel reconnected to my spinning women.

Do you ever spin away?

Every knitter – no matter how experienced, no matter how skilled, no matter how many years you’ve been knitting – has holes in their knowledge.

For me, it’s knitting with beads.  I’ve dabbled in it, but I’d never completed a full project, and I knew I wanted to learn more.  As luck would have it, knit designer Laura Nelkin was scheduled to come to Toronto, to teach at class at Lettuce Knit.  Laura’s one of the best designers working with beaded knits; her designs are beautiful, interesting, and clever. She’s got designs for those just starting out with beads, and designs for knitters seeking a serious challenge.

Her class “Advanced Lace with Beads“, filled up quickly, and I was happy to have a place on the list.

Laura, in action

And what fun it was!

Experimenting and learning.

We worked a small sample swatch, to try out several ways of adding beads to our work.

Fun and educational

We made nupps (and a few swear words, too, for those of us whose needles were too blunt to work that pesky p7tog).

Loose nupps are the best kind of nupps.

And we played with color combos.

I learned lots of great stuff – and not just about knitting with beads.

Laura shared a genius trick for working with charts…

Brilliant!

If the chart shows the WS rows, use a highlighter to highlight those rows, and highlight the corresponding WS definitions of the stitches on the chart legend. That way, you’ll always know which way you should be going on a particular row, and how to work a given symbol’s stitch on that side.  Simple and so very very helpful.

As a knitting teacher, I don’t get to take nearly enough classes, but every time I do, I learn something. I usually learn something about the subject matter in question, of course, but there’s always at least one other nugget – a clever tip, a suggestion for an easier way to do something, an explanation of a technique that helps your understanding.  After all, there’s no way we can all know everything, and a different perspective is sometimes just what you need to expand your thinking, or add to your knowledge.

I love taking classes. If you haven’t taken one recently, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Bigger on the Inside

Sue from Rochester, NY is our lucky winner of the Bigger on the Inside yarn pack. A huge thanks to Lorna’s Laces for providing our prize. And happy wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey knitting to Sue!

Environmentally sound and fully animal-friendly.

The University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor is hosting an exhibition of knitting as contemporary fine art. Ruth Marshall’s “Vanished in Stitches” exhibit is on display until June 9th. The artist knits accurate life-size pelts of rare and endangered big cats – including ocelots, tigers and leopards. Her years working at the Bronx Zoo, she launched the project to highlight the plight of these rare and beautiful creatures. More about the artist and her fascinating work at her website.

Fascinating and very clever.

Artists Pat Ashford and Steve Plummer have created one of their trademark Illusion knits in time for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. The oversized replica of a first class postage stamp with a portrait of the Queen is one of many such projects they have undertaken. An illusion uses texture to create an image that hides: when viewed from the front, the fabric looks only like vertical stripes, but when viewed from an angle, the image appears.

From the New York Times Archive, a pattern published in 1861 for mittens for soldiers. Although not necessarily immediately or obviously knittable, it’s a fascinating insight into how knitting patterns have evolved over the years, and what passed for a decent set of instructions for previous generations. I do like the thought that sock needles were considered “larger”.

Not strictly knitting (despite the article title), but absolutely lovely: Lace fencing.

Also not knitting, but great insights into the larger world around us crafters… two articles from Slate that we’ve enjoyed recently: one on the history of zippers and the Japanese company that dominates the market, and one on the ‘color authority’ Pantone and their color forecasting.

I took a quick drum carding class from Sarah Anderson this winter and one of things she demonstrated was dizzing off of a drum carder.

I tried it and it’s fun and easy. Perfect if you love drum carded fiber , but don’t like spinning from batts.

You need a drum carder (mine is a Patrick Green Deb’s Delicate Deluxe), a doffer (the pointy ice-pick-looking tool) and a diz (I use buttons. I love buttons).

Dizz and doffer ready to go

Build your batt. I did a quick striped batt for long color runs. Start by doffing just enough fiber to fit through your diz.

Pull of just enough to fit through your diz

And thread it through your diz.

Locked and loaded

Start dizzing by pulling the fiber slowly but firmly through the diz.

Diz away

There has to be enough tension in your pull for the fiber to run smoothly and steadily through the diz but not so much that the fiber breaks. Here are some tips:

• Try tipping your diz at a slight angle to the drum carder.
• If you use a button as a diz, don’t use one with a shank on it. The fiber will wrap around it no matter how careful you are, or how many bad words you say.
• If the fiber is hard to pull through your diz your fiber is too thick.
• Keep your hand between your freshly dizzed fiber and the drum carder, or it will catch back onto the carding cloth. Ask me how I know.
• If your fiber breaks or gets very thin, just doff the next little piece and start again.
• Don’t expect the pull of dizzing the fiber to turn the drum on your drum carder. I turn my drum a quarter of a turn, diz, then repeat.

The fiber will pull off of the drum in a giant spiral, like peeling an apple. The resulting roving is gorgeous, fluffy and ready to spin.

Please spin me

Use the exact same process to diz layered batts.

Layered batt in process

The roving comes off blended.

Mmmmm layers

Fun, easy and a great excuse for me to buy more buttons.

Here’s something I figured out about storing my drum carder recently. It and all the carding tools fit perfectly into a big blue Ikea shopping bag – it’s the perfect storage solution for me. Everything in one place and the bag makes hauling it off and on the shelf where I store it easy.

Drum carder in a bag

Here’s the latest update from the world of Jillian Knits Slowly!

I finished Groove from Winter Knitty by Stephen West.

Stephen's tweedy Groove

I knit my Groove out of Madelinetosh DK

Madelinetosh DK - Clematis and Glazed Pecan

I haven’t stopped wearing it since I finished

Completely in love with Madleinetosh yarn

That puts my knit from Knitty count at 3 out of 6 for the year.

Here’s a little more groove for your Monday, I dare you not to dance!

My favoritest new shoes.

I needed these shoes. I was teaching at Yarnover in Minneapolis [which was super-fabulous, by the way] and needed a little footwear-based oomph to make my super-teacher powers fully activate.

You understand, surely.

These are Dr Martens 1461 Oxfords in the unbelievable-but-true color they call Blueberry. The leather is softer than the usual Doc oxford style [which could probably be used as the outer skin of a tank].

They fit great, with super-thick socks. For two reasons. 1: Docs don’t come in half sizes. 2: Even though the leather is softer than their usual, I have wussy baby princess feet and need the protection of a thicker-than-usual sock fabric.

That said, they’re SUPER comfy with the right socks and my trusty Birkenstock insoles [I put these in everything I wear, unless they're already Birkenstocks]. And as you can see in the pic above, the Thorlo light hiking socks I had worked. But man, I’m a knitter. They’re embarrassing. I need to knit me some beautiful socks that will give me cushy protection.

Challenge: I’m allergic to wool, and most non-wool sock yarns aren’t thick enough to make a sock that will work with these shoes. Sock Candy, for example, my usual go-to sock yarn, is great for regular wear. But it’s not enough. Two strands? Not quite what I was thinking.

So I put it to you, dear readers. What wool-free yarns have I not considered [or may not be aware of] that are more likely sport- or even light-worsted-weight, that will make a comfy, cushy, pretty sock? Maybe you’ll see something at Maryland Sheep & Wool this weekend? Maybe you know of an indie who’s using an unusual base? I sure would love a handpaint for these.

Fill the comments with your ideas. I’ll be super grateful.

The response to ‘Bigger on the Inside‘ has been so great – people love the design, absolutely, but they are also enjoying and relating to the story.  (Indeed, given that it’s Obsession Thursday, we might suggest that some of you are obsessed with it… )

I’ve received so many emails from knitters who experienced a similar thing – being told that their style was inappropriate, being told that they shouldn’t dress the way they want to, being told that they shouldn’t wear their handknits. No matter how gently the message is delivered, it can make a knitter feel isolated and out of place. I have to say, given the response I’ve received, I will never feel isolated or out of place again!

Many knitters have asked about my original scarf, wanting to see more of it…

Here it is, in its full glory, Mum’s glorious interpretation of a Doctor Who scarf, made at my request in the mid 1980s. 45sts of (k1, p1) ribbing, worked in what looks like a worsted weight acrylic. It’s 7 inches wide and 106 inches long – just under 9 feet.

Flying my fan-flag loud and proud!

I know the colors aren’t right – and I knew that at the time – but it was much harder to find a picture of the inspiration back then, and at the time I wasn’t keen on brown. So we just improvised.

Thanks Mum!

And if want your own ‘Bigger on the Inside’, we are giving away a yarn pack containing enough of the fab custom TARDIS colorway of Lorna’s Laces Solemate to knit it, valued at $52 US.

Bigger on the Inside

The usual rules apply for our giveaway: Leave a comment on this post before midnight, eastern time, on Monday, May 7, 2012. 1 comment will be chosen at random to answer a skill testing question.

If he/she answers correctly, they will win our prize! Good luck, everyone!

(If you have won a prize from us already this year please give another knitter a chance and leave your name out of the hat. Thanks!)

If you are interested in creating a more authentic version of the actual Tom Baker scarf, this website is very helpful.