Socks, loom and electric wheel

Well my socks went forward and then back again. I made this whole pair in the wrong gauge. I knew it was wrong but persisted. And I screwed up the tops. Oh, and the color - I got it for Steelers colors but there was green. It was too much.


Now, it is ripped and overdyed with some old koolaid I wanted to clear out of my dye cabinet. Nice and mottled, as I hoped. I like them now and am ready to reknit.

Lornas's laces Bee Stripe before and after.



I still have the same damn project on the loom, but I am not hating it yet. I made a huge miscalculation when I put on the warp. I used a different method of winding an screwed up so the warp was 4 times longer than I wanted. You think I would have noticed, right? But I was so thrilled to get the (new to me) loom setup that I just slapped that puppy on. So I am weaving and weaving and weaving. It will be very long and narrow.


Lastly, since someone asked me about it, I thought I might show one of my home made electric wheels. I have it set in bobbin winder mode right now, but I can just pop out the stick and pop in the flier. I have a folded loom behind it, and a yarn counter on the table in this rather poor photo, but you can get the gist. I built it on a really thick and heavy spiral staircase step of solid oak that a woodworker in my old neighborhood was discarding. My luck to find it as the solidity helps stability. Anyway, it has always worked so well that I never really prettied it up. It has been used very often since about 1993, I think. It lives in the corner next to my loom and I can change it for plying or spinning pretty fast, but I built another electric wheel for plying exclusively and so this is now one of my winders. Foot pedal. Reverse by twisting the drive band (on a drawer pull). In line with both swift, ball winder and cone holder.

Blendalong - Ply Blends part 2

I have started with the Ply Blends portion of the blendalong. So far, I tried cabled yarn and didn’t think that worked to show the colors well. I have here some 4 ply and that may work for you. If so, you are going to need a lot of bobbins. I use weaving bobbins to hold singles and my drink mixer to wind them, with the critical latex band to hold the bobbins.

The choices here for me are a) making a 4 ply or b) making two 2 plyed yarns and holding them together.

Remember, by the end of the blendalong you will have lots of little bits of yarn , so don’t go crazy with quantity in this section. The exception might be if you are going to make socks, you might want the ribbing in one color, so more yards.

Weavette

For the mini weavette squares (2”), I am using 80” of yarn. I would overestimate here to save yourself trouble. I use 3.5 extra wrap-arounds at the end of base weave, before using the needle. It takes me roughly 6 minutes from start to finish for a weavette square. It will take longer to put them together, I think. There is a great site for weavette sewing.

Knitting
Well, I am a little behind here. I tried several choices and have ripped them all out. I will try again with larger needles. Since it is a 4 ply, it is close to a worsted weight and I think a size 3 needle might be more appropriate for socks. For a vest, I would go up in size.

Links for all my buddies
Some great links for today. Nona Swatches still is one of my favs. Who knew that just swatches could be so entertaining? I would love to see hundreds of sites doing this with both stitch patterns and yarns. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful resource? A massive internet swatch library. Oh, well, I can dream, can’t I? If you know of any other swatch collections, please let me know and I will be glad to post them.

Then this next one could take a few hours out of your life. On the left side you will notice a stitch catalog with 1371 stitches listed. She gives the books they came from and often has photos with her swatches. These are written out with good references. I don’t know whether to be thrilled or appalled. I love this resource, but am a bit iffy on the listing. On the other hand, we all use pieces of patterns from Barbara Walker’s Treasury series so maybe this is OK. After all, Barbara Walker collected this info from a lot of people too. How do you feel about this issue?