I’ve been a bit off the fiber arts these past few days. For starters, I discovered a stain on my Latvian Mitten sweater which is all but finished. (I just have to sew down the hem.)
It’s a tea stain, which are particularly brutal to get off. My last sweater that I made with this yarn currently suffers from a few more honestly derived tea stains. There’s also something about this yarn, I’m convinced, No other seems to stain so easily. Is there something about superwash? In any case, though I think the stain has mostly come up (salt, who’d thought?) and it’s on the back of the sweater sort of under the arm, so again, not a big deal, that whole mess has put me off knitting just a bit. I’ll get back to it in time. I want to get the hem sewn down by the weekend, which shouldn’t be a problem.
There’ll be more latvian dreaming stuff soon. I promise. How are people doing on this one?
I also finished this little spinning project I’d been working on for a great while. It’s 3ply merino DKish weight yarn. Light blue marl. I’m loving it, though I don’t have a clue what I’m going to do with it. This of course means that I’ve already started spinning up my shetland roving which I’m hoping to turn into three-ply of a similar weight as well. It’s nice fiber, unlike anything else I’ve ever spun, but it’s going well. One thought is that I could use the blue merino at least in part for hems. Which seems like a foolish waist of hand spun. I’ve made a rule that handspun (once it’s spun) doesn’t count as stash, so it could sit around for a while.
I’ve decided that I’m going to try and spin 100 gram skeins of yarn, by measuring off 3 33ish gram lengths of roving and spinning one on to each bobbin and then plying. I think this will give me reasonably sized skeins, it’ll break up the spinning in an interesting way, and I’m less likely to have leftovers of any quantity (I know this isn’t a huge issue, but I’m a bit neurotic.) This decision made me really rather happy. I also decided that I’d not use the lazy kate that came with my wheel except for holding bobbins when plying. All other bobbin holding will be done by the basket that I use to hold my fiber as I’m spinning. Somehow these decisions were incredibly liberating, and I think that realization is kind of worrying. Anyway, I think I should end this before it degenerates any further.
Onward and Upward.