…that the past week or so would be prime blogging time.

I mean, look - the pressure should have been off, right? It’s almost two weeks since I back-burnered the backbreaker project. I have my wonderful Tserf doing most of the heavy lifting of pattern printing and kit assembly. I should have had time on my hands to report on my doings. And there have been plenty of doings to report about.

But somehow, it didn’t add up that way. I guess it’s yet another illustration of work expanding to overfill the resources allotted, which is also partly a by-product of the fact that when the resources increase (Tserf! Pixie! New Packaging and Branding! Big Planz!), so do the expectations. Or to be really original about it - I’m betting my reach will always exceed my grasp. The day it doesn’t… well, that’s how you’ll know I’m dead, right? Right.

So I’ve been crazy-busy with the doing stuff and crazy-bad with the not taking pictures, and now I’m crazy-fried because hey! all of a sudden Rhinebeck is TOMORROW and I’m doing the last-minute errands and printing the last-minute signage and making the last-minute lists and figuring out how to sardine all the stuff into the car (sort of a thousand-clowns operation in reverse)… and for the blog? I got nothin’. Nothin’ but announcements and subject headings. I’ll make it up to you soon, though, I swear.

Reminder of the Main Events

Rhinebeck.

This weekend.

New York Sheep & Wool Festival.

Holiday Yarns (formerly Vancalcar Acres), Building 26, Space D.

Be there, or… miss out on the fun.

They vend by day, they party by night: this year we are co-sponsoring (!!!!) the Ravelry party on Saturday night, and contributing some nice squishy door prizes.

During the day, lots of cool and interesting stuff in the booth. Yarn! Fiber! A visit from Dolores! New spindles! New kits! As I mentioned the other day, we are releasing:

		THE NINE TAILORS
		TURANDOT
		THE ICEMAN COMETH

Also… at long last… by popular demand… this:

The Vintage Leaf Kit!

It includes the pattern not only for the original vine leaf from the Vintage sock but also for its big brother, a scaled-up and more detailed version of the same shape. Plus four skeins of Jennifer’s Flock Sock yarn in assorted leaf colors, each skein enough for about a dozen little leaves.

(And yes, eventually the leaf pattern and its imaginary variations will go PDF. But not yet.)

We will also be offering sets of change-ringing bell markers to accompany the Nine Tailors kit. Bell markers like these -

- only with bells like these:

And here, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go a little pedantic and apparently non-commercial and explain a little bit about the whole bell marker thing. You don’t need the bell markers to knit the tsock. (Or the Tsweater, but let’s not even talk about that right now, though the principle is the same.) You can knit the bell patterns from the charts. You can knit the bell patterns from the directions. OR you can be crazy like me and knit the bell patterns from place notation. And even then you don’t actually NEED the markers… they just make it a little easier to keep track of where you are.

Sorry, does this sound like I don’t want to sell you bell markers? On the contrary, I’d love to sell them to you. But only if you actually have a use for them.

Knitting change-ringing patterns from place notation isn’t really complicated, but it requires a slightly deeper understanding of change-ringing than you’d need if you were just following a regular knitting chart. It isn’t for everybody, but it should be interesting to some - you know who you are. And the pattern does include a fairly detailed primer on the concepts - enough to work from even if you are not a ringer.

From a practical standpoint, why would you knit from place notation? Mostly for portability and compactness. That’s what I love about it - that and the elegance. I could carry four to eight pages of charts around with me for every ringing method I knit… or I could carry the One. Line. That. Says. It. All.

Four pages of charts… or this:

34.x.34.1.x.2.x.1.x2.x.1.x.2.x - le 1

which contains everything you need to know about Kent Treble Bob Major, once you know how to read it. For me, that’s a no-brainer.

(If I were talking about the Tsweater, which of course I’m not, I would tell you at this point that unless I can come up with some other brilliant shorthand the SIX different maximus methods I’m using will probably amount to some horrendous volume of charting - I’m guessing something like 50 pages’ worth. Compare that to the single index card I actually worked from, with its six lines of place notation? Again - no-brainer.)

So that’s the deal on the bell markers. They’re cute, and I love them, and they have plenty of possible uses beyond the purpose for which I originally developed them. So by all means buy them! But don’t feel compelled to own a set just because you’re knitting the tsock. ‘K?

That’s all I can think of at the moment, Rhinebeck-wise. I will have the Wreck of the Hesperus Tsweater and other WIPs there with me and if you come to the booth I will be more than happy to discuss necklines and techniques and aspect ratios with you till we’re blue in the face. Otherwise, I swear on a stack of the writings of Elizabeth Zimmermann that I will blog about it in detail as soon as I finish recovering from (and reporting on) the weekend, with lots and lots of pictures and explanations and plans.

Other pending post-Rhinebeck blog matters:

- My impulsive flying visit to SOAR; the people I met there; the credit card accidents I had there and the spinning that is resulting.

- A birthday party I gave a few days ago.

- The next Club Tsock, complete with yarn saga (or yarn yarn).

- The reveal of the Tslightly Tsecret Tsock mentioned in the previous entry.

- Um… um… several other things, but I can’t remember what. Where DID I put that list?

Sorry I was so cryptic about this yesterday. Or no, maybe I’m not sorry. Maybe I’m somewhere between cocky and relieved.

Anyway, here’s what happened.

You may recall that I named the tsweater Belshazzar’s Nemesis after the two change-ringing methods I had chosen to depict - Belshazzar Delight Maximus on the body, Nemesis Delight Maximus on the sleeves.

Originally I’d picked both semi-arbitrarily for their whimsical names, but on reflection and further research I decided I really liked the way they looked.

Well.

Here’s how the tsweater was looking as of this morning (it’s grown some since, but Real Time is the curse of the blog - there’s no way the documenting can keep pace with the knitting).

Tsweater Front

Tsweater Back

The acute observer will perhaps notice that this thing has an awful lot of bell markers on it. The acute observer will be right. There are in fact six complete sets of bell markers - which is overkill, frankly, if you’re only knitting two methods. I mean, yeah, having a set of markers for each separate instance of each method is kind of convenient - but it’s hardly necessary, since all four Belshazzars are going to be the same, as are both Nemeses (Nemesis-es-es-es-es?). It isn’t a terrible hardship, when you come to the second Belshazzar panel, to go back and check which way the twists went on the previous one, especially since it’s only relevant in every fourth row.

So - six sets of bell markers? Kind of an extravagant indulgence. Unless… you’re knitting six different methods.

Which I am. Now.

Go up and look again, acute observer. Yup. They’re all different.

This happened shortly after I posted the last batch of pictures, the ones where I was 10 changes in and closing in on the armpit. I’m not sure what hit me but I know it was nothing good - at least nothing prudent, nothing that was influenced in any appreciable way by practical considerations like the fact that the deadline for this thing was already a challenge. Feh on that, I thought. With so many methods to choose from, and a canvas of six panels to play with, what possessed me to limit myself to two when I could have made the thing a genuine Maximus Sampler?

Too late? HAH.

I’ll show you “too late.”

Four times I did that. Four times. On purpose.

And I made another four sets of bell markers. And I chose four more methods. And I reverse-engineered them into place.

(And I carved a hollow reed. And I made a rustic pen. And I stained the water clear. STOP STOP STOP STOP…! William Blake, please get out of my head and leave me alone, kthxbai.)

Here are the four newcomers:

Please welcome, from left to right -

• Barking Creek Surprise Maximus
• Gypsy Delight Maximus
• Albion Treble Bob Maximus
• Aldebaran Surprise Maximus

In their places on the tsweater?

Right Sleeve: Nemesis Delight Maximus

Right Front: Belshazzar Delight Maximus

Left Front: Barking Creek Surprise Maximus

Left Sleeve: Albion Treble Bob Maximus

Left Back: Aldebaran Surprise Maximus

Right Back: Gypsy Delight Maximus

Overall I probably lost one day to this, and if that one day screws me up at the other end you are all welcome to say “I told you so” (even though you didn’t because I never gave you a chance) - not, however, unless and until that happens, because, well, the compulsion to do it was that strong. Once it occurred to me that I could be doing six different methods, the idea of continuing to do four of one and two of the other in every round suddenly seemed impossibly, sloggily boring. A ridiculous trick of perspective, mind you, because until that moment it was wildly entertaining.

Why do it? After a while, don’t all the patterns look pretty much the same anyway?

Not to me. But this is definitely a kids-do-not-try-this-at-home (unless you REALLY want to) sort of thing. I had planned the design from the first to accommodate any choice of maximus methods. The way I figured it, there are those who will knit it as written, using only the two methods I started out with, or indeed only one of them. And that’s cool. But there may be those who will want to substitute others, and that’s totally cool too.

Point is, basically, you can plug in ANY 12-bell 48-change lead that strikes your fancy, in any of the panels, and it won’t make any difference to the overall structure of the tsweater. And what better way to illustrate this than to do exactly that in every possible spot?

It also points up (and, I think, enhances) another peculiar feature of the patterns of campanology: they’re balanced in their own way, but they are NOT symmetrical. The two fronts weren’t going to mirror each other anyway. So… what the hell, right?

Some structural details.

A bad shot over the left shoulder:

I’m really pleased with this - the topography, I mean, not the photography.

A closeup of the colorwork bands (pinned together, with the facings and steek pinned out of the way):

I’m slightly less delighted with this, for mostly mundane and mechanical reasons. I made a mistake at first with the edge stitches that fold over - forgot about the weird little trick I’d meant to use for the crease part. You can sort of see where it changes at the point where I remembered - a little less than half-way down. I’ll be able to compensate for this in the finishing, but it annoys me.

Also, as mentioned earlier, the neckline is a little lower than I originally wanted it. That’s mostly a generation-creep issue, because of the long gestation of the project - I drew it a couple of different ways, and I had planned to make another adjustment after I cut the muslin mockup… and I forgot which one I wanted to use, and why. Also, I think I got fooled by the difference in drape. The neckline in the muslin works because it doesn’t have the weight of the knitted fabric. In the long run there will be a trade-off - the finished piece won’t have the bell markers weighing it down but it will of course have a lot more fabric, so it’ll be a wash, and I’ll still end up with a slightly lower neckline than I want. And for that, it really is too late. May do some fudging there when I add the collar; we shall see.

Here endeth the tsweater report for now. It takes some doing to pose the thing for a photo shoot, so it’s possible you won’t see many more pictures for a while - the time is better spent knitting, I think. Especially since I upped the ante.

In Other Hot News

We have our first sighting! The York and Lancaster kit, accompanied by Tsuspense Part II, landed on a remote island off Seattle today.

Do I need to put you out of your misery about the neckline steek?

Sorry. I cut it right after putting up the last post, and it was really no big deal at all. Truth is, I didn’t really think it would be a big deal, but… for blog purposes I had to pretend to be more nervous about it than I really was. Not to heighten the suspense, or anything - I would NEVER do anything that cheap (and if you believe that, I gotta nice bridge to sell you) - but because public hubris on the blog leads to… let’s not even think about what it can lead to, OK? We already know it can turn your black toner magenta, and beyond that I really don’t feel any need to test the limits. Overconfidence ===> disaster.

Besides, everything I said about the structural risks was absolutely true.

On the other hand, it is also true that I had thought the thing out pretty thoroughly, and - hey, cutting one lousy inch of knitting? Just not all that high up on the shake-in-your-shoes scale.

Anyway, here’s the big eventlet:

Before

During

After

Opened Neckline

Opened Neckline with Steek Folded Under

So there you have it. Steek done.

Ahem. You may notice that the progress picture in the sidebar sports a new symbol in the neck area. Dunno how clear it is at that scale, so here it is blown up:

Three guesses what it means.

Looking at the progress picture, it doesn’t seem as if I’ve gotten very far since the last post.

There are two reasons for this.

First, I’ve made some changes in the design that are not reflected in the sketch, making it a slightly less accurate visual progress indicator.

Second, I really do seem to be in one of those famous knitting black holes - the kind where you knit and knit and knit and knit for hours and hours and days and days, and then you look at the thing you’re working on and it doesn’t seem as if there’s any more of it than there was before.

There’s a reason for that too: I’ve passed the inflection point for the armscye, so the rounds are getting longer and longer - they are very nearly the longest they’re ever gonna get. The sleeves are still widening, and now the body has started widening too; so each round feels as if it takes about a decade. (Actually, I clocked myself last night - in real life it’s about 25 minutes.)

Nevertheless, the progress is real if subtle.

I’m nearly at the end of the first lead in the colorwork bands -

- there they are with the neckline pinned into place to suppress the facings and the main steek. (Incidentally, one of the changes I mentioned above is apparent here: the neckline is deeper than I first drew it all those months ago.)

I’m at the 10th change in the Belshazzar and Nemesis patterns -

Belshazzar, 10 Changes with Bell Markers

Belshazzar, 10 Changes, No Markers

Nemesis, 10 Changes

- and pretty soon I’ll be past the curve and taking the sleeves off the needles.

(Hey knitting gods, listen to this: Scary scary scary, what if I miscalculated the ratio?)

And then… comes the equinox.

P.S. I seem to have done a lousy job of documenting the whole thing, but here’s a current (lousy) picture for what it’s worth.

Note to self: take the next set of pictures in daylight.

See ya - gotta go knit.

- one step back. But at least… a smaller step back than I feared it would be.

Yesterday I’m knitting merrily along on the tsweater, nearing the point where I can bind off the neckline steek, then cast on the front steek and then start the colorwork panels, when suddenly a couple of creeping doubts assail me, both having to do with shoulder shaping.

As I mentioned the other day, the last big epiphany on this subject came when I decided to put in the short-rowed section at the top, then shift into increase mode after that. Kinda like this:

So this pause yesterday hits me when I’m about an inch and a half beyond that transition point.

First off, I’m looking at the relationship between shoulder ridge and sleeve and I’m seeing way too much of a straight line. The plan calls for a sleeve that lies at a slight angle in relation to the body, not one that stretches straight out to form a ‘T’ -

- and what I’m looking at seems way too ‘T’-like for my comfort.

Next, I’m none too happy about the increases themselves. I started out working them in pattern, which in this case pretty much meant raised bar increases worked purlwise. That would work fine in some contexts, but in this context and at this gauge it’s giving me all these nasty little holes where no holes oughta be.

Taking it all in all, I’m starting to think maybe Somebody Is Trying To Tell Me that I need to frog back to the transition point, re-calculate the rate of increases, and start afresh.

Frogging an inch and a half of sock, even complex sock? Hey, no big deal. Frogging an inch and a half of deadline-driven tsweater tsupertsructure, including the establishment of all six twisty change-ringing panels? Eeek. Aaaack. Not a comfortable proposition.

I slip in a couple of extra needles and some waste yarn so I can lay the thing out properly and compare it to the muslin mock-up.

Whew. That’s one part of the bullet dodged. And by the way? DUH. Of course it looked like an almost straight line from shoulder ridge to sleeve. It is an almost straight line, because the shoulder is sloped, and the sleeve pretty much continues the slope. Which is exactly what I intended.

‘Scuse me while I hit myself over the head with a large mallet and say “DUH!” again.

That still leaves the other bit of the bullet - the nastiness at the actual increase line. Times four. Not happy with the way it looks. Equally, not happy at the idea of frogging all that work just to fix those four picayune little bits.

Solution: a controlled gamble.

As you may recall, I’ve never been one to flinch at the idea of dropping back and re-knitting small sections. I figure, the corrections to be made here are small potatoes compared to some of the wacko things I’ve done in this vein.

Besides - what have I got to lose? If the small isolated fix doesn’t work the way I want it to I always have the option of falling back on Plan A and (groan) frogging back to the transition point after all. Right? Right.

I start by testing a small sample; drop back one of the nasty spots part way…

… and delicately rebuild it:

That’s both before and after - nasty purled increases above, nice tight knitted ones below - and there’s nothing wrong with the frog/reknit results that can’t be fixed by normal blocking.

Second part of the bullet dodged. So I re-do each of the four corners in turn.

It takes some time, of course, but nowhere near as much as the full frog, not to mention that it doesn’t take anywhere near as much out of ME.

I’m safely past that danger point now. Finished the neckline steek last night, then moved on to build the front opening steek and start the two colorwork panels for the front opening. So here’s today’s overall progress picture:

You’ll notice that it isn’t being displayed on the mannequin. Reason good:

Neckline Steek. Neckline Steek, still uncut, making the front scrunch and bunch so there’s no way the piece will drape accurately.

It’s time, of course, to cut it. And it’s time to admit that, for all my bravado about cutting steeks in swatches, there is still something a bit daunting about cutting this one in real life.

Why?

Partly, of course, because it’s irrevocable. Once I do it I will no longer have the option I faced yesterday, of frogging back a big chunk of shoulder shaping and re-working it from scratch. Which wouldn’t worry me much if I hadn’t just been so very close to doing exactly that. Which does not in fact worry me much, except for the other factor: it’s a pig in a poke. By the time I’m ready to cut the main front opening steek I will be pretty confident about the whole piece hanging right, because by then either I or Madame M. will have tried it on seven gazillion ways from Sunday, checking and quadruple-checking every possible detail of drape and fit. But the steek at this stage is a different animal, because I can’t do any of that kind of checking until after I cut it, and after I cut it there will be only so much I can do to adjust it if I find it isn’t right. Hence the pig-in-poke aspect; hence the touch of jitters.

I don’t really have any doubt that it is right now; my gut tells me it is, and all the evidence backs it up. But there’s still the structural risk, as it were. And structural risk is just reason enough to deliberate just a little longer… and to save the ceremonial cutting, and the documentation thereof, for another blog post.

Neckline steek, here I come.

See you on the other side.

OK, it’s time to face the music. I’m leaving that river in Egypt resolutely behind me, and placing the centerpiece of my terrifying Rh*n*b*ck challenge before me for all the world to see.

Remember last year when it was all about racing the clock to get the Kitri Shawl done in time?

There’s a pile of smaller projects on the list for this year, of course - sock patterns to rewrite, a zillion little things to organize - but the one that looms largest among them is this.

Ayep. The Change-Ringing Tsweater, Belshazzar’s Nemesis. Which we want to present at the same time as, and/or in a bundle with, the Nine Tailors tsock.

This is it. I gotta stand up and be counted. The time for thinking and fiddling and calculating and megaswatching is long over. The time for knitting like a maniac is here.

I’ve got my fear to keep me honest - I’m not actually naming the interval of time between now and intended completion, but believe me I know full well how close I’m cutting it. But to keep me even honester… I’m putting a progress thingy in the sidebar, same as I did last year for the shawl.

(As of now I don’t expect to link it to a statistics/detail page as I did with the shawl, but that may well change as things get more, um, interesting. I’ll keep you posted, of course.)

The blue bits are the bits that are… done. As of now, that’s… the shoulders.

Doesn’t look like much, does it? But it’s the trickiest part of the whole piece, and that relatively minuscule piece of knitted real estate has engendered an enormous amount of frogging and brain-cudgeling and hair-tearing. I am almost afraid to say that I am satisfied with it at last, but… I can confidently tell you that we’ve come a long way and that this is a vast improvement over several versions ago.

If that makes it sound as if I’m winging it, totally making it up as I go along…?

Not exactly.

This thing has been calculated and calibrated and measured and translated to within an inch of its life. Nevertheless, for a while there the shoulder shaping was really whupping my sorry arse. I kept being sure I had the increase scheme all figured out, and I kept knitting up what I thought was the right shape… and I kept getting these weird little puckers at the point of the shoulder. So then I kept going back to the drawing board and rethinking the relationship among the pieces, and adjusting, and trying again, and - still with the puckering, though the location and angle shifted a bit every time.

Finally I whacked myself over the head with the obvious. Aspect ratio. ASPECT RATIO. The usual problem of row gauge versus stitch gauge, only in a different plane. I was neglecting one of the dimensions. Completely missing the fact that at the crest of the shoulder the fabric of the front and back runs at nearly right angles to the fabric of the sleeve.

Quadruple DUH.

I don’t want to get too deep into the details of this right now, because I’m anxious to get back to the knitting and make sure sure sure I really really really am indeed on the right track with this now. Later on I’ll try to come up with a coherent summary/sketch of before and after - for now suffice it to say that I scrapped the original increase scheme in favor of a whole different sequence that involves short-row shaping at the critical spot, and now I think we’re really smelling the proverbial coffee.

The right shoulder is the first piece you make:

Here’s Madame Mantalini modeling the muslin mockup with the two shoulder pieces overlaid:

And here’s the back view…

… showing that we’re ju-u-u-u-u-ust about at the point of joining the back neckline.

And here -

- the back join is done, and I’m cruising along toward the next phase of shoulder shaping (this is literally a turning point; now I can revert to the increase plan) and the join for the front neckline steek.

Keep your eye on the sidebar.

Spinny Update

As it turns out…

… this stitch pattern works better than I thought in the laceweight, now that it’s unpinned from the blocking board and relazing just a little. I still think the gauge is wrong - I need to think in terms of a smaller needle or a slightly heavier yarn - but the texture shows up better than I thought.

But to see what the texture of this stitch is REALLY supposed to look like?

knit it up at sock gauge. I frogged the grey toe, because it had already told me what I needed to know in that context, and I re-knitted it into this swatch of The Cloisters. It is fearfully hard to photograph effectively, but I trust you get the idea.

I’m loving the yarn more than ever now that I see it in this form. Stitch Definition - I haz it!

In other news, the other night I wanted to spin up something lovely to test out a new spindle. Remember this amazing stuff from the onafixedincome haul?

It’s called “Irises” and it’s 50/50 bombyx/merino, from Carin Engen. If she has any kind of sales presence on-line I am not aware of it, but if you ever find any of her stuff run do not walk to grab it. It is simply beautifully prepared, and it drafts and spins like nobody’s business.

The colors are not such as I would normally have chosen, left to my own devices, which is one reason it’s so nice to have someone else make choices for me now and then - broadens one’s horizons. I spun the whole sample at one sitting, and then paused briefly to debate how it should be plied. Pam had suggested plying it with angora; I did try that with a yard or two, and decided I didn’t love it. The result was deliciously soft and decadent, but the bright white of the angora made the colors of the wool/silk fade together into a vague muddy brown, and the combination bore an unfortunate resemblance to bakery string. I can see where that pairing of fibers could work brilliantly, but not with one of them neutral and the other dyed/painted. Not for me, anyway.

So I looked at this beautiful little batch of singles and I knew for sure that I didn’t want to 2-ply it and muck up the color sequence with the barber-pole effect. So I thought… no time like the present to try Navajo plying.

I totally faked the process. I have no technique to speak of. But ultimately the result is what matters, right…?

… and I’m plenty happy with the result.

That’s me again - run as fast as you can to stay in the same place.

I will falsify the date stamp on this post so it looks as if I actually put it up when I said I would. Then I will tell you about it so you won’t think I’m trying to hide it.

Oh… already did that, didn’t I.

OK, so where was I? I’m up to my eyeballs in material, so I may as well take a whack at chronological order, just for laughs you know, and finish up the week at Jennifer’s, and then… we’ll see.

As I think I mentioned last time, Glenna left on Wednesday morning (and it was already pretty clear then that she’d be coming back soon - it was just a matter of nailing down details). Shortly after that, the next shift arrived, in the person of our good friend blogless Kathe (she’s knittingfiddler on Ravelry, and you’ve seen her in these pages before), bearing lovely beer. Kathe is in the orchestra at Glimmerglass, just up the pike a piece from Jennifer’s old place. Getting to the new place is a bit of a schlep for her, comparatively - but not enough to deter her from spending her day off with us.

I would like to state for the record that I was very, very good. Kathe had announced in no uncertain terms that she was simply not interested in spinning, and I respected her wishes and did not try to make her touch - no, did not even LET her touch - any of the soft, pretty fiber or the lovely shiny spindles. I didn’t say a word. The way I see it now, I was always fair game for the Aspinnerating Collective, really, because I never denied that I was interested in spinning - but I figure that if you’re really not interested, then you’re not, and you shouldn’t be pestered. And besides, seems to me that if every knitter were also a spinner, then spinners would no longer be able to thrill knitters with gifts of handspun. (OK, that is totally not true, and I can’t believe I even offered an argument that silly. I would still be completely thrilled by gifts of good handspun - more than ever, I suspect, now that I understand more about it. Well, what can I say - it seemed to make sense at the time.)

So anyway, I really behaved myself. I think even Kathe will admit that.

I did not, however, refrain from spinning soft lovely shiny things in her presence. On both the spindle and the wheel. And I saw her watching. But I said nothing, and she said nothing.

This is how Kathe felt about spinning:

And this is how she felt about knitting:

So I left her in peace.

And we all had a lovely time together, and we knitted and talked and laughed and worked and played.

And then after dinner she left. And the next morning she posted on Ravelry… that she had seen and felt the seduction, that she could see she would have to fight to resist the urge. Yes, she said “urge”! Well, at that point - of course all bets were off. I pounced on her and informed her that she was toast.

I didn’t do the honors myself. I was just the warm-up act. I lined her up, but it was Mardi who actually knocked her down. She and Kathe are old, old friends. At least, they were until now.

And so the sweet seduction claims another semi-willing victim.

With that bit of business taken care of, we settled down to some serious work.

Very serious work.

Hmmm. I really do not know how all these frivolous pictures keep creeping in here. We are all serious fiber artists and we have no time for childish games.

In between hula hoop sessions, then, here’s some of the stuff we worked on.

We were still trying to nail down the elusive main color for the Tsweater (please do NOT remind me how many, or rather how few, weeks are left before Rh*n*b*ck; I’m dealing with it, but I don’t think I want to discuss it).

Here are some of the test runs Jen had done before I got there - adjusting her dye process for the new water as well as the crazy demands of the designer:

The one just to the left of the tsteeking tswatch is pretty much what we were shooting for.

Pardon my color balance - there’s no way to get this exact. But this sure looked like what we wanted…

… until it dried a good bit lighter than that and was sent back for More On - which is why I ended up having to leave without it. (I’ve since received the More On version and will try to post pics of same tomorrow.)

Here is most of the visible result of the rest of that evening’s work:

That’s the Tsea of Tsweater yarn, the skein of Redbreast, another painting experiment which has since been superseded (I’ll tell you all about that, but not till after Rh*n*b*ck), and the yarn for the Frozen Margarita sock, which… is the launching point for a whole ‘nother saga. Sigh. So many sagas, so little time.

The less visible, but by no means unimportant, work we got done that night was a grand powwow over the new bell colors for both tsock and tsweater, a tracking down of dye recipes and a figuring out of which was which, which corresponded to which color on which other projects (several of them are doing double duty in the coming months), and which had to be adjusted for the new chemistry. I should have found a way to get a picture of the three of us (Nora was very helpful with the note-taking and list-making) on the floor with our zillions of notes, surrounded by skeins and reelings in dozens of colors - but I was afraid to move a muscle lest something get disarranged and screw up the whole fragile structure of comprehension we were trying to create. I swear, building the Pyramids was as nothing to deciphering this color puzzle. One of these days I’ll mock it up for you and you’ll see what I mean… but that will have to wait until the Tseason of Tsuspense is over.

And wasn’t THAT a neat little segue into telling you that… the Tseason of Tsuspense has just begun. While Jennifer was doing her magic over the dye pots and periodically calling out “No! No, you can’t look yet!” I was busy assembling/addressing the packages for Tsuspense Project Part I (just think… for Part II and any subsequent parts we will have a Pixie to do this!). Which went out to club members a couple of days later. I’m going to wait a couple more days to show any pictures, because not all the packages have arrived (if you’re a club member and haven’t received yours yet, keep an eye on your mailbox because its arrival should be imminent) - and then I’ll start doling out teasers.

Meanwhile, to distract you from all the tsuspense… here’s some yarn.

This is Nora’s finished skein, with the black stallion hidden inside it:

Here’s that sample merino/mohair handspun, balled up for swatching.

I’ve swatched a couple of things with it, and it was a serious rush, just like they all said it would be. More on that in the fulness of time - meanwhile I bought half a pound of the fiber and it’s on the wheel right now. My spinning time is severely rationed until after you-know-when, but I still manage to get in a few minutes every day, and have filled a bobbin so far, with increasingly fine and confident singles. Pleased. Very.

And speaking of pleased… here’s my latest little petting skein:

Yeah, note the dime. Delusions of grandeur… only maybe not so much with the delusions, because I’m really happy with this in every way. It’s from two batches of tussah silk - one a sample Glenna gave me from a beautiful yellow/orange Abby prep, and the other from a little bag of salmony-pink Jen had lying around. I plied ‘em together, partly to squeeze maximum yardage out of the sample and partly to see if the combination would be as peachy as I hoped. I think it is.

There’s still only about 70 yards here, so what I’m going to do with it other than stroke and admire it I am not sure. But sometimes… that is enough.