… is a lot worse than her bite.

When I e-mailed her (under the subject heading “Please do not kill me”) to give her fair warning that I had been corrupted, she didn’t bat an eye. She calmly replied as follows: “I’ve been expecting this, and I have the solution: you’re going to have to design a sock that starts with hand-dyed roving.”

(Yeah, don’t tempt me. I’m not there yet, but the time may come.)

In public she announces that I’m in big trouble; in private she promises me gifts of roving.

On Ravelry she threatens dire consequences to my seducer; but on the phone? she tells me she is “so happy” for me, and I swear she gets a little choked up as she says it.

Then she tells me that back at MAS&W she saw which way the wind was blowing, and at that point she decided I was a big girl and would just have to fend for myself.

Then she ’splains me all kinds of useful stuff about plying and about different modes of spinning and types of fiber preparation. (”I love to teach,” she unabashedly remarks. Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.)

Then she adds that in any case she blames herself. “It’s obviously my fault for not sending you enough yarn.” (I maintained a discreet silence; I thought it best not to argue the point.)

Today she made up for that - that is, a package of yarn arrived, the first of several - which means today I had to take a small break from my spinning break.

But wait, let’s rewind first to yesterday.

Sure enough, that’s when the new spindle arrived, right on schedule.

I can’t possibly do justice to its beauty. (Notice the recurring theme, though?) It’s another from ButterflyGirl - the whorl is resin and the whole thing is only half an ounce. It’s so light you can hardly even tell it’s turning. Not only is it a fine precision tool; it may well be one of the very prettiest things I’ve ever owned.

And speaking of the prettiest things I’ve ever owned - even less can any picture do justice to the batt that came in the same package:

It’s ButterflyGirl’s “Blue Morpho,” about 70% superwash, 30% bamboo. I fell in love with it when I was ordering the spindle, and as I watched it accidentally tumble into my shopping cart I told myself, “Self, you are SO not ready yet to spin this as it should be spun, but you will be happier knowing it is waiting in your stash for when you are.”

Uh-huh. What a difference a day makes. By the time it arrived… the ol’ Self was already quite a bit cockier than that. At any rate I pulled out a small sample and did a test, on the beautiful new spindle of course.

I’m still not leaping into spinning it - not until I know what it wants to be. But I don’t think it will be waiting long.

Meanwhile on the original tried-and-true spindle, I continued plugging away at the purple stuff -

- and I spent a pleasant evening (much of a night, actually - it got pretty hypnotic) preparing the previously mentioned red/orange mohair:

Not pre-drafting it, as such, I hasten to add (I’ve gotten involved in quite the discussion on Ravelry about the pros and cons of this practice, and am happy to find that the really experienced spinners of my acquaintance eschew it for the most part), but fluffing out the locks and removing VM. (Mind you, it wasn’t advertised as being prepped for spinning, nor did I buy it for that purpose, so no blame to the source.)

MUCH easier to work with now.

Especially on the pretty new spindle.

That’s all the spinning news for now, except for the plying (also on the new spindle! with its 2.25″ whorl!) and finishing of the other skein of TsarinaTspun from the original batch of fiber:

Obligatory penny shot:

I did something a little crazy here - or maybe something ordinary, I don’t really know yet. Being in haste to free up my (only!) spindle the other night, I skeined the singles straight onto my swift, tied it off securely in several places, and then took it off the swift and let it kink itself all to hell and back. The fiber is springy enough that when I came to wind it for plying it was tricky but not at all impossible to get it back onto the swift, and of course because it hadn’t been under tension for the intervening couple of days the twist was still quite active. So it pretty much plied itself; I barely had to guide it onto the spindle and give it a semi-occasional nudge in the right direction. Result: unlike the first tskein it is not at all overplied.

I can see where this approach could be a recipe for disaster with a more delicate singles, but in this instance it was damn cool to go way out on a limb and not feel it break under me.

I am learning learning learning learning!

Then came today’s mail, and spinning went back on the shelf.

Here’s what we got.

A test skein of the latest version (new dye process) of the base yarn for the Tsweater. It comprises the same elements as the earlier version but it’s a much more solid-seeming colorway than the last one. Jen says there’ll still be plenty of subtle variation in the shade, though it isn’t as noticeable in the skein, so I still need to swatch twisty stuff with it and look at it in different lights before I confess my undying love for it. But really, what’s not to love?

The rest of this all has to do with the Frozen Margarita, Tsock #3 for this season’s club.

This is the yarn we’re NOT using:

It’s a very lovely sea-cell blend, and I am sure something very lovely is going to happen to it eventually - but it isn’t right for this sock, which I want to be crisp rather than squishy, summery and silly rather than soft and serious. The sea-cell is 3-ply and it’s a beautiful texture - just not the right texture.

This, on the other hand -

- is exactly what I wanted all along. DINGDINGDINGDINGDING! We have a winner.

This is Crystal Palace’s Panda Cotton, just the thing for a cool light-hearted summer knit. (Yes, I hear you out there in the peanut gallery, groaning “Splitty splitty splitty.” I reply, “A great opportunity to fine-tune basic technique.” So there.)

We also have winners for needle and gauge:

That’s one of the stitch patterns for the sock, a lime wedge, freshly-swatched on US #2 needles, at about 6.5 SPI. I still want to tinker with eyelet placement on this, but you get the idea. (What’s that you say? It reminds you of Grand Shell? Good call - as so often happens with me it’s heavily modified to suit my purpose, but the fundamental structure is much the same.)

So, next up - still more swatching.

And then, while I wait for the next batch of yarn… a little more playing with the red mohair.

Because I’m no longer afraid Jennifer will take out a contract on me. Whatever else happens I’m pretty sure now that I’ll wake up tomorrow to find myself still alive and knitting… and spinning, too.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 9:34 pm and is filed under TsockFlock Club, Bloggerei, Change-ringing, Stash Talk, Spinning, Belshazzar's Nemesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.