My First Traditional Three Ply

This Sunday I decided to try a traditional three-ply. I got some BFL custom dyed fiber in a Tim Burton swap through Ravelry. Here is a picture of the fiber the day that I got it.

Then I divided it into three even pieces. I don't have a scale, so I just eyeballed it. I forgot to take a picture of it right when I divided it, but I did have my mom snap a picture while I was just starting to spin.

Here are a few of me actually spinning, I was using a modified long draw. I have been basically teaching myself to spin, so that I don't have a specific technique per se.

So then I had a several singles. I had them off the bobbin onto cardboard tubes that I got from my grandmother.

And then once I had them on the bobbins I plied them together, and here's how I held my hand.

And then I had all the singles plied onto my bobbin.

And then I wound it off onto my niddy noddy that I made out of PVC a while ago. I got the instructions off line, but I don't quite remember where, sorry. I know that it's a two yard niddy noddy, which makes it much easier to count yardage.

I had 88 yards when all was said and done, and under the wound skein you can see just a little bit of fluff. This was all that was left after I plied it, so less than two yards left in total. I looked up and down all over Ravelry, (OK, I got on and did an advanced pattern search for hats with less than 150 yards of yarn in an adult size), and found the Vermonter hat. Which I thought was cute, and I downloaded the pattern, it's a free pattern, and I just used it for how many stitches to cast on, and then I modified it, but I think that it still looks basically like the same hat. Next to the hat is the ball of how much yarn was left, which was more than I would have liked.

I really liked how it would turn out, and how the colors mixed together, and how it turned out. I think that I will try to spin thinner in order to get more yardage in a traditional three ply and then have maybe even a worsted weight, instead of the super bulky that I got this time, but I really do like the "look" of this yarn.

Finishing Things

I have been quite busy working on things. I finished several things, including one of the books that I was reading. I finished reading Against Calvinism by Roger E. Olson. I thought that it was a good argument against Calvinism, hence the title, but I'm not sure that it totally convinced me, but it didn't really provide very good explanations of alternatives to Calvinism, but just presented problem with the Calvinist theology. I recommend reading it if you are interested in Calvinism, and haven't made up your mind about it, but don't really know anything about it. (This is where I was coming from). It's very informative and good at explaining things, and at a few points almost feels repetitive, which really helps to drive the point home for me personally.

Now I'm reading For Calvinism by Michael S. Horton. Which is the other side of the coin as far as the Calvinist debate goes, just presenting the Calvinism theology with a more positive light, whereas Against Calvinism was an argument against it at every turn, and it was hard to picture why anyone would believe it in the first place. For Calvinism I hope is going to answer the question of why people believe and embrace Calvinism, not that I have decided which side I fall down on, but it's still important and interesting to learn about.

I'm also reading A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans. It's a book about how she spent a year following all the biblical laws literally and how she discovered things about herself through following the laws. I think that it's interesting, and I'm learning a lot about different Biblical women that I had never heard of, and I am interested in the Bible, and finding someone that scoured the Bible and found all references to women in order to figure out what it means to "live biblically" is really interesting to me. She writes in a very approachable style, and has her own blog, where you can read about different things. She links different pages of her blog in the book, so I think the two are coordinated, but since the book was written several years ago she's probably not writing about being "domestic" anymore.

In other news I finished a scarf that was two strands held together, I'm calling it "Dirty Snow". It was a strand of white boucle with bits of color and then a strand of lace weight that striped between light blue to white to dark blue to tan to brown and then all the way back again. I like how it turned out. It's just a strip of garter stitch, but I thought that any patterning would be lost in the boucle, so I thought it best to just keep it simple, and not have a lot of complicated things going on.

And then here's a close up of the scarf, where I hope you can see the strand of the lace weight. It had a pretty good halo and was also metallic. 

I also finished a hat, knit with mill ends of sock yarn, and it was striped, and I knit it on my size US 2 Karbonz 16" needles. I did about 2.5" of ribbing, 2x2 ribbing. Then I did a simple mesh stitch that I made up. It was a row of eyelets, and then three rows of plain knit. It was knit in the round, and then I did my normal round decrease at the top to close up the hat.

And then finally I made a baby quilt for Project Linus. It was a along time in the coming, and in the last two nights I finished piecing, put on a border, and then quilted it and put on the binding. And I learned that while I am not terrible at long-arm quilting (my mom has a long arm quilting machine), I am absolutely terrible at sewing straight enough to put on binding. It's quite challenging for me and I'm not really sure why. It's a bargello pattern, made by Jodie and some of her other patterns are available at the Project Linus Kansas City Chapter website. 

And then here is a close-up of the back just so you can see some of the quilting a little better. There are little flowers traveling all the way around the border, but because the border is so busy you can't tell that it's quilted at all unless you are feeling it.

So there you go, everything that I've finished in the past few days. I also cooked up a storm yesterday, and now have enough food for several days. Today I'm going up to Angelika's Yarn Store, and I'll be seeing some new friends, and then I'll be going to Matthew's Ministry, which is a ministry for adults and children with special needs. I'm really looking forward to it, I enjoy it a lot.

Inventory

I have been very blessed by people that have donated yarn to Project Linus, I have also been "collecting" yarn for about the past five years pretty seriously. That all being said I have accumulated quite a bit of yarn. I entered the yarn that I store under the back porch into Ravelry last night, and the total mileage was 39.1375 miles of yarn! And that's just what I had the yarn bands for! Blows me away. I think that I need to go on a pretty severe yarn diet, but that's ok. It will be fun to explore my yarn and find new and better patterns that will match perfectly with the yarn. That's not to say that I won't buy yarn for special projects, like my brother really wants an aran cabled sweater, that I'm going to make out of Lion Brand Wool-Ease, I picked out the pattern with him already and everything. It's going to be epic. I'll tell you all about that closer to when I will be making it. Anyways, here are some pictures of my yarn stash, it's not the prettiest in the world, but it's pretty efficient, and it is free of bugs and mice and all other sorts of creepy crawlies. (Which is VERY important to me that it stays that way!).

This is what it looks like looking out from my room onto the storage area. That's an antique spinning wheel that needs some TLC that it has not gotten yet. It's missing a flyer and bobbin, which can be made, I just haven't been inclined to devote that sort of time to it, especially since I have a nice, functioning wheel already.

This is all the Red Heart Super Saver acrylic that I use for making Project Linus blankets. 99% of this yarn has been donated, I seriously think there are about 2 skeins that I have bought.

This is more Red Heart Super Saver, as well as the ghosts of projects past (the white laundry basket), and some suri alpaca that I haven't processed yet (the brown laundry basket), and fleece that I am working processing (behind the yellow trash bag, breed of sheep unknown).

There is still more Red Heart Super Saver, but just scraps, which I love to work with. In the boot shoe boxes is all my sock yarn, it's crammed in there pretty tightly. And in the plastic bag there is novelty yarn, and in the boxes on the floor and next to the shoe boxes there is more novelty yarn.

So there is the most of my stash demystified. I have my handspun and other nice yarn stored inside in three dresser drawers, but I didn't quite get to that last night.

I think my goal for the new year will definitely be to stash down and to stop bringing in single balls of yarn, that even though they catch my attention in the shops are not good for much besides scarves, cowls, and hats, and I would like to do some bigger projects eventually. I cycle through the Project Linus yarn pretty regularly, and so I will most likely take in more donations before the end of the year, but as long as I am putting out as much as I am taking in I don't see that as being a problem either. I think my biggest hurdle at the moment is bringing in single skeins of "Ooo pretty" yarn, and I need to just make a promise to myself to either buy enough to make a substantial project, or pass it up, because I have enough "Ooo pretty" yarn to last me the whole year I think.

I'm not going to say "I'm going to knit down x miles" because I'm not good at keeping track of projects, and don't want to set myself up for failure with grandiose schemes.

January Project Linus

Today my mom and I went to the Project Linus meeting at the local JoAnn craft store. There is a new website for our chapter, and there are free patterns from the lady that leads the meetings that I go to. You can find the website and patterns here. I turned in five blankets, the two that I took pictures of earlier, the Catherine Wheel

And the square in a square that was green with scrap yarn, all single crochet. 

I also turned in a tunisian crochet blanket, that was done with a size US 10 crochet hook/needle (I'm not really sure what to call the tool that one does the tunisian crochet stitch with, it's like a long knitting needle with a crochet hook on the end, they also come with a cable on the end, but I don't have any of those). I did the honeycomb stitch, and did the stripes short ways, working my way up the blanket. Each stripe is about one skein of yarn. 

The next blanket that I turned in I got half finished last month and it was a single crochet ripple stitch, and I just finished it up. I finished it with a size US I hook, with scraps and some acrylic that I got with the blanket. 

Finally I turned in the bias scrap blanket that I made, all single crochet, with a size US J hook, and with just random scraps of acrylic from yarn donations that I have received. I really like how this one turned out. 

Those are my mom's bright blue shoes underneath each of the blankets, as she was holding them up while I took pictures. She also turned in two blankets, tunisian crochet, mixed with normal crochet. She sat and sewed on the binding on a blanket while I knit on log cabin blanket that I am starting today. Tonight I will go to the young adult group at church. I made a Kentucky Butter cake, and I hope it turned out as delicious as it looks, because it looks really good. The recipe was for regular flour, but I just substituted all-purpose gluten free flour for the regular flour, and I think it will turn out well.

Splitting A Ball in Half

Today I finished a scarf that I made with four different balls of Hobby Lobby's I Love This Wool, but before I show you the picture, I am going to describe my method for splitting balls in half without a ball winder, a swift, or a scale.

This is the ball in it's original state. One could just start knitting from the inside or the outside, since it's a center pull ball, which is perfect for my purposes. The first step is to find the inside end and the outside end, holding them together, start winding a ball, just manually. 

At the end of all that you will have a single ball held double. Cut the string in half when you get to the very end of the original ball. If you are making two at a time socks you can stop here, and can knit both socks from the same ball, meaning that if you are knitting toe up you will know exactly when to end in order to use up as much of the yarn as possible. I prefer knitting two at a time toe up, on 40" cable needles, size US 1. I think that they go fast. I will describe my vanilla sock recipe in a later post. 

 Next take both ends of the ball and start winding two separate balls. If the yarn gets twisted, simply untwist it. I never find it to become terribly troublesome.

Continue winding into two separate balls. 

Eventually you will end up with two completely separate balls.

Tadaa! A ball split in half with no fancy equipment whatsoever.

After I split the ball in half today I finished crocheting a scarf. I used half of four different balls of Hobby Lobby's I Love This Wool, so I have exactly enough to make an exactly identical scarf, which I think that I will end up doing. I would just like to say that I did not love the I Love This Wool though. I thought it was too splitty, and it kept splitting on me. It did come in a variety of different plies in the Naturals line. I started with a solid brown, then did a section of three plies of brown with one ply cream, then half and half, two plies brown, two plies cream, and finally three plies cream and one ply brown. I think it ended up being a really interesting gradient, and I may have to experiment with making gradients like this using handspun, since I have never really played around with anything more than Navajo plying or two ply, so playing with more plies would be fun. Here is the finished scarf. I used a size US J crochet hook, and used the berry stitch, which is just alternating double crochet and single crochet stitches every other stitch and then double crochet in the single crochet and single crochet in the double crochet in the next row.

I came home this evening and made an especially yummy dinner. I roasted peppers, tomatoes, and chickpeas in the oven, sprinkling them with garlic salt and pepper. I sauteed zucchini, yellow squash, and red onion and minced garlic in a skillet on the stove top, and then I cooked some gluten free spiral pasta. I waited until each component was done then I mixed them all together with olive oil and Parmesan cheese in a plastic container, I ate half and saved the other half for tomorrow. It was really delicious, and I might write out a more specific recipe, but I don't really want this to become a food blog, since I think my crafting is more interesting than my cooking. I'm also not always exact when I cook, so making recipes is not my forte. 

The Lake

Today I went for an adventure with my grandparents to the lake. We stayed for about thirty seconds and then got in the car and came back home (after stopping at a clearance store and Mexican for lunch). Now going to the lake is about a two hour drive each way and the clearance store and the Mexican restaurant were about half an hour out of the way, so I had a lot of time in the car today. I got a fair amount done on a scarf, but nothing finished yet, and I discussed some finer points of religion with my grandfather, and for the record, if you are going to have a religious debate with someone, it helps to have terms clearly defined, as this was a stumbling point in our discussion several times. It never got very deep, but I did get new insights into my grandfather, even if those insights mean that I now realize I agree with him even less than I did before. But it's all good, we're still family and I still love him very much and I know he loves me.

Now onto pictures of the lake! It was frozen over and there were about two hundred geese sitting on it, I guess the ice here is warmer than the ice in Canada? I think if I were a goose I would've kept migrating 'til I was a little further South where it would be even warmer, but alas, I am not a goose.

A close-er up shot of all the geese sitting on the lake.

A view of our dock and the frozen lake.

A broad sweeping view of the lake where the geese where sitting.

A view from the drive way down to the frozen lake, with the picnic tables and firepit.

A view of the house while being on the dock with my grandfather standing on the deck. 

A view from the corner of the dock down onto the ice where the ice split and cracked nicely.

So that was my day, not much excitement, but a lot of talking and a quite drastic change in scenery. 

Crochet, Bake, Knit

Hello everyone! It has been an exciting day of nothingness here at my house. Yesterday I spent the day chilling with my grandparents, and managed to get a scarf done and a hat started. This is the scarf, and I'll save the hat until it's finished.

The scarf was made using the honeycomb stitch of tunisian crochet on a size P hook. The yarn is Wool-Ease Chunky by Lion Brand Yarn Company. I like how it turned out, it's not really big enough to be much more than an accent piece thought, but it would add a pop to someone's wardrobe, and the grey makes it neutral enough to go with more than just a lime green coat or sweater or something. 

Then this morning I made (drumroll please), cinnamon rolls! They are gluten free and from a recipe found at the Recreating Happiness Gluten Free blog. My pictures are not as scrumptious as hers, but they taste delicious! This is the first time that I have been able to have gluten free dough that turned out yeast-y and gooey like a real cinnamon roll, so kudos to her! They were awesome! I think I would take the dough by itself and make dinner rolls (just cook balled up dough so that it's pull apart, but without the cinnamon filling, obviously), it was that good! So here's the picture of how mine turned out....

The link to this recipe is here (Recreating Happiness Gluten Free). It's really great, I encourage you to try it on a boring afternoon. I will warn you that the dough is very sticky and can be tricky to roll into the cinnamon rolls (hence some of mine are a little ugly, they tore when I was rolling them up). But the end product is well worth it. Also, this recipe is entirely from scratch! So you will need quite a few ingredients, but honestly, I had everything in my cupboards already and didn't have to go get anything, so based on my experience I would say that all the ingredients are fairly common, especially if you have been baking gluten free for any length of time. 

While I was waiting for my cinnamon rolls to bake I finished another cowl, made out of Mega Brushed by Premier Yarns, it's 100% acrylic, and I held it double and used a size 13 needle. I used the basket weave stitch, using a pattern that I improvised for my friend when she was making cowls for her family this past Christmas season. I am quite pleased with how it turned out, I think it will wear well and be very warm, it will be going up on my Etsy store in March along with everything else that I have been showing on here (except for the Project Linus blankets, of course). 

Other than that I have been listening to sermons by different people about the differences between Calvinism and Arminianism, and think I am leaning toward Arminianism, but am also torn about determinism, because it seems to make sense in a sort of way. I am still reading Against Calvinism by Roger E. Olson, and Mythologies by Roland Barthes. How I have been reading Mythologies is that I read through it and just underline any word that I may not know (which tends to be slang, it's a philosophical, yet contemporary book, it's hard to explain). Afterwards I go through with the translator on my phone and look up any words that I had underlined previously. I think that this will reinforce my vocabulary and also strengthen the vocabulary that I am able to recall and use, not just the vocabulary that I am able to recognize, because I find that those are two different things. I also found out just yesterday that the community college in my metropolitan area offers courses in Chinese, four separate semesters, and I am seriously considering enrolling in Chinese in the fall, it's too late of course for the spring semester, but that will be something to look forward to. 

So that's it!

Needle Review/ My Personal Opinion

Today I'm going to talk about different needles that I am using and have used in making the color work hats that I am going to sell on Etsy, but first, let's have a quick look at the projects that I finished yesterday, shall we?

These are five little pocket bags that I finished up yesterday. They are approximately 3.5" by 5" by 7". The wider striped ones are going to be priced more because I pieced the base fabric for the bag, almost all of them have different sizes of black and white polka dots as the pocket lining. How the bags are made the inside of the bags are the same as the outside. It's a pretty neat little design, not a lot of cutting, just quite a bit of folding. 

This is another blanket for Project Linus, it's crochet, the stitch is a Catherine Wheel, with three colors, and then borders to make it big enough, since I ran out of yarn before it was big enough. Then I did a shell edge, just to tie it all together. 

And now for the needles. In this picture you can see a colorwork hat, made on size US 2 needles, with Knitpicks palette yarn, for almost all of it, the grey is sockweight yarn that was white and I dyed it and ended up with a tonal grey. The three types of needles in this picture are an unknown brand set of double points, size US 2, bamboo. Then there are the Hiya Hiya interchangeables with a 24" cable and size US 2 tips. Finally there are a set of Knitter's Pride Karbonz in size US 2 with a 16" cable. 

First, the double pointed needles, they are probably the most traditional. I have done quite a few socks exclusively on double points, and once you get the hang of them they are really pretty slick and I don't find them excessively fiddly. Now I usually only use DPNs for finishing the top of hats where the circumference of the knitting prohibits it working on a flexible cabled needle. I have an issue with using bamboo, I use bamboo over metal because it is less slick and I don't have to worry about stitches falling off, which has been an issue for me in the past. (There was one time I was working on socks on US 00 DPNs on a back country road at the lake, and we hit a bump and half of my stitches on a short row heel, half way through it, fell off, and I literally screamed and held my breath while I worked on getting the stitches back on the needles. The finished project ended up being very stiff, as the gauge was too small for the yarn, and the heel just did not fit right. I only finished the one as it was a bit of a disaster). 

 OK, back to the review. This Christmas I made approximately 18 hats for all they guys at the church group that I go to. 15 were done with sock yarn, and the Hiya Hiya interchangeables that are pictured above. I like the join between the tips and the cable, it's a screw attachment, and I find it secure and stable. I also like that the interchangeables go down to a size US 2, since most interchangeable sets that I have seen usually only go down to the size US 4, which just isn't small enough for me personally. The only problem that I am finding with these needles is that because I work a little tensely, and at the tip of the needle, I have been sharpening the needle to the point that it stabs me in the pointer finger on my right hand. I realize that this is probably not a common problem, and I don't think that what I have done with these needles should be considered "normal use", but it is something that I have noticed. 

The last set of needles is the Knitter's Pride Karbonz needles. They have metal tips with carbon fiber shafts, and metal joins to the plastic cable. The 16" cable is really nice for me, because of the hats that I am making the stitches fit better on that size of cable, but that is not really a critique of the needles. The carbon fiber shaft feels a little funny, but they don't snag stitches at all, and the joins are very smooth, and I am finding that I can knit very fast on these needles with minimal stabbing, since the points are not blunt but rounded so my finger is not suffering. 

So there you go, I really think it comes down to personal preference. At this point I prefer the Knitter's Pride Karbonz, but I am not everyone so I think there is a lot of wiggle room about which needles will work for you!

New Projects

So, now into the juicy stuff, there are several projects that I have been taking up to fill up my time. But first, let's look at what I finished this morning, and a new blanket for Project Linus that I finished a few days ago.

This scarf was done with the honeycomb tunisian crochet stitch, with gradient yarn that I dyed myself, it was lopi wool from iceland. I think it turned out quite nicely. 

This is a green blanket with scrap yarn accents that I finished for Project Linus. The center square was double tunisian crochet stitch. The green triangles are single crochet with decreases to make the triangle shape, and the borders are all single crochet as well. I have an affinity for the single crochet triangles right now, don't ask me why, I just find them addicting.

In addition to crafting I have been reading quite a bit. I recently finished 2159 by Criag Borlase, it was an interesting read, giving the history of Christianity, and I thought it was intriguing. Currently I am reading Against Calvinism by Roger E. Olson and Mythologies by Roland Barthes. I am reading Against Calvinism because I am becoming more interested in the deeper theological perspectives than just the shallow interpretations that I have grown up with. I am reading Mythologies because it is a book in French, and I need to practice my French, and Spanish, because I am currently trying to learn Chinese, and currently have a vocabulary of about 60 words (which is not a whole lot, but you have to start somewhere, and I am pretty happy with that number). Anyways, I need to not lose my fluency in French and Spanish just because I have started a new language.

To learn Chinese I am mainly relying heavily on youtube videos. There is a test called the HSK that is an international test that ranks your ability in Chinese for non-native speakers. I have been watching flashcard videos to learn the words. I have been watching grammar and pronunciation videos to better give me a fuller picture of the language. I also purchased a textbook of Beginner's Chinese, but it has not been able to hold my attention as well as the videos (which, I'm not sure why, I think it's because the audio is missing and I'm still lacking in being able to picture and hear what the words sound like from the pinyin alone). I also downloaded several free smartphone apps that have flashcards that have been helping me with my vocabulary.

Tonight I have Spanish tutoring, so I need to figure out my lesson plan for that. Other than that, that's about all that I am doing. So, stay creative everyone!

Alive Again!

Hello everyone, I am now back again again. This time I will be being much more vigilant in posting on here and see what we can come up with.
My current large, overambitious project is to open up my Etsy store again, and to have quarterly updates. I will be having very nice pictures taken and posted to my shop and on here, but so far, this is what I have.

They are little bags called pocket bags, with a drawstring closure, and there are two pockets on the outside of each bag. They are roughly 5" by 3.5" by 7". I think that it is a good size for a notions bag and that it will be a good launching point for my store. I have also made some hats. They are sock weight and color work, all variations in the same weight, but with different designs and colors throughout. 

They are slouchy hats, and are completely handmade. I think that these will add a nice aspect of my own handmade to the store, and I think that I will also have some scarves and cowls in there as well.

So that is what is going on as far as my store front is concerned, in other news I have been very busy in making things for people in my life, and for Project Linus that will be given to children that are either ill or in traumatic situations. Here are some examples of those.

So that's pretty much it. I have finished ECT treatments and am working on getting on with my life, but this is what I've been up to so far and there will be more updates to come. Thanks for reading, and hope to be catching up with you tomorrow!