An beautiful ethereal performance among gossamer veils,
by the Zilliacus Persson Raitenen String Trio.
( see all posts Veils & Variations )
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Meanwhile, I have got a second stole underway with the single ply lace weight …
made from my yarn tasting of Simply Wool . In fact, I am so utterly smitten with Unspun that I can’t help myself wondering how far out I might go. I’ll ponder the thought as I take my stole knitting out for a trail walk!
Another great addition to Knit Pick’s colossal array of yarns, Simply Wool is spun from wool grown in a century-old sustainable way in the Highlands of Peru, it comes in six shades undyed natural fleece colors blends, in both worsted and bulky weights. Having worked with Wool Of The Andes, a Peruvian Highland wool from corriedale-merino cross breed of sheep, Simply Wool is noted on the website as ‘eco wool’ but that is not describing how or to what extent the wool itself is different from Wool Of The Andes. I’d say much softer than Wool Of The Andes, what I’d expect from an un-dyed and minimally processed wool, and it comes in 100g skeins.
I am creating a fine lace-weight in this supreme all-natural yarn, which started from a ball of worsted weight in light grey . 
With drop spindle I deconstructed the soft wool exactly as in this tutorial post , and after a couple of days unplying here and there, finally this morning I spliced all the single plies end-to-end on the swift and felt it to be a major accomplishment that I am very pleased with!
I am not over-dying this big skein in a simmer dye bath, as I want it to be au natural, the whole point of buying Simply Wool, aside from the ecological consideration, so I just gave the skein of energized single ply off of the swift a warm bath and a hot rinse to carefully but slightly felt the yarn to set the twist as it will remain for the rest of its days a single ply, in a stole of a particular design in mind. So I’ll see how this yarn knits up in a day or so!
Right now I’ve got it speed drying on a baseboard heater, hoping to have it re-skeined by the end of the day so I can cast on for more insane lace knitting!
It is raining, how heavenly, and my most recent Unspun experiment, posted about here, is snailing along very slowly. Nupps are so cool, but so difficult, taking real skill and concentration , not to speak of excellent light and magnification!
In previous out gathering lace post you may have not caught it, but I am doing the breadcrumbs thing where I begin to hint of something coming. It will be long coming, a ways down the trail (a long, long meandering, as the lace is taking forever), the theme being woods, music, variations, lace, only vaguely related. Its far too abstract at the moment, but do expect some puzzling crumb hunting, as I’m having some fun with this veils theme. I have decided that I love to ‘play’ on my blog this way, as I did with the whole Fishy thing the summer before last. I love discovering side trails, merry chase always on the verge of confusion, but then we arrive at destination eventually.
For now I am immensely enjoying this wet weekend with tea & lace knitting.
Oh, and my cough is slowly improving!
What I have here is something I decided afterall to design with the Unspun yarn I posted about earlier. I have been wanting to design something for extraordinarily fine lace weight yarn, for I am really going off the deep end with my Unspun experiments. There’s me, collecting single balls & sampling the post-deconstruction qualities, and forming observations & personal opinions about results. Why on earth? I suppose this stems from frugal & philosophical roots, the concept of using what one has before running off and buying more, to empower the idea reusing/recycling odd single balls left unused in ones stash. I think of them as orphans needing a home. A single ball of worsted weight is not enough to really make much out of, but to deconstruct and get enough fine lace yarn to make a whole beautiful lace scarf or cowl, and well folks, now that is exciting! Quirky, yes, but I am beginning to think it is some kind of an odd calling!
Anyway, for this upcoming design I wanted to be different than all of the other lace designs I’ve thus far written patterns for. First, I want to design a lace thing with finally, straight edges, all sides top and bottom, for super easy blocking, and secondly I want this one to be ultra simple, very minimal in patterning. Let me mention that in this forthcoming design I am experimenting for the first time — nupps! Nupps are crazy difficult for me, especially with such fine yarn, because for a nupp-7 is nearly impossible to pick up all the stitches to purl together without accidentally picking up neighboring stitches, or dropping some of them. I am wearing two pairs of reading glasses for super magnification, but still have been messing up and losing count and having to rip back due to this mistake, many times. So many times in fact, that I have had to devise a method of knitting nupps where I section off each nupp either side with a self-made yarn stitch marker (the metal ones snag this ultra fine yarn, can’t use those), so that I can see the whole nupp cluster so much easier.
Thats me here now, a bit of struggling with the nupps, but more in love with the ethereal feel of really fine lace knitting!
My ” Loft “. December 21, 2018
I’ve been pondering a lot lately about how much of my life feels like a work in progress. Fortunately the house is ~ finally ~ in progress, but still I can’t even guess as to when it will be a finished thing. I just hope that we don’t move in and then take another several years finishing, like the … um… first time we built it. I recall sharing in this post, November 2012 when we finally put in the upstairs finished floor, and I finally gave my loft its finished paint coat. That folks, was nearly eight years after we had moved in! When we moved in January 2005, the living room was still a work shop, yup, we were living among chop saws and rip saws, and the like. I am so worried that this will be a repeat performance, but I know I should not worry, because it is a whole different experience this time around.
Now for a much easier thing, a knitting work in progress.
I can at least force myself to think about stitches to distraction, even if it does border on a sometimes extreme perspective in life where knitting is my meditation, medication, and dedication (oh, and revisiting Fishwives Shoal is proving to be quite the challenge!) I am hoping to be finished with this by my birthday in a few weeks. It would be a great present to myself to have knit this special yarn bought back when, this yarn that was among the few sentimental yarns I took with me when I fled the wildfire (although I brought none of my knitteds) and now I can finally make it into a knitted form. When I consider all historic elements of this project ~~ this yarn, this design, and this room ~~ it really is quite fitting that I should put importance on this small stole, for it represents a sort of cycle, and coming around to the origin of things.
Check out the original stole I blocked in the original house loft room, the very same space as the the top photo is showing to be again some day…
From the Archives: June Into July
I don’t know how I can manage to post the past & future photos of my loft together here without drawing tears (now that is progress!) but the theme really is asking for it. This idea of accepting life to be a work in progress, and all we hold dear, for if we were not working in progress, how unchallenged & bored would we be. Anyway, after the holidays now I finally have a quiet little recess to explore unfinished projects, big and small, but mostly pondering what that means, and how leaving things unfinished is not good for me. It feels great to seek out this historic yarn I took with me, and to have the opportunity to finish it at last, and to post these photos of the house being built and anticipating my creative space coming together again. The house will be done in a blink, and there’ll be me next year at this time thinking & worrying about other things.
In previous post I decided to do a mystery Unspun project, not saying what yarn I started with. I am rather surprised to find this whole project really only took me a few hours this time. That is from unplying the original commercial yarn, to splicing and winding on to skein, to overdying, adding the time this morning winding it off into a ball and re-skeining to photograph, and I was finished before I could blink! Not much of a long anticipated mystery was it ?
I did say in the last post that I was keen on writing another lace pattern for this job, but I think it would be an over-enthusiastic pursuit to try, being that I still am feeling under the weather with my sawdust cough. I think instead I will use this lovely skein of yarn toward a cowl or shawlette of Golden Fields .
Tech Stuff:
Original Yarn: Knit Picks Wool Of The Andes Sport, 137 yards, 50 grams, structure 4 plies. Cost = $2.79 per ball. Fiber: Peruvian Highland Wool (Corriedale + Merino) in color Mink Heather.
I deconstructed the plies as illustrated in the Unspun: Deconstructing a ball of Yarn post, then I overdyed with a small amount of Jacquard Acid dye in the shade “Pink”. Being that the yarn was already a richly heathered neutral color, all I was after was a soft brush of pink, so that the heathering was really pronounced even after the dying. I think I put too much dye in, even though a light sprinkle of dye powder, I should have done half of that, for it is really a vivid color, more so than I wanted.
I like to agitate just a tiny bit in the dye bath, being that an ever so slight fulling is desireable, but I warn that this is a very careful step, and I would not recommend this to anybody using 100% Merino or anything too fine & downy. A very very slight fulling or felting really helps set the splices and relax the re-energized single ply after unplying. But too much fulling would result in the yarn being very difficult to unwind. In this skein, after a couple of times from swift to ball, the yarn has become perfect and relaxed.
Unspun Yarn: 548 yards, 50 grams, structure 1 ply.
You can see all posts about Unspun HERE.
Humble new beginnings after the shortest day of the year has come and gone, and I can’t relax with the plague for the holidays a second longer, the antibiotics are done and I am feeling better with only a slight but perpetual sawdust cough, so its back to wool lab for me! Thank so many of you for your get-well wishes, I think they worked!
I have decided to do a mystery Unspun skein, which I will over-dye, write a lace pattern for and knit, sharing with you here the process of course. I’m racing the clock but hoping I might blast through the first month of winter with it and before the end of January have something worth showing off! Its going to be categorized as a superfine lace weight single ply at 1096 yards per 100g.
But this is the dismal beginning, the hard work of unplying a lot of yards, and if you would like to see how I am going to do this, it will be exactly like my previous Unspun on a drop spindle, the post ” Unspun: Deconstructing a ball of yarn “.
I’ll see you back here when I’ve finished unplying, spliced four single ply balls into one skein, and have over-dyed this baby!
A tiny living Christmas tree for a tiny house!
And on it I have hung two ornaments…
A really tiny house, and well, that needs no explanation does it … and an acorn, a symbol of strength & potential. This brave & fearless little tree has a big future to uphold!
Merry Christmas everyone!
Hey! Its a chullo!!!
A totally improvised piece, the way I’ve been making them for decades.
One and a half days before Christmas,
and I am now finished with all of my gift-making!
Now where’s the Irish Cream? I want to party!
Hi, its me Abelene.
I am wearing Jen’s latest knit of a beautiful cowl she knit from Golden Fields Lace pattern. Some lucky lady is going to find this under the tree. It is made from Cascade 220 Sport, in my favorite color of light grey!
Jen says you can knit one for gifts for all the women & dress forms in your life, so be a pal and go find some yarn and needles and cast on! Jen will really appreciate it, because she’s really laid low, struck from the plague & on a short course of strong antibiotics. Actually she has gotten a nasty sinus & upper respiratory infection due to sanding beams last weekend if you can believe it!
It is this beautiful sun-bathed north-facing alcove that has put her down for a stretch…
No more sanding for Jen!
She is happily dreaming of the months ahead when the house might be closer to finished, but for now Jen wants me to say that she hopes you all are enjoying the beautiful Solstice time of year when things up here the Northern Hemisphere are at their most dormant stage. Nothing but dutiful resolutions to come in months ahead, so cozy up in these dark shortest days of the year while you can.
Ta ta ,
Abelene
This is a great little method of shortbread I have refined out of necessity, because of the challenges of Tiny House tiny oven that burns everything from the back way before done, and having hardly any counter space to work on anyway. No complaints really, but only that I have had to abandon my usual ritual of making my own signature shortbread . . . beginning with fresh grinding oats with a grain grinding attachment on my heavy duty Kitchenaid mixer that swishes together three batches at once like stirring cream into your coffee, then a process of rolling out over a great sprawling counter space, between layers of waxed paper with my maple wood rolling pin and lastly cutting then perforating each piece with three particular wooden chopsticks. Right, so my tried and true shortbread ritual with all of its specific paraphernalia has been abandoned while living in our Tiny House, but by abandoning it for a far easier & faster method, I have actually made a discovery of shortbread with delightful and very unique texture!
And I have to make this small batch very often, because not only does Jeff really appreciate home-made shortbread in his working man’s lunch, but the carpenters building our house do as well, and I have been bringing this very shortbread up to the builders often, with pint jars of tea, coffee, or cocoa. They light up when they see me bring in the basket, thanking me again and again, and for me it is essential that our house is being built by happy & pampered carpenters! So, I am the designated shortbread pro. I was once employed at what is now a locally famous bakery cafe, and these are in fact, the same ingredients that bakery used, but put together in a very different way. This is how I make one batch of my no-burned-edges Tiny House Shortbread.
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Ingredients : 1 cup fresh unbleached flour, 1/2 cup organic powdered sugar, 1/2 cup (1 cube) organic salted cold butter, cut into slices. (I also put in the mix just a pinch of grey sea salt ground in mortar & pestle.)
My specific Tiny House instructions:
1. In small Cuisinart (should I say tiny food processor?) blend flour & sugar, then add butter and pulse until all the butter has been finely chopped into the flour/sugar, and has become a lovely buttery shortbread ” powder “. Do not over process into clumpy dough, stop mixing when it is still a powdery crumb, but integrated fully.
2. Dump mix into 8x8x2 inch square Pyrex glass baking dish, and very lightly distribute evenly with your hands or a spatula and lightly pat into a somewhat level even layer, but no pressing, it really will all melt, then crisp together in a beautiful way that these three magical ingredients do all by themselves.
3. Place in oven, right against the door and bake, turning a quarter turn every 5 minutes, so that shortbread is forced to bake more even.
4. When the edges begin to brown, around 15 minutes, lift out of oven and cut around perimeter of baking dish about 1/2 inch into the shortbread and lift out these bits on to the cooling rack (to eat in the mean time), before the edges scorch and are wasted, and the flavor of burn permeates the batch.
Honestly, omit the trimming edge step if you are using a conventional oven which heats evenly and doesn’t burn the edges of things, but if you want to do it for fun, and to have those little bits & cut-edge squares, well then do it anyway!
5. Cut into 16 to 20 squares, and then carefully separate the squares a little in the dish, without lifting — but really, this is fiddly and not even necessary.
6. Back into the oven, turning dish every 5 minutes to get even baking. When the shortbread looks golden and beautiful, remove from oven, and with spatula carefully lift squares onto cooling rack. Voila!
Tiny House Shortbread stacked on a tiny plate!
Heavenly chocolate version: Make the exact same way but add into flour mix 1/4 cup best dutch-processed cocoa powder, and when adding the butter, also add 1/2 tsp of best quality vanilla extract.
Road and house construction side by side.
Quite literally, many things here are getting wrapped up, so to speak. The biggest and most important of course, is our house, and the timberframe is swiftly becoming enclosed, that is wrapped, while road construction is making great progress too as dumptruck after dumptruck of base gravel makes its way up the mountain from the quarry.
Secondly I am about to close in on the last quarter mile of 880 yards of Unspun yarn I made in the end of October. In fact, I have been putting together a lace stole & cowl design using this yarn, and the pattern is all ready but for the finish photo, all awaiting on the speed which I can wrap up this project! I am hoping for it to be ready by the end of this week, and then there will be a lovely simple & satisfying lace pattern available for holiday knitting!
Next we’re wrapping up November, with only four more days to it, then its already December and the big wrapping up of 2018! I tell you, in the recent couple of weeks I’ve had a transformation in attitude; I am no longer feeling sad and sorry for myself, but really excited, and my panic episodes calming, as the tide changes to feeling abundance and gratitude coming my way. Its been a difficult year since last November, but I am so very excited for 2019 at last, with all that it promises. And until then I am loving the loud rumbling of road-making machinery, merged into the cacophony of air compressors, nail guns, and hammers, so while so much excitement is here at last, I want to enjoy every moment! I just know that in a blink the day is going to come when we migrate from this tiny house 500 feet up the road into our new rebuilt house. I am very content for life as it is, knowing that time will be here most certainly by the coming of next summer solstice.
In closing, over the Thanksgiving holiday the rain came in a big way, wrapping up another epic dry season, transforming the dry moss into lush moss, life drinking it in, miniature rain forests growing thick carpets on the wood and rocks, and bringing a verdant mood to things. Loving that and giving thanks indeed.
Now that the posts & beams of the house are going up, I am in a creative mood about what will go inside the rooms. A couple of days ago I found this old oak double bed frame, and I’m really enjoying fixing it up. It is very solid, relatively inexpensive and worth every bit of work I put into it.
It will go in the Loft Room, replacing an old tarnished brass bed I had forever, but I have convinced myself that I love this much better than the old one, for I love the feel of wood, so sensual and natural.
I spent several hours scrubbing every surface with #0000 (finest) steel wool and a beeswax citrus cleaner, scrubbing off a layer of dirt & old lacquer, resulting in a satin finish with golden oak highlights! Although it could use another scrubbing, I am reticent for I don’t want to lose the depth of patina in the grain & crevasses.
A few cracks in the posts and flakes lifted from the veneer of the side boards, but I am absolutely totally in love with it. I will be looking for old quilts now to dress it with, perhaps making another someday, but for now I am envisioning blocking out lace stoles the whole length of it!
From a single ball of worsted weight yarn, I made a beautiful new skein of single ply fine lace weight yarn, then over-dyed into a very personal colorway. What is the point you might ask? To make something handmade from something commercially made. Enough reason in my thinking, and yet there are more reasons (oh, so many more).
The color selection alone is entirely worth it! There are certain commercial yarns that are timeless & very popular, like Cascade 220, easily found in local yarn shops, and have a colossal color selection to add. I am a lover of “heathered shades” which means the yarn is spun from blended colors of fleece, not yarn dyed in one color. Heathered shades make over-dying that much more interesting for the base colors are already color textured.
If making a fingering weight , or a lace weight yarn from balls of yarn needing re-purposing sounds appealing ~~ then this post is for you. I dare you, go into your yarn stash and look over your plied yarns, grab one, and simply deconstruct the plies. You may end up with a sport, or fingering or lace weight single ply. But first it may be helpful to see this post.
♣ ♣ ♣
The techy stuff for the Cascade 220…
Start with drop spindle and untwist, separating the 4 plies into two balls of 2-ply (they will be 50g each) This will take some time.
From two balls of 2-ply separately divide and wind into two single ply 25g balls.
I found that I really didn’t need to untwist the 50g balls that much, if at all, because the initial untwisting of 4 into 2 plies did all the work, so it goes so much faster in this step. In fact, I just took off of the spindle and just began to pull apart the plies wind into little balls, however they will still have some twist (sometimes a little z-twist , and sometimes a little s-twist ) so it helped to put a weight (I used a pen) on the 2ply, and draw out about 8 feet, then the plies separated easily with hardly any twist.
Finally I had four balls of single ply, at 25 grams each. A feeling of strong satisfaction comes from the work!
Now join the ends ~~ spit-splicing them joins nicely and quickly!
I ended up with one full 100 gram ball of single ply. But not finished!
The single ply needs to be wound into a skein it so that it can be simmer-dyed, or just soaked in a very hot water bath to relax & set the plies which will be energized with twist, as shown above.
I dunked a couple of times in a very pale diluted dye bath of Vermilion pink, to give the yarn a tone of late summer, ‘toasted in the sun & weather’ look. In the over-dying, I wanted to capture the lovely color of late summer golden fields of my home and made a pale bath of a purple-pink which I used to cut the brilliance of the yellow. The dye soaks really fast having a slight blotchiness. If you lightly over-dye your single ply yarn as I did, re-skeining the yarn is essential to see the color variegation at its best, and it mixes up any slight blotchiness that happens in a very light non-saturated dye bath ; which is what I aim for these days, simmering a little in an acid dye to set the plies & relax them, but also exhausting dye bath quickly and with clear water left only, having used a dash of white vinegar for the fixer .
Summary: A ball of Cascade 220 weighs 100g and is approx 220 yards , and constructed of 4 plies. When that is split into half , there will be two balls of 2 ply weighing 50g = 440 yards per 100g. When those balls are split into half , there will be four balls of 1 ply weighing 25g = 880 yards per 100g. Another four ply worsted weight I’ve tried and love is Knit Picks Wool Of The Andes, with almost the same yardage and definitely the most impressive color selection. But seriously, try splitting plies of ANY yarn you have, if you can get a hold of a simple drop spindle, then you have all the tools you need. (A swift and ball winder are tools I used as well).
It takes some time, but untwisting yarn is something really innovative and resourceful in my thinking, and I’ve come up with a fun category under which to post the process of re-purposing yarn to finer weights ~~ Unspun ! I’m just kind of getting to be a nerd about it.
Original Yarn: Cascade 220 = 220y / 100g in “Birch”. Made in Peru.
Repurposed Yarn: Unspun = 880 y / 100g in colorway ” Golden Fields “. Remade by Moi!
Pattern made from this yarn is now available HERE
See all posts Unspun
Hi everyone, its me Abelene!
Jen let me try on her most recent lacy things, and they feel so pretty. Just so nice. This blue one is baby alpaca, called Alpaca Cloud by Knit Picks, and Jen said it is a sample of a new lace thing she is working on that she hopes to come out with this Autumn. How exciting that I get to model it as a sneak preview!
Jen told me that there was no room in the Tiny House to block the cowl out to dry, so she pinned it down on her car seat over night ~~ ha ha, very funny! Also she put this lovely plum colored ribbed lace on me, told me to say that it is made from a yarn called Gloss by Knit Picks, which has silk and merino wool, and is a modification of her Double Cappuccino pattern … and I just can’t help but think how similar to frothed milk that it feels like. Really so!
Thats me for now, signing off… and its back into the shed I go.
Ta ta, Abelene
