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!
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…
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.