Annual Demo at the NYS Fair

There's a tiny old building, called the Wool Center, squeezed between several others at the NYS State Fair. It's really only a couple of rooms with garage doors at either end but has served quite well through the years for all kinds of demos having to do with wool.

My guild, the Black Sheep Handspinners, take on one day each year to demo wheel and spindle spinning in this building.  Jim and I have been doing this for the last 3 years.  The first 2 were so hot we thought about not going again.  Really sticky, muggy, in the 90's, hot is not too wonderful for spinning wool but this year the temps were merely in the 80's and sometimes clouds blocked the blasting sun so it was fun and always interesting talking to folks wandering by.

I got to eat greasy expensive yam fries.  Jim had a humongmous fried haddock sandwich and Deirdre  got some excellent coffee with real cream.  I also indulged in fresh squeezed lemonade and a people watching walk around the area.  Other than that it was 4 hours of spinning with no phone calls or internet to interrupt us, just pleasant folks asking good questions.

That was my view from behind the picket fence.

A weaver answering questions.

Sharon and Sue getting ready for the afternoon shift.

Hard to see but these two stands had bacon everything -- batter fried, dipped in chocolate, etc.

And we couldn't have done it without our faithful Dolly.

Ravellenic Gold!!

Yesterday I received this:

Following the link I came to:

**PODIUM**

Done and Done

As of Friday, the knitting of the

was completed.  All that remains is the paperwork - finishing the pattern, figuring all the yardages, and whatever else is needed before I send it all away to Knitter's Mag.

Once that knitting was done, I concentrated on the socks.  It felt very freeing to have 5+ days to get it all done.  I was actually going for being able to mail them by Tuesday so MVOS would have her socks by her birthday on Thursday.  Instead of spinning at guild yesterday I knit.  Both Becki and I knit with these results.

 Hers are on the top and mine are the bottom ones.  One sock was ready for ribbing and the other had about 3+ inches to go on the cuff before the ribbing.

I remember on Friday Marina wrote to say she was spending most of her weekend trying to get her shawl done on time.  I thought she meant before her trip to Madison but, no, she meant before the Olympics ended.  I was happy to tell her it went until Thurs or Friday.

Then this morning while talking on the phone with my mother she mentioned the Olympics ending today.  I said I thought it was later in the week so she checked her newspaper and confirmed today as the day. My mother sometimes gets her dates mixed up but since the newspaper said the same she had to be right. Don't know where I got the 17th as the ending from either.

Sheesh!  And there went today's schedule of getting the paperwork for the skirt done.  I immediately turned on my ipod and the latest book I am listening to - Fern Michaels' Kentucky Series (I'm on Bk2).

Amazing how much knitting can get done when one puts one's mind and fingers to it and does not check email or facebook.

These will ship tomorrow!

19.5 - 9.5 + 0.5

I play Words with Friends from Zynga with a few friends.  Yesterday Ruth played ungot.  Ungot?  What kind of English is that?  We fooled around thinking of other un words - unhad, unborrowed, uneat, unknit.......

Little did I know what a portend that was.


About midnight when I was merely about 120 iterations away from completing the skirt I had a brainstorm.  Before even completing the I-cord cast-off I wanted to see just how the skirt might look. There were enough stitches off the needles to allow for that neat sneak peak.  So I spread the skirt on the table and it was HUGE.  Really HUGE. How could that have happened?  Was I just too tired and not seeing correctly?  No the circumference was really really big.  I had planned for some flounce but when I started analyzing the results I realized that the flounce was only meant to be 3-4 inches but now it was 9.5 to account for the extra length I misread.  Sigh.  Midnight is not the time to make big decisions.  But I was now not at all sleepy either so I left the skirt to sit and watch an episode of The Closer.  When I got back to it there was no difference but I was tired enough to sleep.

I woke up several times to relook, each time nothing had changed.  I guess I was hoping my view might change or my reaction - something.  Nope.  Even this morning at 7 it looked too big and bulky.
However this morning I also could think more rationally.  OK, so I submitted a piece to be done in sport weight yarn and they changed it to worsted making for automatic bulkiness.  Also when I lengthened the third tier got elongated. I could now see how out of proportion it was.  The second tier should be way longer and the third back to 3-4 inches.  sigh.  Major sigh.

So I fed Basel and the kitties and the bunnies and went to put out the new fly catcher thingie which really does keep flies away from the buns.  You know the kind you fill with water and dump in the magnet smelly stuff?  The old one was so full of dead smelly flies that it split when I lifted it. Dead smelly flies all down one leg, into my expensive Alegria clogs and all over the top of the bunny run.  DISGUSTING is too mild a word.  After I cleaned it all up I roamed the fresh smelling yard getting rose, berry, apple and Bee Balm branches for the buns.  On my way back to the bunnies I saw that the new, just put out, fly catcher thingie had separated from its top and spilled all over the spot I had just cleaned up.  Seems the screw on cap is not quite right so doesn't stay on.  Made in China is starting to mean no quality control. Not my morning.

I had something cool to drink, had an attitude adjustment and looked at the skirt again.  It had not changed and neither had my opinions.  OK. Frogging time. UNknitting.  Good thing most of the ends are left for tying at the end or it might have been a nightmare with 4 colors.

Several days of knitting now looks like this.

(I figure grayscale reballed yarn is not giving anything important away.)

The last time I frogged this piece it was 5 rounds from done, this time on the last round. Hopefully now it actually gets completed to my satisfaction.

Almost Done

The skirt, which I cannot show you even a bit of and that is so frustrating, is about to be done.  I am casting off.  Of course the cast-off involves I-cord so is 3 times as long to do as a regular cast-off.  I love the look of I-cord so put up with the repeat stitches but like to whine about it.

*knit 2, slip 1, knit 1, pass slipped stitch over knit stitch, move 3 stitches to left needle* and repeat what seems like endlessly until one day in the far future you reach the last stitch.

One of the socks is ready for gussets and the other is 2 inches shorter.  Once this skirt is done those socks will fly.

It's All Good

Part the first:

Friday night T (w/ Theo and Jeremy),

 Ruth and Shirley

Becki, me and Aimee all met up at Panera's for the GREAT CAST-ON.  Marina could not make it and Deirdre was Missing in Action.  We had such a great time some of us didn't leave until almost 9.

Ruth and T both started baby/toddler sweaters.  

Aimee a hat. (photos complements of Aimee)

Becki and I both began toe-up socks and Shirley was new, not a Ravellenics participant but was invited anyway to join us after her shift at Panera's.  The more knitters the merrier.

Becki had made little toe swatches with her hand spun 2 -ply MVOS.  Me I made the world's smallest swatch, (shown in the last blog) and incomprehensively believed those measurements so cast on with US zeroes.  After 3/4 of an inch I realized that the fabric was way tight.  We discussed this little difference from the swatch and decided I should leave the toes alone as they will never wear out, but do the main part of the socks with US1's and the heels with US0's.    Then we thought about how that swatch didn't work very well even though I used 3 needle sizes and measured carefully.

I also remembered the rule about swatches needing to be about 4" by 4".  Hmmmmm.  Think that makes much difference in gauge?  Duh - well I guess it sure does.

However, even with the fooling around, eating and fun my first evening's goal of completing 2 toes was accomplished.

Part the second:

Saturday's goal was to get the skirt ready for cast-off and do an inch on each sock.

One inch was accomplished on one sock and then I went back to the skirt.  At around 7pm, when I was about 5 rows from cast-off, Jim remarked that the skirt was awfully short.  I answered that Rick wanted it short and pulled out the email with Rick's sketch of dimensions.  That was when I saw the the 12" was not for the entire skirt but for the hip to hem measurements.  oh my!  So I measured the last tier and came up 5 inches short as it should be 17", not twelve.   What to do?  What to do?  I left it alone for a bit to let my brain cool down and ponder this puzzle.  Actually I went and watched an episode of While Collar on my netflix CD.  I do love that show.  

That bit of space let me decide to keep tiers one and two as is (phew!) and only redo tier 3. The decision could have been to start over so I was grateful.  At 10pm I began frogging.  Mind you this meant removing a stitch marker every 6 sts for over 300 stitches and not losing most of them.  I slowly removed the needle which allowed me to lift off the st markers and then frogged back to round 5.  At that point I had no real plan so thought some sleep might help before I messed it all up. Sometimes I am clever and sometimes I am not.  Looks like this was a combo event.

But before I headed up to bed I wanted to recheck the tier 3 stitch pattern.  It hadn't been turning out the way I wanted and I needed to know where I had gone wrong.  I wanted a scalloped edge effect but was only getting mesh.   Actually I had been telling myself that becuase I was using a 40" needle and the skirt had a larger circumference at that point that the needle was holding the scalloping as straight. 

Of course I couldn't find the page where the pattern was located so looked through at least 5 stitch books.  One thing I saw in common in all of them was the fact that if you want a scalloped effect the yo's need to be in the same column of stitches.  I was doing a dropped st pattern but the idea was essentially the same.  hmmmnnn   Finally I found the little idea book the skirt was dreamed up in and sure enough there was the Elongated - Wave Stitch, p81 of Barbara Walker's Treasury, Book 1.  Hmmmmnnn the picture does what I wanted so where did I go wrong? 

 Now I was wide awake.  Slowly the instructions were charted. It was then that I saw that the dropped sts did not go above each other but alternated in each row so that the elongated stitches cancelled out the regular stitches after every 2nd row.  Odd very odd.  It was now almost 11, the bunnies needed to go to bed and so did I.  The picture only alternates after every 4 +2  rows.

This morning I re-looked at the instructions and saw that this pattern was listed as 8 st + 6.  That means any multiple of 8 plus 6 stitches on the end.  However in the first 4 rows it only uses 8+2 sts.  The last 4 use 8+6 though.  hmmmmmnnnnnnn   I never expected an error in a Barbara Walker book but think we have one here.  I recharted to mimic the picture then did a swatch to check.  Sure enough it now works properly.  My copy is ancient so maybe/hopefully in the newer ones this has been corrected?

Frogged back another 3 rounds and then tinked and placed the st markers back where they belonged.  Funny how things work easier in the morning.  So because I made a length mistake I was able to catch a major stitch error before I cast-off, felt done and then sadly had to frog it all out.  Funny how the Universe does guide if it is left alone to do so.  Thank you.

Alas, no more was accomplished on the sock but the skirt is back to round 5 with more rounds planned for this afternoon after July's Fondle This! kits are made ready.  

Ravellenics Ready

Some of us are meeting tonight at the Ithaca Panera's to enjoy our GREAT CAST-ON together.
We are exercising enormous restraint by not casting on yesterday or the day before or last week.  Well maybe not last week as some of us were still spinning the yarn for this Challenge.

I told myself that the skirt needed to be done before 4pm today.  Alas that is a big joke on myself.  I compartmentalize so well.  I thought that once Troy was over and Tour de Fleece was over I could just sit and knit.  Right.
I neglected to factor in getting ready for Troy, unpacking from Troy, not being able to bring the skirt to Troy, getting 2 knitting submissions ready and in before today's deadline, ummm and doing errands like getting the beads for Fondle This!, getting those packages ready, returning a shower shade that was too narrow and too short, getting more ink for the printer so the Fondle This! patterns can actually be read...... Visiting friends at the Annual Ithaca Artist's Market this afternoon.   Oh my - Actually listing these things gets me all sweaty.

The skirt is about 75% done though.  Need to rewrite the last section and then knit it.  Doesn't sound like much except that as of 5pm I will be madly knitting socks.  

OK so the challenge is now going to be getting that pair of socks completed AND the skirt.  Deadlines on both.  I am good with deadlines.  Don't need all that sleep anyway, well at least for a week or so.

Last night while working on a part of the skirt that felt like a black hole, I played Words With a couple of Friends to take breaks, balled up the MVOS yarn, took out the Bare Bones Pattern,

and then made the teeniest swatch ever.  Can you see it there on the right?  I tried US 1.5 first but the fabric was loose, then US1 and finally US0.  Guess that yarn is fingering weight after all.

Upon typing all this I have come to a big aha.  No wonder that black hole took so long.  I'm actually amazed it got done at all with all those breaks (however practical) thrown in.

Go Ravellenics Team Spinning Bunny.