It’s finished!
All the loose ends were woven yesterday afternoon.
What a journey. Almost two years of learning how to spin, including purchasing a wheel and taking several classes, and months of practice with merino before starting to spin the fiber for this project.
I enjoyed every minute of it.
Just got in from a trip to Kyoto and Tokyo so I’m in recovery mode today.
Instead of hauling the current sweater project with me I took a new project, the Scottish Wave scarf from A Treasury of Magical Knitting.
Despite two very long flights, I only managed to get eight rows done and now after checking the corrections on Cat Bordhi’s website, have to rip out half of those rows. Oh well, at least I got a lot of practice doing her “moebius cast-on”.
While in Tokyo I picked up this row counter at a craft store called Okadaya in Shinjuku (parallel to railroad tracks, left of Studio Alta – fifth floor). I’ll post more about Okadaya soon.
Patternworks has them listed as a Mini Kacha-Kacha on their website but haven’t gotten any in stock for a couple of months now. So, I feel a bit lucky to get a chance to pick up a couple while on my trip. Surprisingly, it wasn’t cheaper than the one Patternworks is offering.
What’s so special about this one? It can be hung around the neck on a string and has a lock to keep the counter from accidentally being clicked when not in use.
It just keeps going.
I think all spinners have faced the dilemma of what to do with that end of freshly twisted fiber when they need to stop spinning.
Until recently, I would pull off my remaining fiber supply and wrap the end around the tension nob on the top of my Schacht. While this worked most of the time, occasionally the thread would come unwound and cause a small mess.
Several months ago when I was at the NWRSA Conference, another spinner showed me how she used a small clip to contain the end. I thought, what a great idea and since then, have been meaning to find a clip. A few weeks ago I came across this Oxo Magnetic Mini Clip in a kitchen supply store.
This week I had a chance to try it out and found that it was the perfect solution to my problem. Not only does the clip contain the twist but I’m also able to place it in a convenient spot on the wheel without having to permanently attach itl. It just happens that there’s a bit of metal just below the orifice where I place the clip. This also allows me to leave the fiber supply attached and ready to it pick up and start spinning immediately without another join.
To expand on this idea, I plan on attaching a magnet to my oil bottle clip so that the bottle can be also be stored on the wheel.
Oh by the way, I finished spinning up another skein for the other sleeve and already have 1/4 of it done. This skein working up nicely so I should have the sweater done soon.
While contemplating what to do about the length of the sleeve I realized that the fabric on the first sleeve felt a bit dense compared to the upper part of the body. This was reinforced by the fact that the sleeve was already about 1 inch longer than it should have been. So, I to eventually faced the fact that the current ball of yarn didn’t match previous ones and that I would need to rip it out, spin more yarn and knit the sleeve again.
Although I need to spin two more ounces to re-knit the left sleeve, I decided to started knitting the right sleeve with a remaining ball of yarn. You can’t see a difference in the photo but I can definitely feel it. This one turned out much lighter with the stitches looking much more even. So, ripping out all that knitting was the right decision.
Now back to the cuff.
The pattern specifies a sleeve length of 19.5 inches which is one inch too long for me so I’ll need to make an adjustment. The instructions says to stop knitting the honey yarn when the sleeve reaches 15 inches and there are 64 stitches on the needle but I stopped after reaching 14 inches and now have 72 stitches after decreasing two additional stitches at the middle of each cable.
At this point I’ll start following instructions for the medium sweater instead of the “small” one as I have been doing. This will add one repeat of the patterns on the cuff; just six extra stitches. I’m positive that this won’t make the cuffs too big because I already attempted to follow the pattern for the small sweater and ended up with cuffs that were too tight.
All of my re-knitting hasn’t gone unnoticed. My husband commented today that it seems like I’ve been working on this sweater much longer than any other (not including spinning).
Purlwise 