I finished the Scottish Wave scarf from the book A Treasury of Magical Knitting (by Cat Bordhi) this week.

A few weeks ago I took it with me to Japan, hoping to get it done during the flights but only managed to get eight rows done.  The cast-on proved to be a bit tricky, taking several hours of practice.  It was a bit frustrating to find the stitches formed during the cast-on more loose than the following rows.

It’s a good thing I didn’t get too far because when I returned home I found out, after visiting Cat’s website,  that the pattern in the book has some major errors.  I had to rip out four of the first eight rows.

Takhi Shannon is such a beautiful yarn (although, beware it’s not very soft).

I keep dreaming about making a sweater out of it. Perhaps, I could spin something similar on my wheel.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I never imagined knitting anything from Cat’s book when I first flipped through it. I wasn’t too inspired my most of the designs but one day,  several months ago, I happened to see the actual scarf from the book on display at The Weaving Works. The colorful yarn was so lustrous and gleamed with flecks of color that I just had to find out more about it.

I held off getting the yarn, thinking I would eventually try to spin something  similar. While waiting ages to get the book from my library,  I couldn’t help thinking about this scarf and yarn. I frequently found myself loitering near it at the yarn store,  trying not to give in to temptation.  Eventually, I did surrender and after three trips to various yarn stores I gathered enough yarn to make the scarf.

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.

Yippee, The Weaving Works in Seattle is having drop-in spinning once a month.

The first one will be September 9th from 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm.

I planning on attending and will bring my current project along. I can’t wait to see what others are doing.

Ever wonder what they call a female spinner in French?  It’s fileuse de laine (at least that’s this picture says).

Work has really been keeping me busy this week so I haven’t had time to stop and take a picture of the progress I made this weekend on the Spin Off sweater. The back is done, including the weaver bird and I’m working on the collar. Hopefully I get some time tomorrow to take a picture.

After the collar is done, I’ll need to do some more spinning before I start the sleeves.

I happened to be watching Nova: ScienceNow on PBS this evening and was captivated by the story about a project to photograph one of the  unicorn tapestries from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the problems that they encountered.  After doing a quick search on Google, I found this article from The New Yorker which presents the  story in much more detail.

I love how it demonstrates just how resilient natural fibers can be.

Since I  don’t have any progress to show on my current projects, I’ve pull out one from my “to do” back log.

When Cat Bordhi’s books on knitted moebius garments came out last year I wasn’t terrible interested in getting my hands on one of them until I saw this Scottish Wave Scarf (A Treasury of Magical Knitting) displayed at the Weaving Works. It’s one of those designs that is easily passed over in a book but jumped out at me when I had a chance to see it close-up.

Since I wasn’t interested in the other patterns in the book, I put a hold on a copy from my local library and just got it after a three month wait.

While the design is interesting, I think I was mostly attracted to the yarn, Tahki Shannon. Here’s a closer view of the color called “charcoal” (#11).

Wouldn’t this be a  fun yarn to duplicate ? It looks like it was constructed in a two steps. First, a smaller black wool yarn is loosely wrapped with  a roving to construct a base and then a smaller variegated single is wrapped around base.

I just saw this post on Knitter’s Review.  Interweave has been sold.

I wonder how Spin-Off will fare. It’s hard for me to believe that this could be a good thing for Spin-Off. In February, at the Madronna Fiberarts retreat, Deb Menz mentioned that  it was really tough for her  spinning fans to get Color in Spinning back in print. Now that Interweave will eventually be just another division of a holding company that owns a myriad of other magazines, who knows what will happen.

As you can see, I didn’t get very far with my knitting. I’ve been spinning a bluefaced leicester top in preparation for the one of Rita Buchanan’s classes called Plying with a Handspindle. Along with our favorite spindle, we’ve been asked to bring three medium sized center-pull balls of handspun singles. The photo shows one of my balls still on a nostepinne.

This bluefaced leicester top is so much easier to spin than merino, because of it’s 6 inch staple length. The unspun fiber seems so soft that I think it will also make a relatively soft yarn with a bit of luster. The price is right at about $1 an ounce.

This quarter’s Spin-Off magazine arrived a few days ago.  What’s up with Spin-Off? The past few issues really haven’t been very good. I guess I’m not the only one that think the content is lacking good quality in-depth articles. One of the letters to the editor mentioned that Spin-Off’s content  has been a recent topic of discuss on a online discussion group. The editor responded by saying that she would love hearing from readers with specific feedback. I’m already working on my letter.

Over the past six months I’ve been collecting back issues of the magazine and can tell you that there’s a big difference between the ones from the 80’s & 90’s and the ones put out since Amy Clarke Moore took over.  Perhaps Spin-Off has covered everything  there is to know about spinning during the first 25 years and is having trouble coming up with original content.

I did sent an e-mail to Amy in December and mentioned that Rita Buchanan’s articles are among the best and suggested putting them together in a book. She responded, saying that I’m not the first to request this but Rita is enjoying her retirement and doesn’t have time to put a book together. That’s too bad. I’ll suggest it to Rita when I take her class. I don’t see why it would be so much work to compile the articles straight from the magazine without any changes. Heck can’t the Spin-Off staff do it?

Besides the lack of truely interesting content, at the moment, my other top complaint is that covers of the subscriber issues are marred by a big white address box. Good heavens, what were they thinking when they decide to do that. If they keep it up, I’ll let my subscription lapse and perhaps buy it at a bookstore.  They should follow what Saveur magazine does, and use a easy to peel (0ff) address label.

I’m now back in my spinning grove. The red is coming along just fine. I did however have to put this skein through the wheel twice in order to get the right amount of plying twist. The second time I used a larger whorl so that I wouldn’t over do the twist.

Rob shared this link to pictures of the Spring/Summer  issue of Vogue Knitting on her blog the other day. I usually don’t buy Vogue but couldn’t resist this issue. I think it’s  much more inspiring than the Spring issue of Interweave Knits. I’d love to do this sweater but not in the acrylic/polymide yarn that they used. Cotton or a cotton/silk blend would be much better.

My niece Emma loves being a kitty.

I whipped up this hat from http://www.kittyville.com last week just before we headed up to the mountains for a week of fun in the snow.

Yarn: Debbie Bliss Merino Aran
100% merino wool
color 325606

Needle: US size 7

Notes:

– hat  measures approx. 20 inches at base (above the ear flaps)

– worked stockinette stitch for 2.75″ instead of 3.75″

– used provisional cast-on and knitted flaps after working top.

– next time will try starting from flaps first so that hat edge won’t be so noticeable

– once top and flaps were done, picked up stitches along  flap edges and then casting off these stitches along with provisional stitches to make a  finished edge.