less spinning, more sweatering

I have yet to learn how to use my wheel, unfortunately. However, I started this cardigan a week ago, and it’s quietly becoming my new favourite thing to knit. This is Bellevue (a name which, as an aside, is kind of rad. My grandparents used to live on a Bellevue Ave!), in Malabrigo Sock. I’m enjoying the yarn – it’s a little finer fingering-weight than I usually go for, but it’s nice and soft like Malabrigo tends to be, and the colour is lovely. Good blues always get extra points in my books. This yarn is also plied, so I have high hopes that it won’t be quite as felty as the Malbrigo singles I’ve worked with in the past.

The lace portion at the bottom of the body I found a bit fussy – I don’t know why, because I’m used to knitting lace on hundreds of stitches in fingering-weight yarn, and the lace pattern is actually really easy to memorize, but I guess doing it while I was in “sweater mode” instead of “shawl mode” made it harder. (Also, it’s been brought to my attention that I did the decreases on the purl side wrong, because I’m bad at reading – Laura’s version of this lace is much, much neater.) Now that it’s done, though, I really like the look of it.

there’s good karma, and then there’s this.

I remember, very clearly, a time a couple of years back when a few of my favourite knitting bloggers suddenly began to post about spinning. “Spinning,” I said to myself, “That’s ridiculous. It takes forever, and you could just buy yarn. What a useless skill.”

By last summer, the idea of spinning had at least grown on me. I sort of thought it might be fun to learn how to drop spindle. Like, just to see how spinning worked. And it was kind of awesome. But I wasn’t going to get a wheel or anything.

Except that, about three weeks ago, I got a text from a good friend of mine. We have knitting in common, and she knows that I’ve been learning to spin, and as luck would have it, her mom has been trying to get a relative’s spinning wheel out of her basement for a few years now. She wanted to know if I would be interested in it.

So, yeah. I lucked into a free wheel.

I am absolutely giddy with excitement, but to be honest, I am a little terrified of this thing. There are lots of moving parts, and I have been assured that it is a complete working wheel, but I do not understand how someone could make that thing spin yarn. Laura promised that she’d come over and show me how it works, and I’m sure it’ll be less frightening after that.

not quite knitting

When I first start a vacation, I always cycle through the same basic stages. “Vacation?” I first say to myself. “This is the BEST EVER. I’m going to do so many FUN THINGS. I’ll never be tired again!

This elation lasts for approximately an hour (give or take), before I get bored. Quickly, it becomes clear that I’ve completely forgotten how to do fun things, except in short two-hour bursts bookended by work. So I start thinking of things I can do, and end up making work for myself. You know, fun work. Things I’ve seen other people blog about, or have been meaning to do around the house, but haven’t quite had the time for. Projects.

In other words, I made my own jam this week.

It wasn’t a terribly labour-intensive process, much to my surprise. I used the freezer jam recipe on the back of the pectin packet – 1.5c sugar to 4c fruit, which was a surprisingly low ratio, as all the reading I’d done led me to believe that freezer jam involved several cups of sugar for every cup of fruit. This definitely wasn’t the case with the pectins I was able to find in my local Canadian Tire.

I smushed up three cups of blueberries and one cup of raspberries – all awesome local Ontario fruit from the farmer’s market – mixed in the pectin, and put the concoction into jars. The whole process took maybe an hour and a half, and I’d totally do it again, because the jam is delicious. I’ve gone through half a jar already.

I think, after a few days, I’m finally starting to get the hang of relaxing. But the projects are definitely helping.