A Little of This...

"I didn't do it. It was the cat. Honest."

I have a few things to post up here in a random fashion just to tidy up the loose ends and be nearly caught up for reals. I do have another (probably multi-part) post on our Christmas pressy to each other but it will wait until this ones' done.

First off I want to snivel in full whiny fashion that I can't just upload a stinking picture. Every post I've done lately with pictures has required me to go through extra steps* and really, I'm blog time impaired as it is. I don't need the extra steps. It's silly stupid hassles like this that keeps me away sometimes as I just don't have the patience or time and it's one of the reasons I still have the "other" phantom blog. I'll have to spend some of my extra (snort) time over there playing around and I will have to seriously think about moving permanently. I know, I know I keep threatening to move, but never do. I hate change. So I'll snivel a bit more.

Onwards! Up first is the first (left hand) red/black/grey glove. I'm happy with the fit and wish I had more of the yarn already completed so I could cast on the second glove. It looks a bit funky in the pictures and makes my fingers look overly long me thinks, but that's due to the nature of the finger construction. If you recall, I knit them with long fingers and open tips so that they would keep my fingers warm, but allow for grip inducing pull back.

Here they are with their tips pulled back to allow for grippage. Grippage. Heheheh. Sorry, just amusing myself. As I knit these up, I notated any changes I made as I was customizing them for a better fit. Overall these are larger and super comfy, if not as soft as the last pair. I'll have to clear the fiber off the wheel asap and get some more of this colorway blended and spun so I can complete the right hand.

Next up is Maria's purple skein. (Sorry for the blurry pic.) This one is a three ply and nice and squishy. It measures in at 158 yards and is a nice plump round yarn. Ya gotta love Navajo ply for making a nice round yarn! I've already started the Vermilion skein and hope to have them finished this weekend. As always, I'll post when I'm done. Or whenever.:)

Now I give you a picture of my back yard. It's only snowed a small amount in the last few days, but the rains come down and you'd think it would wash away the snow faster than it does. This is what we had in the back yard as of this afternoon.
And this is why I'll be sharing the truck with the hubster for another day or two. At least. Still lots of snow surrounding the car and with all the rainfall it's smooshy and slushy and icky and all those little girl words depicting icky.
Did you want proof that he loves this stuff? He really wanted to wrestle but when he realized I meant business he decided to settle for a belly rub. He's such a sucker for a belly rub.

*What extra steps, you ask? Well I have to first put some words in the body of the post. Then I have to hit save now. Then I have to return to the list of posts and click on edit post. Once that opens I can usually upload pictures to the post. Its not a whole lot of steps and if I were on DSL or satellite internet connection it probably wouldn't bother me as much. However, I am on dial up and each page refresh is a chance for carnage. ;) And yes, I'm reporting it to the powers that be at Blogger.

Spinning Silk Caps

Back on October 24th I posted about my first experience dyeing silk caps. I promised then to post about my experiences with the next steps. I do not intend my posts to be a tutorial. I'm just sharing my experience with this fiber. There are much more qualified tutorials out there. The SilkWorker being one.

Here we have the dyed and dried silk cap laid out ready to be prepped for spinning. My goal is to get only one layer off of this at a time. I've yet to do that. I did read somewhere that if you put your hands up inside the bell and stretch it out some then the pulling off of the layers is easier. I tried that and it was much easier...but I'm still unable to get a single layer at a time. I think it will just take practice.

This is what it looked like about half way through the drawing out process. To do this I stretched out the layer(s) until I poked a hole in the center. I continued to stretch out the circle of silk until it was almost as thin as I wanted to spin it at. Because I had more than one cap at a time, there were instances that I had to "fluff" out the section I was trying to draw out. If I pulled too hard too fast then the fibers would compact down much like a Chinese finger puzzle. When this happens, I will pull the fibers horizontally instead of vertically to "fluff" them out so they can draw out thinner.

At some (not predetermined) point I broke the circle and just started drafting out the silk into thin roving. I couldn't wait to spin some and started with a thicker roving than this and found it was really difficult for me to draft and spin at the same time so I decided to draft it out to the thickness I wanted to spin it at and go from there. I have some plastic containers that hold fiber safely away from my fiber helper shown in this pic and decided to draft into that. Hopefully this isn't a disastrous plan, but I'm not sure yet.

I will admit that I love the dying of this stuff and I love the idea of it, but I'm not completely sold on the spinning of the silk caps yet. I use my hands a lot and they are not the smoothest they could be. The tiny silk fibers catch on any and all rough spots. Even those I wasn't aware of. It is much like getting caught in a spiders web and I am terrified of spiders. So there are a few issues there. I've been coating my hands with a really good hand conditioner (actually for feet lol) before and during spinning and that seems to help a bunch. I'm not giving up on the caps yet. I've hear of spinning directly from the cap and think I'm going to try that with the next one. If nothing else, I'll dye some up and use them in gift packages to some of my spinnerly friends. :) They shall not go to waste.