Bring Out the Champagne!

Beautiful new (to me) Leclerc Nilec!

Sometime last week, a lovely package arrived on my doorstep: a Leclerc Nilec. It's a beautiful little table loom with 2 shafts (plenty enough for me, as I do mostly plain weave anyway) with a 15" weaving width. The lady who sold it to me also generously included in the package a collapsible warping board, two boat shuttles, and an extra 8dpi reed so I could get started right away.

30/2 cone yarn in colour "champagne"

I knew I wanted to weave at finer setts than I could get with the 250 heddles it came with, so I cleared out the 400 wire heddles from Romni's at a highly discounted price ($6/100) since that was the last of their stock. The new heddles are significantly easier to work with and get caught on each other much less, so I'm really tempted to just replace all of them, but that would require me to make another purchase of 100 heddles (at a higher price + shipping, most likely), so I'll just use what I've got for now. I wanted to weave 15" using the champagne cone at 30epi, so I needed 450 heddles, which meant 225 per harness. That came out to 2 threads per slot in the 15dpi reed.

3 warp chains, cut before their time. The three musketeers, if you will.

Warping on the board went fine, more or less, though it did end up taking me a couple of days to get around to actually doing it. Beaming, on the other hand, did not have me beaming, but rather wanting to sob in a corner. I had no raddle, and didn't want to have to pull all the threads through the reed to beam the warp on, then have to sley the reed again, so I kind of just went at it. A couple of issues came up:

1. The warp wasn't spaced properly. Duh. I really should have waited a bit to go to Home Depot and just make myself a raddle, which I ended up doing... two days ago. I was already threading the heddles at that time.
2. For some reason, the first warp chain got very very tangled. That might be because I warped it up over the course of several days? The other two warp chains were more or less problem-free, and I had done those both in one day.
3. The cross wouldn't let the lease sticks slide along the warp! I had to keep tugging at the warp chains to straighten everything out so that the lease sticks would be able to slide along the chain. I'm not sure if I just did something wrong or what. I tied two t-shirt strips from the front to the back of the loom and made the cross using them to hold the lease sticks in place. I think I'll try tying them to the front of the loom next time? I really don't know what I did wrong here. It might have had to do with issue#2 though, since the bulk of the tangles that interfered with the lease sticks at the cross occurred at the first chain.
4. Due to tangles and threads starting to stick to each other making a mess of the cross that I could not brave with the lease sticks, I cut the warp before I reached the end. I'm guessing I only got half the warp on. Oops.

I think that was it for the beaming process.

What's happening with this harnesses over yonder? Also, see that broken warp thread? Fixed.

A couple of other things though:

• The paper covering the top and bottom of the 15dpi reed is coming off more and more with every beat of the beater. Maybe I can just rip it all off and tape it over?
• The harnesses don't lie completely evenly with one another. I don't think that's too much of an issue though. I've also had to put a magnet on top of both sides so the lever would stay up in position. I'm not sure if that is more due to issues with tension in my warp or if that's just the loom. Again, not a big issue.
• I feel like the shed isn't actually big enough for the boat shuttles. If the loom was any wider, the shuttles might just get stuck halfway, but it works since it's only 15" across. Actually the shed is plenty big for the boat shuttle, as long as I don't weave too close to the reed. The shed shrinks with each pass of the shuttle, the closer the woven cloth gets to the reed, so I have to advance the warp pretty often.

That's all so far? They're all pretty inconsequential, I think, and I'm really enjoying weaving on the Nilec despite those issues (plus a couple of snapped warp threads)! It's so much quicker than weaving on the AKL (especially since I'm doing mostly double sett with two rigid heddles on my AKL). And besides, now I know what not to do next time! I think this quote sums it up really nicely*:

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (Samuel Beckett)

*I have a confession to make: I've never actually read any Beckett. I have seen this quote everywhere though. And for good reason, I think!

Scarlett's Garden Test

Love this lacey shawl! Hand-knit using my own hand-dyed yarn!

It's been pretty hard keeping this one secret! I'm in love with this shawl! The pattern, Scarlett's Garden, is well-written and easy to follow - perfect for a beginner lace pattern, I think. The crescent shape is also very versatile, allowing you to drape it over your shoulders on chilly spring days and summer evenings, or to wrap it around your neck during the cold winter months.

I knit this one up in Fleece Artist 2/6 Merino that I hand-dyed. Can I just say this yarn is incredibly luscious? The entire knitting process was heavenly. And the yarn relaxed during the blocking and became even softer than before (if possible). Definitely going to be dyeing up more of this. And maybe there will be some left to put into my store after I set aside all the projects I'll have to make with this beautiful yarn?

This particular shawl has gone to a good friend of mine, Shirley, a fellow printmaker. The colour reminded me of her first space woodcut, and I thought it was very fitting. I have also been promising to knit her a shawl for about a year or so now, so I hope she likes it! And of course, now that this has been gifted away, I suppose I'll just have to make one for myself, right? I do have so much fingering-weight yarn lying around...

SABLE?

Spoiler: I haven't. Not yet.

Recently, I scrolled all the way down to the bottom of my ravelry projects page, and saw this:

Not bad.

But then I wanted to see how much yarn I still have in my stash, and whether I had actually achieved SABLE yet or not. So I exported that excel file using that handy ravelry function, totalled up the yardages left, and saw this:

I can totally use all of the yarn I purchase! Look at how much yarn I've got! I must be super productive!

This gap between what I have actually produced and what I have left with which to produce new things is a bit overwhelming. It's more of an abyss, truth be told.

Granted, some of my projects have no yardage listed because I used cone yarns and I'm too lazy to measure out how many yards they are per gram. Also, none of my weaving projects save one have yardages listed, and I think those probably do eat up quite a bit of yarn. (The same argument goes both ways, though: none of my cone yarns have yardages listed in my stash. So actually there's more yarn than the numbers suggest, both in my stash and in completed projects.) Anyway, I decided to break things down.

I've been a member since 2010, so that's 5 years. I've been knitting more in these past couple of years than in the beginning, so let's actually count from 2013 onwards. That'll be more representative of how much yardage I consume yearly, on average:

2013: 6422 yds
2014: 9832 yds
2015 (so far): 10 800 yds

Hey hey! Do you see a pattern? I seem to be getting pretty good about using more and more yarn, so that's good news. More good news: it's only June, end of June. I have a couple of projects still on the go (another test knit for Nadia - go check out her designs!) and more that have been queued and are in the foreseeable future that I've linked to stash yarn.

Now, the bad news. Unfortunately, I can't seem to sort all of my stash according to date added on ravelry and still see exactly how much I got each year, but here's an approximation (cone yarns not included, of course):

Rate of acquisition per year.

Prior to 2013, it was mostly cone yarns. Which explains that super low yardage. Also, I was only just getting into knitting. Then came 2013 and my rate of acquisition shot up. More specifically, I purchased approximately 51 times the yardage of 2013 and before. 2014 was my worst yet, but growth-wise, I was only 1.5 times the 2013 acquisitions. So not too bad, right? (Right?) And this year has been showing great improvements: so far, my acquired yardage for the year has been only a quarter (1/4) of what I purchased last year. If I continue on like this for the remaining half of the year, that means I'll have decreased my habits by half! And I'm already actively trying to not purchase more new yarn, so the rest of this year will probably see even fewer additions to the stash.

Let's sum up all that I've said, then:

1. On average (extrapolating from my usage these past 6 months into the future 6 months), I use about 12 618 yards/year. That's a very safe average, considering I've already used 10 800 yards.
2. I have in my stash 97 934.4 yards.
3. If I do not add to my stash (... I'm not calculating the likelihood of that), it will take me 7.76 years, so approximately 8 full years, to use up all of my stash.
4. Life expectancy is 84, from a quick search on google. I am not 76.
5. In conclusion: I have not yet achieved SABLE. (In order for me to be at that level, I would need to have more than 782 316 yards of yarn. I'm not too sure whether I should be happy to relay this or not, but my stash currently makes up 12~13% of that number.).

Regardless, I think I really do need to do more stashbusting.

Mouse

Lovelier colour than I had imagined when on the cone: stone.

Not an actual mouse (thank goodness? sadly?), but this lovely silvery grey that came from an old cone I had purchased years ago warped up a lot lighter than it appeared on the cone and reminded me of a mouse. It's really quite a lovely colour, if a bit boring at first glance. The top and bottom of the cone have probably been exposed to sunlight for long periods of time before, and so have become more of a pinkish colour as compared to the rest of the cone (the colourway is officially "stone", I believe, though the label has long been lost), resulting in short pink slivers popping out occasionally on both the warp and the weft. Like mice.

Or spiders. Speaking of which, a spider rested itself upon my wall right above the loom and stayed there for a good part of the day as I wove: a good omen, I think. I mean, spiders are master weavers, aren't they?

Look how relatively evenly tensioned that warp is! And those little pink flecks! Charming.

I think I'm starting to get the hang of winding on the warp on my own! I might have to shove something into the back beam on the right edge later on (odd; it's usually the left side that's loose), but for the most part, the tug-and-wind method is working beautifully for me. For the first couple of warps it was a bit difficult simply because the plastic warp ties bounced back into shape, but they have since curved much more and go quietly into the back beam without too much hassle.

The check pattern cloth has been finished for a number of days now, and I just have to take some pictures of it and figure out what to make with it. I'm pretty happy with it, though I can't imagine myself wearing it... perhaps it will simply remain a wrap and end up in the store?

Weaving Through Checks

Check check.

I've started weaving a 2-shaft draft using my AKL, and while the reed marks are distorting the pattern a bit (a lot), I can see it coming out if I try to shift my focus on a point beyond the actual weave! Exciting times. Hopefully the reed marks will lighten up, or better yet disappear, once it's off the loom and I put it through the wash.

More of the check pattern. And the reed marks.

So. While it's pretty obvious in hindsight - and I'm not too sure why I thought it would be the case - I thought that the checks would be larger. I envisioned them larger. (Which, if they were, would have made the cloth pretty unstable in the middle of the checks if I were ever to cut into the cloth to make something of it.) Even though I knew, just by looking at the draft, that the checks would each have 3 strands making up their width. Oh well. At least I know how to translate weaving drafts onto my rigid heddle loom.

That being said though, I'm not completely satisfied with the sett that I can achieve once I move onto doing anything beyond plain weave, especially once I get to 3-shaft drafts: because the threading sequences don't necessarily use every hole and slot, I can't double my sett even using the two heddles (because each hole/eye acts as a different shaft, and then the slots act as the third one). Even with this draft, which was made for 2 harnesses, my sett was far from doubled, even though I used two heddles. As it is, it's not too light, but I really like the idea of working fine, so perhaps a floor or table loom would better suit my purposes? Something to think about for the future.

You can see the two heddles here in rest position.

The Oracles at Delphi

Hand-dyed fingering-weight superwash merino

So I've been trying out this dyeing thing using some food colouring pastes (Wilton), and been getting some really lovely results! Mostly with the superwash merino yarns, but also with the BFL and Corriedale. I get the feeling BFL & Corriedale soak up the dye a little bit quicker than the superwash merino, so when this colour broke, the BFL & Corriedale got all the pink-purple hues and left all this lovely blue-turquoise-teal for the merinos to soak up.

Test-knitting. Hush hush.

And of course, I've had to knit it up to see what it looks like used, so I've used my two skeins of fingering weight superwash merino dyed in this colourway for a test knit. I've already finished up and it's just blocking now - the colours dyed pretty evenly across both skeins (hurrah!) so there aren't any sudden changes in how it knit up, and while I wasn't too excited about it while it was on the needles (I'm more a fan of semi-solids rather than variegated), it looks pretty darn nice blocking, if I do say so myself. It's probably going to go to my friend as a graduation present, since I've been promising to knit her something for years now. Also, this colour is perfect for her love of space!

Zenith

It's actually in the 20s right now. Sweltering.

Third sweater complete! This was a pretty mindless knit, even into the cables part, which I really needed at the time. I'm ready to do a huge allover cable sweater or cardigan at this point, complete with buttons (read: Timberline), but Zenith was perfect for this semester. I really enjoyed the look of the original sweater, so just went ahead and copied it. A simple grey mock turtleneck complete with simple cable details at the yoke? I had a hole in my closet for that.

Look how happy I am!

The only thing I would change is probably to knit a couple more rounds - maybe 3 or 5 more rounds - for the yoke, so that there's a bit more breathing room in the underarm area. It's a perfect fit if I wasn't wearing much under it, but because I didn't get gauge, this might just be a gauge issue rather than a pattern issue. I love the short rows at the back of the neck - they make the mock turtleneck very comfy, since it doesn't feel like the back is slipping down.

I'm also pretty happy with this yarn! It feels pretty durable, yet soft enough that if I so chose, I could probably wear it next to my skin (it is a little itchy, but it's ok). I mean, my neck hasn't started complaining yet, so I think it's probably fine. Definitely wanting to work with this again.

As for the TCK sweater KAL, I'm kind of behind by a month or two at this point. My linen cardigan's coming along, but I haven't churned out anything for the month of April (going with the one sweater a month schedule here) and I don't really have anything I think I can finish for May. Maybe I'll have to pick up the sheep vest or the green Sherwood to help me along.