Nerd Wars Swap.

Yep, more Nerd Wars. What can I say, my non-competetive crafting has been a been a bit lackluster this summer. The NW swap was great fun and small enough for me as a first time swapper to test the waters. I'll be honest, when I first read that my swap partner was KokoCat, all I could think was: "I can't possibly spoil this woman! For Bob's sake, she has her own yarn store! She's been knitting for longer than I've been alive!" But that's what happens when you hang out with a bunch of knitting nerds, they are awesome and you just have to deal with it. This is what I ultimately came up with:

I actually had to buy the seeds and sweets to get above the minimum amount to spend. Thrifting, Ebay and handmades are real budget savers. I included three knitted items, although I had a lot more ideas (but not the time).

Crivens!

A tiny Nac Mac Feegle. Incidentally, I finally bought a copy of I Shall Wear Midnight which arrived yesterday. The Tiffany arc is one of my favourite since Wintersmith was the first Dicworld novel I read.

It's the Doctor's name. We think.

A cowl inspired by Doctor Who. Not a Doctor Who scarf, though. I may be an ambitious swapper, but I would have needed a Tardis, time-turner or other nerdy device for time travel to pull that off. I wasn't a bug fan of cowls before, but now I can see the point of them. Well, at least the longer ones you wrap around once or twice.

Mio pattern.

These didn't come out as nice as planned. It's a cute enough pattern, but in 100% cotton (Schachenmayr Cotton Eco) they lacked a bit of stretch and the rolled-up thumb edging is a bit bulky for my liking.

I was alternately hating and loving the colours as well, but didn't have a suitable backup yarn. I hope it'll wear better than the first blocking suggested. Argh! This is why I don't gift hand-mades! (That and I've embraced the principles of selfish crafting(tm).)

Nerd Wars Projects.

The 3rd Nerd Wars round is almost upon us, so it's high time I shared last round's projects! I have yet to find a better way to stash-bust and get motivated than these challenges were. All in all I completed 12 out of 18, which seems like a good if slightly obsessive quote. Some of them were really boring, but the results I quiete liked are:

This lightning scarf wouldn't have come out half as nice
if I hadn't run out of red yarn halfway through! (Pattern)

Bookmark. Although spinning plarn makes it a lot nicer to work with,
crocheting is still easier than knitting. (Pattern)

It may not be the cutest kid's set out there, but I love the hat pattern.
I should make one for myself some time.

These are easily my favourite two projects.
Plarn Cthulhu and Tiny Old Spice man.

Starting Saturady, I'll play for team Shady Cells (comics, animation, etc.) which should be fun because there's very little in popular culture that hasn't had its own comic at some point.

Stimulating the economy.

I certainly did my part last week. Other than swap goodies, I also went on a shopping trip extravaganza down south. First stop: Wollmeise summer sale. I really was a picture of restraint; the plan was to get two or three skeins.

The colours are really much brighter but hard to photograph.

From what I gathered, it's important to know which colourways you have. I haven't really checked, I just call them Shiny 1 and Shiny 2. Or the green one and the blue one. Really, if you only have two skeins, a nominal system isn't necessary. So now I know what that particular craze is about. Kind of. The lace was pretty tempting as well, I figure I'll try to get a skein of that once I'm finally able to make cardigans that fit. There was a whole shelf of some lovely lavender sockweight as well, but I just keep chanting "stick to colours you'll wear" over and over. Well, not out loud, just in my head - I'm not that crazy. Same for the very colourful skeins. "Yes, it looks lovely in the skein, but will it still do as a scarf?" So I went for a very subtle semi-solid and a slightly more colourful skein to test the waters. It's odd, it feels both very underwhelming (because by definition, if *I* was able to aquire it, it can't be that terribly rare or special) and daunting (you need to think of something extra special for these immensely precious treasures) to have they laying around. Also, it's the most expensive yarn I've ever bought. Don't get me wrong, 13€/150g is good value for money, especially for handdyed yarn on what feels like a very high-quality base. It's certainly crazy cheap for such a popular product.

Since it wasn't a huge detour, I also visited the Buttinette store on my way back. Last time I was there with my mom for a birthday present and I forgot half the stuff I wanted to buy. So this time I had a list with article numbers and everything. It'd probably have been cheaper without, despite the many bargains they have.

I got some fabric, party swap related - I especially love the dark green one at the bottom. I found it at the bottom of the leftovers bin and it has lovely drape. I'm worried the crappy sewing machine won't be able to handle it though. Also some embroidery thread and a hoop. No, I don't know how to embroider - yet. If my mantra in the Wollmeise shop was to stick to my favourite colours, here it should have been to stick to crafts I know and have the necessary equipment for. Which really only leaves knitting. I got a skein of Opal Regenwald in Caterpillar (did I mention I love the Regenwald line?) and Addi lace circs in 2,0. Yay! Can't wait to try them out. Finally some fabric paint and plastic buttons so I can have matching buttons for that cardigan I shall knit someday which will actually fit.

All in all, a very successful trip and certainly a good investment of my birthday money.

Handspun Hat.

I'm currently busy with my first swap, so there hasn't been a lot of other knitting this month so far. I did finally get around to using my own handspun in a project though.
I used the very first yarn I ever made, which presented two challenges: There wasn't a whole lot of it, and it was really uneven and bulky. I'm not good at bulky, I never know what to do with it. A hat seemed a logical choice though, because it requires very little yardage and you can adjust the size if it turns out there isn't enough. It still took a bit of trial and error and playing with different patterns, but here we are:

Shiny!

Seriously, taking a photo of my own head was almost as difficult as knitting the thing. I've never had a MySpace, so never perfected the art of taking photos of myself from slightly above (duck-lips optional).
I started out with the idea that somehow, lace and eyelets were a good way of saving yarn, which is very much not true. What does work though is knitting with a larger needle size. This hat was done on 4,5 needles, which is the biggest I own.

In the end, it became a very simple top-down stockinette hat, no pattern and no fancy bits. Surprisingly, I like it quite a lot. I used up every last bit and it fits perfectly. Surely, that's a sign that I should keep it for myself!

After a half-hearted attempt at blocking - how do you actually block a hat? - the stitch definition is not that bad and it's certainly not as uneven as by rights it should be with such a thick-thin yarn.

My only concern is that after that first blocking, the hat took almost three days to dry. So probably not a good hat for rainy weather, but we'll see how it goes. It might be fine as long as it isn't soaked completely.

Taking Stock.

I'm currently in the rare position where all the stuff I own is in the same place. I also feel there's too much of it. That also goes for my stash, although I realize it is tiny compared to a lot of people. Still, it was time to take stock. As of yesterday, I own 7.3 kg of yarn and fibre. It's not as much as I'd feared, but it's still a lot. This lot:

Click on image for bigger view.

On the left: Fibre, reclaimed yarn and a bit of Tshirt yarn.
In the middle: Sock yarn on top and inherited acrylic in the bottom. I've already knit up a lot of the acrylic, especially really small amounts, for some charity-ish baby clothing.
On the right: Assorted other yarn on top and cotton bits in the bottom. The huge white cone is crochet thread I'd like to make shawls of and dye them. The orange cone is the still very much unfinished Dragon of Happiness. That one alone is more than a kilo...

I can't remember the site, but I recently read another blog with a neat system of stash reduction: 2:1 - for every 200 grams used up you're allowed to buy 100 gram. I think I'll stick to that, roughly. Except for next week, when I reaaaaally want to visit the Wollmeise summer sale. I'm not a fan (yet), I'm just curious. I already have a couple of pattern ideas if I end up buying a skein or two.

Catching up - sock edition.

To be honest, I more or less lost track of blog-able projects of the last weeks. There was some crafting in between, but not a lot actually sticks out as noteworthy right now. When I said I would lay of the socks for a while, though – yeah, that was apparently a lie, or a massive miscalculation at least.

The second-newest pair are pretty basic arch-shaped socks, more or less this pattern, incidentally the same as my first pair ever, which also got me back into knitting. It was a lot easier the second time around.

The very new, very loose socks:

I love this yarn. It’s 75/25, but cotton instead of wool. I love it the way I think some people feel about Wollmeise. If only it came in more than six colours, I would never need to look for another yarn ever again. So far I’ve chucked it into the wash at 40°, which was no problem at all, it is virtually non-scratchy and I think it would have the perfect drape for a shawl. It is still cotton, though, so there’s not a lot of stretch and it would probably sag like a bitch as a loosely knit cardigan. Still, much, much love. At this point, maybe I should mention that it’s Schoppel Sport Cotton. I’d like to say it’s also dirt cheap, but really it only was for me because I live reasonably close to their factory outlet.

In retrospect, the colour would have been the perfect for a pair of Dr. Who socks. Oh well, I shall call them „stylised Tardis“. There are a ton of Harry Potter-themed socks that, in my opinion, have an even less obvious connection to their namesakes. I like to think of these as well as my own socks as nerd knits incognito.

Speaking of nerdy knitting, I recently discovered the joys of competitive crafting via Nerd Wars on Ravelry. I’m not on any team, so there’s not actually a lot of competing going on for me, but it’s great fun so far. Lots of small projects, which is nice for stash-busting. Because it thus turned out I’m apparently a team-crafter, I also, on a whim, joined this year’s Tour de Fleece. Well, I say joined: so far I spun on four days of… the very many that it’s been going. It might actually already be over, I don’t know. As mentioned, I spectacularly failed at it. Maybe I’ll try again next year with a bit of preparation and more clearly defined goals for myself.

Spinning licorice.

Thanks to some awesome people on Ravelry I was able to get my greedy little fingers on more fiber. I got two individual batts of alpaca and one lovely merino/silk blend. Silk, people! I've given that one a little test spin, but I can't quite get the hang of it. There's tiny bits in it that just mess me up and it's not the long continuous hank of fiber that a newbie like myself seems to need.
The first skein of alpaca, however, is already finished:

Hanks make every yarn prettier. I don't know why.

Spinning alpaca is, for lack of a better word, different. It's sort of smoother, yet harder to pull out. And once that yarn rips, connecting it back to your spinning is hard! If spinning was a candy store (spinners will agree that it elicits similar feelings of giddyness), then what I've spun so far would be candy cotton, but alpace feels like licorice. It's a bit rubbery, stretchy, but only to a certain point, and a bit of an aquired taste. That's my analogy and I'm sticking with it. Does licorice shed though? Probably not.

Oh, I almost forgot, the second colourful fiber has been spun up for a while as well, I just never got around to plying it. I feel about plying the same way a lot of knitters seem to feel about sewing sweaters together. I'm quite happy to have my singles lieing around in the closet for ages if it means I don't have to deal with the horror of plying. I imagine it'll be less tedious whenever I get a bigger spindle.

Two balls, both strands broke halfway and reconnecting them seemed like an impossible chore at the time.