Guys, I Totally Made Yarn

Look at this yarn that I totally made! It totally looks like yarn and not like deranged clown dreadlocks (unlike my first few attempts at spinning). I am so excited! It’s a fingering weight that I have named “Brickhouse” because the color is much more like brick red in real life than like the sort of glazed-carrot color you see here. It’s been very cloudy for the last few days here, so it’s been tough to take accurate pictures. But check out my macro-mode styling — the front is all popping out at you in focus and the back is all fading mysteriously into fuzziness. BAM:

That’s the yarn wrapped around the niddy-noddy prior to skeining; I thought it would be a good opportunity for some macrosploitation and I was not wrong. This is actually my second skein of this yarn– it’s 180 yards, which was about all I could handle on my spindle. My first skein was a puny 56 yards; I was impatient to get it off the spindle and see what it looked like, but I didn’t get around to taking any pictures until now. I’m only about halfway through my Louet Corriedale fiber, but I decided to switch it up and turn to this Mountain Colors Targhee top:

I’m excited about the multi-coloredness of it. This is the “Indian Corn” colorway. My master plan is to stripe the yarn I make from this with the “Brickhouse” yarn above in something like Kirsten Kapur’s Andrea’s Shawl or one of Stephen West’s many stripey designs. Yessssss.

I also have a new project to show you, one that I am madly in love with:

This is Gaia Lace from The Sanguine Gryphon, an indie dyeing studio that you may have noticed I am kind of head-over-heels for. I’ve knit a few things now with their Bugga! sock yarn, and I’d been meaning to try Gaia Lace for awhile now — it’s 40% Mongolian cashmere and 60% silk, which means it’s both shiny and fuzzy, and it’s got a lovely heavy drape. I wasn’t in love with any of their summer colorways for it, though, so I resolved that I’d wait to buy some until they came out with a nice rich dark red. As if they’d read my mind, the SG ladies came out with just such a colorway in their fall collection: Haemophobia, which you see above.

Then there was the question of what to knit with it. I wanted something unusual — none of the lace scarf patterns in my queue were really crying out to be knit with this yarn — and something that didn’t need much more than 400 yards, because this yarn is pretty expensive so I’d only bought one skein. So I went on a safari through Ravelry’s search engine, and eventually came across the perfect thing: Jackie E-S’s Shallow Sideways Tri Shawl — it’s got cables and lace, and lovely sinuous lines, and it can act as either a shawl or a scarf, and I am in looooove.

In other news, I received something exciting in the mail this week:

A few weeks ago, my friend Iz (who you may remember as that student of mine who had knit my dog sweater pattern by random chance a few weeks before our class started) posted to her knitting blog about her struggles with winding center-pull balls on toilet paper rolls. So I decided to send her my nostepinne, which I used all of once before Pat got me a ball winder, and had been languishing in my drawer for over a year. She is already using it with much more expertise than I ever could, and she sent me this lovely reusable grocery bag in return! The whole thing folds up to fit in its own front pocket, which is pretty amazing. You can buy one of your own at her Etsy shop, where she has a bunch of other sewn goodies for sale! Personally, I’ve decided that it’s too nice for groceries — so I’ve officially designated it as my spinning bag. Check it out:

Here it is, holding all the fiber from my current spinning project (both the red Corriedale and the multicolored Targhee), plus my spindle, with tons of room to spare. Yay! Thanks, Iz!