Fibering heaven

Last year for Christmas I asked Santa John for a drum carder.  He told me to order what I wanted, and I started looking around at different models.  The one I really wanted was an Ashford carder, but they are about $700 new and it's next to impossible to find them used.  I was getting ready to bite the bullet and buy one new when my mom fell, and all plans for anything fell to the bottom of my attention span.  Fast forward to last Friday night.  As I lay in bed, unable to sleep, I decided to get onto craigslist and see if any drum carders came up.  And as luck would have it, someone had just posted a drum carder on Thursday.  However, it was part of a complete setup, and the seller was not splitting the lot.  So, for $775, I walked away with the drum carder (Ashford, as I had wanted); an Ashford Traditional spinning wheel with spinning stool, jumbo and standard flyer and bobbins; carding combs, niddy-noddy, drop spindle, yarn winder, spinning books and magazines, and 3 garbage bags of wool.  I'm like a kid in a candy store.  I now have a spinning wheel for each of my two permanent houses.  And with the drum carder, I hope to bring some wool here to Missouri (where I have a top-loading washer) and start prepping some roving.

The seller lives outside Springfield and was going to be gone for Thanksgiving, but she was traveling to St. Louis today, so we met in Lebanon and traded.  She got a whole lot more room in her car, and and envelope with cash, and I got a lot of fiber dreams to get started on.

More shawls

I have discovered I love knitting shawls.  I don't know why, but I do.  I have a lace shawl on the needles right now, and recently finished these two.

I find self-fringing a fascinating (and frightening) adventure.  This is a pattern called Fringed Benefits, which I adapted by using 3 stitches at the edge for self-fringing instead of the 5 the pattern called for.  The reason I say this frightening is because you bind off all but the end stitches on each end, then unravel and tie off each row of un-bound stitches.  I worried a great deal as I began this.  And believe me, I tried it on a test-knit before I attempted it with the finished project!  This shawl was made with 3 balls of Bambool (I guess you got that is a bamboo-wool blend!)  Since 3 balls made a shawl that is 48" tip-to-tip, I think I will try again with the one ball I have left, and make a shawlette with it.

I absolutely love knitting with bamboo.  I love the softness, the drape, everything.  So I made another shawl, this one with Caron Spa yarn that I got on clearance for $2/ball.  Since it took 3 balls to make this shawl, I think the $6 was money well spent!

This pattern is the Firefly yarn Dayflower Shawl.  I made the end and short row shaping with one ball for each end, and used the third ball to add shoulder-to-shoulder width in the full depth of the pattern.  It is 72" long, which provides plenty of length to tie in front or drape long.

My own designs, start to finish

I finally got it together and have begun to knit with my handspun yarn.  The earwarmers below are from my early efforts at handspinning, and are knit with a pattern of my own creation that is listed in earlier blogs.  The earlier pattern is for worsted weight, and I adapted it for the chunky weight that these yarns turned out to be.  The yarn was spun from 4 oz each of Mountain Meadow roving.