I made my mother a labyrinth rug last Christmas, and I wanted one for the tower. Right now I’m in the middle of one.
I started it earlier this summer to use up some yarn scraps. Now I’m waiting on some very special yarn scraps to finish it up.
The students are back in school, but here in Arkansas, it still feels like July. I’m told that 80F days in August in Arkansas are unseasonably cool, but I’m also told people mow their lawns until December.
Also, the ground is so warm here, it is hard to tell the hot water from the cold water. In fact, the hot water runs cooler than the cold for the first few seconds. We’ve got a faucet that is set up backwards, so I’m constantly trying to switch back and forth to figure out which side is the hot water.
Last night Tyrone and I went to a couple of school gatherings. Even though it has been cooler out, the super humidity is still in effect. I still don’t understand wearing pants and sleeves out into that weather unless it is your mosquito armor.
My fear is that we’re still months away from fall around here. Luckily, fall has arrived in Sweden, and I can watch. One of my favorite crafty blogs, smosch.com, features elegant pictures as well as fun knitting and crocheting projects from Sweden. Everything Sandra does is classy with a little bit of cute. Her latest project, wrist worms, are so cool that they sell out the minute they are posted to her etsy shop.
If you are also yearning for fall, I encourage to visit my friend Jen’s etsy shop, where she has a hat and gauntlets for sale. She is soon to have more.
Finally, I found a shop that sells the newsprint yarn, for $30/30 yards. She frequently sells out. If I get this spinning thing down, I may try to do some of that.
A few days ago, there was a tutorial on spinning newsprint into a type of yarn on the greenupgrader.com website.
The spools of newsprint on the site seem to have a really delicate yarn on them. Although I didn’t know what I was going to make with the yarn, I wanted to make some.
First I needed a spindle to spin with. After looking all over the internet for instructions, I put a hybrid of instructions together to write an instructable for a spindle. If you’ve never heard of it before, instructables.com is an open-source site for patterns, instructions, and how-to’s on almost anything you can dream up.
Here is my instructable on constructing a Drop Spindle. On the last page, there is a video from a crafty spinning website, The Art of Megan, that shows you how to spin wool.
After I had my new spindle, I started spinning. I noticed that the 1/2 inch strips of newspaper were creating a thicker yarn than what the tutorial indicated.
Thinking that my brand new spinning technique could be flawed a little bit, I kept spinning, trying to get the yarn a little thinner, but it kept tearing off on those attempts. Also, in cutting the newspaper, my strips could have been a little wider than 1/2 inch. Next time I spin newsprint, I’ll measure out an exact 1/2 inch for the strips.
I ended up getting a couple of spindlefulls of yarn from one section of the newspaper. One warning, my fingers turned black really quickly. The ink does rub off on your fingers, and then when knitting, on the tips of the needles. Amazingly the newsprint does not look smudged after spinning.
I knitted up this swatch on size 13 needles. It isn’t the most enjoyable stuff to knit, and I did get two tears in the swatch. One tear stuck back together after being slightly moistened, and the other just wants to completely unravel. Both of the tears happened in previously knitted rows, when I was working rows above the place of the tear.
Even though spun newsprint isn’t a perfect medium, the finished texture is amazing. I’m not quite sure when or how to use it since it needs to stay away from water. It would be good for a semi-transparent room divider, or a thick platter/place setting for dry goods only. I can’t get the stitch down small enough to obscure any stuffing behind the material.
How would you use hand spun newsprint?
When someone gives you the pick of a huge lot of cone yarn, and someone else gives you a knitting machine, you would think fate is speaking to you, “You should knit on a knitting machine.”
At Christmas, I picked up 40+ cones of mostly acrylic (some wool blend, some cotton blend) yarn. Each cone ranges from 1000 - 4000 yards! In April, a friend gave me her British Bond knitting machine.
Last night I drug the two out in an attempt to appease fate.
For someone who is pretty good with machines, I found this knitting machine to be the most counter intuitive bucket of bolts I’ve ever encountered. Even worse, the instructions were extremely vague, and there were a few broken parts. There are some internet sites that detail how to use a knitting machine, and they explain how to start the first row of knitting, or “cast on”. These sites allowed me to get around a few of the weird broken parts, and get started knitting.
Despite the “ease” and the “speed” of the machine, I managed to completely fail at this task.
A second attempt is in order. The first and last stitch of every row began falling off. That is probably a weighting problem. The two white objects hanging off the bottom, and the purple clip are all weights. The broken part is a weight that goes between each stitch to evenly weigh down with each row.
I also tried changing plates in the middle of the work and that failed miserably too. It’s not all fun here craft blogging.
I seem to always be making clothes in late Feb/early March during Oscar season. In the past, it has been on the sewing machine, but now I’m in the home stretch on the Green Gable Sweater. It is Oscar the Grouch colored, so I think it qualifies.
Got the arms attached, and worked through the 2 pages of yoke. So far only one portion of the instructions made absolutely no sense, which is actually great. Looking at the length of the yoke instructions, it appeared really intimidating.
Really enjoyed looking at all of the dresses and the awards last night. Super psyched at how multi-cultural the awards ceremony and movies have become. None of the actors who won are American! I was really excited by this, as I really enjoy foreign films. It would be really sad if a performance such as Marion Cotillard’s Edith Piaf didn’t win just because it isn’t in English. She did such an amazing job in that movie portraying and singing Piaf’s life from ages 18 to a super-worn out age 48.
Made some progress on the Green Gable Sweater. This is knitted up in Misti Alpaca chunky, color Chartreuse Melange (7238). To hit the gauge, I’m knitting it on size 11 needles.
Got the arms done this weekend, have about 13 inches done on the body. I’ll have more pictures on that later this week. I really want to get it done before it gets warmer outside. It is a weird sweater. The cables on the arms and the back are fantiastic. They aren’t really cables in the classic style, however the plain front leaves something to be desired. It is an over-sweater/hoodie, so it is meant to be worn over many layers and not very form flattering. It seems like something could have been done design-wise to make it a little more flattering. Maybe I’ll put a kangaroo pouch on the front of it or something to just break it up a little.
I warned you I would do it.
Today is the Nebraska Democratic Caucus. I am reminding folks with my garage door.
Sorry for the break, went on a quilting spree, and I can’t get good looking pictures.
Here is the super-secret installation piece. In December I inherited 20-30 industrial spools of fine weight acrylic cone yarn. I also purchased a small I-Cord maker. The I-Cord maker is a little annoying in that it “twists” the I-Cord, so making 30-40 ft quickly becomes a pain. I also purchased 40 super-strong mini-magnets.
The intent was to have an I-Cord with embedded mini-magnets that could be configured into words or symbols on our garage door. The first attempt showed the magnets were too small to be contained by the I-Cord, and easily fell out. I ended up wrapping a single magnet in a 2” by 6” piece of magazine paper. The ends of the paper were creased to a point to hold the magnet, and to make passage through the I-Cord maker easier. Next I started the yellow acrylic through the I-Cord maker, passing a wrapped magnet through every 10”-12”.
I made about 30 feet of magnetic cord, and then I continued the cord for 60 more feet and cut the cord. After messing with the cord, I noticed the magnets still popped out. A second pass through the I-cord maker was required.
It all comes together to form the following:
Thank goodness I had to send off gifts to NY state by December 15th, otherwise, I would have never finished this gift!
The rug is the “Labyrinth Rug” from Leigh Radford’s _Knitted_Gifts_. I let my friend Sarah borrow the book while she was in the hospital, so I purchased the internal cotton cording without the pattern. The cording I got was much smaller than what the pattern called for, and this meant more knitting and more stitching the cord together as a rug.
The finished size is just over 26 inches. It is small for a rug, but as the circle winds around, it just takes longer to get another inch. Those last two inches almost did not get done.
Gave the rug to my mother for Christmas, and she said she was going to hang it on the wall. Now she says she just keeps it on a table. I think this would be a really cool way to upholster a piece of furniture.
I want to make one for myself someday. I still have 20 ft of cord left. Maybe I should double it up.
Got the elastic in on Tuesday night and wore it to work on Wednesday. It may need a little blocking. The A-shape is a little weighted down by the seams on the sides:
From Vogue Knitting magazine Winter 05/06 in Woodstock Wool company baby alpaca, color chocolate.
