Wednesday WIP

I'm finally spinning the rest of the fiber that became a felted dog toy. It's...challenging. I couldn't find the right settings for my wheel, so I pulled out a drop spindle for the first time in months.

Now when the fiber is clumpy or suddenly breaks it's no big deal. (Although I hate having this not-cheap spindle hit the floor.)

This stuff has little blobs of short fiber in it (neps). You can either obsessively pick them out, or make lumpy yarn.

It's neps all the way down. Let's just call it rustic texture and admire the colors.

instructions for people who don't need them

I went to Weaving Works to roll the body* today. I was hoping it would be more picked over, for their sakes. I got a couple books and a skein of Arne and Carlos yarn.

anyhoo, one of them is Designs for Knitting Kilt Hose and Knickerbocker Stockings. It is so charmingly half-assed. Originally it was self-published in Scotland in 1978, and the author was about 78 at the time. It assumes that the reader is intimately familiar with kilt hose, and the concept of cuffs hiding a garter, and calf decreases.

she doesn't bother with a legend for her stitch abbreviations** until there's a section she lifted from antique pattern books. THEN there's a legend and the untranslated patterns for a couple pages.

the best part? The section on argyle where she admits that she was never able to finish an argyle sock!

I will be able to make good use of it, but a few years ago it would have been impossible for me to decipher.



*they made some poor choices when they relocated a few years ago, and they exhausted all their resources. the storefront closes this month.
**w.o. stands for wool over, which folks in the US call a yarnover.