The Scribble Knit Shawl is finished!

I’m amazed how quickly it knit up. I’m also amazed that the laceweight and slubby silk finished up pretty much at the same time. Somehow I got the ratio of slub to laceweight rows right. I don’t often knit shawls, as they tend to be special occasion garments I wear only now and then.

I’m also amazed at how clutzy I am this morning. I had nice photos of the blocked shawl, but somehow I managed to delete them all from the camera instead of copying them to the computer.

Yesterday was the final of our spinning classes. We spent the whole day playing with different fibres.

From left to right: merino carded with silk, silk with some silk noir bits in it, alpaca, and cotton.

The merino was much easier to spin with the silk adding strength to it. The silk with noir bits was fiddly, because if you slid your fingers along while drafting the noir bits would gather behind your fingers until they formed a big lump, rather than smaller, nicely spread out lumps.

The alpaca was great to spin with, especially once it had been flicked. Unfortunately the dustiness of it made me sneeze. The cotton was bl**dy hard to spin, particularly ginned cotton (though Gabrielle, spinner extraordinaire, spun it with grace and aplomb). The sample is spun from cotton roving, which has no strength, so I would simply draft it out thinner first, then just letting the wheel twist and draw it in.

After watching Carmel teaching Gabrielle to spin woollen, I began to suspect that I’ve been spinning somewhere between worsted and woollen all along, which might be why I find it hard to spin finely and easy to make slubby yarns. (But on the other hand, deep down fine laceweight just doesn’t rock my boat, wheras I love slubby yarn, so where’s the motivation to spin finely?)

We raided the shop at lunchtime. I bought these:

Since the last class, I’d decided to buy a white Finn fleece. I can spin it up in whatever style or quantity I fancy, then dye it the colour I need. I also bought some merino possum, some of the noily bits, a silk cap, and some 50% cotton/50% lyocel roving (before we tried cotton and I learned how difficult it was to spin) and I popped back later to pick up a reel of pale cream silk thread to ply the silk+noil sample with.

On top of all this, I bought the fall issue of Interweave Crochet. In retrospect, I should have bought the summer one, since what I’m looking for is a cotton summer cardy pattern.

Another student, Natasha, had brought some spindles in for me to look at. They were so light and pretty, suddenly I can see why some spinner bloggers have ten or more spindles. I’m going to have to do some spindle shopping…

When I got home I plied up the samples. I kept sneezing and assumed it was the dusty alpaca that was bothering me. But it wasn’t. It’s a head cold. And when I consider how fast it came on and how awful I felt last night, I’m relieved it didn’t arrive at the class!