Hemingway & Faulkner

I've heard it said that if you want to write, you should read all of Faulkner, and then read all of Hemingway to get the Faulkner out of your system. The styles of these two greats are well-known for being at opposite ends of the writing spectrum, and I enjoy them both. (Though if I had to pick, I'd take Faulkner.) This quote found its way into my head after the long ordeal of spinning the raspberry merino tencel was over. After all that precision, concentration, patience, and striving for evenness and perfection, I wanted to spin something positively organic. (Okay, so this is more like reading Hemingway and washing it down with Faulkner - bear with me.) First, I pulled out my Maggie spindle:

Mystery roving from Spunky Eclectic.This was definitely an experience on the road to satisfying, and it was fun to play with a spindle again, but it was just a little wisp of roving (maybe an ounce?) and I was looking to make a big hank of soft, fluffy, thick and thin yarn, and really have some fun. So I pulled out the Rose, put it on the slowest ratio on the big whorl, and spun up the last few ounces of the chocolate-covered cherries bfl which was my very first roving purchase ever last year and the first thing that I really spun into something approximating yarn. The ChocCherries bfl has brought me good luck. It was also the first roving I spun on my Rose.

Treadling with Townes on board.When you are first spinning, more experienced spinners will look at your lumpy yarn and tell you that at some point you will have to work to achieve thick and thin like that, and that you should appreciate not having to work for it now. (Due to woeful inexperience, no less!) I've taken this to heart and made note of exactly what it was that I've done "wrong" to produce such incredibly large slubs, so that I could later reproduce them at will. If you're just starting, take note - your own foibles put you in a position to learn a lot about making designer yarn. One of my favorite thick and thins from early on was this Tahiti handspun, which reminds me of Manos (but lumpier). I was going for an even more extreme, fluffy version. This is what I got:

So fluffy! So soft! So fun!

I'm going to set the twist using Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' method of simmering the yarn, but I'm waiting until I have a chance to hop over to the Goodwill and buy some old stockpots, because I think it's probably a bad idea to simmer dyed yarn in the ones we use for our soups and stews. I've been really impatient to knit with some thick and thin yarn, though, so in the meantime, I've pulled out my Tahiti skeins and started knitting a Christmas Scarf for my little niece, Sophie. I really like how it's coming along so far:

Zoom in, zoom out.

This is almost as good as reading The Bear.

I love a beret! Or, 1 down, 3 to go...

Christmas started in September this year over here at chez Mind of Winter. I have realized that if I wait until I am in the mood for knitting Christmas presents there really isn't sufficient time to finish them all, and it becomes a chore to try to cram them all in at the last minute. This year I have six items that I'm making for family for Christmas. This may sound like a lot, but the family, it is big, so six is pretty minimal. Since my side got knitted gifts last year, this year I'm hooking up part of Moxie's family. It is simply not possible to hook up all of Moxie's side in one Christmas. That would make it not fun, and fun is really an essential part of the Christmas knitting spirit. The best part is that I don't have to finish anything, because all the gifts are for people who have stopped growing, so they'll keep. Plus I never let anyone believe that I am knitting a Christmas gift so that the pressure is off. Ah, the things we do to keep ourselves from procrastinating.

I feel so positively French.

The first knitted items on Santa's list this year are four berets. Which means a beret a month until the BIG DAY. I was inspired by this lovely beret, which was a knit cafe store model for about two seconds, before Suzan generously allowed me to keep it. (This might have had something to do with the fact that I kept trying it on and sighing "It's perfect.") The pattern is the beret designed by my friend Kat Coyle for Greetings from Knit Cafe. The yarn for this one is Katia Gatsby, which Knit Cafe carries in abundance, and which I plan to use in two of the four berets.

Here's the first one, which I just finished, in Valentina di Roma's Angora Print, an expensive little confection that I really enjoyed working with:

If you want to appear cold, bundle up, look serious, and pretend to be sipping hot tea!

I'm going to leave project notes on this one until all the berets are done, but I can say this: there are no mistakes in the pattern, it is simple and fun to execute, and the results are great. You might want to take the rim out a little further than the original if you are knitting, as I did, with a yarn that does not drape. The original and the Gatsby version are drapey, so the pattern is perfect for them. It works well for the angora, but it could be a teensy bit drapier and a wider circumference might accomplish that. I used US 3 needles and exactly three skeins of this yarn, which has rather limited yardage (55 yds/skein). Other than the snippets cut off from yarn tails, there was less than a yard left.