Brace yourselves: it's another knitting and crafting post.

My apartment is in an uproar right now. The movers are coming in less than a week and I'm running out of places to put the boxes I've packed. So how about a knitting post?

The last time we chatted, it was in March and I was dressing up Flora. I've done a few other crafty things since then. Here we go.

First: I decided I needed to clean up the clutter on my desk. This desk has several drawers (and what's with the desks they make without drawers these days, anyway? Where are you supposed to put all your stuff?) but I had a bunch of little containers on my desktop, as well as two cups full of pens and scissors and things like that. The clutter was making me a teensy bit crazy. So I bought an unfinished box and decided to stain and varnish it, rather than paint it. I asked Mama Google about staining and she said you could use instant coffee. Well, I had some packets of instant Starbucks that were about to expire anyway, so that's what I used. It turned out okay. And now the top of my desk is a little bit less cluttered (although right now there's a pile of papers that need to be filed. Gonna do that tonight, I swears it.)

Lynne Cantwell 2021

I also decided to spin up some of the roving I've picked up here and there over the past few years. This stuff is Falkland wool and it came in a rolag, which is what you get when you put a bunch of dyed fiber on a blending board, mix it up, and roll it off into a tubular shape. These turned into lovely yarn. I have no earthly idea what I'll do with it -- it's not enough to make anything with. But it was fun.

Lynne Cantwell 2021

Less fun to spin is the silk top that my daughter Amy gave me a few years ago. Silk is more slippery than wool and it's been a challenge to keep it from breaking. I spun up part of it and put the rest aside. I might get back to it eventually. Or not.

Now, about the knitting. In the spring, I took a virtual class on brioche knitting from here in Santa Fe through fibre space in Alexandria, VA. I'd never done brioche before. It's, um, challenging. If you make a mistake, you're almost better off frogging the whole thing and starting over. There was one more issue: the cowl called for three coordinating colors of yarn. I had leftover yarn from another project and wanted to use it as one of the three colors, but that meant picking the other two while looking at photos of my options online. I was only kind of successful. But it's done, and now I have even more yarn left over, so I might eventually make a hat to go with the cowl.

Lynne Cantwell 2021

Next up: a pair of socks from this sock yarn I bought about a billion years ago and finally got tired of looking at in my stash. 

Lynne Cantwell 2021

The socks were sort of a palate cleanser after this next project. 

At one point this spring, I totally lost my mind and bought a shawl kit from an ad I saw on Facebook. The yarn was a nightmare to work with and some of the pattern directions were confusing, so I won't be doing that again. The result is stunning, though, so I guess all the cursing I did was worth it. I'm calling it my Sunrise shawl.

Lynne Cantwell 2021

If I have a Sunrise, then I need a Moon to go with it, right? As it happens, the Moon shawl is what I'm working on right now. I've included the cover of the instructions so you can see how it's supposed to look when it's done. 

Lynne Cantwell 2021

This pattern is a different nightmare. Like the Eden Prairie shawl, this designer is using a dark color to separate the sections of the shawl; unlike the Eden Prairie, which sensibly used garter stitch for everything, this pattern calls for knitting each section in stockinette with an I-cord bind-off, and then picking up stitches along the edge of the I-cord to start the next section. I'm currently about half done with binding off the 399 stitches of the third section. If you're not a knitter but that sounds like a lot of stitches, you're absolutely right. I have two more sections to knit, then an I-cord bindoff around the whole shawl, and I get to use duplicate stitch to make those cute little moon phases along the border. I keep thinking I'm making progress on this thing, and then I look ahead to the next section and despair. But eventually it will be done, I swears it. Just not before the movers come on Saturday.

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Which reminds me: I'm going to take next week off from the blog due to the move. See you back here on the 22nd.

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Which reminds me of something else: Our summer reading challenge is heading into the final few weeks. Check out the list and the prizes at the link, and good luck!

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These moments of crafty blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

Mother's Day spinning.

Pschemp | wikimedia.org | CC 3.0

Today is Mother's Day here in the United States. My daughters Kat and Amy took me out to dinner -- brunch is too early for us -- and then Amy pulled out a couple of drop spindles she bought recently and let me play with them for a little while.

A drop spindle is basically a low-tech, but quite efficient, way to create yarn or thread from carded wool. (Carding cleans the sticks and other junk from the wool, and lays the fibers straight so they can be spun into thread or yarn.) Last fall, Amy talked me into taking a learn-to-spin class at the yarn shop where she works. She took the class, too, and has gotten really good at spinning. I have not practiced much, and so I am not as good at it. (Actually, I'm not very good at it at all. I need a lot of practice.)

The spindles in the top photo are all top-whorl drop spindles, the "whorl" being the circular chunk of wood (or other material) at the top of the shaft. There's a hook on the end of the shaft above the whorl. You wrap your wool around the hook to anchor it, then pull on the supply of fiber to thin it out, and then you set the spindle spinning to put twist in the yarn. The twist makes the yarn stronger. Once you've got a length of spun wool, you unwind it from the hook and wind it around the shaft below the whorl; then you wrap the unspun end around the hook and do it all again.

Pschemp | wikimedia.org | CC 3.0

There are bottom whorl spindles, too, including what's known as a Turkish spindle. Its whorl is two interlocking pieces of wood that, when assembled, make an X shape. There's no hook at the top of this type of spindle -- instead, you make a half-hitch knot near the top of the shaft (the spindle in the photo has a little knob at the top to keep your half-hitch from sliding off) and then spin just like you would the top whorl spindle. When you've spun a length of yarn, you undo the half-hitch and then wind your yarn around the arms of the whorl. The big advantage to the Turkish spindle (to me, anyway) is that when the spindle is full, you pull out the shaft and the arms, and you've got a ready-made center-pull ball of yarn.

Other bottom-whorl spindles have a point on the end. You use them by putting the point in a bowl or on the floor, and spinning the spindle like a top.

I say all this like I have a great deal of experience with spinning -- which, as I said above, I don't. At all. I have a bit of yarn that I spun with the very basic top whorl spindle we got in class, and that's it. But I've been wondering whether part of my lack of enthusiasm is due to the fact that I don't really like the spindle we got in class. So Amy (bless her heart!) got me a gift certificate for Mother's Day, and I've just ordered not one, but two new spindles. One is a bottom whorl spindle that's flat on the bottom, so you can set it on the floor to "park" it while you're stretching out the next bit of fiber (the other options being sticking it under your elbow or holding it between your knees). The other one is a spindle that you can use as either a top or bottom whorl. If I hate both of these, I'll try a Turkish spindle. And if I end up hating all of them, well, Amy's going to get a nice collection of spindles out of it.

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The game is afoot for the release of Dragon's Web, the first book in the Pipe Woman's Legacy duology. As the first step in my nefarious plan, Seized is now free at Smashwords, and the price is never going back up. If all goes well, it will also be free everywhere else by the end of the month, including -- with any luck -- Amazon. I'm hoping this will bring lots of new readers to the series.