Anarchistelfliege 2

For the last 2 weeks, I've been trying to change my eating habits. I've gained some pounds over the last year, after stopping to smoke in the end of 2008. And I just want to be fitter and fit into my clothes again. It's not grave, it's just a bit, but just enough to feel a bit uncomfortable.
If you're vegetarian like me, there's the "Cheese Sandwich Trap". If I'm too lazy to think about food or to prepare a meal, I'm just preparing cheese sandwiches for me, and even if it's wholegrain bread, it's not a healthy diet. That way, there's too much saturated fats involved.

But now to spinning:

Saturday, Bella hosted a spinners meeting in her appartment, and one of the spinners brought spindles she had ordered from the USA. There were Forrester spindles, Spindlewood, and Bosworth spindles. I had been very curious about the "Bossies" for the whole week.


photo courtesy of Wondermike on flickr, made available through a creative commons license. Thank you, Mike!

My own homemade spindles however, while looking unspectacular, proved to be very high quality, next to the professionally crafted items I could compare them with. The Bosworth spindles are spinning longer, because of their rim-weightedness, something I have yet to add to my spindles. I plan to do that, tough.


The pencil is there to show the proportions.

I've finished socks with travelling stitches, the pattern is taken from Stephanie van der Linden's book "Socken aus aller Welt". She recently announced that the book will be available in english in fall 2010 - I can highly recommend it.

The yarn is one of the hand-dyed yarns I got in spring 2009 from Dornröschen-Wolle. I've used two skeins of her colorways, and I like how they turn out. There are many small stripes, and different reds read semi-solid in the finished socks, but also blues and greens turn out semi-solid.

There's a german speaking group participating in a "project 52" together. They started Jan 1st, 2010 and I had intended to not do it this year. I only took 5 or 6 photos for last years' project 52. But now I've changed my mind and I'm going to take part. It's about taking one photo a week and blogging something about it. This year, there's a topic chosen from readers' suggestions every week, and there's a little character that should be in every photo. I think I won't do the topic stuff, because I believe in talking about things that happen in my life, and not some pre-planned topics, but I like the character idea. I found a little Spiderman-action-figure on the street some years ago, and since my crabs are all gone to my niece and my brother for xmas, the little Spiderman is going to be in the project 52 photos:



His mask has frozen to his forehead... bad weather!

They all have to do with feet.
I'm knitting socks a lot again, and I've finished the Filey socks and gave them to my father for xmas. The other pairs are for me. One is a pair of felted slippers and I love them and wear them every day. And there are "Broadripple" Socks and "Die Farben der Anden" from Stephanie van der Lindens's book "Socken aus aller Welt". I love that book!



I can't remember having seen as shocking images on the news for years, as the footage on the earthquake victims in Haiti. It's really heartbreaking how there's no food, no medical help and how people are waiting in the street with injuries. And so many people killed. It's really a tragedy.

Today, we got a wardrobe from a young woman who's moving back to spain, and we had a trolley where one tire had a small hole and we had to pump it up from time to time. I had taken the wardrobe apart, and we loaded it on the trolley, but we had to go 2 times, each way took us about half an hour. Through the snow. With one half-flat tire. Now after carrying all the parts upstairs into the 3rd floor, we're both to tired to put it back together.. *lol*

Today was the most wonderful winter's day this year. The sun was shining, and snow from the night before was turning everything white. I've taken the chance to take pictures of my newly finished shawl:



And I'm wearing the sweater I made from handspun yarn. I love it so much, I'm wearing it every day. I originally made this "Silk kerchief" shawl (it's not made from silk, this is just the name of the knitting pattern) to give away as a present, but now I'm not so sure any more. I've heard people say how much they admire my Laminaria Shawl with the complicated lace patterns, and I don't want the recipient to be disappointed because she knows I can knit lace and I'm giving her only a garter stitch shawl. I wouldn't mind too much if it was not made entirely from fine handspun BFL and merino yarns. Oh well. It's very soft and warm and I think it's most beautiful. A tough decision - should I give it away or not?

And there's another project I finished:



These are Tridactyl Gloves (The link leads to the free pattern page at knitty.com). I've added a fleece lining to make them windproof and they are the most wonderful winter gloves for bike riding.



I love the winter sun.
What I couldn't catch on camera was just now on my way home, in the middle of the night, when it started to snow heavily. There were snowflakes as big as a quarter of an inch. And there was this moment when I wondered if I could see a snowflake, and I held out my glove and looked what fell on it, and there was the perfect snowflake, big, white, sparkly and wonderful. I think I haven't seen a snowflake like that since my childhood. But then, I had not taken the time to look for snowflake crystals in many years.

And I've seen a knitted graffiti on saturday:



I love this idea. Must make one myself when I've got the time. Maybe a crab. ;)

My sock knitting has nearly stopped, and I'm very much on a spinning trip. I've spun "Space", which is a printed Merino top, into a 50 gram skein of 281 meters of yarn. I had bought 200 grams of it some weeks ago, and I've divided the fiber into parts of 25 grams each. I'm spinning one part, then another, and ply them together. I should get more than 1000 meters out of it. Which is enough for a lace shawl.



I thought that I'm no beginner any more when it comes to spinning, but my new spinning book (RtS, as it's called on ravelry all the time) includes some exercises that are.. intimidating. Spinning blind, including winding on and securing the yarn on the spindle, while reciting a poem to distract the mind from it? Wow. I'll try it some time, but with some beginner fiber. I've got some left!



this is the new laceweight yarn with some sock yarn and a large skein of worsted-weight sweater yarn, all spindle-spun. I had some plying balls lying around when I wanted to ply my laceweight and decided I could ply them all, so I could soak them all in one bucket of water.

Yay! I've received Abby Franquemont's new book "Respect the Spindle" today! The layout and styling is great, with lots and lots of wonderful photos, and what I've read so far is really interesting. There's something about history, spindle types, ergonomics, lot of how-to's and some project ideas in the book.



I thought I would have to wait until next year, because amazon said it would be shipped within the next 2-6 weeks - when I looked it up again on sunday, it was in stock and ready to ship. So here I am happily thumbing trough the book!
It's my "one-year-smoke-free" present I gave to myself.

And here's my collection of spindles. They are all homemade toy wheel spindles, half of them top whorl spindles and a few bottom whorl ones. I've run out of hooks, and I wanted to try hand-bent hooks next time I make a top whorl spindle anyway... and I just didn't get around doing it. So the spindles I made recently are all bottom whorls which don't require hooks. I'm just securing the yarn with a half-hitch, and although I wouldn't have believed it, it's just as fast as using a spindle with a hook.



right now I'm reading on in the spindle book, which is worth every cent in my opinion.

I'm trying a new way to spin a colour gradient. I've got merino tops of different colours (solid colours) and I'm carding them to blend them a bit with hand cards. The rolag I'm getting from this is split in half and each half is spun on one spindle. I've finished a skein spun this way yesterday, and when I would my plying ball, one single was only about 10 meters shorter than the other.



Now that I finally understood how to card fine fibers, it's such a joy to see those colours blend together and the spots of bright or dark colour, very subtle, I get this way.





The next thing I would want to do is make a blend with silk this way. I only think it would be maybe better to start with a commercially prepared silk blend instead of trying it myself without any experience with silk.