Tonight I played with my new drop spindle and some roving that was here, and look:
It took a few tries, but guess what? It’s yarn! My roving on the other end is a bit of a twisty mess but I am trying to get the hang of managing the twist as it spins. Of course I spent the evening doing this instead of knitting on my scarf for my friend Jen. But I did get quite a lot of knitting done on the commute today. I still have hope that between now and the weekend, some miracle will happen and I will be able to get the scarf done.
But hey, my first yarn! How exciting is that? Ok, it’s only a few inches of yarn, but it’s yarn! Who would have ever thought I’d get excited about making my own yarn, when I’ve been promising myself all these knitting years that I really don’t need another fiber obsession? I can tell already that spinning is seriously addictive. I’ve got a typical all-over soreness that I get from tensing up when I learn something new. I hope I can get comfortable enough soon so that this feeling goes away. I guess that means there’s more practice spinning in my future!
What is it?
Lookie at what I got in the mail today:
I used to knit with a Bond Incredible Sweater Machine, but stopped completely when I learned to hand knit. I really don’t have room to set it up in my house since the addition of a little boy, first with playpens, and now with train tables and Legos abound. But there are one or two little gadgets I miss, especially this one, as I recently found out.
This little double ended latch hook tool is used to create seed stitch on the machine, which is really only capable of producing stockinette on its own. Well, in working on my February Lady Sweater, and dropping garter stitches one too many times, I realized that this tool is something that would make it so much easier to fix the dropped garter stitch. Basically, on the knit side you grab the ladder in the latch and pull through as you would with a crochet hook, but then you push it through to the other end and grab the stitch in the other direction for the purl side. I’d make a video to show what I mean, but there’s one on the Knitting Today site already. It shows the tool in use on a machine, but hand knitters can easily see what’s happening to the fabric and figure it out. I think everyone who garter stitches a lot needs one of these!
Back to the scarf knitting tomorrow. Maybe I’ll post a pic then. See ya!
is really no little knitting book. It contains a plethora of patterns for babies. My mother had some old knitting books from the 50s in her collection–I remember reading them and not understanding a thing about what they were trying to tell me to do. Many years later, I of course became a knitter, and you know what? I went looking for those patterns, and was dismayed to discover that I still didn’t understand them. This book attempts to solve that problem. The author, Kristen Rengren, is a lover of vintage knits and has translated some classic baby wear designs from decades past into modern knitting language and modern yarns. 
