SpinnySpinny

With my jury duty date looming, I decided to start a knitting project with the county fair yarn. The rest of it is still on the bobbins but I have tons of the fiber so I can use this and still do something substantial. I’ve been wanting some scarf-like thing but not an actual scarf that will flop around and come undone. So I started knitting a 3-1 rib tube, about the diameter of a hat. There is 78 g and about 250 m so we’ll see how far I get. I have no clue about these sorts of things.

So I’ve been on Ravelry for a couple weeks now. It’s in beta and by invitation only. I found out about them a few months ago when people started linking to stuff on this site and it showed up in my logs. Eventually I got off my ass and signed up for an invitation.

Being an experienced software professional I know what beta means: if we let too many people in, our product will fall over. It’s pretty much an all-purpose excuse for when something doesn’t work. I could get into a long thing about that (why the hell is gmail still “beta”?) but that’s for another blog. They are doing a pretty good job, and certainly have the hot ticket in town as far as yarn people go.

The site, for anybody living under a rock, is social networking for fiber. The interface is very much targeted to knitting and crochet, those being the only two choices of project types in your online project notebook right now. But there are lots of spinners and a good number of people interested in other things.

And anybody who has any sort of online presence seems to be there. People I haven’t talked to in years have found me already, as have new folks looking for fiber friends. I’ve had a lot more site visitors lately coming from links to my stuff and people looking at my profile.

The UI is clearly a work in progress (there is a skeleton iPhone version!) but it’s good enough to be functional. Some of my complaints have been odd toolbar behavior in MobileSafari (not to mention crashing it regularly) and the fascination with Flickr (can’t use self-hosted images in project notes.)

Really, the last thing I needed was another social networking site to suck up time, but Ravelry has interesting forums on pretty much any fiber topic you can think of (nalbinding!) and some you hadn’t (I’m doing Mac online tech support?) I’ve been meaning to ask Abby how she feels about having a fan club. She’s already got a popular blog and online yarn and fiber store. I occasionally post on various online forums, both for my own entertainment and to get interest in the site, and this is the biggest fiber thing I’ve seen come along yet.

The project notebook section is promising, allowing people to share work in progress and things you are contemplating as well as finished items. The Stash section does allow for handspun yarn although I’m still trying to figure out how to link yarns and patterns together into projects. I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve got my own special yarn (and not one of the thousands of commercial ones listed) but the UI still seems kinda clunky.

I’ve experimented with the project notebook some, but I still have my own site to post things on so I’m less inclined to put everything I do on theirs. That it will pick up my RSS feed and link to my blog posts in my profile is very cool. I’ve been thinking it may be useful as an RSS reader alone.

Overall, I’ve been spending way too much time trolling the forums and looking at pictures of what people have posted. It looks like a good online community, for people with and without personal blogs and sites. That is one thing about posting online, there isn’t much integration with my own site to get people interested in coming over here to visit other than the occasional link. But with my blog displayed in my Ravelry profile people can easily see what I’m up to without having to pick it out of twelve different messages on as many sites.

The Z bobbin of romney is done and I’m well along on the second S one. There are some pictures I haven’t gotten off the camera yet, but I can tell you exactly what it looks like: a skein of 400-ish meters of off-white singles. Rather a lot like this, actually, although a bit finer and nowhere near as even. I’d guess it’s around 25 wraps per inch, for those who pay attention to such things (I usually don’t.)

I left it on the skein winder and sprayed it with water rather than wash, I don’t want it to fluff up at all and drying under tension would be a good thing. The skein winder is wood, but I long ago finished the pegs in clear nail polish so it could handle a little water. It’s still not a proper yarn blocker, but it will do for now. I started to count the finished skein to get an accurate length measurement, but I tried it the day I was home sick and managed to lose track before I could write it down.

I spent a couple hours yesterday spinning and my wheel is being kinda cranky. When I was spinning daily I never had a problem with this, and even a couple times a month it would be fussy for a few minutes and then settle down. But now that I haven’t been regularly spinning for a year it’s annoying. The takeup tension comes and goes.

I’ve already cleaned the various flyer parts and gone at it with the graphite powder (which I use instead of oil.) I did have the original rubber band on the scotch tension brake, so I’ve replaced it with a hair elastic. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve been suspecting it’s the change in environment, as previously we were in a basement where it was pretty much the same all the time. Now it’s winter and cold even with the heaters on, and despite all the rain it’s dry inside. This is the second winter in this apartment and since last year I’ve done even more weatherstripping and insulating, including plastic film on the windows. I’m going through hand lotion like nobody’s business, it must be having an effect on the wood equipment. But you would think with all the plastic and metal parts on the Lendrum it would be less sensitive.

More in the saga of the carder swap. With the other one off to its new home, I have the Fricke Petite. I wanted to give it a go before I committed to buying, on the off chance there was something about this particular model that totally irritated me. Well, as expected, now one of my chores for this weekend is figure out where I put the checkbook.

This model is intended for occasional use, which is fine with me. Since it takes so long to spin fine yarn, fiber prep only happens occasionally anyway and I’m certainly not getting rid of the combs. The key feature (and why I almost never used the other carder) is the ability to card fine wool. I will likely one day still get the DDD but this is quite serviceable for what I expect to do over the next couple years. It’s also smaller and less expensive. As much as I love Pat Green equipment, it doesn’t fit into my city life all that well.