SpinnySpinny

I picked up a new book today, one that leaped out at me at the store and chased me down. I wasn’t planning to buy anything other than the Spanish phrase book I went in to get. A knitting book, of all things. It’s Big Girl Knits by Jillian Moreno and Amy R. Singer. It’s a collection of mostly sweaters designed for fat chicks, from a bunch of different designers. There’s even one from online SpinningFiber friend Emma Crew.

I’ve been thinking about making a sweater for a while. I haven’t really done knits with any kind of shaping, although I well understand the theory from sewing. And what I saw I really wasn’t liking: big rectangles. If I wanted to wear a garbage bag, I’d go get one from the kitchen. Boxy is not at all a good thing for a short fat chick with a big ass. Oh, and narrow shoulders. Anything dropped shoulder is just a bad idea, I don’t need the shoulder seams hanging around my elbows. I know it’s possible to knit in shape, I just wasn’t looking forward to the twenty-seven attempts it would take to figure it all out myself and develop a pattern. Remember I said I’m not all that much a knitter?

Here is a whole book without a single drop shoulder oversized box. They all have shaping and, more importantly, lots of directions on how to make things actually fit. No “Sweater in a Weekend” super chunky yarn, either. A lot of that stuff doesn’t even look good on skinny women. The authors are sassy and in-your-face and make no excuses about being fat, they just get on with it. My absolute favorite line in the whole book: “Black is not magic. Black does not make you look thin; black does not give you a shape. black makes you look like a fat girl wearing black.”

I’ve known about short rows, Lily Chin did an article for Threads a long time ago and I still have it someplace. And increases and decreases are a beginner basic. But getting it all together the right way takes trial and error. I expect it will take a couple tries to get something that is perfect, particularly when I start changing yarns and such, but this is a huge head start.

I’m working on my second learning exchange yarn, three plys of different colors. My first sample was about my usual small-ish size and the space-dyed pink vanished in the final yarn. Now I’m making the singles about twice as large so you can actually tell there is supposed to be something going on there. I like subtle, but my idea of subtle is usually not even noticed by anybody else. So it looks like I’m doing two bulky knitting yarns. How… un-weaver of me. Oh well.

The yarn is one ply burgundy, one ply red and one ply the dyed pink. I’ll have pictures up when I get somewhere, but for now I’ve only just started on the first single. I pulled off about 30 g of each fiber (yes, I measured.) I need about 70 m of yarn for all the samples, I hope that will be enough.

If I were ambitious, I’d knit a swatch of the other yarn and take a picture for the website. Err, maybe later. After the sofa gets assembled.

It hit me today, as I was cleaning out the sock collection. I know what to do with those old socks! I’d been trying to come up with some practical re-use of the wool blend socks I wear year-round here in San Francisco. The feet are all worn out, but the tops still look great. But I don’t sew sweatshirts or anything in need of a cuff.

But yesterday I was at an outside spinning demo where it was cold and windy, an unusual thing for the East Bay this time of year. I was fighting the wind to keep my fiber under control, so I tucked it into the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Now I have a nice wool-blend wrist distaff for spindle spinning. And I don’t have to feel guilty about throwing away those old socks. You can read about it here.

I started a page for my Learning Exchange yarns. I have one done so far, with pictures. It’s some brown-gray Merino fleece I got in Vermont a few years ago. Parts are too short to comb, so I’ve been flicking it with no particular purpose in mind.

I’ll add more as I go. I’ve got a second yarn started, that tentatively involves scary pink hand-painted fiber. No, not that same one again, although I did start with the Merino/Tencel for sampling. I didn’t have enough, so I dyed some white top. One of my other goals for this project is to not buy any fiber. And since I’m not planning to do anything with the yarn, I can design all sorts of stuff that I would never actually use myself. There is something liberating about that, in a way, although The Boyfriend keeps commenting on the “Anti-Feorlen” yarns I’m turning out. I may have to stop just to protect my cranky traditionalist reputation.

Finally the website is back up. I wrote a few entries while it was down and now I can start putting up new stuff.