Friday, July 11, 2008

Weekly Post

I've been slacking off on posting to my blog a lot lately. It had deteriorated to a weekly post, that recaps the whole week. Well, so here it is.

On Tuesday night, I took my spinning wheel to the Frog Pond Fiber Arts meeting. I was hoping to get a few pointers to help me get started. There were just 4 of us who attended; Mel, Mary, Aubrey and myself. It was a nice homey group. The scotch tension nob came out of my spinning wheel when I was carting it inside so I spent most of my spinning time trying to find the right setting. Thanks to Mel, I learned that by tightening the know it draws the spinning in faster and by loosening it it slows it down a bit. But I still had problems. Too loose, too tight, too loose, too tight. No happy medium.

Here is a picture I snootched from Aubrey's Flickr page. This is she and I spinning on our Ashford Traditionals. Only I discovered I can't spin and pose at the same time, because I forgot to let the yarn go in to the orifice. It was way too overspun!


Once I got fed up with the spinning woes, I decided it was a good thing I brought knitting along. I pulled out my Cul-de-Sac Vest pattern to work on. When I chose this pattern, I didn't notice that it said it was for "advanced" knitters. I was having a problem with some of the unfamiliar increases/decreases. I found 1 explanation on-line for right/lifted lifted knit/purl increases, that I thought would be great. Don't know if I was doing it right or not (probably not) because I ended up with a whole. Not sure how that happened, so on Wednesday, I pulled out another skein of my yarn and did a practice swatch. I also remember that I had just done some lifted increases on the gussets of my Toe-up sock that I am currently working on. So I brought that along to Knit Night too. I'm so glad I decided to to the practice swatch, because (1) it helped me practice unfamiliar stitches and (2) it made me realize I need to enlarge the chart.

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