Knerdy Knitting
where spelling isn't as important as awesome

Inspired by the Ravelry group Ply-By-Night, some of us at Corvallis Ravelers decided to have a spin-a-long using wool from Bellwether Wool Company. (Whew! That’s a lot of links!)

Here’s how it worked: we each got the same 4 oz of roving (2 oz of aqua, 1 oz of blue, and 1 oz of lime green) and then secretly, under cover of darkness, spun it up any way we pleased. The goal was to see how different people could start with the same roving and get wildly different yarns.

I decided to card my roving with hand carders, just barely mixing the colors. I mixed half the the aqua with the green and then the other half of the aqua with the blue. Here are a few photos of the process.

I then spun two singles, one from each of the mixes. I spun fairly loosely (as is my tendency) using a long draw. This, along with the carding, made for super fuzzy yarn.

I then plied the singles to create a balanced yarn. I believe I described it at Knit Night as “cat yak,” and I’m sticking to that. Not pleased with the results at all. But maybe with the right project it will look lovely. Here’s hoping!

Even though going through mohair by hand is lots of fun (see Goats), I wanted to go faster. So one of my goals at OFFF was to get a pair of hand carders. It turns out they are fairly expensive, but I found one pair that was half the price of the others. They were used, apparently for “Dark Wool” as they have a masking tape label to that affect attached to them, and their former owner is deceased. Her friends were selling some of her things at their booth.

Just as mortality inspires other forms of great art, mortality affects knitting and knitters. No, we do not knit little stuffed Death dolls. (Though that is a good idea.) But a common was to describe a yarn stash is that it exceeds life expectancy — that there is no way the knitter will use all this yarn before her death. And what starts out as a joke can become very real. I have only been a part of the knitting community for a short time, but I have been to two “give aways” following a fiber artist’s death. In both cases I didn’t know the knitter personally and the relatives of the knitter were trying to give things to someone, anyone, that would use them. I knit, and so they gave me yarn. But I also eat, and they didn’t push silverware on me with nearly the same intensity.

Knitting is such a huge part of knitter’s lives. It becomes more than playing with string, more than the pragmatic need to keep our loved ones warm. It is a reflection of ourselves and our lives. When our lives end with projects unfinished it’s like cutting off a song half sung. Even non-knitting relatives recognize this and feel the hunger to see the projects finished. Nature abhors a half-knit sweater.

After I die (…and I will die in the middle of lecture when I’m 96… all my students will get automatic A’s due to the trauma…) I’d like to think that Pirate Boyfriend would bring all my yarn and needles and books to Wednesday night knitting. That people would fight over the hand painted sock yarn and try to figure out from my Ravelry queue what projects I was intending for what yarns. I’d like to live on in the stitches that they make. I would like a Knitting Wake, where my yarn is divided and my patterns scattered to the four corners of the earth and the spirit of my knitting is laid to rest.

Because if you don’t, I am so haunting your asses.