Jenkins 10 Years of Ravelry SAL: January Recap

So, Ravelry is having its 10 year birthday this year! In celebration of this wonderful website being around, connecting fiber artists and fiber minded people, developing friendships around the world, and inspiring people, the Jenkins YarnTools group is having a year long spin-a-long with Jenkins Turkish spindles!

There are going to be 10 challenges over the course of the year. January is just about over, and I've finished up my January singles for the SAL challenge. The January challenge was all about spinning the rainbow as a group, rules laid down by our group momma:

"January: A piece of the rainbow!!

This will be a one month challenge with a min. weight requirement of 50g.

To kick off our year of challenges we will try to create a colorful rainbow! Each person can pick from the following list of 10 colors. Spin some fiber that has at least 75% of the one color of your choice. The higher the percentage the better! (this is not hard and fast…just try to make sure the fiber you choose is mostly one color!)

Colors of the rainbow!

• Red
• orange
• green
• blue
• yellow
• purple
• pink
• brown
• grey
• white"

The color that I chose to spin this month was pink. I used my hand cards and blended a bunch of pink and shades of pink together into a batt.

Then I used my Jay and spun two turtles of pink! I ended up with 59 grams of a lovely pink, shot through with orange, green, and blue.

I decided that I needed something else to spin for the rest of January and carded up some blue.

Well, I'm not quite done with the blue yet, but I'm already looking forward to spinning the February challenge fiber! Now I just need to pick which empty spindle to use...

Episode 29: Scatterbrained and Disorganized

Happy Sunday! Shownotes today are going to be fairly sparse...

WIPs:

1. Jenkins "Blue" spin, connected with my Jenkins Year Long SAL
2. Shetland Lamb Fleece spin for An Aran for Frederick by Kathleen Dames
3. January Socks
4. Alma Park Alpacas "Cafe au Lait" Goddess spin
5. BKQ by Tiny Owl Knits

And this week I will be posting about my sweater spin, Jenkins SAL, and the BKQ. As well as the standard Wordless Wednesday ;)

Episode 28: All The Spinning!

Happy Sunday!

I tried to record a video of the creation of my Jenkins February SAL fiber, but for whatever reason it didn't save! Instead you guys get to see before and after blending photos. And a little video of a different batt creation, so you can see how I do the making-a-batt-using-hand-cards thing.

Anyways, on to the video!

WIPs

1. Jenkins January SAL - colors of the rainbow, I chose pink! Finished the singles. They weigh in at 59 grams. Planning to ply this with a beaded thread. 
2. Jenkins February SAL - 10 Blend. Blend 10 different colors/fibers. I pulled cotton, bamboo, BFL, Husky down, Romney, alpaca, angora, mohair, red, green, blue, white, grey... I'm pretty sure that this counts as a blend of 10! Won't begin spinning this until February. (will probably add the blue batt from the batt creation video and make this yarn a 3 ply - 2 of the 10 blend, 1 of the blue blend)
3. January socks using Rio de la Plata multicolor 3-ply sock in SP33.
4. Shetland lamb fleece (from a lamb named Ondine) SPKAL project. This fleece will grow up to be a 3-ply DK weight and then knit into An Aran for Frederick, with some modifications. Project going with the Handmade and Woolen year long Natural Wardrobe MAL SPKAL, and (hopefully) with the designer's own KAL.

Wordless Wednesday...

and it's on a Wednesday!

Shreds: A Self Designed Shawl, from Handspun

The fiber that started it all! That Inglenook Fibers Princess Bride yarn (on the right in the photo below) was spun for a spin-a-long on Ravelry. I used a variety of support spindles to spin my sicklebatt set. The fiber is a marvelous blend of 30% Australian Bond Fleece, merino, silk, alpaca, bamboo, faux cashmere, tencel, and silk noil. If you ever have a chance to spin anything by Inglenook Fibers, take that chance. The dyed tops, the batts, anything dyed by Inglenook Fibers is stunning. The colors, the fibers, and I've never seen anything even remotely kinda felted. 

So, once I spun the Inglenook Fibers yarn I knew that I wanted to knit something that would showcase the lovely colors. I didn't want anything that would get worn hard - I want to be able to enjoy this yarn and wear it for the rest of my life. I'm still young, so it had better last for at least 4 or 5 decades, I think! I considered a cowl, but I  just love shawls. I love wearing them, I love knitting them, I love using them as mini blankets... they're just one of my favorite things to knit. I knew that only the Inglenook Fibers yarn wouldn't make a very big shawl. I decided that I needed to spin something else to match it! I decided to spin some medium grey Romney into a neutral skein to pair it with. The Romney is stuff that I processed from a fleece that I purchased at the Black Sheep Fiber Festival in 2016, about the same time I was actually spinning the Inglenook Fibers Princess Bride sicklebatts! 

You can see sort of in the middle of the picture above, I entered the Inglenook Fibers Princess Bride yarn into my local fair! I won a special yellow ribbon and a blue ribbon for the yarn. While the yarn was sitting at the fair, I was working on spinning up the Romney. 

I cast on for the shawl in mid November, right before starting all the Christmas presents that I wanted to give to knitworthy family. Maybe a bad plan, because all I wanted to knit on was this shawl, but it worked out in the end! I used knitting the shawl as a dangling carrot so I would be motivated to knit Christmas presents... 

I started the shawl with a star/flower kind of shape, moved into a fun sunflower-esque like section, then into a frost flowers stitch pattern...

and finally into an old shale stitch pattern...

The shawl is big enough that I used most of my king sized bed to block it. I love when shawls are this large!

I'm actually still working on weaving in all the ends... there are just a few, with all the color changes that I did throughout the shawl, but I absolutely love the way that this shawl turned out! I enjoyed the challenge of fitting stitch patterns together, and making sure that I could show off the Inglenook Fibers Princess Bride yarn to the best of my ability! 

Episode 27: Twitch.tv and a Few FOs

Happy Sunday, fiber peeps! It's been about a week since it's started snowing... and it hasn't stopped yet.

I'm just glad that the snow plows finally came through my neighborhood street on Thursday morning, cause I was stuck at home for three whole days! Ty and I walked back and forth to the horse barn... twice a day... I couldn't get to work, and when we did try to get out it took about 30-40 minutes to finally get to the corner of our street, get stuck, and then turn around and get back to our driveway. We had to both dig our car out and push it out of the snow. Neighbors had to come help. As horrid as it was, it was definitely a bonding experience with some of the neighbors! (Plus, there's a bonus video of us getting stuck one of those times on YouTube now!)

Anyways, on to the good stuff - the show!

And the notes!

WIPs

1. Jenkins January SAL - colors of the rainbow, I chose pink. Fiber is a batt that I made using my hand cards, and blending a bunch of pink bits from my stash, with splashes of orange and blue added in for fun.
2. Shetland lamb fleece (from a lamb named Ondine) SPKAL project. This fleece will grow up to be a 3-ply DK weight and then knit into An Aran for Frederick, with some modifications. Project going with the Handmade and Woolen year long Natural Wardrobe MAL SPKAL, and (hopefully) with the designer's own KAL. 
3. January socks, using Rio de la Plata multicolor 3-ply sock in SP33. 
4. Alma Park Alpacas "Cafe au Lait" batt, spun using goddess.

FOs

1. "Shreds," self designed circle shawl using handspun IF Princess Bride and Romney from BSG 2016. 
2. Guggeren Mütze beanie, modified to only have 2.5 repeats of the cable pattern. Knit from Baa Ram Ewe Titus in Crucible. 50% Wendleydale, 20%BFL, 30% UK Alpaca. 

Wordless Thursday (Again...)

Episode 26: Snow Days!

Sorry, but with a raging headache that has only gotten worse through editing and uploading, I'm skipping typed out show notes today ♥

Wordless... Thursday!

Episode 25: New Year, Big Plans!

After a week off (because of Christmas), I do have a video to share with you guys! It's a poorer quality video than I would have liked, but circumstances as they were, I only had my old point & shoot to record with.

With no more ado, here we go!

WIPs:

"Shreds," the self designed circle shawl knit using handspun Romney and IF Princess Bride
Pair of socks #1 of 12, for 2017
January Jenkins SAL, using a batt blended and created by me with hand cards (using this article from Knitty as a guide for the batt creation)
An Aran for Frederick (sorta) - I need to sample a little more, spin a bunch, and then I can finally knit

Plans for 2017:
Process and spin all the fleeces that I have
12 pairs of socks (1 pair per month)
Jenkins year long SAL
Winter Camp 2017

Please, if you have any questions, get in touch with me on Ravelry or Instagram!