Thursday, November 30, 2006

Navajo Plying

I treated myself to this bump of dyed roving when we were at Oregon Flock and Fiber this year. I was attracted to the colors of Dicentra Designs, who can be found at home.earthlink.net/~dicentra/ because they reminded me of the rovings of Sandy Sitzman. I wanted to buy something that I probably wouldn’t dye up for myself and I wanted Blue Face Leicester for durable socks. I told myself that I would Navajo ply it but knew that I probably wouldn’t. I was so pleased with the results of Navajo plying in my hats for Wayne that I decided to go ahead and do the whole five ounces. Besides, I need some practice in spinning thin. I’m still getting a lot of practice, but I have started the socks, based on my swatch.

However, I’m not working on the socks. I’m working on a sweater from commercial yarn that I started several months ago for my granddaughter. It’s superwash and I hate it, I hate the pattern that came in the book for this yarn. The yarn splits and the pattern has had mistakes. The sweater is so cute in the picture that I crocheted three rounds for the four required to finish it. It just looked wrong, so I referred to the picture and found that they had meant single crochet, not double crochet. When I got home tonight, I frogged it and am now on the first round. I am compelled to finished as I can hear my granddaughter growing as I slog my way through this project. It has certainly soured me on commercial yarn. So if it’s a success in the end, I’ll add it to a blog. If not, you’ll never hear about it again. But I can tell you, either way, I won’t be buying commercial yarn any time soon. I have learned never to say never when I said that I’d never knit socks when you could buy perfectly good ones for a fraction of the cost. So I won’t say I’ll never buy yarn, but…..

2 comments:

Purple Fuzzy Mittens said...

I'm with you on this. I keep getting suckered into pretty commercial yarn, then bored to tears or just plain disappointed with the results when knitting it. More importantly, I always regret the loss of time I could be spending on working with handspun.

Sara said...

I hear you on this! I have been lured by the *instant gratification* of buying yarn to knit with, only to be disappointed in the flat, lifeless results.

Handspun is the only way to go :-). (and aren't we lucky to know that?)