Zero t(w)o Mittens!

So it's been more than two weeks since I posted here! Let's change that.

The first weekend in February, I spent Saturday night at Carleton for the Mid-Winter Ball. Of course I was really excited for all of the dancing and seeing of friends, but in one way I was equally excited to head home:

Friday night I'd stayed up until 3AM finishing up spinning, plying, winding, and washing my red 2-ply yarn!

This was the second batch of yarn that I'd spun, and this batch was substantially more difficult. More difficult because I tried to spin the yarn as thinly and evenly as possible! This means I was letting fewer wool fibers into the yarn with each drafting pull. Because they have less friction in between them when there are fewer of them, thin yarn also requires more twist than thick yarn to stay solid.

Spinning thin meant that the yarn was weaker and far likelier to break from the weight of the spindle! If I spun a section too thin or with not enough twist, my spindle would crash to the floor and I would nervously inspect the hook - if it snaps off, I'll be in trouble!

Incorporating fewer fibers into the yarn at a time also meant that I moved through my fiber supply much more slowly than when I was spinning the thick butterscotch slubs! So spinning all of the red wool took me a little over a month. By the time I was done, I was really sick of it!

Once I finally finished spinning the red wool, I had a spindle-full that needed to be plied. Plying is where you twist the yarn together with itself in the opposite direction of how you twisted it during spinning. Plying strengthens, thickens, and balances, the yarn. With the butterscotch yarn I spun at the start of January, plying was a relatively fast process, because the yarn was thick and thus relatively short (86 yards after plying). But when I set out to ply what ended up being 426 yards of red 2-ply, I didn't realize how long it was going to take.

It took hours!!! This is what I was doing until 3 in the morning the night before going to Carleton!

Thankfully, once I'd plied it, the rest went pretty fast: I wound it out onto a chair back, measured it, washed it, and set it to dry.

This is a very round-about way of saying that, when I went to Carleton last weekend, I was really excited to come back home because I knew that by that time my yarn would have had time to dry, and I could try knitting with it!



I'd decided that I wanted to use this new yarn to knit a pair of mittens. I wanted to do a fun pattern, and I was really interested in trying entrelac, which is a neat pattern of individually-knitted rectangles in a basket-weave type pattern. So I spent a couple of days teaching myself entrelac and trying out some variations, but I ended up not being happy with it. Maybe I could have gotten it if I'd stuck longer at it.. But I decided to try something else!

Once I had a pattern, I cast on my ball of red 2-ply! How exciting!!! I was using size-2 needles.

It soon became clear, however, that size-2 was too large! So I decided to use the size-0 needles Momo gave me for Christmas. Size-0 needles are two millimeters in diameter, so not much bigger than toothpicks, and I'm really terrified of snapping them!

So for the past couple of days I've been knitting these mittens with my size-0 needles. It goes super slow because the needles are so small and the yarn is so thin, but I'm really loving it and I'm really happy with the results so far! Wish me luck!

love, Jimmy