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I guess there were sheep. There was definitely wool 🙂  And some
other interesting fibres, too.

If you want to understand more about what the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival
is like, have a look at these pictures
to get a sense of what happens when an estimated 70,000 people (and
some number of sheep, alpaca, angora rabbits…) descend on the Howard
County Fairgrounds for each of 2 days of the annual festival.

For myself, I thoroughly enjoyed a 2-day pre-festival workshop on Aran
Sweater Design, lead by Janet Szabo.   There’s something to
be said for spending 2 days with fibre-fiends of a similar level and
interest, focusing on fibre and design.  On day 1, sensing that we
were all a little twitchy after 3 hours of data about cables and ropes,
Janet lead us through the ultimate infinite cable — the circle:

It’s magic!  (It’s in Janet’s
book, and also in Barbara Walker’s Charted book).  On Day
2,  there was a certain amount of swatching, and a dive into a
sample project sweater:

We arrived at the fairgrounds around 11am on Saturday — a little late,
by most standards.  But, there was still room in the fields for a
few more cars, so we got to enjoy a few hours of wandering through the
throngs of fibre and sheep enthusiasts.  Truly, it was
overwhelming.  In the end, I focused (if “focus” was possible!) on
stuff from small-scale outfits that I’m just not likely to encounter in
the fibre anywhere else.  And, yes, a touch is worth a thousand
words when it comes to yarn!

In there, there’s a crochet (!) kit from Shelridge Farm, some wool/bamboo
sock yarn and some silk/merino from Ellen’s 1/2 Pint Farm,
as well as some laceweight silk and some silk/wool blend from Spirit Trail.  Oooh, and
some Koigu KPPPM leapt into my hands, as well.

Oh, and there might have been T-Shirts, books, and a few other
oddments, too 😉

So, apart from enough yarn for 2 sweaters, a top, 3 pairs of socks and
a shawl, what did I get out of the experience?
Completely overwhelmed.  And I realized that yes, possibly, there
is a point at which one does not want any more yarn (this may be a
passing condition 😉 ).   One of the things that really
struck me was the quantity of yarns in a multitude of colourways. 
That is, unlike a typical LYS setup, each booth at the fair was pretty
focused, and it stocked several skeins of any given
colourway.    This is a *major* win, as far as I’m
concerned. 

It was pretty neat to be wandering around that many people with similar
(and yet, clearly, wildly divergent) interests.  I managed to
resist the lure of all the spinning paraphernalia, though I am told I
would be a better knitter if I did spinning as well.  With 2
knitting machines craving attention in the basement, I really can’t say
I have time for spinning.  No, not even with a drop spindle! 
Though, this resistance, too, might be a passing condition.

To round out the weekend, I just about finished up a sweater project
I’ve been working on for some time.  (Pictures, soon!).   I
have a few more things to clear off the decks and then I’ll let myself
dive into some of these new finds…

I haven’t had a lot of time for machine knitting over the last few
months (something to do with having to be in the same place as the
knitting machine for a chunk of time?!), and when I have sat down at
the machine, it hasn’t been a uniformly positive experience. 

For example, I sat down the other day and cast on 166 stitches for the
back of a cardigan/jacket I started making last fall.  I’ve done
the left & right front pieces and “just” need to do the back and
sleeves.  I really didn’t get very far with it:  the carriage
practically jammed on the first knit row, and by the second, all kinds
of stitches were leaping off the needles.  Taking a closer look, I
realized that a number of needles had bent latches:  they needed
to be replaced.

How many needles?  Well, this many…

How does that happen?  Well, I guess it’s sort of like learning to
drive standard — if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re bound to
cause some wear and tear on the parts.  Every time the carriage
jams or is very stiff to run across the needle bed, it’s likely that
needles are getting bent.  I’m certainly hopeful that I’ll be
replacing fewer as time goes by and I get more experienced!

What do you do if you don’t have enough spare needles?  Well, I
finally broke down and ordered a serious whack of spare needles (50 for
each bed).  In the meantime,  I pulled some of the needles
from the left and right edges of the machine to replace the bent ones
in the middle 166.

How bent is bent?  I guess I’d ignored/been in denial about the
problem for a while.  But, finally, the seven I pulled suffered
primarily from bent latches — they would not open fully, as is the
case for the needle in the background in this next picture — the latch
is as open as it will go, but it should flatten all the way down to the
stem.  Another failure mode is that the needle gets bent sideways,
as you can see in the foreground needle below (it’s not lying flat on
the table).

After replacing the 7 needles, with some trepidation I cast on my 166
stitches once more, and passed the carriage cautiously (and
smoothly!)  across the needle bed…

Hurray!  That’s 2324 happy little stitches a-hanging from the main
bed!  And, if ever you *doubted* the fun of machine knitting,
completing a couple thousand stitches in a matter of moments will
convince you!

Probably one of the reasons for the bent needles on the machine is that
I’ve been struggling to find the right yarns to use with the standard
gauge machine.  It was (is) hard to get used to just how fine a
yarn the standard gauge machine uses.  Essentially, it’s happy
with laceweight yarn.  But, I kept doggedly trying yarns that I,
as a hand knitter, considered “fine”, and they just were too thick for
the machine.

Well, too thick for *that* machine.  Not too thick for *this* one
🙂

A while back, I found this Studio SK890 on eBay.  It’s a *chunky*
gauge machine.  That means the needle pitch is 9.0mm (to the
standard machine’s 4.5mm needle pitch), and it has 110 needles on the
bed (to the standard machine’s 200). 

As I observed a while ago — knitters fall into exactly one of the
following categories:

• have no knitting machines
• have one knitting machine they don’t use
• have several knitting machines that do get used 🙂

At two machines, I really am just a beginner…

At long last, some knitting content!

Some time ago, I bought some Schaefer Yarn “Anne”.  I’ve now knit
up a pair of socks using the the black and tan colourway.

A few meetings passed by as I worked on a pair of Feather & Fan toe-up socks, from Wendy‘s pattern, yielding:

I used just under half the skein to make these (small foot!). 
Unfortunately, I think I’ve decided they are about an inch too short;
survivable, but not going to be my favourite pair of socks.  I may
have to see if there’s just enough more-than-half left in the skein to
do another pair a bit longer 🙂

Knit on 2mm needles, these are fairly fine socks — fine enough to wear
in leather lace-ups, which means they’ll be part of regular office wear.

Oh, and there was the question of whether I was attracted to the
colourway because of the resemblance to our cat: