Who is the SpaceCadet?

Spotted in the Wild: Socks Knit with SpaceCadet Creations Yarns

By Stephanie

The thing that never fails to take me by surprise me is the way that the colour of a yarn can change as it is knitted up.  As beautiful as it looks in the skein, when the colour repeats are all long and stretched out, is nothing compared how to it looks as you start knitting and the stitches join the colours together in unexpected ways.  It’s so exciting to watch each row unfold!

So exciting, in fact, that it’s sometimes a bit hard for me to send my yarns off to customers…  because I want to knit them up myself and see how they come out.  And so the thing that never fails to absolutely delight me is when customers share pictures of their finished objects and I get to see my yarns all knitted up.   Let me show you two that I think worked out beautifully.

Cindy won this skein of Garden In Spring in the SpaceCadet Creations May Giveaway…

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And she used it to make these fabulous Dancing Diamond Socks by Wendy D. Johnson.  I love how knitting subdues the wild variegation of the colours but still allows the yellow to pop.  The result is just gorgeous!

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When I lifted my first skein of Plumberry out of the dye pot, I loved it — loved it — but I knew that it was the kind of wild variegation that needed a carefully chosen pattern to really bring out the best in the colours.

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And when Sarah chose to knit Pomatomus by Cookie A. with it, I don’t think she could have picked a better pattern for the yarn or a better yarn for the pattern.  These socks are absolutely stunning!

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Thank you so much, Cindy and Sarah, for sharing your beautiful socks with us!

And everyone else, when you finish a project with one of my yarns, please do share it — I just can’t get enough of seeing how those colours turn out!

Sunshine Today, More Forecast For Next Week

By Stephanie

When I discover my yarns featured in an Etsy Treasury, I get such a rush of excitement, I can’t tell you.  And so it was yesterday when I found Sunflowers had been picked for a treasury called “My Sunshine“, put together by ThePlumTree.

Sunflowers sold pretty quickly after that, and I am so excited to send it off to its new home.  But if you loved all these golden colours, don’t worry — I’m going to be dyeing a lot more beautiful yellows over the weekend.

The forecast for next week?   Bright Sunshine!

What Happened Nest…

By Stephanie

This summer, a pair of robins built a nest on top of my back porch light, right outside my backdoor, and consigned me to using only the front porch for the whole month of June.  And I (and you) got to watch as the eggs appeared, and the babies hatched and grew.  It was magical thing to witness so close.

Also this summer, the family next door moved away.  As she was in the middle of the chaos of packing up her house, my neighbour mentioned to me one day that she always collects a bird’s nest from every house that she lives in.  But her husband had already started his new job on the other side of the country and she was having to pack up the house and move the (5!) kids all on her own, and I suspected that she never got a chance to collect a bird’s nest.

And I have a beautiful nest sitting empty right outside my back door…

So today, we very carefully took it down.

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It came away without too much difficulty and all in one piece.  It was made from sticks and leaves, as you’d expect, but I was intrigued to see string, yarn, and bits of dried grapevines (complete with old grapes!) tucked in there as well.

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We put the nest into a bag to keep it safe.

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And then wrapped it in tissue paper…  just because.

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And packed it up with all the love and care that I package my yarn.  More, probably — this is precious cargo!

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And, just like that, the little nest that gave three baby robins their happy start in life was ready to travel all the way to the other end of the country.

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Where, I do believe, it will be absolutely cherished.

Maybe I’ll Become a Cook

By Stephanie

Sometimes it’s good to push yourself outside your comfort zone.  And if it works, it’s such a boost to the ego!  And when it doesn’t…  well…

Well, indeed.  Last week I pushed myself right out of my comfort zone and straight into yellow.  I don’t do yellow a great deal — it’s just never been a personal favourite of mine.  But yellow is a great colour — sunny and bright, and filled with warmth.  It was time to tackle yellow.

And, while I was pushing outside my comfort zone, I decided to shake things up even more by trying a new dyeing technique.  It was something I’d never tried before — indeed, I’d never even seen it done before — and I got excited about it as soon as I thought of it.  The technique would create very short bursts of colour — just one, two, maybe three knit stiches long — and unusual blends of shades.  I couldn’t wait to try it.

And so I took a deep breath and mixed up my yellows…  and in went the yarn.

And what came out did not thrill me.  The yellows were beautiful, but The Technique had not worked the way I had expected at all.  The short bursts of colour were there, but were much more ragged at the edges than I had hoped, and the shading was simply too haphazard for my tastes.  I pursed my lips and shrugged…  Chalk it up to a learning experience and be done with it, I thought.

“I like them!  They’re interesting.  They’re… earthy!”  Turning these yarns over in her hands, my friend clearly saw something in them that I hadn’t spotted at first.  And she was right.  The shades are earthy, and the colour changes aren’t ragged as I first thought, they’re organic.  And the yarns, I suddenly realised, are beautiful.  Even if they weren’t what I was expecting and are completely outside my comfort zone.

So here they are!

The idea behind this one started as Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, but when it finally dried, I realised it makes me think so much more of Sunflowers, of their lovely golden yellow petals and dark seed-centers, of the earth they sprout from and the sun that nourishes them…

And this one… this one…  I am trying to think of a good name for it, but time and again, all I see is Pasta in a Garlic Pesto.  Even though the colours are exact, no matter which way I turn it, no matter how I look at it, that’s the only thing that comes to mind.

You know, if this dyeing gig doesn’t work out, maybe I could become a cook…

Dyeing Disaster, Last Minute Save

By Stephanie

This yarn was a dyeing disaster.  I was aiming for Garden In Spring, one of my favourite colourways, and the colour just went all wrong on me.  I pulled it out of the dyepot and… Oh no! The pinks were crazy-bright, the greens were just plain ugly, and the purples totally non-existent.  I have a picture of it…  I can’t even show it to you, it was that awful.  It was embarrassing.

I set it aside and decided not to think about it for a few days.

When I finally went back to it and turned it over in my hands (cringing, cringing the whole time), I realised what I wanted to do with it.  I thought I knew the shade that would salvage it.  I mixed my colours and in went the yarn.  And a little while later, this is what I lifted out…

I had hoped to salvage it — instead, it has been saved.  It came out so much better than I could have hoped!

There’s one skein in Astrid DK and one in Celeste Fingering weight.  And now I just have to decide if they go in the shop or…  if I keep them for myself!!!  I may have to think about this for a spell.

Boy oh boy, it is soooo tempting…

How Thin Can You Spin?

By Stephanie

Do you remember this?

This is the bombyx silk I was going to spun for the second half of the Tour de Fleece, but…  life intervened and I didn’t manage to get that far.  So, running just a wee bit late, I’ve finally got it on my wheel now, and it is a dream to spin.

Not that silk is always a dream to spin…  Bombyx silk generally has a very long staple length, and that can make drafting a challenge.  The distance that you’re used to holding your hands for drafting wool simply isn’t far enough apart when you’re spinning silk, and it can easily become a struggle as you start tugging at both ends of the same fibers.

A few months ago, I spun pure bombyx silk for the first time in many years and, even though I’ve spun a lot of silk in the past, I realised that my hands had forgotten what to do.  It seemed to take forever to retrain my hands (…or more likely, my brain) and until that moment when it finally clicked, I was pulling and tugging on that silk as if I’d never spun in my life.  As a result, the yarn came out much thicker than I’d wanted and lumpier too.  There’s no doubting it’s beautiful to look at, and the colours ethereal, but because I spun so much thicker than I intended, I just didn’t get the yardage I was hoping for.  It’s come out to a measly 143 yards and I’m really not sure what I could make with it.

So now, as I begin spinning this second braid of silk, I am really focusing on spinning as thinly as I possibly can.  And, it turns out, I can spin pretty darned thin!  Now that my hands (and brain) are back in the groove with spinning silk, this is how it’s coming out…

That is, as long as I don’t get too involved in a scary movie on telly and forget to spin super thin (see the occasional thick bits in the photo below?  Yeah… that was when the film hit a tense spot…).  But overall, this is coming out exactly the way I want it.  And now that I’ve got the hang of it, it is just sooo much fun to spin.

And this time, I hope to come out at the end with a really good length of some truly beautiful, smooth, pure silk yarn.