Pumpkinspun’s Musings

Years ago, back in my Compuserve Spinners & Weavers days, I wrote up a little tutorial that came about when I was helping someone online try to use their Support Spindle. And for years, the tutorial sat on my computer, until Ted asked me to share it last year. This prompted me to give it a small tweaking and redo as a pdf. And it sat again, for nearly a year.

I’m finally sharing it with those of you who just need a little extra printout to refer to. When I get around to getting a camera with sound, I’ll do up a little video to go with it, but there are plenty of good spinning videos out on the net already.

So here’s the tutorial, and if it helps you at all, please leave me a comment on the blog.

I’ve added some of my most recent Spindle Jewels™ earrings to the blog. For wholesale orders, I am starting to fill Springtime festival orders, and can do a small amount of Christmas shop orders. Just give me a yell thru the contact link above and I’ll get right back to you!

This was my 6th Clapotis. I guess I’ve become rather fond of them - easy to knit, they drape just wonderfully, you can choose just about any fiber to make them from, you can make them as wide or narrow as you like. They make great scarves, shawls, wraps. My first 5 were made of Cotton, Rayon or Cotton/rayon blends, most for gifts, the first rayon/silk one was for myself. I decided this year I wanted a new scarf/clapotis that was a tad warmer and lighter. So this winter, while I was purchasing some thrift store sweater to harvest for yarn (yarn harvesting is a GREAT way to get thru quitting smoking!), I found a women’s small sized cropped sweater in 100% cashmere.

The real luck was that the yarn was near DK weight, a rarity in thrift store cashmere sweaters. It was an ugly dusty pink, so after harvesting, I painted it with a kool-aid dye solution, using sponge brushes to get the color just where I wanted. I ended up with 4 skeins of 600yds total yarn, and used blueberry and cherry kool aid packets, about 6 total. In general, when I make my Clapotis’, I use purl stitches rather than stitch markers, to mark the stitches that will be dropped. It’s very visual, and much less fiddly.

You can find the original Clapotis pattern by Kate Gilbert on Knitty.com, as well as some other tips on working with the Clapotis pattern here: http://www.knitting-and.com/wiki/Clapotis I really like the warmth and lightness of this particular Clapotis. I also twisted the stitches on either side of the dropped stitches in such a way that they mirror each other. When I finally finished, I added some fringe to the short ends of the scarf. It’s lovely yarn…I wish I had more of it!