Wool For Brains

I finished spinning all the skunk tail batts, washed it, dried it and packed it away. There are at least two warps standing between it and the loom so it’s not in any danger of becoming a rug just yet. I’m still working my way through the sacks of 2011 fleece purchases and even a little spun up is a move in the right direction. The purple yarn started the week as Portland fleece, this week I’ve combed it, spun it, plied it and dyed it. There is about 500 yards here, it’s going to be a little beaded shawl providing that it behaves itself when knitted and the beads I’ve ordered turn out to be the right colour in real life.

This started off as more odd ball wool, at some time I dyed two hanks of some wool I can’t now remember for a project I can’t now remember. The one thing that I do remember is being pleased that I got exactly the colour I wanted so it’s a mystery that I went on to use something else. It made a lovely warp, it’s nearly but not quite solid and the slight variations of colour aren’t enough to swamp the diamonds (it’s raining/sleeting/snowing so you’ll have to take my word for the subtle colour variation). I like it, it’s a length for another of those one piece bags because the wool isn’t really soft enough for a scarf.

I was sewing the buttons on this at about the same time that the ambulance was arriving to school to collect the teacher who had gone into labour two weeks early. I don’t feel guilty that I caused it because I didn’t know she was pregnant so I couldn’t have been knitting the jacket with her in mind. It is finished, seams sewn, buttons on and ends sewn in so if she had a girl this will be going to school on Monday. If not then I’ll be finally sewing up this one from last January. That’s usually how long it takes me to finish something, it’s exactly how I left it after the photo for the blog. No ties, no seams, no interest. I needed to finish the pink one quickly – until I’d knitted the edging and made the button loops I couldn’t use the leftover pink for something else and I’m planning another in pink and brown.

It’s knitted in two pieces and sewn together at the centre back. I wound the sock yarn oddments into centre pull balls so that I could work both pieces at the same and have them match with little effort. I didn’t feel like icord edging, I rarely do, so I edged this with two dpns, picking up stitches with one and then casting them off purlwise at the other end of the needle with the other end of the ball of yarn. I could have picked up all around with a circular needle and then cast off purlwise on the second round but it’s easier with two dpns, you don’t have all those stitches sitting around and you can see straight away whether you added enough ease at a corner for the edging to turn and sit flat. It doesn’t have the roundess of icord but it does the job.

I’m beginning to believe that I could knit all year from the bag of leftover sock yarn. This is another baby jacket and I’m knitting both sleeves at the same time because you know what I’m like for having things match. The photo needed flash, you’ll have to take my word that the blue is less evident in real life. I feel like I’ve been knitting the sleeves forever which is usually a sign that they are about the right length. I measured them and I have about half an inch to go before I get to do something other than knit with two increases every eight rows. It’s made ideal tv knitting this week but I’m ready for a change.

Next week I’ll try to take photos when there is some sign of the sun, either that or I’ll skip the photos altogether and attempt a description. Either would be better than colours distorted by flash or missing in poor light.

This was the week where the leftover yarn hit the loom multiple times. The first scarf was a variety of pale sock yarn leftovers and it was let down by my choice of weft. I’d woven the header with some navy that was left on a bobbin and that was what I should have stuck with but that meant going upstairs and finding the rest of the cone. The alternative to this was stretching out my hand and picking up a ball of leftover Regia sock yarn left over from weaving a ruffle scarf and so I took the easier option, telling myself that it was the better solution because it used more leftovers. It wasn’t, I don’t like the colour changes all that much and the navy looked better against the warp.

For the next scarf I’d learned my lesson and made a massive investment of time in that I walked upstairs, opened the wardrobe door and took out the cone of navy yarn. It was a detour of a less than a minute when I was upstairs putting the ironing away and the result is that I like this one much better with the dark solid weft. The warp is a leftover ball of Wendy Happy, the leftovers from the first Baby Kendyl and two balls of mystery yarn. The Happy has added the odd white streak which I rather like. It’s the same threading and tie up as the one above, just a different treadling. I think this used about 90g of warp yarn, there was still a fair amount of some of the yarns leftover so I found some more red and wound another warp.

This was also the week when I saw the end of the fun fur. I do now remember what it was that I originally bought it for, after I bought my rigid heddle loom I bought two balls of eyelash yarn because I thought they’d look good woven. I used it in an early scarf and then forgot all about it. That’s how the stash grows, buy two balls, use half of one and then put the rest away “for later”. The yarn police no doubt have a rule about never mixing handspun and eyelash yarn but it’s my yarn, I spun it and I’ll do what I like with it. For the record, making a twisted fringe with eyelash is about as bad as it gets and I’m planning on never doing it again. There was a yard or two left but I was ruthless and put the odd bit in the bin.

You will be imagining that I am spending every waking minute weaving (I wish) but I do have slightly more of a well rounded wool obsession than that. I’ve been knitting and spinning too, it’s just that the weaving is the only thing I finished this week. The baby jacket needs a bit of seaming up, some sort of an edging and buttons. That’s several months work there, six weeks of avoidance followed by two evening’s work. The yarn is made from the skunk tails that I carded before Christmas, I said that I was going to work out how much I needed for a rug and spin just enough. I decided that involved too much estimation of unknowns so I’m spinning it all and the leftovers can become future stripes. There was 530g when I started, I think I’ll end up with about 400 yards of really thick yarn when I’m done. I like the way that the white streaks ended up, I have a bag of mule fleece and another coloured Ryeland fleece and I think I’ll do the same with those. The yarn would be much lighter but I should still get that streaky look.

(I used to have an Etsy link in the sidebar but I took it out for some good reason that escapes me now, anyone who wants to relieve me of a scarf should look here.)

It’s been a while since I wove something on the floor loom. Early in December I ordered some cotton yarn samples and that threw me into a turmoil, I was flip flopping between yarn choices and projects several times a day. When I look in the stash for something to weave my options are limited, but give me a sample chart where I have choices of colour and thickness and there’s too much choice for me to pick just one project to work on. I could think of dozens of things to weave but couldn’t narrow it down to the one thing to weave next. I’ve spent over a month looking at the sample cards and bought nothing so I’ve put them aside and gone back to the stash where there fewer choices and a big bag of leftovers that needs using up.

I gave the big loom a spring clean. I’ve been tying onto a dummy warp for some time, the big advantage to that is that there are no threading errors or sleying errors, all you are doing is using the end of the old warp to pull the new warp back through the reed and heddles. If you habitually make errors in threading or sleying this is a really good thing. I might have rethreaded once or twice but I always used the existing warp and the result is that the back of the loom is a mess of knots. It doesn’t matter to the weaving and you can rarely see then but I know they are there. On Saturday I pulled the loom out and unwound the yards of knots from the back. The original project was the mug rugs that I started last May. I made a single set of black and cream and then moved the remnants of that warp across, added a dummy warp on the other side and made two sets side by side in red and orange.

The back is all neat and unknotted now, the front is a warp of sock yarn oddments made just to get me moving again. I picked three balls of leftovers in similar colours and wound a warp twice the length that I wanted, holding all three yarns together. When one yarn ran out I continued with two and in the end I just had the one yarn left. I cut the warp in half and put it back together again so the more varied part is at the outsides. I didn’t think that I could see the difference between where there are three yarns together and where there is only one but I can see in the photo that the centre is darker than the edges. If it does go on to make an obvious stripe then one central planned one will please me more than two smaller stripes. I’m not winding another warp until I’ve finished the first scarf just in case I’ve got the length wrong but after that I’ll be thinning out the sock scrap bag. I have a bag of browns and a bag of pinks to go at before I need to start putting odd balls together.

When I’ve made scarves like this before they’ve been a mixture of superwash and normal wool and the ruffles form in a hot wash when one of the yarns shrinks. This one is different, it’s a mixture of leftover sock yarn and Cascade Fixation. The interesting thing about the Fixation is that it’s stretchy, it’s a cotton and elastic yarn. I warped the loom with the Fixation stretched tightly, once off the loom it relaxed and pulled the sock yarn into ruffles. Unlike the fulled wool version the ruffles aren’t permanent, if you hold it by one end you can bounce it up and down like a Slinky. A warp length of 130″ gave me a 60″ scarf, this used 36g of the 50g so it should be possible to get three scarves from two balls.

This is not the project I was hoping it would be. I’d imagined something where I could knit both halves of a baby jacket together on one needle using both ends of odd balls of sock yarn. That would mean that I could use up all those odd balls without having to think much about matching the two sides. What I’d failed to consider was that when I cast on to form the shoulder and complete the round I needed to start in the middle of a row. For a couple of inches the knitting is U shaped rather than straight and I had to work each part separately. I did consider ripping it at that point but I carried on because it’s a learning experience and will teach me to plan ahead. It’s all back on one needle again but the fun went out of it and I won’t be making a second one. The browns that would have gone into the second one will become a scarf warp instead.

One way or another I am going to make an impression on the bag of sock scraps this year.

I don’t do New Year resolutions, if you want to change your life then any day will do, why not pick a day and start rather than waiting for the “right” time. I started with my resolution for 2012 back in December, that’s when I had the idea and it was as good a time to start as any. It came about from poking around in the yarn stash recently. The last time it had a really good clear out was in 2007, since then I’ve bottomed the fibre stash but the yarn has crept away from me. It’s not particularly that I want less, I just want the bottom layer to move along and make space for new and exciting yarn. I have a lot of odd balls and leftovers that are of a useful size and would come in for something but somehow they never do, they just sit there and taunt me. This is the year that some of them leave home, my plan is that 2012g of the older stuff will be used up and moved out by the end of October.

This will be part of the January weigh in, it’s another endless cowl from the endless bag of pink. The pink bag has now provided the yarn for two of these and two hats. I’d like to say that there was looking to be less in the bag but that’s just not true. I’ve taken 500g out and there seems to be as much left in there now as there was when I started and I’m pretty sure that there’s been no-one adding to the bag. I hope when I’ve made another cowl the bag will suddenly reach that tipping point and move from “full” to “not enough”.

These look like scrap socks and they should have been given that the sock scraps bag is taking up most of one storage box. The reality is that I started with two 50g balls of Regia, took an instant dislike to the cuff and brought in a plain ball of Trekking to break up the pattern. There will be a lot of leftovers from 200g of sock yarn but I want brown scraps for the next project so it’s not as bad as it sounds. I would have cast on Project Scrapeater by now but when I worked out the number of stitches to cast on and it came to more than three hundred I had second thoughts, especially as I wanted two matching pieces so would be casting on 600 stitches. I’m making excuses (can’t find the right needle, need to wait for more brown scraps) but the real reason is I don’t feel up to facing those long rows. I’ve lost the bit of paper now with the drawing and calculations so I can put off starting for a little longer especially as the socks are photographed against the background of the poorly blanket. The dog is fine, everyone else has some variety of lurgy.

The weigh in for December was 366g, made up of one woven scarf (150g), two hats (170g) and one pair of mittens (46g). It’s a good start, let’s see if I can keep it up until I hit 2012.

PS It was a good job I lost the piece of paper with the pattern notes on otherwise I would have been casting on twice the number of stitches that I needed on the brown scrap eater.

It turns out that there is still room to fit a dog under the tree after Christmas Day, you just need to pile it up on top of the presents. I think he might be sitting on a box charkha as well as a Lego book, I rescued my fluff from under the tree in case it was scrabbled into but I thought a wooden box would be dog proof. He’s basically a Good Dog now and not much of a chewer but we removed the beef jerky to a place of safety just in case the temptation was too much for him.

I put the wheel up for a couple of days, just long enough to spin and ply 100g of coloured merino. You can’t see it clearly in the skein but this is a rainbow and I think it will end up as a scarf running red to violet to red across the width. There is a little over 200 yards here, I do have another 200g of fibre but that might well end up being something completely different.

I’ve spent the last four days knitting thumbs, one a day until I was done. It turned out that with a 72 stitch mitten there wasn’t quite enough yarn left over from a pair of socks to knit two mittens and two thumbs. I could have got a matching pair if I’d split the remaining yarn into the red and the yellow/green multi and then knit the two colours in alternate rounds or I could have knitted a red thumb and a yellow thumb. It was easier to go with option three and find some more leftover sock yarn in a similar colour and make a matching pair with the minimum number of ends.

If I make a mitten eight stitches smaller then there is enough yarn left from a pair of socks to make two whole mittens. If I make any more then this is the size I’ll be making, cast on 60 stitches, increase to 64 after the rib and increased to a 24 stitch gore. I had yards of the contrast left, enough for me to not be worried about running out. I’m not sure there will be another pair right away because I didn’t want to face up to the thumbs on these which does not bode well for another pair. The driving force to finish them was that I wanted the darker yarn and couldn’t count it as leftover until I’d finished.

The post with my aims for 2012 will have to wait for another day, I had a late night followed by an early morning and as a result I’m tired rather than reflective today. I think I’ll end with a random selection of photos from the camera card as that doesn’t need me to be coherent (click for bigger photos). The card has an assortment of photos of things that don’t belong together, just like the space man at the helm of the “Black Pearl”. I wasn’t utterly convinced about the lime working with the smoked salmon. that seemed a bit astropirate as well, but the vol au vents all vanished so I was not able to snag the leftovers for a second taste. (I didn’t make them, my husband isn’t just a sock appreciator, he can bake as well)

In finishing the mittens I successfully emptied the knitting bag for the start of the new year, it’s time now to start filling it up again. Happy New Year to one and all, may your cast ons all be successful. I hope mine are too although experience says that a fair percentage of them will be rippers.

I don’t get into the Christmas knitting madness, if it’s not finished by July then it doesn’t go on the gift list. I made an exception this year because it’s just socks and I know how fast I can knock a pair out although I didn’t allow for ripping one back to the heel and reknitting it. I think this is some variety of Trekking, again it was a surprise because I was expecting narrow stripes. I deliberately tried not to force them to match, I went as far as starting the second one from the other end of the ball so they would be different. You can see just how well that idea worked out for me.

These are 64 stitch mother socks with a bit of variety in the six by two rib. The first one I made was a little too long in the foot, in addition the pattern ended several inches below the toe and I’d managed to fail to count to twelve and thereby made a pointy heel. I made the second one the right length and moved the pattern and then remade the first to match the second. It just goes to show that lager and heel turns do not mix.

From one extreme to another, from two day socks to twelve month mittens. I set these aside sometime after Christmas last year, I can’t even remember now whether these are the second or the third pair that I made from this yarn which is a two ply yak plied with a single strand of lurex. When I pulled the second mitt out of the yarn basket I found that the needles were not where I thought they’d be, I was pleased to find that I’d already finished the body of the mitt and picked up for the thumb. All I needed to finish the pair was to knit two half thumbs and sew in a few ends. If I’d known how little there was to do I’d have dug them out and finished them before now. They’ve not been blocked and are somewhat deformed from having spent a year buried under a pile of wool, you can see which one was neatly folded and which one was left with the needles in.

This is the sum total of my knitting, I’m two thumbs away from having an empty knitting bag. I’ve not run out of yarn yet, there’s a small ball left that is probably enough to finish the thumbs because how much yarn can a thumb take? (Don’t answer that, I want to be pleasantly surprised) It does look like it is possible to make a pair of decent sized mittens from the leftovers from a pair of socks but I’m still making the next pair smaller to reduce the level of suspense. There are more ends than you’d expect because I had to use the small ball that I took out to make the second sock match the first and I split the larger leftover ball into two colours so that it would stripe. Now that I have to sew the extra ends in this is no longer seeming like such a good idea.

Don’t tell the dog but he’s not going to be able to play there tomorrow. He’s had his toys under the tree since it went up, the tree skirt has been pulled every which way by someone burying bones under it and the drummers mysteriously fall off the bottom branches every day. There won’t be room for him under there tomorrow but he’ll probably try to squeeze in somewhere.

There is no second mitten yet, it’s been sidelined while I worked out why it was that I didn’t want to knit it. I worked out that it was because the first one was cobbled together from odd bits of the contrast sock yarn and I wasn’t certain that I could get them all in the same order with the second one. I’ve had a firm talk to myself, this is knitting not brain surgery and no-one dies if you get it wrong. There will be a second mitten and if it doesn’t match the first then I’ll get over it.

While I was undertaking mitten aversion therapy I made a hat and it was so much fun I made another. There probably would have been a third except that I ran out of yarn which was good because that was the object of the exercise. The first one (left) is more or less the Southern Lights hat from Knitty except that I worked it top down. The second one had eight increases every two rows worked wherever I felt like putting them and a bit of garter to stop the edges rolling. There would have been a pom pom on the top except that I didn’t have enough yarn for that. The yarn was a combination of the sparkly handspun that I made from the Portland combing waste and something unmentionable from stash. Labels have been destroyed to protect the guilty, I hope that it’s been discontinued because it had few redeeming features other than the way that the colours changed. I can’t think what I’d knit with it on its own, it pilled with a glance and didn’t have much in the way of body. Knitted along with another yarn it’s given its colour changes to the hat and the solid pink has given it some substance and some twinkle. That little bit of duff yarn in the photo is all that was left after knitting the body of the hats, there was none at all left after I’d made the tassels.

I used a new to me increase on this, one I’d read about but never tried. I was knitting with two strands of yarn held together, when I wanted to increase I knitted into each strand seperately (click the photo to see the detail). It worked a treat and I’d do it again. The reason I had thought about it now is that it is a variant on the increases I’ve been using on the mittens. They are also knitted with two yarns but obviously I’m only using one of them at a time. In the round before the increase I knitted both colours into the same stitch and then in the next round knitted the two strands seperately. It is surprisingly difficult to knit both yarns into the same stitch, it’s not physically hard to do but it runs against everything I’ve ever done in knitting. It just felt so wrong and I struggled with doing it at first.

I did finally get points on this shawl, just in time. I decided on Thursday that it needed to be reblocked before it was handed over on Friday. There was no time for any other option than an emergency steam blocking so that’s what it got. It worked really well, the difference this time was that I put the pins in the right places. It was pointed, dried, wrapped and out of the house in a few hours.

Today (as opposed to “tonight”) will be 23 seconds shorter than yesterday, tomorrow will be 15 seconds shorter than today. Roll on Friday which will be four seconds longer than Thursday. The solstice is coming, it can’t come too soon for me.

This is the second skein of Ryeland, there won’t be a third until after Christmas because the tree is up, the wheel is down and the other half of the wool needs carding. The Perendale was just the ticket for a dull day, zingy and packed with colour. I have no idea what it’s going to be, everything I look at says “mittens” to me but I know that is just my obsession talking. It can live in a box until I’ve lost my current focus.

The socks are mitten related because I picked the sock yarn from the drawer that I thought was most likely to provide leftovers suitable for mittens. These are Trekking something or other, I started them while we were away at the weekend so I can’t rifle the bins now for the missing ball band. I didn’t realise that they were going to knit up like that, for some reason I’d imagined narrower stripes. There were two knots in the ball which meant I had to take several yards out of the second sock to get it to match the first but luckily I’ve had enough experience with knots in sock yarn for me to catch it straight away and no ripping was needed.

The last installment in the 2011 Mittenquest left me with a pair of tiny mittens that were smaller than I wanted but at least the proportions were right. I looked on the bookshelf which doesn’t have as much content as Google and isn’t as easy to search but has the right focus. I should have looked there earlier because I found the table of hand sizes I needed in Robin Hansen’s “Favorite Mittens”. As well as the sizes for various ages it gives the proportions of a mitten, thumb length to hand length, thumb circumference to hand circumference and all the other ratios that you need to build a mitten. What I’m after is a child’s mitten in sock yarn that knits at 9 stitches per inch in two colours to make them nice and dense with a pattern that isn’t much of a pattern so I can knit it while watching tv. These appear to be just the ticket. I haven’t made the thumb on the first because I’m not convinced that I have enough of the brighter yarn. It looks like the leftovers from an adult sock is just about enough to provide the contrast colour, the original sock is this one.

I wanted a child’s mitten, what I got was one that fits me. I’m not particularly bothered by this because I know that children come in various sizes. I have one that’s nearly big enough to put the star on the Christmas tree. I won the arm reach contest this year but not by much. This is a 72 stitch mitten and I think the next pair I make will be eight stitches (two patterns) narrower and correspondingly shorter because then I should have less issues with running out of yarn. This has a cuff of 68 stitches, increased by 4 in the plain row after the cuff, gusset increases made by knitting both colours into the same stitch, 26 stitches taken off for the thumb, 2 cast on over the top and a length from the top of the cuff of 7″. The plain rows right at the top indicate how fast the end of the coloured ball was coming up and are worked using both ends of the ball of plain dark yarn. I ripped version one because you could really feel the difference between the dense colourwork part and the weedy single colour mitten tip. What’s the point in knitting a nice dense mitten to then have cold fingertips?

I went away at the weekend, my camera didn’t so this is the only photo I can offer you. Yes, it’s reindeer season again.

This has been hard work. The Ryeland was not what you’d call a good fleece, it was full of chaff, second cuts and general rubbish. I picked heaps out, a pile fell out under the carder and I’ve had to vacuum every time I finished a bobbin because of the snow that fell while I was spinning. Sometimes the bobbins fill themselves, with this I have had to work for every inch. This is a four ply but I couldn’t bring myself to fill the fourth bobbin, I’d had enough of it after the third and had to resort to the wool winder to take some off to make the fourth strand. I thought that seeing the finished yarn would make it all seem worthwhile and it did, I like the colour and it doesn’t look as rustic as I thought it would. There won’t be enough for a sweater, the smallest sweater wearer has proclaimed it to be “too brown” and there will only be 800 yards or so. It will end up as a knitted something, it’s lovely yarn and now I’ve seen it I’m happy to start ploughing through the rest of the fibre.

That will be after I’ve finished playing with this, my reward for filling the third bobbin was a change to another colour, something brighter to cheer up a grim grey day. This is Crown Mountain Farms Perendale in “5th Element” chosen for no other reason than it’s bright and sunny. I have no idea what this will become, as the only reason that I’m spinning it is that it’s not brown. This is spinning itself so I’ll probably be back to brown by tomorrow.

I’m still looking for mitten heaven. The pink ones are a lovely fabric but they are wrongly proportioned and the thumb is too wide. That will teach me not to use a pattern that says that gauge is not important. It is, if you’re taking off ten stitches for a thumb then that could be an inch or two inches. The multicoloured ones are more what I was after but because I started them before I found the table of hand sizes they are much smaller than I was wanting. (If anyone is wondering why I paired the blue cuff with the green and browns, it’s all one ball of sock yarn and that’s the way that the colours fell) It’s back to the drawing board but I’m confident that this time I’ll get what I wanted because I’m going to start with a blank sheet of paper and a table of hand sizes and work out the pattern for myself. I thought I was taking a short cut by amending someone else’s pattern to my tension but it’s turned out to be a long bumpy road that’s taken me exactly nowhere. The only thing I can say in my defence was that I didn’t have the hand sizes I needed to base a pattern on, a feeble argument seeing as I did have the size table all along, I just needed to open the right book.

This is not a boa, it should have been but it was a total pain to make and I gave up after the first few inches. It’s woven and it only needs two shafts but it was utterly frustrating on the rigid heddle loom because the half inch weaving width wasn’t enough to keep the heddle in the up position. When I try again it will be on the floor loom, which seems like total overkill for six bits of thread and a bit of fluff. I don’t think I’ll be making the boa but I might make a dozen or so of these little bits for fastening on hair slides or head bands. This one will be going for a one way trip on the school bus just as soon as I get a hair slide to fasten it to.

I’d love to say that this made a big hole in the bag of pink yarn but it didn’t. It seems to have made no impression at all but it weighs 150g so the reality is that I’ve moved a ball and a half out of the bag. I am refusing to weigh the remaining yarn and face reality, I think I’ll progress better if I think that the end of the journey is just around the corner.

My final verdict on the gloves is that they are not bad I suppose. That should be enough to tell you that I won’t be wearing them and it’s back to the drawing board. About six years ago I spun and knitted myself a pair of gloves using a knit to fit pattern. They were merino, silk and camel and if it hadn’t been for the Frankenstein finger they would have been perfect. The yarn had a random colour change and one finger ended up being solid blue which jarred with the rest of the gloves but they were warm and soft and they fitted so I tried hard to overlook the odd finger. About three winters ago I misplaced one glove, not in a lost-lost way but in a it’s-around-here-somewhere way. I put the lonely glove in a safe place and waited for its mate to turn up. It never did and of course now I’ve lost the other one as well.

It was going to be a hard act to follow, any new gloves would have to live up to the wonder gloves so it shouldn’t be too surprising that these failed to meet expectations. They are a little too long in the cuff and not quite dense enough and they aren’t the pair that I lost. I didn’t like the way that the colours pooled, I could live with the spirals on the wrist and the stripes on the fingers but not the big red blob on the back of the hand. The photo on the left shows the gloves after dyeing, there’s still a big red blob but now it’s on a red background which goes some way to camouflage it (or so I would like to believe).

The green on green mitts also failed to meet expectations but they (or rather “it) was fun to knit so I’m feeling more forgiving. No fingers = fewer ends and that’s a big plus as far as I’m concerned. Its major failing is that it’s slightly too big on me, probably due to me getting 9.5 stitches per inch rather than the 10 that the pattern calls for. I’m also not sold with the gauntlet cuff, for me to wear it (if it fitted, which it doesn’t) I’d have to pick up and knit an internal cuff and I’m never going to do that. I’ve not sewn the ends in so it is still potentially a ripper, it can hang around for a while until I decided whether to rip it or knit its partner.

I’ll come out and say it straight away, I don’t like this much either, but I’m well into the second one so it does have a future. I don’t have a problem inventing mittens when I have a hand to aim at, I know roughly how they work but what I don’t know is the measurements I need for a child’s size. I used to have a resident child but he got big while I wasn’t watching, he’s now of a useful size for reaching into the tops of cupboards but no good at all as a hand model. The idea with this one was that I followed a pattern and took the measurements from the mitten so that I could then make the same sized mittens in different sized yarns. The problem with that idea is that I don’t think I started with the right pattern, this looks to me to be too wide for the length. This can be solved with blocking, it can be persuaded to get a bit of length and in the process loose some width. I’m finishing this pair (three ply Dorset Horn, dense and wind proof) and then starting over with another basic pattern. Had I not thrown away the pattern I had from years ago that was sized in inches rather than stitches I wouldn’t need to be doing this, it’s enough to turn me into a hoarder.

To end on a more positive note, here is something that came out well despite having a few hiccups in the process. I was involved as an interfering parent advisor which was just as well as the recipe was subject to some intepretation and needed converting to an all in one method at a critical point. The frosting would have probably have been twice as thick without my interference advice but that was all I had to do with it. At the moment his repertoire is beans on toast and sponge cake but it’s a start.

Late breaking news – I’d like to report that I have my mitten architecture sorted now – if I’d looked on the bookshelf and not on the internet I’d have got there much quicker.