Wool For Brains

I have worked out why it is that puppies are so cute, it’s a survival trait. If they were not so adorable then you wouldn’t put up with the chewing, peeing, crying and the early morning starts. They have a lot in common with baby humans except human babies score higher with me by wearing nappies. It is hard to be annoyed with anything that is this soft and fluffy and wants to be your friend. I have some concerns that I’ve been sold an Ewok rather than a dog but we’ll see what he grows into. Don’t be taken in by the small size, that’s only visual. If you could smell him you’d think that he was a very large dog indeed. I’m steeling myself up for being nasty enough to give him his first bath. It feels cruel to do it but it would be in self defence.

I have some new knitting because the second sock in the Tsock Flock club came this week. Details are after the break so that anyone who doesn’t have their package and wants to be surprised by it can be. I will eventually catch up with your comments, the only time I can safely potter about on the computer is when the mothhound is doing something where he doesn’t need to be closely supervised.

(Read on …)

It’s been a long process planned well in advance. The softening up process started two years ago, the guinea pigs were the first over the barricades and they’ve been good at converting the family to the joys of pet ownership although they are a bit excessive with the morning greetings. I took my time and the husband caved in much earlier than I thought he would so I got my decision in principle - we could have a dog. The next step was what sort? We had thought that we would get a rescued dog (a recycled one as Dan was want to call it) but having kept my eye on local shelters for a year I wasn’t so sure. I wanted something small and daft and totally not fierce and that’s not the sort of dog that turns up at the local shelter. About 12 months ago I decided what we were going to want was a cocker spaniel and set about making sure that everyone else thought that too. Look, that’s a lovely dog isn’t it? Oh, I think it’s a spaniel. Look at that dog there, bounding along, I wonder what sort of dog it is? Oh, it’s a spaniel is it? I was almost there, we’d actually got the paper open at cocker spaniel breeders when my long term planning jumped the tracks.

This is Pebble and he is very definitely not a spaniel, not even close. Just at that moment when we were about to phone local spaniel breeders the two boys were let out unaccompanied for a few hours and were seduced by a pair of Shih Tzu’s. When they came back spaniels were off the list for ever, what we wanted more than anything else was a small Dougal. I had to admit defeat, I tried explaining that what we would be getting was a high maintenance couch potato but it was a lost cause. This is not the sort of dog that is going to run alongside a bicycle or spend its days chasing a frisbee, I doubt that he’ll be much of a digger either. He is small, daft and not fierce so he meets the specification although not in the way I’d planned.

We booked the accommodation fifty weeks in advance and the result was an ideal location. That was a good start to a weekend in Cumbria for Woolfest. It would have been an even better start if we’d got moving on Friday as early as I’d planned. Sadly I’d failed to communicate my plan to anyone else and was relying solely on the power of positive thinking to get us there early enough to go to Woolfest before moving in and hitting the pool. It’s no surprise to find that positive thinking was not enough to get us up, packed and out even though we had been woken early enough (6.30am) to hear an interesting fact about eye infections in guinea pigs. We arrived on Friday just after 3pm, unpacked, looked for squirrels, went swimming and a good time was had.

On Saturday my idea (again) was to be up and out early to Woolfest. This time I effectively sabotaged my own plans by booking pot painting at 9.30am. It takes far longer than you think and as a result, yet again, it was 11am before we were moving. This wouldn’t have been an issue except that we needed to be back by 2.30 to go quadbiking and it was an hour’s drive to Woolfest. The result was that we had a three night stay in Cumbria specifically to go to Woolfest but could only manage an hour’s visit. I have no photos as my camera and phone were in the car, but Louise has some because she obviously is much better at short term planning than I am. I did manage to see Denise in the short time that I was there so I don’t feel quite so bad about stalking her blog now.

I would have loved to poke around more of the stalls but all I had time for was a walk around, a visit with the animals and a quick shop for the things on my list. I did buy more than this but the Christmas fairy has already spirited the rest away and the kilo of superwash bfl has now vanished until late December. My shetland fleece from last year is all washed up and carded so it seemed sensible to buy another. This is two and a quarter pounds of Shetland ewe fleece, poop free and with very little hay. I do now wish that I’d bought the other one that I was looking at, next year’s list will say “Two Shetland fleeces”. It will also say “allow plenty of time for visit”.

On Sunday the boys did some archery, we went swimming, did about half of the orienteering course and then Daniel and I walked a llama called Pixie. Llamas are now his most favorite animal, displacing rabbits and ducks, but I suspect that will change sometime after 6.30 this evening when they will be knocked into second place by a puppy.

It’s a big weekend, we’re going on holiday with archery and quadbiking planned. It just happens that we will be about half an hour from Woolfest (fancy that, what a co-incidence us being there at the same time) so we might just find a bit of time to fit a visit in between the swimming and the bowling. When we get back on Monday then we’re going to pick up the tripe hound. It’s all go at Casa Morris. (For anyone who reads the husband’s blog - don’t be concerned, we aren’t leaving him in Germany, he got home last night and unpacked his bag just in time to pack it again)

If you are expecting any knitting maybe you should come back in a week or two when things have settled down and I’ve caught up with the laundry. Everyone else can come back next week for photos of the purchases and the dogdogdog (that will be two photos because I won’t be putting the two of them together)

The other exciting thing - I now have four goldfinches in the garden although they are definitely two sets of two and won’t share the feeder. They come in shifts and sit on the fence waiting for the changeover. I’m still getting a thrill whenever I look out of the window and see them hanging there.

Yet again I’ve managed to scare myself witless while tidying the front bedroom. That’s where the fibre lives and the majority of it is supposed to be safely stored away in three sealed boxes. The corner of the room is a landing pad (and doesn’t that sound so much better than “dumping ground”?) for all those things that I leave there temporarily until I put them away later. Yesterday I decided that “later” was “now”. The corner was piled with things that I had sampled and didn’t like, remnants of fibre left over from past projects and the returnees from the auditions where I’ve pulled out a choice of three, rejected all of them and gone out and bought something new. The biggest pile is whatever fell off the drum carder most recently which for most of the year was white alpaca but is currently white shetland. It all needs to be sealed up and put away. There’s always the danger that the moths have found it and that’s what makes it scary. When I picked up a bag and a label dropped off and fluttered to the floor I frightened myself so badly that I had to sit down and have a cup of tea. That’s why the job has to be done over several days, once my nerve has gone and I’m jumping at dust then I’m done for the day. There were no scary moments this morning and so I’m done now.

Funnily enough it looks as if I do this thoroughly once a year towards the end of June. I have another bash just before Christmas but June is the best time to see the floor in there. It’s not a conscious thought, I just decided yesterday that it needed sorting out and I looked back to see when I did it last. June 22nd 2007, June 24th 2008 - in both cases the week before Woolfest. There is obviously some part of me that feels guilty about thinking about buying more fibre when I can’t store what I have, that’s probably why the other big tidy up is on the run up to Christmas. The guilt trip is over for now - it’s all gone away (the blue bag is the shetland and that’s next on the wheel, the yellow bag is Etsy stock). I did come across a few things that are going to be spun sometime never, they weren’t right for what I wanted them for when I bought them and I’ve had no better ideas for them in the meantime. Next week I’ll empty out the storage boxes and pull out the no-hopers and come up with a plan. I suspect that it will involve a drum carder and hat knitting.

You’re thinking “what is that white board behind the wheel?” I know you’re thinking that because I am too and as soon as I press “publish” I shall be off to investigate further. I didn’t even notice that it was there until I looked at the photo. It must be one of the side effects of photography, you can see things in the picture that you can’t see in life. I can also see that the floor needs cleaning which shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise seeing as it doesn’t get done on a regular basis. To clean the floor you have to be able to see the floor.

When I was in my kntting rough patch there were only two projects that survived for more than an evening. This and the worm stayed the course while everything else in the knitting bag had a four hour life. This is a little less than one skein of Knitting Goddess dk cashmere/silk (55:45) on a US8 needle, I might have managed another pattern repeat from the remaining yarn or there again I might not. Given my urge to rip everything in sight I thought it best to err on the safe side and cast off without risking having to take it off the needles. The colourway is Stormy Sky and it does look like that, dark inky blues and greys. The beads are left over from the beaded Christmas stocking and the pattern is stitch number 244 from Lesley Stansfield’s “The New Knitting Stitch Library” with beads substituted for bobbles. The yarn was a little splitty but not maddeningly so. The pattern was simple and the beads were strung on the yarn so it made for a take along project which was good because I didn’t have a sock to take to swimming the other week.
It’s finished up at 6″ by 68″, a reasonable size for a scarf. I could whitter on about the beads being drops of rain falling from the stormy sky but that wouldn’t be like me at all. Someone gave me the yarn for my birthday so she must have liked the colours, seeing as she’s been having more than her fair share of stormy skies this year it seemed right to send it back home. Hopefully this year her storm will blow over and the sun will shine again. I can’t make that happen but at least I can keep her neck warm.

I did say that I’d wait until Iris had the full four repeats before I dragged it out again but I must admit that I wasn’t expecting to get there quite so soon. Thanks to the chap on the left there I finished the last repeat on Sunday evening. Indie was battling against a tree cutter on the living room floor for several hours on Sunday, that’s after the four hours it took to construct the tree cutter on Saturday. My only involvement there was to find a few pieces of Lego and advise on the best way to assemble 86 small black piece of plastic into caterpillar tracks so it earned me some quality bead knitting time. Much as I’d have liked to show you the tree cutter it came off the worst in a pitched battle late on Sunday and has gone back into the box for major repairs. It looks like I’m stuck with using the 0.4mm hook with the barb that I can’t see because a 0.6mm crochet hook is too big to go through the beads. Just so you know - if you try to pull a stitch through a bead when the hook is pointing the wrong way it gives you an instant dropped stitch that runs back a row. It gives you a dropped bead too but quite frankly I’ve lost so many now that I’m reconciled to having to buy another bag.

The yarn is made from some of the oldest fibre in my stash. The reason that it has sat there for so long (Christmas 2006) was that I was wary of the colours. It seemed like a good idea when I bought it but afterward it seemed like not such a good purchase. The dark plum is lovely but I had my concerns about the extent to which the fuchsia would dominate the final yarn. The yarn is a two ply so there was hope of blending the colours together, a three ply would have been better but to get it fine enough to pass through the beads means that I’d still have been spinning it. I’m pleased with the way that it’s knitting up (so far at least).

Ophelia is also moving forwards, this is the front or perhaps the back. The pattern gives three options for the hem, the one on the pattern photo has three contrast stripes and I liked the look of that very much. It is one of the things that drew me to the pattern in the first place but I have to admit that an eye catching stripe around my widest point is not probably a good move for me. It was with some regret that I left the contrast rows off the hem but I will using it around the neck and cuffs because I’m all for leading the eye upwards. I’d love to link you to half a dozen finished garments but the pattern isn’t listed on Ravelry and I managed to find just one on a blog which seemed to die a few inches from the hem. I have to admit that when I bought the pattern I took one look at the directions for the shoulders and put the pattern away in a hurry but on the basis of the two Lucy Neatby patterns that I’ve knitted since I have complete faith in the designer’s communication skills. I have knitted saddle shoulders before and I’m certain that it will all come back to me when I get there.

Top marks here for use of accent colours - you wouldn’t notice if goldfinches had big hips because you’d be too busy looking at their heads. I had a pair start visiting the feeder and then they just stopped coming leaving the expensive thistle seed swinging in the wind. I found out why when I flushed a cat out of hiding every time I walked past it. I’ve moved the feeder to where there is less cover for the local cat population and now the birds have returned.

It’s taken me a long time to get to this point, I like the pattern for Ophelia (for reasons that will become clear as I knit it) but the sticking point has been the yarn. Fifteen 50g skeins of hand painted sock yarn do not come cheap and there was a big gap between what I wanted and what I was prepared to pay for. I did in the end pluck up the courage to dye it myself, the thing that has been stopping me was the requirement to have all 15 skeins looking the same, or at least similar enough to knit a sweater from. I worked out two ways by which I could do this with some certainty. I could make one huge skein, paint it, wrap it in black plastic and set it in the baking sun. The lack of reliable baking sun was the challenge with that one. My more recent thought was to make one big skein and dip dye it in sections with a plastic resist to stop the colours running together. The advantage here is that there is only a small part of the skein in the dye pan at any one time so it wouldn’t have needed a big pan. It would have taken several days to dye the whole skein but it would have been the same all the way through with a regular colour pattern and if you end up with a colour that you didn’t intend then it’s easy to overdye just that section. That was by far and away the most sensible option, giving certain results but the “want it now” was too strong and I went for the non-option of putting a 900g skein in a big pan, pouring dye on it and hoping for the best. The most I’ve ever dyed before by this method is 300g and that came out just fine but it was still a big risk.

Well, I did it. One skein (bottom right) is noticeably lighter than the others but that’s fine as I got carried away and skeined up 900g rather than the 800g I need. This is sock yarn so that’s what the lighter skein will become, it has dyed well enough but just not with the same saturation as the others. The rest are not strictly identical in that the blue/green mix varies slightly, but they are close enough for it to work. I can’t see that any one skein is significantly different from the others but I’ll knit from three balls at once just to make sure that there isn’t a visible stripe where one skein ends.

I’m expecting that it will be less blotchy when worked over a larger number of stitches but if it doesn’t work out that way then I’ll be messing with the yarn to make sure that it does. I can see that I have tv knitting covered for the next several months.The really good thing about this is that I don’t have to worry about my major fitting issue (that would be my hips) until I’ve knitted the back and the front and am ready to start the sleeves. I have more than a mile of yarn to knit before I have to start thinking about anything significant.

I love it already.

The crochet hook that I started with is the great big thing in the centre, a 1.75mm hook. It was the smallest one that I had but it would only spear about one in ten of the 8/0 beads that I bought for Iris. It looks like a boat hook next to the new crochet hook that I bought. So far I haven’t come across a bead that it won’t pick up although it is doing a good job of snaring my trousers too. This is a 0.4mm crochet hook and it is without doubt the smallest thing I ever want to see. The chunky thing at the bottom is a pin to show the scale. I think you could invisibly repair laddered stockings with this, if you could be bothered. I am now a happy bunny and the beading row is now a piece of cake. I had my doubts that the hook would be big enough to pick up the yarn but it seems to work ok, now and again I’m only catching one of the plies and I have to start over but it is still much faster than messing with a sewing needle and thread.

This is a full packet of beads, there are about 1,175 in there. I can report that if you are dozy enough to stand up at the end of the row without fastening the bag and drop the lot on the floor they make a faint hissing noise, like pouring rice into a pot. Sadly I did not make a faint hiss but at least I held it together enough so that my son didn’t extend his vocabulary in any way. So far I’ve done this twice although the second time I got lucky and the bag landed the right way up with just a bit of spillage. I have now learned to dole out a few dozen beads into a little bowl and then put the sealed packet away. It’s a pity I didn’t work this out before I’d dropped them on the floor (twice), I just didn’t think that I was daft enough to forget there was a packet of beads on my knee.

This is after one pattern repeat, I promise not to show it again until there’s at least four repeats. I’m hoping that next time I’ll have a pile of sweater yarn to show, maybe even a swatch, so there is the promise of knitting to come. That will be a pleasant change then.

The knitting is still not going well. I start something, knit on it in the evening and then rip it back the next morning. I think Penelope did it the other way around but I’m making just as much progress. The blog has not seen half of my recent starts, most of them don’t see enough of the light of day to be photographed. I suspect that the problem is me, so many projects can’t all be wrong, but I seem to be a long time pulling out of it. There have been some unexpected benefits, my free time has been spent cleaning the house and it shows. I’ve been doing the sort of cleaning where you pull the room apart, clean all the remaining surfaces and then reassemble it, polishing or scrubbing everything as it goes back. You could safely eat a meal off any surface in the kitchen although you might need very sticky gravy to eat off the cabinet doors and splashbacks and I’d rather you didn’t do that. I’ve even purged the stray keys that have been accumulating in the knife drawer for the 17 years that we’ve been in this house.

This is half of my surviving knitting this week, excluding the single row I added to Iris last night (I’m still waiting for the delivery of the wondrous crochet hook that will hopefully end the tedium of placing beads). This is a Worm from the game “Worms Total Mayhem”, knitted in a double strand of Carolyn’s kid mohair and silk. It starts with a circular cast on at the head (I thought I was starting at the tail but it’s difficult to tell with worms) and has two sets of short row shaping to shape the neck. It’s not totally finished yet, I have still to do the hands but as worms have hands and no arms I need a bit of guidance from the end user. I think the solution involves string or invisible thread but opinions may vary on this.