Wool For Brains

Although I still have only one item on the needles the socks aren’t growing as they should be. I was trying to work out what had been cutting into my knitting time and I think this is the guilty party. I have this idea that to make a bag I just have to cut and sew a bit of lining but when I’ve really thought about it I’ve realised that I’m far off the mark with that idea. It took me the whole of music school to pin it and sew the side seams and top edges. That’s an hour and a half of quality knitting time gone. I spent most of “Mastercrafts” (Friday 9pm and this week they will be weaving) putting gold beads on the fringe, running out, taking some off and replacing them with bronze beads. It took two evenings of Agatha Christie’s Poirot to twist the fringe by hand (I’ve lost the battery case off the fringe twister) and no time at all to sew the lining, make the cord for the top and fashion a tassel. Despite all the time that it took it’s pretty and so I forgive it everything.

I can’t spin and knit at the same time so there must be some knitting hours lost here. The sock yarn was 400 yards before I soaked it, I should remeasure it now but I have better things to be doing. It’s a three ply superwash merino and nylon and it looks very like sock yarn to me. The others are very soft merino and I’ve given them the hot and cold water treatment to hopefully stop them pilling. They run about 200 yards to 100g and I like them too which surprises me no end. They are soft and squishy and nothing like what I usually spin or knit and I’m sure that they have been good for my personal development.

These have been the other time suck. These are rather large bookmarks in Jaggerspun Zephyr at 30 epi (ends per inch, the weaving equivalent of stitches per inch). I didn’t measure a bookmark before I started, just looked at a ruler, and as a result they are wider than they needed to be. I can now read a weaving draft and negotiate an eight shaft pattern with floating selvedges and two shuttles all at the same time. My brain hurts. The warp was long enough to make more bookmarks but after the second I reviewed my learning.

I had discovered that I’m not longer scared of the big scary table loom, that I have a deep dislike of floating selvedges because they slow everything down, that changing sheds sounds just like slamming the knife drawer and that I don’t much like working with tiny yarn because it takes too long to see any progress (also slamming the knife drawer thirty times an inch is not much fun). I couldn’t see what I would learn from a third bookmark other than selvedge improvement so I cut off the rest of the warp and chained it up. I have a lot to learn and I’d rather spend the time trying doubleweave or any of those other chapters in “Learning to Weave” (ideally without a floating selvedge and with thicker yarn. The drawer slamming I’ll learn to live with). I should say that some of the weaving is that of the husband who took to tabby with tiny yarn better than I thought he would.

The big surprise was that the new noise didn’t need barking at. Nothing interferes with the morning nap, not even me slamming the knife drawer over and over again. If it had sounded like the fridge door opening that might have been a different matter altogether.

I didn’t join any of the various knitting things that run alongside the Olympics. This is because I am not in general a joiner of things, I know my limitations and I know that I’m not good with deadlines or authority. It doesn’t even matter if I’m the authority that made the deadline, if I have to knit X then I’ll be wanting to knit Y. It’s far simpler for me to just watch the Olympics and do some knitting.

Having knitted my way through the Christmas stocking I found myself with an empty knitting bag. This is of course a total fabrication, I had knitting but not the sort that I wanted to knit. I didn’t have second sock syndrome with these so much as first sock syndrome, I’d had enough by the first heel. These have got to be the front runners in any “most boring sock I’ve ever knitted” competition. I couldn’t see the point in adding any patterning because the yarn is so dark that it would be a waste of effort so it was all plain knitting with boring dark splitty yarn. The only way these were ever going to be finished (they’ve been in progress since September) was to ignore the call of the cast on and get on with it. I did seriously consider ripping them just after the second heel (yes, they were that tedious) but I stuck it out. The obvious question is why did I buy such boring yarn in such a hard to knit colour? I bought it with a red semi striping Trekking yarn with the plan to knit stranded socks except that this yarn is boring, dark, splitty and elasticated and I couldn’t manage to get anything like an even tension. The sorry tale is here, it’s taken me three years to knit up the frogged yarn.

Having seen off the boringest knitting in the history of knitting I could cast on with a clear conscience. These are some of the leftovers from my Ophelia sweater, when I dyed the yarn one skein came out lighter than the others and that’s the one that I’m using here. It just happened that when I took a photo of the sock against the tv that the four man bob chose that moment to invert. Sorry America 3, it was all my fault.

There is the potential for more Olympic knitting even though the closing ceremonies are over. I can pause live tv and rewind it which is good for getting replays of things that went past too quickly the first time. I’ve been using it for stalking hats in the crowd and I think this is the one on the top of my list. The second placed hat exists only in my memory because I didn’t think of catching it with the camera so it’s fair to assume that it is now lost for all time. I like this one, a dubbelmossa, plain except for the detail on the roll over cuff (a good warm four layers there over the ears), knit long with a tassel on top. The other hat had a heavily patterned band in different colours to the rest of the plain hat. The common feature is a patterned band on an otherwise plain hat so that’s what I’ll be going with.

I can’t quite bring my thoughts to bear on a blog post at the moment because my brain is fully occupied by weaving so I’ll show you some photos and come back another time with carefully thought out words. There are no photos of the weaving that is filling my mind because I’m still at the planning stage and my thinking is along the lines of “if there are 600m on a cone and I’m using a 10 dent heddle and a 15″ width then what warp length will I get in inches?” “No wait, I’m using two colours so it’s twice that” “Hold on a minute, I’m using it doubled so it is what I thought it was originally”. I then started down the path of “how much yardage will there be after I’ve dyed it?” and the only answer I have to that is to dye it and then measure it. I’m still trundling through the calculations though, I’ve made so many simple errors already that I’m sure there’s another one ready to bite me.

The number of times that I’ve knitted this pattern is two. It’s possible that I might yet knit it again because it is straightforward enough and it’s a fun knit. Adding the beads prevents the repetition in the leg from becoming boring. The heel is not fun, it’s knit back and forward and some of the beaded rows are purl rows but on the plus side the heel isn’t that big. Last time I moaned about the length of the boring white bit on the foot, this time I flew through it while watching the Olympics.

This is the Victorian Christmas Stocking and I used 104g of the main colour and less than 50g of the contrast. The white is undyed bfl sock yarn and the contrast is a superwash merino and nylon sock yarn that I dyed. I’m fairly confident that if I’d only had a single 100g ball of the white I could have made it to the toe by knitting the 3″ facing in the contrast colour. (Do your own maths on that one, I’m still doing warp calculations) I know there’s an odd stitch on the toe that is the wrong colour and I’m going to hunt it down and eliminate it with duplicate stitch, the heel veered away from the chart too but I caught it early enough to make it consistently wrong so I’m leaving that.

The number of times I will be knitting this again is zero (which is equal to the number of times I will be wearing it). This is the Helianthe hat and it was lovely to knit but it does nothing for me at all. I wasn’t sure that I had enough yardage, there was probably enough but it was cutting it a bit fine, so I started above the ribbing with a provisional cast on. After I’d worked the crown of the hat I recovered the cast on stitches and worked downwards. You wouldn’t notice if the ribbing was a couple of rows short (especially not in this photo because you can’t see it at all) but you would notice if I ran out of yarn before I’d finished the crown shaping. Although it doesn’t suit me it does deserve a better photo but this was as far as I got when the camera battery died. Luckily the calculator is solar powered so it’s unlikely to fail on me before I’ve satisfied myself that my warp calculations are right.

That’s all for now, I’m off to research shrinkeage and factor that into my never ending calculations.

I do sometimes have three hands when it comes to carding, child labour is very useful but the problem with it is that he does disappear off to school during daylight hours. When I have an assistant he turns the handle and I feed the fibre in and occasionally run the brush over the main drum. Using the brush means that you get more fibre on the drum and it encourages those fly away bits to go where they should. When I only have my own two hands then I use the brush less because I still have to feed the fibre in and turn the handle and I can’t do everything.

Those clever people at Ashford have eliminated the need for the third hand because if you buy a drum carder now they come with a packer brush fitted. For those of us with older models you can buy it as an accessory to retro fit. This comes in a small box that is identical to the one on top of the heap of stuff in my last post. It comes with a spanner to loosen the two bolts on the carder that are already there (the ones that alter the drum spacing), then the brackets slip under the bolts and the brush sits on the bracket. Even if you are hopeless with a spanner it still takes only a few minutes to fit.

Do you get the impression that I like it? The brush sits against the drum all of the time without me needing to hold it and the result is that my batts are bigger and they take less time to make. It is a big improvement over the wallpaper brush and I wish I’d had one sooner. What am I going to do with all those batts? Some I sell, some I swap and some I spin. The latter might come as a surprise because the blog certainly hasn’t been seeing much in the way of spinning recently but that doesn’t mean that it’s not been happening. I dye something or card it then spin it and never think of photographing it at any stage. I think the group shot is proof that I’m not quite over my orange period yet. I thought I’d moved on but after a brief diversion into blue and grey I slipped back to orange again. I think this also demonstrates that I will be needing to get a grip on the yarn stash during the course of the year.

It would appear that I have discovered the secrets of making finishing palatable. This is the totally finished Polar chullo, complete with the second ear flap, icord and tassels and with a total absence of ends. For me this is a major achievement and I promise to reveal my solution to tedious finishing after my thoughts on the hat. If I were knitting this again I’d start the ear flaps in the same way as a toe up sock and I’d knit them in the round with a simple pattern on the inside. This would mean that I could knot the ends together, tuck them inside the doubled flap and forget all about them. I suspect that I’d make them smaller too but I might change my views on that after I’ve worn it a while. Another time I’d take more care on the bears. The rows where I expected to have problems with the floats were the ones at the top of the bears but I took more care there and they are fine. The rows where the floats are puckering the work are on the legs of the bears. I should have had no problems at all there and I knew this so rattled through them without much thought. Maybe another time I’ll remember that lesson.

I will admit that I had anticipated that the icord would be dropping out of the icord mill. It’s just not suited to yarn this fine, the result looks as you would expect if you’d knitted sock yarn on a 5mm needle, loose floppy and unattractive so I had to knit it properly. The last time I made a chullo (predating the blog, the Cross Country chullo from Knitty) I followed the instructions and finished with applied icord. This time I knitted the icord and sewed it on because it made for more of a portable project (and also I’ve gone off applied icord recently). It did the trick and stopped the rolling on the ear flaps, there was still a bit of a roll on the front but that was persuaded to stop after a good steaming.

I’m sure you’re dying to know (humour me and pretend you are) – how did I make sewing in ends (a lot of ends) and knitting icord not be toe curlingly tedious?

Step one – arrange for any other knitting to be boring or even more tedious than sewing in ends. This is a sock that’s been in progress since September (boring) and the Christmas stocking has now reached the heel. This means working the pattern from the wrong side and beading from the wrong side and it is currently ticking all the boxes marked “tedious” and “no fun”. There’s a small element of excitement because the ball of beaded yarn is looking very small and there might be enough to finish the heel. Or not.

Step two – increase the need for the finished product by having two days with a forecast of snow. It’s forecast as “light snow” rather than “apocalyptic dump of epic proportions” for which I am heartily grateful. This was about the total of it this morning although the sky is turning that odd brown colour that means more is on the way. We have longer dog walks when it’s frosty because some of the more interesting paths are off limits until the mud freezes so when it’s cold we’re out for longer.

Step three – explore alternative finishing options. Would you have guessed from the second photo that this is what the backs of the flaps looked like? One has all the ends lovingly woven in one by one, the other has them braided along the edge on the wrong side. I didn’t much like doing the braiding either but it was certainly fast. It would have been easier if the item had been larger because I found that I needed something to tug against when I was making the braid. I don’t get much practise as I have short hair and a boy child. On the whole I think I prefer sewing the ends in but you have to try these things.

Step four – provide a distraction from the monotony. This should really be step one because it was the main reason for me finishing quickly but if I’d put the link in at step one you’d have wandered off and never returned. I’ve been listening to A History of The World in 100 Objects and it is an ideal accompaniment for tedious needlework. Each episode is under twenty minutes long, just long enough to sit down with a cup of tea for a nice relaxing session of sewing in ends. Hearing about King Den’s sandal label (carved on hippo ivory) got me through most of the icord at the top of the hat. If you don’t have a mound of boring knitting to trudge through you could download them to your phone or mp3 player and listen to them while walking the dog or sitting on the bus. You can listen to them wherever you are because although iplayer won’t let you watch BBC television from overseas you can still listen to BBC radio. This week is week four (the beginning of science and literature) but it’s not as if you’ve missed anything, you can still start at week one with the stone axe.

The next post will probably relate in some way to this little lot – the post man just called. The good side is that I don’t have to troop to the sorting office over and over again but I would have liked them to have been spaced out more because I don’t know what to open first. Anyone like to take a stab at guessing what’s in the big white thing or the small brown box? There’s no skill in guessing that the big black bag and the blue bag are fibre but the other two are more entertaining.

There’s a bit of work still to do on the hat: icord, tassels, a second ear flap, duplicate stitch noses and the elimination of that mane down the back (weaving ends in as I knit gives me a pain in the back of the hand with the tendon issues so I no longer weave as I go). I would no doubt be further along except the hat has spent two days in the naughty corner while I addressed the problem of the white yarn. I knew from the start that there probably wouldn’t be enough, it was the one that I made first and it was a bit thicker than it should have been with correspondingly less yardage. After the first round of polar bears the ball of white was looking very small. Before I could knit any further I had to decide whether to start another set of bears with the remaining yarn and then have to risk starting another ball of white part way through a bear or whether to leave the rest of the white for the ear flap and start the bears with a fresh ball. The deciding factor was that I didn’t have another ball of white so (after two days consideration) I went for broke and started the bears. It would have been quicker just to make the next ball of yarn, I could have had it spun and plied in an afternoon and dried overnight.

While the bears were in time out I found something else to occupy my knitting time. This is the start of the Victorian Christmas stocking, I’ve made it before and I always intended to make another. Dan gave me a box to “keep stuff in” and I went through all the various places that I keep beads and brought them all together. That was an interesting exercise, I have no idea what I ever intended some of them for but I certainly have enough to keep me going for a while. One set of mystery beads were prestrung so I’ve come close to casting on with them at some point although I can’t recall ever seeing them before. I could see they would work with some sock yarn that had come to the end of its time in the shop. (You might need to click for the big photo to see the beads) It’s a long winded way of tidying up the beads but it works. I’d like to say that I’m hiding another five inches of work off the bottom of the photo but that is all there is at the moment.

I’d already started knitting the second set of bears with the ever decreasing ball of yarn when I realised that the undyed sock yarn I was using on the stocking was about the same shade and thickness as the yarn that was living in the other bag with the hat. As it happened that small ball of yarn was enough for the bears and the three rounds with white in the next chart too. The remaining work on the hat is not exactly exciting but I still have some pressure to finish it seeing as it snowed again last night. When the choice is between knitting with beads or sewing in ends it’s hard to work up any enthusiasm for the needle with the eye so being cold keeps my mind on the need for the finished product. (Did that sound as if I was trying to talk myself into spending some time with the hat?)

I remembered the advice that they gave you in school, always read to the end of the paper before making a decision. Admittedly that applied to choosing exam questions rather than making a knit/rip decision but looking ahead was still the right thing to do. The combination of colours that failed in the ear flap was the mid and dark grey and there was very little of that combination in the next chart. The next chart related to a 192  stitch round rather than a piddling little 41 stitch ear flap so the motifs were chunkier and would likely stand out better. After due consideration and a cup of tea I came to the decision that the ear flap was going to be the worst bit and everything would then get better. It helped that the bit I’d done felt soft and warm and there’s been a cold wind these last few days, a warm hat is welcome even when there’s not enough contrast in the greys.

Don’t you love it when you’re proved right? I like it now, I’ll even forgive it for the white being not exactly the same grist as the other yarns. I bought the pattern because of the bears although I hadn’t realised when I did that the bears are walking, in the first repeat there are two different bear patterns.  When I bought it I also managed to also overlook that my favourite stranded work features small repeating patterns so that I don’t have to read a chart or catch floats. I refuse to carry a colour all the way around just to knit the occasional bear’s nose, that’s going in later in duplicate stitch. (For anyone who thinks that this looks really even and that I must be a fantastically awesome knitter I should say that I am an average knitter in possession of a steam iron. This is sitting on the end of my ironing board having had a quick steam so that I can check that my tension in the round resembles my tension on the flat ear flap)

The pattern calls for five 25g balls of Shetland Spindrift which would come to £12.50 plus shipping. It’s not that I mind paying that much for a hat but spinners have other alternatives. World of Wool sell a pack of four different colours of shetland roving for £7 plus shipping which becomes even cheaper when you factor in that you get 400g of fibre for that £7. Spinning doesn’t take that much time so the choice between 400g for £7 and 125g for £12.50 wa’t exactly taxing. I made the white yarn first, it was a little too soft and a little too thick so that skein was a different beast to the others. I’m calling that one the sample but using it anyway. The light grey and darker grey were a mixture of the original grey (the middle skein) with white and black, hopefully they are repeatable colours because I weighed everything and wrote it down rather than relying on memory. I made 30g of each colour, I suspect that I’ll run out of the white because there was markedly less yardage in that ball but what I have will see me through the next chart.

At the moment it’s a hat for a person with only one ear, I really disliked knitting the earflap and couldn’t face a second one straight away. My excuse is that until I’d started into the hat I didn’t know whether I’d be knitting or ripping and there was no point in making two earflap swatches. The cast on row for the hat has some waste yarn where the second flap should be, that one will be knitted downwards rather than upwards. No-one will ever know unless I tell them. At the moment my main concern is that the icord edging isn’t going to control that wayward rolling edge, it’s been a pain because it made the first inch or so really difficult to knit – you can’t see the way that the pattern is developing because you can’t see the previous rows.

I caught the wonder dog in the act. He ran into that corner after his ball and then he found something small, wooden and tasty to play with.  It was so attractive that he went back to  it after he’d been a Good Dog and done DropIt and then he tried to run off with it so he could pretend that he couldn’t hear me say DropIt again.  That was the point where he found that the tasty wooden tension knob was fastened to a piece of string that was fastened to a lazy kate that was just too wide to go down the gap between the wheel and the toy box.

Usually when I say that something “just needs blocking”, what I really mean is “all the interesting knitting is done, it needs blocking, sewing up and the boring bits knitting on it and so I’ve buried it behind the settee in a carrier bag until I feel guilty enough to get on with it”. To avoid the carrier bag mummification phase I blocked the mittens straight away before I lost interest in them, they needed it to eliminate the line on the palm where the needle join was. You can see it on the right hand mitten, there wasn’t much of a line on the left mitten because that was the second one that I made. I can learn quickly when I put my mind to it.

These are my second pair of Anemoi mittens, made because my aunt lost one of the original pair that I made. My notes were patchy on the first pair, I know that the one I started with 2.5mm needles was too small but I don’t know whether I ended up on 2.75mm or 3mm. With these I got 9 stitches per inch with 2.75mm needles, it’s a lovely fabric but they wouldn’t have wanted to be any smaller. They fit, they’d still fit with an extra four stitches but they’d be too small with four stitches less. I didn’t do the tubular cast on, I couldn’t get the mitten on when I tried that last time around so this time I didn’t even try.

This has been more or less finished since Christmas Eve, that was when I stuffed it behind the settee to see whether it would block itself and sew itself together. I’ve made this pattern before in grey, this is the same yarn dyed brown so it was a no brainer to knit it again, same yarn, same needles. This time I eliminated the side seam because we all know how much I love sewing up and I changed the shaping on the sleeves to two decreases on alternate rows rather than one decrease every row. I dug it out last week, blocked it and delegated sewing up to my mother. It turns out that I’d knitted one of the button bands before succumbing to terminal boredom so there was less boring knitting to do than I’d expected. I didn’t knit buttonholes in the bands, when I knitted this pattern before my mother created two extra buttonholes with a needle and thread. As I don’t know what buttons she’s got stashed for this I decided that she could add buttonholes wherever she wanted them. The pattern calls for two rows of crochet around the neck and I wasn’t sold on the result the last time I did it. This time I picked up stitches around the neck and cast them off on the next row. It’s finished the edge without adding any width and there isn’t the bulk of a facing to deal with. It had the added benefit that I didn’t have to dredge through the bottom of the needle bag looking for a crochet hook.

When I block things while they are still on the needles it’s usually a sign that there’s something wrong. Blocking is the last chance for it to prove itself to be worthy of my knitting time. I’m not fully committed to this, partly because it involves purling with two colours, partly because there are more ends than I care to deal with but I could forgive it for both of those sins if it looked good. There’s not enough contrast,  the two dark greys vanish into each other and the brown could have been more black. The fabric feels lovely, the tension is right but the end result is less than stellar. I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth carrying on into the hat or whether I should call this earflap a swatch and be done with it. I’m still undecided, this might need a spell of confinement down the back of the settee while I make my mind up.

I’ve had my Ashford drum carder since May 2007. Recently it’s been not behaving as it should, sometimes the licker in (front drum) doesn’t turn because the drive band scoots along without turning the wheel on the side that turns the drum. My diagnosis was that the drive band had stretched which didn’t surprise me because I don’t take it off when I put the carder away. I know that I should but because I struggle to get the thing back on again I decided long ago that I’d leave it on all the time and just replace it when the time came. When I was using it last week I could hear that the teeth on the two drums were just catching at one point so it was time for some adjustment.

The Ashford web site has copies of the assembly instructions for all of their products which is useful for those of us that don’t keep hold of pieces of paper for more than two minutes together. While I was fiddling with the licker in to get it aligned properly, it struck me that maybe the reason the drive band wasn’t turning the front drum was that the front drum was not exactly spinning freely, probably as a result of the fluff I could see jammed around the axle. It was clear that what was needed here was a proper clean, the sort that starts with a screwdriver and moves on to partial disassembly. Happily the last part of the instructions show you how to do it and I can report that it is quite straightforward, especially when you get someone else to do it for you (I knit his socks, it’s a two way thing).

The part that I could never have managed myself was getting the handle off, I couldn’t remember how it went on and the instructions didn’t spell out that it was screwed on. Once we’d managed to get that off everything else was straightforward, it’s not the sort of disassembly where small parts fly off around the room. After taking out all five screws the side of the carder that has the handle on comes off and then you can prise off both drums and get to any fibre that’s accumulated there. This pile was off one side of the axle of the front drum, the other side was not quite as fluffy but still nothing to be proud of. Even with long tweezers it is really difficult to remove stray fibres that get wrapped around the axle, it’s much easier to do it when the drum is out of the way.

The carder instructions also show you where you should be oiling it. It’s clearly been a while since I oiled mine, the black line on the left is where the oil hole is jam packed with the lint slug on the right. I’m planning on making 2010 the year of frequent oiling, I suspect that if  I oil it twice it will be more frequent than it has been getting. In future we’ll be taking this apart more often than every two and a half years. Now that I’ve seen it done I’d have no fears about doing it myself, I was worried that I’d get the drums on back to front (they will only go on one way) and that when it came apart there would be a shower of washers that I’d never manage to get back. When it comes apart nothing moves, the drums hang there and have to be prised off with the handle.

When we got it back together (with no spare parts left over) it was better but the licker in still wasn’t turning properly. Then the split in the drive band became so big that the band broke, once it was rejoined with a sliver taken out the whole thing was perfect. My original diagnosis may have been right after all but there’s no disputing that it did need a proper clean.

I’ve learned a few things over the last two weeks. I found that I have anti lock brakes on my car, I’ve had the car for nine years without discovering this but it was a pleasant surprise to find them when I needed to brake to avoid an accident going downhill in the snow. I found that wearing socks over your boots is just as good for avoiding slips on ice and snow as it was forty years ago (although still not good enough to cope with the freezing rain that coated the floor as well as the side of the car). I now know that the thermometer on my car goes down at least as far as minus six and that it takes an hour to walk to school and back in four inches of snow. When shovelling snow my thoughts were of ear flaps and stranded knitting rather than of beaded straps and bag construction because this last two weeks has really brought home to me that wool is what you want to be wearing when it’s cold outside.

The ice has nearly all gone now thanks to raised temperatures and heavy rain but I’m still holding onto that thought that warmth is good. In general I don’t knit the same pattern twice although exceptions can be made for things that are intriguingly constructed such as the BSJ There are so many really good mitten patterns out there that I see no reason to repeat myself but as this is a replacement ?I thought that it should be the same pattern as the original. I finished the first pair of Anemoi mittens in March 2007 and they found their way into my aunt’s Christmas stocking later that year. She loved them, they were the warmest mittens she’d ever had and she wore them all of that winter.She was wearing them all of this winter too, right up to the moment when she lost one of them on a shopping trip before Christmas. She retraced her steps in an effort to find the missing mitt but it was gone for good.

The original yarn went into a woven scarf so I didn’t try to match the colour, grey goes with everything after all. I bought this yarn once upon a time for making a pair of stranded gloves. I messed the pattern up in the same place that I’d messed it up the first time I’d started knitting it, ripped the lot and stuck the yarn back in the drawer. Both the dark and the light are Araucania Ranco Multy and I thought that they had enough contrast to carry the pattern. You can see in the cuff that the light yarn has one length of darker grey, where this runs against a lighter grey in the darker yarn then the pattern vanishes. It’s infrequent enough that I can live with it, the end result will be as warm as the original and my aunt will be pleased to have a new pair of mittens.

This is my next project, the cold snap has reawakened my love of knitting to the extent that I’m queuing up warm woolly accessories. I’m pleased with this one so far, although having said that, until I cast on there’s not that much that can go wrong.