Wool For Brains

It’s a quick post today as I am knee deep in fibre but I thought I should take the time to establish that I do still knit.

When I looked for the remainder of the beads for the blue beaded socks I remembered that they were still strung on the ripped project I’d originally bought them for. Once I’d recovered the beads I decided that the yarn was too good to go back in the drawer, it needed to be knitted. On its last outing it was trying to be a Swallowtail shawl and I didn’t get very far before deciding that it was not to be. This time I think that it has a future as a finished object.

The yarn is merino, angora and silk, I have two skeins that weigh 96g and total 850 yards. I wandered about looking for a pattern over a couple of days and then had the stunning idea of looking in my Ravelry queue for one. It should have occurred to me sooner but sadly it didn’t. This is Aquila, it’s a free pattern and you get a lot of shawl for the yardage as it’s mostly all holes. Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s in Finnish, I don’t speak it either but I can read the charts at the bottom of the page well enough. I did originally consider knitting it as big as I could for the yardage but as it’s getting towards the end of term and Dan’s teacher is tiny I thought that I could find a home for a smaller lace piece. My inner knitter thinks that I’ve overdone the smallness, Miss D is petite but not miniscule and it’s not looking big enough. Hopefully blocking will save the day again.

It is growing slowly because I’m only knitting a few rows in the evenings. Any free time in the day is being spent rationalising the fibre stash. I had a moment of revelation over the weekend, I previously had thought that it was too big but now I think that it just contains a few big bags of fluff that really shouldn’t be there. I am a woman on a mission, I’m washing, carding and spinning my way to a new and improved stash, one that has a purpose and a plan but doesn’t have those big bags of unloved fibre. I’ll be back when I’ve got there (or more likely when I’ve had enough), in the meantime I’ll leave you with the verdict on the denim bag fabric.

I gave it a severe wash as the likely recipient is going to get the most out of a washable bag. I was expecting major shrinkeage and some fraying, what I got was some shrinkeage and major fraying. I now prefer the right side of the denim (right side of the photo) as it now looks interestingly textured as opposed to the reverse side which is too shaggy for words. I like it more than I did before it went in the washer but it was still a bit of a shock when I first saw it.

I’ll be back next week, probably with a mountain of newly spun yarn and my thoughts on why the right sort of stash is a very good thing. There may also be a few Woolfest consolation purchases which are totally sensible in the context of the new and improved stash although on first sight you might well assume it’s down to alien abduction.

Got to go - alpaca doesn’t wash itself you know.

I thought my Trindle was tiny until I unpacked one that was even smaller. This one will go in the bag that I made which is a good thing because I didn’t have enough fabric to make the second bag any deeper. I bought this one to replace the first one which was missing believed stuck on a boat. The reality was that it was stuck in customs so now I have two. This is smaller however you want to measure it, it weighs less, has a shorter shaft, smaller hook and dinky little flat sandstone weights. I’m justifying having two on the grounds that I’m not going to Woolfest this weekend so one is a birthday present and the other a consolation prize. In case you were wondering - it is easier to wind on with flat weights rather than round ones. (I can spin cashmere on this, I’m pleased beyond reason about that. I wonder if I can spin yak too?)

The first bag was good, the second one is better. I’m a nitpicking perfectionist and I can’t find anything wrong with it. I’ll admit that it would have been nice if the handles had been a bit longer but this is as long a braid as I can make on my inkle loom so that’s not going to happen. (Yes, I could make two braids the same but we all know just how likely that is) Making the second bag was a piece of cake, I chose a more suitable interfacing and I’d learned that it is far easier to put the handles on before you sew the side seams. This one has some stiffener in the base, longer handles and a different method of sewing the side seams. I’m happy with this one so bag three will probably look very similar to this apart from the colours in the straps and the addition of internal pockets. The fabric underneath the bags (and in the first photo) is intended to be bags 5,6 and 7 after it has been washed.

I don’t think I ever showed what these bags started out as. I had a set of pink batts that didn’t sell and some merino and silk that had the same pink in it as well as blue and black. I split each fibre into three and plied it against itself and the other fibre. My idea was that there would be a dark, a medium and a light yarn but there wasn’t really enough contrast for that to show. The supposedly light fibre had some dark stretches in it and the dark fibre had some runs of light.

These two really are the same. If anyone would like to comment as to which side should be the right side on this then I’m listening. This is probably going to be bag four (possibly 4a and 4b depending how much it shrinks in the wash) and I wove it with the dark side of the strips up. Now I’ve seen the other side I think that I like that better because there’s more contrast. On the other hand that might be too striped. (Ignore the edges, they will be neatened up after the wash and shrink phase)

Next time - knitting, unless of course I come to a quick decision on blue bags or wander off with my precious bag of cashmere. Have a good Woolfest if you’re going, spend lots to help the economy along and make up for me not being there.

I had originally thought of calling this post “Goldilocks and the three bags” but I am currently two bags short of that title. I suspect that when the story comes to fruition this will be the bag that was too stiff. I’m hoping to have learned enough from this one to divert from the fairytale rule of three and have two bags that are just right but we will see. It ended the size I wanted, just right for a sock knitting bag and although the handles are the length I wanted them to be they are not long enough. The interfacing that I used was very stiff and although it’s given it a good shape I think I’d like it better if it were not quite so unyielding.

The reason the other two bags aren’t finished is that I was diverted into spinning. I might make the next bag a bit taller to accommodate my new spindle because it’s a tiny bit too long for the bag. I’d forgotten how much fun it was to spin on a spindle until I was demonstrating on one recently. What I needed was a really light one for making skinny yarn and that was what I got for my birthday. This is a Trindle made with glass beads and it weighs 14g. I love it, I can’t really compare it to anything else I have because I don’t have anything that light, this is half the weight of my lightest spindle. I struggled at first with winding the single on because it’s hard to build it up against a whorl that isn’t there and the beads (being round) make it tricky to get the single wound right up there at the top. I think I’d fare better with one with flat beads rather than round ones (yes, just like the one the Yarn Harlot got for her birthday) and when the other one that I ordered eventually clears Customs I’ll be able to compare the two. How much do I like it - so much that I can barely move my arm today from all the spinning that I did yesterday.

This is the other reason that the bags aren’t finished. When I counted the beads at the start I didn’t have enough (432 for the pair) because I was using leftovers from another project. It eventually occurred to me that I couldn’t remember seeing a knitted item with beads of this colour and when I thought some more I remembered what it was that I’d started knitting with them. It was a beaded Swallowtail shawl that I started last June, the reason that I couldn’t remember what the beads looked like on the finished item was that there never was a finished item, I ripped it at an early stage. I searched out the yarn and there were the rest of the beads all nicely strung on the yarn. The photos show them as being a deep blue, in life they are a mix of three shades of blue, all iridescent. Now I have some beads that are real left overs.

One of the things my mother sometimes says is “You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince”. I’ve found that it applies as well to knitting as to fairy tales, sometimes your project is never going to have a happy ending and needs to go back to the frog pond (rippit, rippit). This is the second version of this sock, the first had the beaded cuff from the current issue of Knitty. I adjusted it to fit around a 64 stitch sock and set off merrily. The beads vanished into the garter stitch and it was difficult to see that they formed any sort of a pattern, they needed to be bigger or to have more contrast. Version two was a simple pattern that I made up as I knitted it, the beads are the same ones I used in the first attempt (if I’ve strung them on the yarn then I’m going to use them) but this time it works. It’s surprising the difference the background makes, the beads that were invisible in the dips in garter stitch show up just fine against stockinette. For a change I didn’t lose the ball band so I can say that this is Opal Cotton. It’s a bit splitty but should make for cooler summer socks.

With the weaving my prediction in the last post was just plain wrong. It turned out that the too-subtle, didn’t-stripe, waste-of-effort weaving was a prince in disguise. I love it, it’s possibly my favorite bit of weaving so far. This is why I chopped the ends off very short so that they wouldn’t work as a fringe, there’s no backtracking now and converting this to a scarf. I intended this for bags and bags it will be. You can see that the stripes run dark-medium-light to the centre and then reverse out. That’s what I’d planned to happen but even though I got what I wanted it doesn’t look at all as I’d expected. I now have to stop procrastinating and reach for the scissors.

How do you know whether you are looking at a frog or a prince? In the story you have to kiss the frog to find out, only by making the attempt do you find the answer. Thankfully messing about with wool is a lot less risky than princessing. I’m now thinking that there this next project might come out right after all, it looks very similar to the last one as yarn so there’s a chance that it will look similar when woven. There is only one way to find out of course and that’s to warp it and see.

The pair on the left are mine, Trekking something or other, 68 stitches and a toe that started K8, K2tog around then knit eight rows plain. As I am now in sandals it may be October before I determine whether these are the socks with the toe of my dreams. I have 30g of yarn left over that might have found itself woven before I’ve worn these. The socks on the right are far more interesting. These are a 64 stitch pair for my mother and are the ones from Opal left overs that started as a tube. It’s taken me over four days to get around to sewing in the ends because there were a lot of them and I hate sewing in ends.

It’s a bit more obvious why there were so many ends if you look at the first pair of Opal socks, the ones knitted straight from the ball. This is the one on the left here, you can see that it has some dark grey stripes but not so many as the one on the right. The dpns show what was knitted as the tube, this was the yarn in the ball after I finished the last sock on the left. Everything above the top needle and below the bottom needle is pieced together from the small ball that was left after knitting the tube, the larger ball that I’d wound off to get the first pair to match and a contrast yarn. Those sections of sock are not self striping, there were two ends to every stripe. It was a lot of messing but I think it was worth it to end up with a pair that don’t have a great big slab of grey Araucania Ranco at cuff and toe.

The verdict - would I make another pair of socks starting with a tube? Yes, I would. There would have to be a good reason but for me making best use of the yarn you have is reason enough. It would mean that if there was ever a time when you just wanted to knit without any thought you could just go around and around mindlessly until you’d had enough. When you have time for thought you could then come back and slice the tube into multiple socks.

I am entering this in the category of “so subtle I needn’t have bothered”. The general idea was that the colours ran dark-light-dark across the fabric and it does but it could have stood more contrast than it has. This will be back once it’s finished, I think I’m about half way through the weaving at the moment. It’s looking good but not as good as I hoped it would. I’d like to be able to say that the next one will be better but I’m already spinning the fibre for that and I suspect that there will be no more contrast in that. Having done two variants that failed to live up to expectations I doubt that I’ll have much enthusiasm for a third attempt.

I was right - we didn’t need all those towels, sheets and blankets. Just because I had to empty out everything from the airing cupboard to make way for the new hot water tank didn’t mean that I had to put it all back. There’s a whole shelf free in there now. The blanket box yielded up its treasures too, he kept the 1995 T shirt, I kept the one from 1985 but just about everything else we decided we could live without. It was a box full of memories and I made myself thoroughly miserable going through it.

This was also in the blanket box, it is practically unworn as it only ever got an outing in the week before Christmas. This is the Christmas Cracker sweater from “Creative Knitting” by Kaori O’Connor, I made this both as a sweater and as a vest, I was certain that I made the sweater as a present and kept the vest but that’s clearly not the case. I know now that there are alternatives to knitting in four pieces and sewing up but I didn’t know that then. Considering how much I whine now if I have to follow a colourwork pattern on the private side I find it funny that I didn’t have a problem way back then. I made this sometime after 1991, I don’t have enough memories of knitting it to date it but I know that we were in this house when I knitted it. My floats are better now but these days I’d consider this to be a big project, back then it was just a jumper.

I had it smoothed out on the bed contemplating the ease with which I could turn it into four Christmas stockings when it was born off by the resident child who would not hear of me cutting it up. In a couple of years he will have grown out of it and then it will be mine (insert evil laughter here) and I’ll sew the fronts and backs into tubes, insert a heel and knit on a toe.

Hopefully next time there will be two pairs of finished socks, in the meantime here’s another finished item that I managed to overlook last week. From the pilling you can see that he’s been in action for a week or two. This is Kirby from Kirby Mouse Attack, Smash Bros Brawl and a few other Nintendo games. If I’d looked on Ravelry before I’d finished him then I might have got the arms in the right place but the idea never occurred to me. Kirby is made from mystery handspun, it’s clearly mine but I have no recollection of making it. I suspect that it might be the very cheap merino batts that I bought that never saw the blog (that’s a story for another day). We dyed it a suitable shade of pink, found another skein that was already the right pink for the feet and there he was done. My mother turned the card woven braid into a bandana so there was a use for it after all.

Should you ever be required to knit round things that need stuffing I can recommend taking the time to plan an exit strategy. When I knitted the Taffly I stuffed it as I went along and that made it heavy and unmanageable near the end. With this I used the same technique as for putting a thumb in a mitten, when I was done I unpicked the waste yarn, stuffed it and then grafted it closed again. The thing we struggled with was attaching the bandana but if you knit at a big enough gauge then accessories can be made to stop on by the use of small buttons, you just fasten them into the fabric wherever you fancy. This could be handy for attaching decorations to hats or scarves for those of you that do sensible knitting. Alternatively you could have fun making Mr Potatohead.

This is the latest step in my ongoing attempt to use it up and move it out. The starting point was a bad purchase that’s been lingering in the yarn drawer. What was I thinking when I bought aran weight silk? It’s a single, would probably pill like stink and is of limited use to me. That’s no doubt why I have in in three different colours. I pretended that it was a thin roving, spun it and navajo plied it into a weight that was a good deal more useful. I broke out the inkle loom and changed it again into a braid. I did originally think that it would become a strap for a bag but I’m having second thoughts and seeing it now as the bag itself. It leads to the question of what I’d then make the strap for this from but I’ll worry about that another time.

As the inkle loom was out I thought I’d see what I could do with tablet weaving (or card weaving depending on where you live). I love the results but I’m not sold on the process and I cut the warp off rather than finish it. I found it difficult to turn the cards, maybe the holes in my home made set were too small, maybe it was the yarn, maybe you just get used to it. Maybe another time.

The tubular knitting from last time is now obviously a pair of socks. I snipped a thread at the centre and unpicked it until the knitting fell into two parts. Then I snipped a thread at the centre of the smaller tubes, unpicked it until I had half the stitches released and then I knitted a short row heel, grafting it to the stitches on the other side when I’d done. That’s most of the messing done with now, it’s down to the toes, up to the cuffs and then done. My verdict so far is that I wouldn’t rule out doing this again but I’d have to have a pretty good reason for creating all those ends.

I did look for some darker bfl roving to match the lot that I’d already dyed and I came up empty handed. This is a pretty close match, the fibre on the left was a humbug mix and the colours are about right but it’s overall too dark. If my next attempt doesn’t come up any better then this will do.

There may be a short blog break, we’re having a new boiler next week which will mean me clearing out the airing cupboard (for the new hot water tank) and moving furniture around upstairs (for access to the radiators which are having thermostatic valves fitted). It’s a bigger job than you might think, ideally I’d just move the furniture, vacuum a bit and call it done. Instead I’m asking myself questions along the lines of “exactly what is in that blanket box anyway?” and “do we really need this many towels?”. I’m hoping that when I’ve done I will have magically created space into which wool can be packed so it won’t be a total waste of time.

When I forecasted that there would be knitting in the next post I expected that it would be red lace, the start of a Maplewing shawl in Angel Hair (baby alpaca, silk, cashmere). That idea went out of the window because there was something not entirely right about the combination of yarn and pattern. Just about all of the shawls I’ve made start off with a few stitches and increase to the border. That means that you can adopt the shawl-as-swatch method and just set off. If it doesn’t work out then there’s not much to rip. This pattern starts with the full number of stitches and then decreases. If you’re starting with a 600 stitch cast on then you better be certain about the yarn and the sizing because there’s less room for fudging. I did not feel the burning passion for it that I should, my inner knitter wouldn’t specify why but poking it a bit and sniffing is never a good sign. If anyone reading this wants to rehome 1100 yards/100g of red laceweight alpaca silk and cashmere for the yarn cost (£11) do drop me a line. I have two.

One of the reasons that the yarn didn’t make the cut was that I’ve keep looking at this little skeinlet. It’s overspun and a bit hard (it’s not often that you get to hear that here) but that’s what samples are there for. If I had more of the fibre then this would have been the front runner for the shawl. As it is I only have 100g and that’s going to give me 800-900 yards which is not enough. If the shawl was an increasing triangle then I’d go for it and just make it a bit smaller but that’s not an option with this pattern. What I have to do is dye more fibre the same and the challenge there is that I can’t get any more of the same colour base fibre. It was a very dark oatmeal, much darker than the normal oatmeal and as I’ve been sat on it forever (it’s the output from another stash dive) there’s little chance of replacing it. It would have been sensible to have checked this before I started and I did, I pulled the bag of wool out, looked at it and remembered that there was “a lot” of it. I dyed all of it, even though there was “a lot” and it wasn’t until some time later that I checked the weight and found that there was all of 100g. Ho hum.

Knitting then. In the absence of the planned big lace project it will have to be socks. Daniel’s socks have been released into the wild and are now missing, presumed taken off and dropped. No doubt they will turn up in time. There was a biggish ball of yarn left over from those so I set off with a provisional cast on to see how far it would go. I’ve never made a pair of socks like this, it’s a method suggested in the Twisted Sisters sock workbook but it’s always struck me as too much messing about. You knit a tube, snip it into two and add heels, toes and cuffs as appropriate. There were four repeats left in the ball so I’ll add the heel one repeat in, separate the first sock after the second repeat and add the toe, undo the cast on and knit up for the cuff. The main reason that I did it this way is that I start off knowing the patterned length and can then balance the contrast colour at the cuff and toe. The other reason for making it like this is that I’ve never done it before and it might turn out to be fun. I have doubts about the level of fun involved in snipping and picking up stitches but we’ll see.

I’m still pulling things out of the back of the yarn drawer, this is a ball of Trekking that I bought for a specific project in February 2007. That was a ripper and the yarn has sat in the drawer ever since. Its time has now come as part of the use it up and move it out regime. It’s interesting that back then I wasn’t willing to knit it for me because it wouldn’t make a matching pair. I’m obviously more relaxed about that these days because these are for me..

It was one of the better bank holiday weekends, not only was it not raining it went so far as to be actually sunny. My usual rule is to stay home on bank holidays so as to avoid being kicked to death/unable to park/in a queue for everything but there had to be an exception made for this weekend. It was the weekend of the Canal Festival at Kiveton (the 2009 Inland Waterways Association Campaign Rally if you want to be picky) and as the husband is one of the Chesterfield Canal Trust trip boat skippers there was always destined to be a day out regardless of the weather.

On the Sunday Daniel helped serve drinks on the boat, found a nice lady who showed him how to paint the roses that decorate traditional canal ware and had a go at a spot of stone carving with the masons from Hardwick Hall. The mason would much rather he had gone for a design with straight lines but he was adamant he was doing his initials and would not be moved.

I did my bit on Monday by filling a corner next to the beer tent and demonstrating spinning. I was surprised to find that I could cover a table in handspun things just by walking around the house. As well as talking about rooing in primitive sheep over the day I wandered though what the Romans did for us, how to dye roving, the opening hours at Winghams, making a yarn fit for its purpose, the ethics of spinning possum, how to scour fleece, why alpacas don’t like the rain and finding uses for those itchy shetland jumpers we wore as children. If I had to summerize all that yakking it boiled down to “it’s not just wool”. My favorite moment of the day was provided by a very small boy who was feeling the different wools. This one is from a goat (cashmere darlink but let’s not confuse him yet), this one is from a sheep, and this one is really really soft, what might this be from? He was a bright lad, he’d spotted the farming link and confidently proclaimed it to be from a pig. I was hoping for rabbit but pig was more memorable.

This is my festival wool, I didn’t get a lot spun at the festival itself, maybe half a bobbin, because I spent too much time on my feet talking and spindling. I suppose I should have been industriously hand carding fleece and then showing the lichens that I’d painstakingly gathered and the final naturally dyed yarn but that isn’t me at all. Instead I was spinning the little known purple sheep. This was a shop reject because the magenta didn’t exhaust and by the time I’d finished rinsing it the fibre wasn’t as open as I would have liked. It turns out that I am far too picky, it’s spinning up beautifully.

Next time - knitting because I have some at last.

You might be assuming that I’ve been quiet this week because I have nothing to show but that’s not the case at all. I have plenty of content, it’s computer time that I’ve been short on.

These will be Dan’s new socks, using up a ball of Opal that I’ve considered to be the most boring yarn in the drawer. That’s why I’ve kept passing it over, it’s just Opal, and I can always find something more interesting to knit. As I’ve been sorting through the stash I’ve picked out the oldest balls so that they can to be the first on the needles or the loom. This particular ball turned out to be more fun that I expected, it’s been a while since I knitted with self patterning yarn and it made a pleasant change. There have been no knots so far, if I come across one between now and the toe then I might love it less.

There are no prizes for guessing that this is yet another scarf, the main feature about this one is that it has a hemstitched edge and a twisted fringe rather than knots. I also ignored the instructions that came with the loom and lashed on the warp rather than tying it to the front bar. This is so much faster and reduces loom waste to next to nothing so this is the way to go in future. This is a mixture of handspun silk and handspun yak/silk. It failed to meet expectations (not enough contrast in the colours and I think I prefer wool) so this is all the blog will be seeing of it.

This is the swatch from the yarn from the great big batt I showed last time. It knits nicely to 4 stitches to the inch and I have 990 yards of it. I am ignoring the little voice that is trying to tell me that it wants to be the start of an adult surprise jacket, if there ever was a time to have a big heap of wool on your lap (and I’m not certain that there is ever a right time for that) then it’s not at the start of the summer. At the moment I’m still pondering what it wants to be but it’s very nice to knit with and I’m pleased with how it’s come out.

This is where my time has gone over the last two weeks, I’ve been helping paint a wall, or two walls to be precise. My son’s school has been working over the last few months with a community artist who we shall call Sue seeing as that is her name. She’s taken each class to the country park that runs near the back of the school and they’ve done collages, prints and drawings of the landscape around them. This has all come together in a two wall landscape mural that brings together elements from the children’s artwork. The weather recently has been poor, it’s rained just about every day and this is the last week of school so the paint needed to go on quickly. Some of the parents helped, we painted the walls white, Sue sketched the outline on the wall and then we helped fill in the blocks of colour.

My main contribution to this (other than my amazing wall whitening skills) was painting the river. I did have a bit part on duck’s eyes but as I did most of that after I’d taken the photo you’ll just have to take my word for that. (Click for bigger pictures) When I took these photos the mural was about three hours away from being finished, the ducks were still mostly featureless and there was a lot of outlining to do. In time there will be a proper photo with massed children but of course you’ll not be seeing that here.

I think I put about eight hours into this, it was totally worth it for the moment when a boy rounded the corner and exclaimed “That’s my tree! Wicked”. I’m told there are half a dozen owners of the yellow tree but he thought that it was his and that’s what mattered.