Wool For Brains

Let me first thank everyone for their comments. There was a time when I would have responded to every one but of late I’ve been a bit of a slacker and instead of replying straight away I wait until I have a bit more time. It’s a recipe for failure because I should know by now that I never do have more time, if I do I’m off researching doubleweave or norwegian purling. Thank you all for taking the time from your day to comment, I would promise to buck my ideas up but we both know that I am a lost cause and that’s unlikely to happen.

I did have today’s post written, it was a compare and contrast of two scarves except the comparison is rather straightforward at the moment. Once has been through the wash and is 8″ wide, the other hasn’t and is 13″ wide. I didn’t find the time to full the second one so that is a post for another day. Fortunately I have enough stray knitting for a substitute post.

My hat was indeed The One, or at least The One That Is Good Enough For The Time Being. It’s the one I reach for as I walk out of the door, it’s getting warm enough not to need a hat but I need something to keep my hair in order so I’ll be wearing wool until I get a haircut. The boy doesn’t want my hat now (and by the way full marks to all those who recognised “cheesehead” as his way of getting me to give it over to him). He picked a hat from the book and would not be swayed from his choice. I think the cone shape is not exactly flattering and you probably know my thoughts on bobbles. I suspected that what I was knitting would become a tea cosy but I was wrong. It is apparently a cool hat, his friends want one in different colours and he loves it. I liked the yarn (I spun it) but that was about all. It’s cone #2 from “45 Fine and Fanciful hats to knit” except that my stitches per inch went the other way this time. The hat should have four panels, mine has three that are slightly larger. One day I’ll knit one of the hats in the right sized yarn and things will be so much easier.

I haven’t got round to ripping and reknitting the heel on these (a time management issue again). I’ve been on a run of flap and gusset heels and I fancied a change. It’s been a while since I knitted a short row heel and I was sat in front of the tv when I realised that I wasn’t sure how many stitches to work to in the middle. The sensible thing would have been to look it up but I decided that I should be able to remember it, after all I’ve knitted it often enough. Seven seemed like a good number at the time so I went with that. Seven is a good number for many things, days of the week, prime numbers under ten, but it’s no good in this situation. When I tried the sock on to check for the start of the toe decreases I found that I’d made a pointy heel. I’m going to snip a stitch above the pointy section, rip it back to 12 stitches unworked in the centre and graft it back together. You can see that it’s not a lot of knitting to come out but if there’s one place that you need something to fit it’s a sock heel.

This was the start of a pair of Kissing Koi mittens, 9 stitches per inch on 2.75mm needles. That was yesterday, today it’s slightly smaller, 10 spi on 2.5mm needles. I refuse to sub the needles again, if I need to go to 2mm to get them to fit I’ll take a pencil to the pattern and lose a few stitches from the width. I should of course have measured my hand before deciding I was a “large”, one designer’s definition can be very much different to that of another. I know this but instead of investing a few minutes in finding a tape measure I spent an evening knitting something in the wrong size.

I thought the common thread was substitution but on reflection I can see that there’s another theme here. Look at all the time I would have saved if I’d spent a couple of minutes at the start by doing things right and finding a tape measure or checking my dodgy memory of heel construction against reality. It’s a good thing I like knitting because poor planning means that I get to do so much more of it on the same project. If I can’t be a good example then at least I can be a terrible warning.

PS The wool is now in the washer – seize the moment and all that. Maybe I have learned something after all.

Long time readers will be aware of my ongoing search for a hat that keeps my ears warm in the winter and doesn’t make me look like “a torpedo head” or “a numpty”. I keep on knitting them, every time I cast on I’m convinced that this one will be the perfect hat. What I’ve used for dog walking all winter is the one in this photo, the one that Daniel knitted. It’s a perfectly good hat but it’s a bit bright and when it’s really cold the wind blows straight through it. I’m frequently reminded that it’s not mine and I’m only borrowing it and when he can’t find his he claims what I see as mine.

This one is really mine, it’s warm and it fits. It bears no relation to the hat that I spotted in the Olympic crowd but that doesn’t matter. It’s based on pentagon number five from “45 Fine and Fanciful Hats to Knit” (Anna Zilboorg) except that it veered away from the pattern fairly rapidly. I used the Cascade 220 that was left over from knitting the penguin hot water bottle cover together with some handspun yarn from a set of mini batts that I got from a Ravelry swap. They were polwarth, merino, alpaca, bamboo and twinkle, I added some jade falkland to make them go further and carded the lot together. I knew that my yarn wasn’t going to knit at 5 stitches per inch so I started at the top of the hat rather than the bottom. I knew that I would have worked out what my tension was by the time I reached the part of the hat that needed to fit. It turned out to be six stitches per inch so I added another few sets of increases before I worked the band and started decreasing back to something the size of my head.

It’s very warm, the wind doesn’t blow through it and I don’t feel as if I’m wearing hi vis workwear. If I was knitting it again I’d probably make life easy and knit a hexagon or (radical idea coming up here) just use the right weight yarn. The bottom edge doesn’t curl up in wear because it’s a bit smaller than my head and it’s the stretching that stops it curling. I might knit that bit on smaller needles another time because I suspect that this time I just got lucky.

I will be knitting some more of the hats from this book, there are some interesting shapes in there. The book reviews tend to focus on the errors in the charts and I’ve amended pages 45,47,49,51,69,75,85 and 87 in my copy but in the main they are all the same printing error. The instructions tell you to decrease on each side of a central spine of stitches but some of the charts only show shaping on one side. There should be shaded “no stitch” shaping on the other side and that’s been omitted. All you need to do is draw in the mirror image of the shaping on the other side.

The child refused to take photos of me because I look like “a cheese head” and because I wouldn’t give him the hat so this is the best I can come up with. I know it’s a poor photo but you should have seen the other nine.

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.

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.

This lead to the best line I’ve had in ages, one I will treasure for some time to come. “Mom, can you get your brain out of the bath please?” So that’s where I left it. This was a three man effort, I knitted the under hat, David made the icord (using the super duper icord mill that Santa will be bringing me next week) and my mother sewed the lot together. This is made from the uneven fluffy long draw practise yarn, there’s still some left but there’s less than there was. I wouldn’t have started this without an icord mill, this used something like fifteen yards of icord which would have been exceptionally tedious to knit on needles but took no time at all with the widget. I dyed it after it was all sewn up because I had no idea how much of the yarn it was going to eat and I would rather be left with white yarn than pink yarn.

The idea was simple enough, knit a hat and sew icord on it so that it looked like a brain. What it actually looked like was a frisbee, it needed extreme blocking over a basin to get it back into a hat shape (this was the point where it was lurking in the bath when my son wanted to get in it). Even after that it was floppy around the edges but that was easily cured by round elastic. It’s simple enough, the elasticity in the knitting goes out of the window when it’s sewn to the icord, unless you are fanatical about keeping the shape correct then it’s going to be distorted. In the end it came out looking enough like a brain and it fitted the zombie’s head so I’ll count it as a success.

I had a lovely surprise yesterday, it just goes to show that sometimes the stinky jobs have an unexpected benefit. Now and again the sock yarn drawer in the bed base won’t close properly, I have a quick fix for it which involves sticking my hand in the back and shuffling everything around. Yesterday I did the job right and took the drawer all the way out and off the runners and looked to see what was stopping the drawer from shutting. It wasn’t a mountain of yarn that was back there but it was enough to be exciting. I was really pleased to discover a bag of yarn that I’ve been looking for since I got my loom. I’ve looked in all the places I ever put yarn, I’ve been back through the blog to see if I’ve knitted it up and forgotten about it but I could not trace what had happened to that thousand yards of yarn. At some point it’s been pushed over the back of the drawer and it’s sat there ever since. Even better, back there in those plastic bags was a skein of black alpaca and bfl. I made this for a woven blanket but when I gathered all the skeins together I didn’t have enough and I made the blanket out of something else. I went back over my calculations several times because I had worked out that I would have enough with the ten skeins except that I ended up with only nine skeins. I know now where I went wrong with that one.

Why are hats like buses? You spend ages waiting to see one and then two come along together. First let me say that the colours weren’t my choice, the request was for an orange fish with yellow stripes and blue fins. The orange is merino, the leftovers of the “henna” I bought to ply with some multicoloured single and the yellow is the poorly spun white stuff that resulted from my woollen spinning practise. It did come in for something after all and I suspect that the hat will be lost before that yarn has had a chance to pill. The other bits are from the odd ball bag, the reddish brown is the very last of the Rowan Magpie that I fulled into my first knitting bag and the lips and tail are the leftovers from Rogue dyed blue. I like revisiting my past projects but on the other hand I’m glad that this is the very last of both those leftovers.

This is my fourth fish hat. This is a little smaller than the others because it’s going on a smaller head. This time I at last remembered to start the colours where the lips were deepest rather than at the beginning of a round then they end up under the belly of the fish where the jog is less visible. The one thing all the hats have had in common is that I made the first stripe 6″ from the start. This means that when I came to place the fins I didn’t need to measure again, the fins start where the stripe starts.

I was panicking this morning when the bright hat could not be found. I knew that I’d taken it to school yesterday afternoon and I was sort of sure that I’d brought it back with me when I found that the recipient was off sick. You would think that an orange and yellow hat would be easy to find even on a dark morning but it had vanished. I had visions of setting to and knitting another over the weekend, hoping that the recipient wouldn’t spot that it wasn’t quite the same as the one that he’d seen in progress. I stood outside school this afternoon and saw the missing hat come out on the right head. I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I was, I really didn’t want to start another fish hat right now. I had looked in the school bag this morning but for some reason I’d managed to overlook the screaming orange and yellow creation.

I didn’t cast on for a replacement this morning because I was trusting that it would magically turn up during the day. After a thorough search had come up blank I tried to distract myself from the missing hat mystery with a spot of dusting. In my defence, this place is usually hidden by two photographs so unless you pick them up you’d never see the dust. I think it’s obvious enough that no-one ever moves the photos and the last time I did would have been this time last year when I went around with the duster. I’m not sure that I could have written my name in it, maybe it would have fitted on the diagonal.

What could it be that would make me pick up the needles after eleven knitting-free days? You might think that it would be a new and stunning pattern or a drop dead gorgeous yarn and you’d be wrong on both counts. It was the result of a genuine knitting emergency and by that I don’t mean the usual seasonal lack-of-planning emergency (I don’t have those because I’ve realised that December follows November every year). My son came out of school in tears because he’d lost Fishie, he’d searched the cloakroom, his bag and complied a list of likely hat-nappers. I did a mental stock take and thought that I could whip up a look alike with what was in the house without waiting for anything to be dyed and dried.

This then is the stand in Fishie, he’s been waiting for his eyes for a week or so because I couldn’t put my hand on the felt. It’s the Dead or Alive hat from Knitty, as with all striped hats it is a fantastic way of using up odd bits of yarn leftovers. I messed with the shaping a little, it’s the same length as Fishie but narrows earlier. This wasn’t a design choice so much as a necessity caused by running out of yarn.

As it turned out I didn’t have to knit all night to replace the hat. I’d managed not to notice that I’d put the green yarn for the new hat down on top of the old hat. It wasn’t lost at all, it had never gone to school in the first place and beloved Fishie had been in a safe place all along. I made the hat anyway because it’s possible that Fishie might be lost before he’s tired of wearing it so now I have a spare.

I had the carder out this weekend, I fished around in the fibre bit box and now the lid fits on it. The blue is mostly merino with about 20% blue bamboo rayon, the orange brown has everything in it. There was no alpaca but there was camel, silk, kid mohair, merino, angelina and blue faced leicester. They were all odd bits leftover from other things but together there’s enough to make something. Overall I think it’s lacking a bit of contrast but I’ll probably spin it up anyway.

Totally unconnected – hands up all those who have seen one of the Liptons tea adverts. I was fascinated by this and because I live under a rock I’d never heard of sand art. One thing lead to another and then I was watching the winner of Ukraine’s Got Talent. The funny thing about that is that I’ve never watched Britain’s Got Talent – do we have artists too?