Wool For Brains

I had thought that last week would have been all weaving all of the time but the wheels fell off the cart when the endless cone of grey yarn that I’ve been using for weft since last summer came to an end. After that I needed to think about what I was doing, the third scarf made itself and then my plans for the next were scuppered by there being not enough of one of the yarns. I could have sorted it out easily enough but my lack of enthusiasm for doing so told me that I’d had enough. (Left to right, bag, bag, scarf, all have handspun warp, scarf has handspun for warp and weft)

The reason that I expected it to be a weaving week is that this is the view from my usual knitting spot.  They did a fantastic job putting the scaffolding up without interfering with access to the door or garage and we can still park as usual. It totally blocks out satellite tv reception but we can all live without the box for a week. I spent a few days attempting to not look out of the window but it was surprising how quickly I got used to it and then it was back to knitting as usual. (Check for positive language and lack of moaning – PASS)

This is the start of Amalia, it’s another crescent shaped shawl that starts with the edging and is shaped with short rows. The yarn is thicker than the pattern calls for and so I’ll need fewer repeats to get the same length of edging. I’m nearing the point where I should really work out just how many repeats that is before I overshoot, make it huge and run out of yarn before I finish.

I’ve been dyeing too, there’s a bit of a theme here caused by me having recently been on holiday although I have to confess that the sky was not that blue and the sand was not that golden. Front to back this is Dorset horn, Wensleydale, superwash merino lace and silk brick. The silk brick is staying home as it has a bleeding turquoise issue but the rest will be shop-bound when I manage to resurrect it. The shop went in holiday at the same time as we did but didn’t come back. I imagine it out there somewhere lazing on a beach, sipping cocktails and watching fantastic sunsets. It could at least send a postcard.

I really dislike having work done in the house. It doesn’t matter how much of an improvement there will be after everyone has packed up and gone, it’s the process that bugs me. I’m tied in while people come and go, the dog wants to drive them all away or have a sneaky sniff in their pockets, there’s usually dust and noise and it’s all just pants really. Previous home improvements have included having the fence removed and then the fence team vanishing for two weeks, having the shower ripped out and then finding that the specialist manufacturer of odd sized shower doors had stopped making them. There was the excitement of the replacement double glazed windows that were the wrong colour and the new oven that was white instead of stainless. I could go on but that’s enough to show that my experience of having work done on the house has not been totally positive. It occurred to me that even if the builders were busy putting in a dedicated wool room with voice activated tea production, a moth annihilator and an automatic wool desiccator I’d still whine about it. I am trying to be positive, to focus on the outcome rather than the process and to believe that this time things will go well. I am also trying to give myself something to think about if it all goes wrong. Not that it will of course, I’m being positive remember.

These are not colours I would have put together, it’s the pink that I’m not enamored of. To be truthful I don’t much like the green either. Happily these aren’t for me and the recipient likes them so all is well. These are Opal, wool with cotton for summer socks, and I bought the ball because there was a choice of two colours in cotton rich and the other was even less appealing. These will forever be holiday socks and you have to like them for that.

Guess what – I don’t like the colours of these either, all Finding Nemo with added pink. The selling point with this one was that it was cheap, when it’s £3.50 a ball it can be whatever colour it likes. I did plan on overdyeing it but when I was packing for my holiday it was close to hand. We will get to see what it looks like after a dye bath because I bought two balls (it was cheap remember).

I can’t rely on socks to keep me in a positive frame of mind this week so I’ve turned to weaving. This is a selection from the big black sack of yarn that periodically I feel ashamed about. I’m hoping that the feel good factor from using up stash yarn will see me through the week. I’ll weave until I’ve run through this pile of yarn or until I’ve had enough, the idea is that they’ll all be about 80″ long and 6″ wide and I’ll make them into one piece bags (like this one). If I was organised enough I’d wind the warps and bag them up with the wefts but I’m capable of changing my mind at any time about what goes together.

If that’s not enough to keep my mind off the noise then I have a fallback. Yet again I’m not sold on the colour but as it’s foster knitting and not mine that doesn’t matter. This is lace in superwash sock yarn again and I think I’m forming an opinion. More about that another time..

After I’d trawled out the various bits and pieces of work in progress I decided to work hard on reducing the numbers. Every knitter has their own views on what constitutes an acceptable level of work in progress, it varies from one person to another but the number that they feel happy with is the right number for them. For me, at least this week, that heap is too big. It’s not just about the numbers either, I know that the reason that some of those things are not finished is because they are stuck. I need to decide whether the sock needs a toe and as that is not knitting it’s not happening. The blanket needs some sort of edging and I can’t decide what. The baby jacket ran out of interesting yarn way too early and the sundress is just no fun. If I cast on for something else then they will linger longer so I’ve put the silk out of sight for now. I decided to chip away at it, one win a day and by focussing on what I have already started I might take my mind off the silk.

Day one of the new wiploss programme (Tuesday) was a clear success by anyone’s standards. I measured the length of fabric, cut it into three and sewed it back together again. The reason it had been sitting about was that I couldn’t decide how to finish the edges, satin binding, candy cane binding, something with prairie points? In the end I did none of those and just hemmed the ends, leaving the sides as they were. I’ve pressed it, sewed the ends in from stitching the seams and it’s as done as a baby blanket needs to be. Final measurements were 36″ by 31″ wide, it’s a scrap sock yarn warp with superwash laceweight weft. It’s a clasped weft which means that it’s doubled and the doubled laceweight is just about the same weight as sock yarn. I used the 12.5 dpi reed, I started off with the 10 but it didn’t look right. It’s just as well that it came out narrower than I’d planned because otherwise it would have been huge.

Day two – there was measureable progress in that I filled a third bobbin with green polworth. The rest will fit on the very last bobbin and then I’ll have a massive plying session. I had this set aside for a Tour de Fleece project but I’m not much of a joiner and I’d filled the first bobbin on the Friday before the start. I watch the cycling every day and I spin most days but that’s as far as it goes

Day three – one sock down, one to go. This has been sitting on hold for a week because I needed to make the decision of whether to start the toe and that seemed to be too taxing in an evening. I spent five minutes during the day doing the measuring and then that got me past the stage that I was stuck on. The second sock is always easier because all I have to do is make it match the first, no thinking about “is the cuff long enough?”, “what heel should I make?”, “is it time for the toe yet?” just match and knit.

Day four (Friday) – The last bobbin of Polworth is done. I’ve gone right off green which is a bit of a shame because I have 8oz of it to ply now and by the time I’ve finished that I imagine that knitting it would be out of the question. I don’t really feel like plying it but it’s filling four bobbins and I don’t feel like winding it off for storage either.

That seems to be the right place to stop because if I continue I think I’ll be looking at a fail for day five. If I give myself the weekend off then there’s a chance that something might be finished by Monday but there’s no realistic chance of a win for tomorrow.

There was a point last year when I felt in control of the sock yarn leftovers. It was just after I’d bought my rigid heddle loom and I’d ripped through several scarves using the sock scraps as warp. It made a pleasing dent in the pile of yarn and I knew then that I’d won my battle with the bulging bag. I proceeded to rest on my laurels, happily knitted several more pairs of socks and took my eye off the ball(s). It shouldn’t be surprising that I am now faced with an exploding bag of sock yarn (too out of control to pose for the camera). I know that I could hold four strands together and knit it up on big needles but I like the sock yarn bag. The colours are lovely, everything is washable and sock yarn is just so useful. It’s just that I’d like it more if it didn’t fling itself all over the floor whenever I open the wardrobe door.

I’ve started to get to grips with my embarrassment of riches. The balls on the right are all that is left from the balls on the left, I’m using superwash laceweight for the weft which I did have to buy because in general I’m not a huge fan of superwash. After much dithering I decided that grey goes with everything so the two colours I used were grey and undyed. The grey I love, it’s exactly right against the warp but the white is too bright. Just for once I didn’t go down the road of “so subtle I needn’t have bothered”, the contrast between the two is more than I’d visualised and the white would have been better as light grey. My selvedges are terrible, the one on the right is anyway, which is why they aren’t in the picture. I’m hoping that it will improve in the wash because the edges will be going into a seam providing that I can find a way to straighten them enough to ram them together.

I have the scraps bagged by colour, I think I paid 50p for my colour consultant to sort them for me one rainy afternoon and it was money well spent. One of the well filled bags featured red/russet/orange sock scraps and as the last baby born in the family has dark hair I think these will suit her well. This is the start of Phazelia’s mitred baby jacket, I was going to make it after I finished the blue framed baby jacket by the same designer but I was overwhelmed by the number of baby jackets tucked into the top of my wardrobe and decided that enough was enough. I’ve now cleared all the jackets out of the wardrobe and out of the house so I can start again. It’s another entertaining construction that means there is nearly no sewing up. If you want to see how it grows to make a jacket from such an unpromising start you can pop over here and see Carie’s. She has sleeves so it gives you a bit more of a clue on which bit goes where.

Does this mean that I’ve finished the big grey blob? Nope. I’m about a foot away from the last corner and then it’s a straight run along the last side to a bit of grafting. I like the edging, it’s easy to knit but I feel an urge to knit a row longer than twenty stitches. Hopefully next time it will be finished, if not I will feel compelled to bore you rigid with the contents of this bag (ball of sock yarn for scale).

I have a standard unit of comparison for spending decisions. Actually, that’s not quite true because I have several. There’s the unit of sock yarn, the bfl equivalent and the big unit, the fraction of a new floor loom. Would you rather have an ice cream sundae or half a ball of sock yarn? Me, I’d prefer the non-dairy option. An ipad will set you back half a floor loom (there’s no contest there either). In general wool always wins, I think about the wool I could buy with the money I’m just about to spend and then I put my purse away.

This week I found something that was a better buy than wool. Shocking isn’t it? For my birthday I asked for a professional oven clean. This cost about the same as two kilos of shetland fibre and on this occasion there was no contest. It looks like I have a new oven, the black crunchy bits have gone from the door hinges and you could eat your dinner off the bottom plate (try it and I’ll bite you). The shelves are shiny and he fixed the light as well. I got the idea from Carie who can’t clean her own oven at the moment because of her bump. I can clean my oven but I always choose to do something else with my time. Clean the oven or spin? Clean the oven or knit? It’s not hard to see which way that goes. The top tip I gleaned for cleaning your oven is to start by taking the oven door off, it’s easier to clean the oven when you can actually reach it.

I’ve been waiting for the postman to bring the yarn I needed for the weft for this and I had a moment of panic last night when I read the email from the vendor telling me that the yarn was out of stock. Fortunately Google is my friend and I managed to find something similar, closer to home and 50p cheaper (that converts to 25g of wool). I had hoped that this would be finished by now but it looks like I will be twiddling my thumbs until the weekend. I still have to choose the two colours I want the weft to be, the front runners are white, blue or grey and any two from the three will work. I might agonise endlessly over the perfect choice or there again I might just roll a die, one medium, one light, job done.

The absence of weaving doesn’t mean that I am twiddling my thumbs, I’m knitting. The sometimes-never socks had a burst of activity. The Kerry blob is not allowed on my knee at the same time as the dog, not allowed near food and certainly not allowed to sit outside near the barbeque. This is because the blob is not mine and I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to it. Socks are another thing altogether, it doesn’t matter if they smell like roast lamb and dog combined or if they get hit with the salad dressing. This meant that the sock was the only choice for a few hours sitting in the sun over the weekend while the grey blob stayed indoors where it was safe.

The blob is now in the final phase of knitting. I worked out exactly how I would turn the corners and how many stitches it would take to do that and then calculated how many stitches I needed on a side to be an integer number of repeats with appropriate corner fiddling. I’ve been caught before with devising with something so obvious that I don’t need to write it down then when it all goes horribly wrong I’ve no idea what I was thinking when I came up with the numbers. This time I wrote everything down, with sketches of the corner and which rows doubled back without attaching to the shawl body. It was a brilliant piece of work and I was really proud of it right up to the moment when I tried to knit it and found that it was backwards.

I’m not doing any more maths on this. Specifially what I’m not going to do is time how long it takes to knit a repeat because then I’d be able to work out how long it’s going to take me to knit the edging. I think that’s something that I really don’t want to know. There is no other choice but to get it finished.

The big grey blob is bigger now, I’ve 500 stitches in a round and it’s reached the stage where it is a lovely tv knit. There’s one pattern round in every four and providing I can count to six it’s an easy pattern round at that. It looks just the same as it did last time but bigger so we’ll skip the photo.

The sock dyeing experiment came out well, I think I’d award it a tick in the box for “exceeded expectations”. That’s a good mark seeing as my expectations are usually sky high. Both socks came out the same, there was enough in the ball to reach the toes and the colour changed gradually all the way along. I worked the heel using the other end of the ball so as to avoid any colour change along the top of the foot. These are now Daniel’s seeing as they fit him and he likes them.

The end of term report for these would be “adequate, let down by poor preparation”. They are fit for their purpose as teatowels, they’ll dry plates well enough, but they aren’t what I’d planned. I failed the first test, dyeing the warp, because I intended these to be jewel tones rather than pastels. I was ill but I’d promised Dan he could help me dye and the warp was already wound so we did it anyway. The result was that I tipped some dye into jam jars (not enough as it turned out) and he did all the work. He petitioned for the orange and yellow, the yellow worked well enough but the orange was very definitely a mistake.

The thing I did right was to hang the soaked warp to dry before dyeing it thereby avoiding puddles of liquid. Apart from messing up the depth of shade the whole warp painting thing went very well. We covered the breakfast bar with plastic and used a small paint brush to make sure that the dye penetrated all of the warp. I never really thought about how long each teatowel would be and how many colour changes I wanted, shorter colour runs would have been better. You can see how scary the orange looked at this point, even Dan agreed that it was not really a good choice.

The scary orange was only in one spot, the other two patches you can see fell in the loom waste (I may have been ill but I managed to make that come out right). Now that I’ve done it once I’d certainly make a painted warp again, it was much less messing about than I’d thought, but next time I’ll stick to silk or wool where I know what I’m doing with the dyeing. Although I don’t like the finished product the process was fun and it made me use the boat shuttle for the first time and find a way of winding the bobbins for it. It’s never a total loss if you learn something along the way.

Is this a clue as to the colour of the moment? (shop stock)

How about this? (also shop stock)

This week everything is green. This will be the next project on the loom, three greens, one is 20% green carded with white shetland, one is 60% green with white shetland and one that was green all on its own (easier than it sounds, each is 50g with one part green, three parts green, five parts green). If I’d had this idea to start with then I would have carded the green too, as it was I’d spun that before I thought of the shading so the darker yarn will stripe. I have to decide whether I dislike the thought of this enough to card up another 50g of the green and spin it. This depends on how picky I am (we know I’m going to card and spin some more, don’t we?) With this I will sample first because I have a clear idea in my head of what the fabric should look like. This means that the real fabric has a good chance of being Wrong because I’ve a definite idea of what Right looks like.

It will be no surprise to find that the last piece off the loom also featured green. The warp came from a quick trawl through the bag of sock yarn leftovers. I don’t want to talk about the sock yarn odd bits bag mostly because it’s currently residing in three bags, it really should be four bags because the three are overflowing. The first yarn I picked was the edge colour from the mitred square baby jacket, the rest were chosen to go with that one. The green stripes at the edges are the leftovers from Dan’s Tannenbaum hat and the luminous green accent is some of the leftovers from the Margarita Tsocks. The weft was the shiny twinkly flapper yarn from here, I knew there would be the ideal project for this in time, one where it just had to laze around and look wonderful. I’ve made a solid blue stripe in the centre, I’m planning on cutting it down this stripe and sandwiching it back together with a narrow piece of fabric that I haven’t made yet. If there turns out to be not enough of the eye catching lime then it will be onto plan B just as soon as I work out what that is.

It has been a change from purple but I can’t see that green is going to divert me from it in the way that the red/orange combination did. It’s been a pleasant diversion but I can’t see the green phase lasting for that long.

I read enough knitting blogs to know that I should be showing at least six photos of this shawl, in a bush, hanging across a window, artfully posed on a statue. We know that this is not going to happen. This is Sivia Harding’s Diamond Fantasy, finished size 37″ by 78″. It would have blocked bigger but I ran out of surface to pin it to. I have knitted this before, somewhere down the line I ripped that one and recycled the yarn into a woven scarf. This one will not suffer the same fate, it’s off to beautiful British Columbia as soon as I get the label on the envelope. That’s the good thing about foster knitting, it doesn’t fill up the cupboards once the knitting stops.

When I started I thought that the yarn was too dark to easily work with in the evenings but I got used to it quickly enough. The only time I struggled was late at night if I dropped a stitch and it ran. That was rare enough, the yarn was a lovely soft cashmere blend and a dropped stitch was more inclined to sit there and wait patiently to be recovered. Towards the top the length of the rows was just right for the colour changes in the yarn to stack up on each other but after blocking it’s less prominent than it was on the needles.

The flap was the last thing to be finished on the bag. I was planning on bringing it to a point with the fabric loop coming out at the sides of the point. I bottled out at the last minute and sliced the point off for a flat tip and an easier seam. This is made from half a scarf and a wonky inkle braid both of which originally appeared here on the blog. The scarf is at the outside, there was nothing wrong with that, I’d hemstitched it and twisted the fringe so it was finished and ready to gift. The thing that doomed it as a scarf was that it was exactly the right colour to work with the central piece. Originally that was going to be an inkle braid but it was too sticky when the warp was as close as it needs to be for inkle. I didn’t want to throw it away seeing as I’d spun it so I took it off carefully, cut it through and threaded it into the rigid heddle loom. Once the warp was wider apart it was fine and I ended up with a short and narrow piece of fabric that I knew would come in some day. The scarf and reject braid will make two bags, I’ll use all of the scarf and have a bit of the centre fabric left over.

Thank you for the comments about pockets. In the end I made a magazine or pattern pocket (next time I’ll make it a bit longer and pleat it at the bottom and I’ve learned my lesson about using a contrast fabric), a padded phone pocket (next time I’ll rethink this entirely because I like it not) and a zipped pocket for bits and bobs (fine apart from lack of contrast). All the pockets are lined because I didn’t like the floppy hand of a single layer of fabric. The bag is 16.5″ by 4″ by 13″ high which it really needed to be for the size of the woven panel, it works as a shoulder bag but for me it’s a bit on the big side of ideal.

I’m done with purple for a while. Also violet and anything vaguely pinky have fallen off the bottom of my favourites list. You can have too much of a good thing. I have made big inroads into the pile of yarns I showed last time. The warp was the shetland that I carded and spun nearly three years ago, I would have knitted it up before now except that it escaped over the back of the drawer and hid under the bed. This was the third length of fabric from those yarns and there wasn’t enough of any one of them for the weft, not enough even to use two in two shuttles for alternate picks (one row stripes). This time I did a different stripe, two inches each of four shades. It ended up being two inches each of two shades as the yarn ran out as well as my enthusiasm before I reached the end.

This is the first time that I’ve had enough of weaving something before I’ve reached the end. It went on and on and I was sick of the colour about half way through. This may be because there was no rhythm, it was all stop, change colour, start, stop. It could also be because I accidently made a warp much longer than usual. I warp between two points, one being the back of the loom and the other a clamped peg. If I put the loom at the end of the dining table and the warping peg on the toybox (B-D) then the woven length is about 72″. Lately I’ve been putting the loom on the breakfast bar and the peg on the dining table (A-C) and that gives a woven length of about 80″. There’s no reason for this, it depends which area needs more toy clearance before I can set the loom down. After I’d woven for a week with no sign of the end coming up I remembered that with this I’d put the loom on the breakfast bar and the peg on the toybox (A-D). It turns out that gives a woven length of 116″ which is way longer than my attention span.

Given the trouble I’d had in sewing together the log cabin fabric you might think that I’m on a hiding to nothing with this. There would be no chance of matching the grey lines at the side seams of a bag, every stripe is a different yarn which will shrink slightly differently so even if they were all the same width to start with then they wouldn’t be when the fabric is finished. I have actually thought this one through, the stripe height doesn’t matter because I have a plan.

This is the first of a different design of bag, one that makes a bigger bag without needing a bigger loom. So far I like it, it would have been finished by now if I hadn’t got stuck in a search for the perfect size for pockets. The added benefit is that I don’t have to match the woven fabric at a seam, if some of my stripes are taller than others it won’t matter at all. Hopefully this week I’ll commit myself to a pocket decision, finish the orange bag and review the prototype before moving on to the type two version. If I was working to a pattern then I’d go with the measurements it gave but because I have a blank canvas I get to fuss endlessly over the perfect height to width ratio, whether the handles need to be a fraction longer/wider and how many pockets is enough. The reason that pockets are giving me so much of a headache is that my knitting bags come from the supermarket with the shopping in them. Plastic carrier bags do not have pockets so I’m not used to a bag that has them. (The yarn at the front is what’s left from the purple/violet collection. They have a future as stripes.)

I have some finished knitting, that came about as a result of avoidance of looking at more violet, but it needs blocking so that will be a post for another time. Anyone who would like to complete the sentence “My knitting bag must have a pocket for…” has my complete attention (unless you want the pocket for a named prescription drug, in which case your comment will be going straight to the spam heap unread)

These are all over 80″ long and between 11 and 14″ wide. Together they weigh over 700g so in the last two weeks I’ve used a pile of yarn roughly the size of seven balls of sock yarn. It’s not a lot but it was enough. The big bag of wool is still full but now it’s full of the stuff that was previously in little bags all over the floor. The spare bedroom looks so much better now that I can see the floor again. I’m right at the start of another long piece, that one should see the last of the pink/violet yarns and then I can ram the leftovers in the big black bag and ignore it for another few months. You can see that the end is in sight, this was the last of the three pieces that I made and the weft here alternates two yarns, one thick and one thin. I like the effect even though I was driven to it because I didn’t have enough of either yarn.

There were two silk braids but the one on the left is presumably stuck in a big pile of post at an airport waiting for a plane. My edges are still pants but I enjoyed making them and watching the colours change. The darker silk is the yarn that was formerly Iris, there is still a lot of it left but much less than there was. I think the next couple will have the light pink as the main colour because that’s the one that I now have the most of. I know that it’s making no real impression on leftover yarn but I’m enjoying something that was previously stuck in a bag so it is still a positive move. I’m enjoying it so much that I’ve spun some more silk so I can make braids in colours other than pinks. That makes no sense at all seeing as what I’m supposed to be doing is using up not making more.

There was also knitting, the Diamond Fantasy is now at the stage where the rows seem awfully long. I have been knitting two repeats a day but now I’ve dropped down to one (ten rows). It’s very close to being finished, or rather being close to the icord bind off that goes on forever. I’ve knitted this before and I remember how long it took me last time.

The reason I’ve had time to sit and weave despite it being school holidays is that this holiday turned out to be Airfix fortnight. I sit at one side of the dining table weaving while Dan sits at the other side building Spitfires. At the start of the holidays I was needed for getting the tops off the enamel paints and opening the childproof cap on the varnish. Through the week my workload dropped to being the colour consultant and wing pusher innerer and then by the end of the second week I was redundant. (The photo was taken by the model builder who doesn’t see past the planes at the front. Please try to follow his lead and ignore the general clutter, Easter eggs and dog treats)

Sewing can’t be done on the dining table so this is the only new bag I have to show. This one will be going in the post tomorrow so with the fabric that I wove that probably puts my use of fabric on minus eleven this week. I’m not even pretending that I can catch that up next week but sooner or later I will do.