Did I sew in the ends and finish the striped green jumper? Nope, I added a collar, sewed in the ends on the body, looked at the ends on the sleeves and then put it aside to start something new. This is the “Hoodie Bear” pattern and I’m knitting it to use up some of the double knitting yarn that I was given recently. The reason that I chose this pattern rather than any of the others that I found is that this starts at the front of the hood and works down. I thought that had the potential to be interesting and might make a more rounded hood than the usual seamed at the top varieties. I’m starting to think about knitting a zip up hoodie this winter so hood construction is of more interest than usual. It has the advantage of being seamless so I know that I’m not going to be faced with a mass of ends at the end. I’ve split the sleeves off and it’s now mindless knitting with the occasional buttonhole all the way to the hem.

There’s been a lot of weaving this week and there’s a good reason for this. I’ve stripped the threads on one of the screws that holds the loom folded up and until I can get a replacement then the loom has to be open all of the time. Rather than thinking “I have a free hour, I’ll open the loom up” I can sit down while I’m waiting for the oven to warm up. It’s surprising just how much weaving you can do in odd ten minutes here and there. On and off throughout the week I wove five yards of green and white stripes and replaced it with a blue and white striped length.

I was originally going to make this with a navy weft and a white weft so it would make solid navy and white squares alternating with a patterned navy/white block. Thanks to the invention of weaving software I can see the result before I start and it looked lovely on the screen. Fortunately there was just long enough between me winding the warp and picking up the shuttles for me to have a reality check. I’m intending this for bags and because I’m me I’ll want to perfectly match the blocks at the seam as well as having them be spaced nicely at both hems. This means that all of my squares have to be the same size and I can do it but I’d rather not. It’s easier to avoid the whole matching thing by using a single weft and making stripes. I thought I was going to use the mid blue as weft right up to the moment when I tried it, now I think I’m going with my second choice.

Any guesses as to whether I’ll finish the pink hoodie before the green striped jumper?

I like the second bag much more than the first one. This is more the size that I had in mind for a sock bag, based on a 6.5″ cube rather than an 8″ cube. Sock needles are usually 6″ long so this is about as small as it can go and still be functional. It’s not perfect but I’m happy with it. The handle isn’t exactly where it should have been, I’d have liked it to be centred on where the seam would have been if there had been a seam. Of course if there had have been a seam there then I’d have got it centred without even thinking about it which is exactly what I did with the first one. I didn’t think about it on the first one (which had fake seams), didn’t think about it on the second one (which didn’t) and as a result it’s ever so slightly not right. The next one will be better.

The button hole is an improvement on bringing the drawstring out through a gap in the seam. There’s nothing wrong with doing that, my knitting bag has a drawstring made like that and it looks the same today as it did when I started using it two years ago. It’s a solution that works, but I’m not sold on how it looks. I like the look of this, I think a bound buttonhole will do very well, at least it will do until I come up with a better idea. I did look at grommets but I need big ones to accommodate the big cord and I though that would be too heavy against the quilting quality cotton.

The dinky little bag is already on its way out of the country, it is going to start a new life in beautiful British Columbia. I’m fine with that because I can now make another with a more perfectly placed handle. It won’t be identical because this is the total of the cotton fabric that was left from lining the bag but I’m sure that I have some other purple cotton that will do equally as well. I can’t believe that the day will ever come when the stash can’t provide a good match for whatever I’m weaving, realistically at some point I might have to plan to match the wool to the cotton rather than the other way around.

I couldn’t decide what to weave next so I saved myself the effort of having to plan something and went for another length of Spring stripes because then I could tie the new warp onto the old one (it wasn’t quite as simple as that because I needed to get the loom waste off the loom to make the tassels for the bags). The green yarn is nicely variegated, it started life as yellow but that was cured by navy dye. This looks to be the same pattern as the purple stripes but it isn’t, it’s similar but easier to weave because the treadles run up and down in order. The purple stripes had a jog in the treadling, not difficult but one more thing to get wrong. If your mind is somewhere else then simpler is better.

It’s not all weaving all of the time, if I’m running around all day I still get to knit in front of the tv at night. I am slogging away trying to work my way through the sock yarn leftovers, I have got them all into one bag now which feels like progress. This is a variation on a DROPS pattern, the last time I knitted it I followed the pattern as written and made the neckline with the shoulder fastening. I wasn’t happy with it so this time I’ve gone with what I know and moved the opening to the front. I also simplified it by knitting single colour stripes. I think there’s going to be a collar although I’m not totally committed to that. I’m not totally committed to dealing with all the ends either but if I do them a few at a time I’ll survive it.

I fixed the malt loaf too. This is the middle of the loaf and you can see that this time the fruit isn’t all in a solid layer at the bottom. The solution was smaller loaf tins, the little loaves cook fast enough for the tea soaked raisins not to have time to sink. The recipe makes two loaves, last time I made one big one and this time I have four small ones. It is a bit more fiddly lining the tins but it’s a small price to pay to avoid the fruit floor in the loaf.

If you want me I’ll be weaving, or weaving in ends depending on the time of day and my level of guilt.

It would be difficult for socks to be a surprise to me because I would have needed to have knitted them with a bag over my head and that would make it very difficult to watch the TV at the same time. They are new to the blog though. I started them so that the leftovers could liven up the blah beige beachy baby jacket but after I ripped the jacket I didn’t have the need for the leftovers and as a result the socks were sidelined. I’m tired of seeing them hanging about so they are now finished and in the sock drawer. These are for me, it seems to have been a while since I got to keep a pair so I think I was long overdue a place in the sock knitting queue.

The scarf was a surprise even to me, it was a good four months since I saw the beginning of this so I was clueless as to what it looked like. As you weave you wind the bit you’ve completed around the front and then it vanishes, not to be seen again until you take it off the loom. I can’t remember when I started this but I’m pretty sure that it was before Christmas when I warped the rigid heddle loom. In theory I’d be able to find the details in my weaving project book and tell you the starting date but it was a complete surprise to the book too. Fortunately when I put the loom away (for Christmas?) I had packed all the yarns together in the same bag so it was a simple job to pick it up and finish it off even after it had been sitting around for four months. It’s not one of my favourites, it’s mostly commercial yarn so I don’t get that warm fuzzy feeling from looking at my handspun. Having said that I do like the grey, it’s an alpaca boucle and it’s ridiculously soft. I have issues with a lot of alpaca, it makes my eyes itch as commercial yarn, fleece or processed top, but I’m fine with DROPS alpaca boucle.

There are no surprises on the other loom and I’m really pleased about that because it’s a good thing. The general idea is that every inch is just like the previous inch without any dramatic knots or tangles or exciting changes in tension. This has been the perfect warp, I think I may have overcome my weak spot in warping which is beaming (rolling all that yarn onto the back of the loom). Weaving has been totally uneventful and without drama, I keep rolling fabric onto the front, unrolling yarn from the back and filling bobbins when I feel like it. I think another day or two will see the end of this, it’s about five yards long and that seems to be about the length of my attention span. I like it, I would have liked it more had it been an inch or so wider but seeing as I used all but a few yards of the purple that was never going to happen.

The really big surprise in my week was the two big (dog sized) bags of yarn that appeared unexpectedly in my porch. I didn’t see that one coming, neither did the dog as the yarn fairy managed to open the porch door, leave the bags, close the front door and nearly get back to her car before he got out of his basket to look out of the window and bark. Someone had a tidy up and for some reason thought of me when she asked herself “who could use this wool?”. Until I’ve got to the end of this warp I’m not letting myself think about the next project so I couldn’t possible have a page of notes on how much warp I need for a blanket 46″ wide and 72″ long (yes, there’s enough in those bags)

There comes a time when you just have to admit that you’ve gone the wrong way and no amount of blundering on hopefully is going to get you to where you wanted to be. I thought that the combination of off white, bleached blue, tan and brown would look like beach pebbles and the overall effect would be light and summery. I saw the colours of faded blue beach huts, white shingle and a concrete promenade and what can be wrong with that? The picture in my head was lovely but the baby jacket didn’t echo that at all. It is now back as yarn, adding a few more inches to it wasn’t going to improve it at all. I know this for a fact because I tried that so it was bigger but just as bland when I came to rip it. That project has been replaced with….another baby jacket. Yes, I know, it’s some sort of seasonal affective disorder I have, as soon as it starts to look like Spring I start knitting countless tiny sweaters for which I have no use but at least this one isn’t garter stitch so that’s something. The photo shows that the bottom is rolling horribly, I’m pretty confident that will be cured by blocking and I’m almost certain that if I knit this again I’ll be ignoring the pattern and extending the garter section at the hem.

I sorted a pile of yarns out of the stash, starting with the leftovers from the last piece I wove and adding some handspun that had been sitting about for far too long. In my mind this was lovely, I saw lots of pinwheels in purple and creams and golds looking like a field of crocuses. My imagination let me down again, I didn’t like the pinwheels it made at all although I tried. Every time I walked past the loom I tried to like them but they didn’t look even slightly as I’d imagined them. I tried a bit of plain weave (nope) and then a pattern with arrowheads which was close but still not right. Using a light weft rather than the dark was better, now it looks like deckchair fabric. (Do we see a theme here? Do we think I’m ready for a holiday?) It’s not even close to what I had planned but seeing as my imagination has let me down so badly I’m happy to settle for a stash reduction project rather than the thing of beauty that was in my head. This is the back, I can’t photograph the front because I’m weaving it the wrong way up. For once this is deliberate, it means that I only have to lift three shafts at a time rather than five. When you’re going to be doing something two and a half thousand times it makes sense to do it the easy way.

That leaves me with the one thing that I planned that did come out right. I wanted to make some raisin oat bread to use some of the oatmeal that I bought for the oatcakes. It could have done with a bit more fruit and cinnamon but it is proving to be delicious toasted for breakfast. The loaves went into the freezer in slices and I take one out for my breakfast each morning and toast it from frozen. The bagels are boy-breakfast, we’re into week two of giving up sliced white floppy bread and it’s going well so far. It’s too early to say that I’ve seen the last of the floppy white loaf but it’s starting to look like a possibility.

Added extra – I’ve woven enough now to be able to contort myself to see the reverse of the fabric I’m weaving which is supposed to be the front. The cream yarn is oiled and will fluff up when I wash it so it won’t be as stringy as it is now. I know this isn’t what I intended at all but it’s growing on me. I might actually come to like it before I get to the end of the warp.

There you are, an honest to goodness completed finished knitted object. Well it would be finished if it had buttons. I’m sure I’ll get to the buttons in time, I might even manage a proper wet block rather than a waft with a steam iron but it won’t be today. I’ve knitted this before, it’s DROPS b14-27 in left over sock yarn. It is about 23″ across the chest and I had hoped to squeeze it out of a single 50g ball of the light yarn but that was not to be, I came up short with four rows left of the front edge and three rows to pick up and knit around the neck. It was boring enough to make it an ideal tv project which is why it was finished so quickly. I did the same thing as last time and cut two lengths of each yarn that I used, knitting with one and winding the other into a ball. When I got halfway around I started using the ball that I’d set aside and all the yarns presented themselves in the reverse order so my stripes match.

I used the leftover light yarn to start another baby sweater from the sock scrap bag but it’s in time out at the moment for being too light coloured. I’d imagined it being the colours of pebbles on the seashore but now I’ve actually got that I’m not sure that I like it. I may carry on knitting, I may rip it back and throw the yarns in a navy dye bath, I may make the second side to match to here and then dye the remainder of the yarn. That’s something else that can wait, I fished around in the bottom of the washing up bowl yesterday feeling for the pot brush and found the carving knife instead. It’s only a shallow cut but it’s right on the end of my finger and I keep opening it up. Knitting is a bit hit and miss now because it depends on whether I have a scab or a gap that catches.

The woollen cloth from last time was transformed from a stiff piece of board into lovely soft cloth. It had two baths because after it was dry from its first wash it wasn’t quite right, I wanted it thicker and fuzzier. I like it now so it is washed enough. When I warped it I thought this was going to make two bags but now I’m not sure about that so I’m setting it aside until I’ve thought it through. Once I’ve cut into it there’s no going back so I want to be certain that I’m doing the right thing.

I’m still trying to bake my way through all the flour I can find. It turns out that the substitute for floppy white toast at breakfast time is going to be bagels and not croissants or brioche as I’d thought. That’s fine by me, as a parent I’d rather breakfast not be made of treats. I made a second batch of bagels to replace the first dozen that were eaten straight away and this time managed to get most of them in the freezer. I made a second batch of naan breads too, this involved far less pan scrubbing afterwards because I bought the right tool for the job. I started looking for a flat griddle pan but it turns out that a tava (tawa) pan is close enough and much cheaper. It’s slightly dished but not much, a liquid batter needs a flat griddle but breads aren’t going to run and pool in the middle.

The malt loaf I made was suitably sticky by the day after it came out of the oven. It was delicious, you should all go and make one providing that you can get hold of malt extract. The recipe says to make two small loaves but seeing as I only have one small loaf tin I had to use a single bigger tin and cook it for longer. That meant that the fruit had more time to fall through the soft mix before it set – the centre of the loaf had all the fruit at the bottom but the ends had a much better distribution. I know about coating the fruit with flour before mixing it all together but I think if the fruit has spent the night soaking in tea it’s going to need more than a bit of flour to hold it up. I’ve subsequently tried to buy another small loaf tin to match the one I had but I’ve had to settle for some teeny ones instead. The centre slices looked very average but it tasted fantastic so I will be making it again. The next time I make this I’m hoping that the smaller tins will make for a nice speckling of raisins all the way through rather than a solid lump at the bottom of the slice. It might not work out that way, having looked at the photo that accompanies the recipe I can clearly see that the unbuttered slice has a big fruitless gap at the top.

The oatcakes were a one off, I lived over the border so they are not a familiar thing from my childhood. I looked at my plate and my eyes were telling me “pancakes” and with every mouthful I was disappointed that it wasn’t pancakes after all. They even stuck to the pan that nothing sticks to and that didn’t endear them to me either. I may come back to these in another ten years and wonder why it was that I didn’t like them the first time but there again I may not. For the moment I’ll stick with adding bagels, naan bread and malt loaf to my regular baking and pass on the oatcakes.

There are some similarities between baking and knitting, it’s not all about the product if you enjoy the process and there’s the same world of potential in a bag of flour as there is in a bag of wool. This is the woolly equivalent of the store cupboard clearance recipe, another sock scrap project. I’m not quite sure how it is that I started knitting another garter baby jacket, it must be a seasonal thing that I have going because I remember this happening last year. I picked a bag of similar scraps out of the bag of sock yarn leftovers and a plain ball of sock yarn. I do have a second 50g ball of the light and I think I might need it, I had hoped that by knitting the second smallest size I might get two jackets out of the two balls. This seems hopelessly optimistic seeing as the pattern says it needs a 100g ball but I might get lucky. Leftover light coloured yarn is always welcome, I can dye it a colour and use it as the main colour in another striped jacket. I suppose I could dye it black and use it for socks but that’s not appealing to me right now. I’m seeing everything in garter so I suppose this signals the start of another long run of baby jackets.

I really enjoyed weaving this, I had a lovely long session at the loom on Sunday afternoon and was unhappy when I stood up and saw the knots at the back because I’d hoped that I could get to sit and weave all over again another day. I don’t know how I calculated how much weft I was going to need but I seem to have got it wrong by a factor of two and that’s not going to do anything at all for my stash reduction. At the moment this has the drape and softness of a cereal box but that’s because it’s not been washed yet. It’s long enough for me to want to dry it on the washing line and that’s not going to be happening today because the forecast is for rain. This is a good thing because I cut the grass earlier in the week and I want to put some moss killer on it, usually once I’ve sprinkled the stuff on it signals the start of a drought because it has to be rained in.

My first bake this week was Bara Brith which was an impulse as it wasn’t on my planned baking list at all. I cleaned a kitchen cupboard out and found a multitude of part packets of dried fruit so it seemed like a good idea to use up the smaller packets. I had hoped that this would provide an easy freezer to toaster breakfast solution and it did, I left the loaf overnight so that it sliced nicely, froze it in slices and it is delicious toasted. Sadly my tasting panel refused to touch it for reasons best known to himself so it has no chance of displacing toasted floppy bread as a breakfast item. It set me thinking about baking a nice sticky malt loaf but of course I need to buy some nice sticky malt first so that will have to wait for another week.

My next bake was a second attempt at chocolate chip brioche and this was a winner – 100% of my tasting panel said that this was much better than the last one and I’m inclined to agree with him. This was a Waitrose recipe, I left out the melted chocolate and added 100g of milk chocolate chips. The recipe says it makes twelve, I made thirteen (weighed at 100g each) and they were still huge. Another time I’d be looking at shaping this into fifteen pieces and then I’d feel slightly better about the packet of butter and six large eggs that went into it. I still don’t know what consistency this dough/batter should be but I suspect that my dough was a bit wet because the flour wasn’t as strong as the one in the recipe. I seem to be buying a different flour every week, initially supply wasn’t a problem but then the BBC started showing “Bread” and now there is usually a gap on the shelves where my staple cheapo supermarket bread flour should be. It’s the same story in Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Aldi, the own label white bread flour is out of stock. Back in the day when I made all our bread in a bread machine it was important to have a repeatable result and I used to buy baker’s grade flour in big sacks. I don’t need to do that now I’m not using a bread machine, I can control the mixing and the rise so I don’t have the same need for consistency besides which the space where the sack of flour used to live is now home to a spare euphonium. When you’re present for the mixing it’s easy to add a spot more water or flour as needed although it’s a bit more tricky when you haven’t a clue how soft the dough should be.

I did make bagels again, I am now a convert to sticking my finger through the middle and twirling them around, mostly because it’s so much fun but also because there’s no join to come undone. This was a repeat of the naan bread, the first time I made them decades ago they were poor so I never tried again. These are way better than the ones I can buy in the supermarket, soft and chewy, and I’ll be making them again. Next time I’ll make a better job of oiling the tray so that I don’t mangle them getting them off to drop them in the water and I might step back on the seeds. “Next time” might be as early as next week because they seem to be vanishing rather quickly. Pretzels are now off the baking list as I established that I’d need to eat them all myself because no-one else is going to touch them. I’m glad that I found that out before I made them. I swiped a bit of dough and fiddled about with it and that’s as close as I’ll be getting. I’ve seen the commercial process on the tv and I used the idea of freezing the dough before poaching it so they held their shape well. I’m happy that I understand the process even if I don’t have a use for the product.

UPDATE – be still my beating heart – the bagels have been judged to be “awesome” and breakfast worthy. It’s possible that I’ve bought my last floppy white sliced loaf.

For those of you in the UK who may not have heard about it – the postal rates go up this week. For the general public and those vendors who are too small to qualify for a RM online business account post will now be charged by shape as well as size. Up to 2kg is now £3 (£2.60 second class) providing it will fit through a slot 8cm by 45cm by 35 cm (or if it’s a 16cm cube or a tube of various sizes) and if it’s under 2kg but the wrong shape then it’s £5.65 (£5.20 second class). Parcel rate has been “simplified” but from where I’m sitting it doesn’t look like it. The other thing that changed is the compensation you can expect if your package is lost – it’s been more than halved to £20. Working out what to charge for combined postage was more than I could face so I declared it to be a holiday and closed my Etsy shop until I feel like dealing with the chore. (ETA – mostly done now although one cup of tea wasn’t enough)

I’ve had a few comments in real life about how strange it is to be knitting a Christmas stocking at Easter and I can’t think why. Christmas is coming and I know it’s a long way off yet but knitting stores well and I will have plenty of other things to be fretting about come November. This is one present finished (oops, the hanger) and out of the way even if I haven’t decided know who it is for. This is my third Victorian Christmas stocking, the white is something unlabelled from out of the wardrobe and the red is a ball that was condemned to the scrap bag for pooling offences. With this one I started with a provisional cast on then came back and knitted the hem last. This was because I wasn’t certain that I had enough of the white but it works better that way. If you do the facing last after having knitted the body of the stocking then you can see when it’s long enough to cover the top of the cuff. I could aim to get the facing to end exactly in the right place to sew it to the back of the braid. When I made the other stockings I was bored rigid with knitting the facing and kidded myself that it was long enough when it wasn’t but when you can see where it needs to end there’s no excuse for knitting it too short. I knitted it as written except that I added the little diamonds before the heel to reduce the length of the floats where the leg pattern finished and I used the same needles throughout, reducing the stitches in the facing by 10% to avoid it flaring. There was plenty of white yarn left but another time I still think I’d start with a provisional cast on, it’s worth it to have the facing finish in the right place.

With my Easter stocking finished I did a bit of spinning, the green is a merino/cashmere/nylon blend spun as a chained three ply for socks. They are very Spring colours but they aren’t speaking to me right now which means they are doomed to be shop stock until I feel more Spring like or have navy dye in the pan. I stuck with chained three ply for the next bobbin even though there’s no call for maintaining the colour changes when the fibre is plain brown. I do have another 50g of this roving (brown merino/possum) but it didn’t really want to be spun fine and picking out all the bits and sticks was hard work. I don’t want to face the second half, that can go and sit in the corner with the shop until I know I have to do it. I’m intending this for gloves and there’s a fair chance that I can get a pair out of 50g of yarn so I might get to ignore the second 50g altogether.

This is as far as I got before the school holidays struck. At the moment I have a couple of ends near the middle that are misbehaving but I hope that will settle down in the next foot or so. The yarn has done exactly what I wanted it to do and (so far at least) I am well pleased. It’s clearly showing three bands of colour and I’ll be happy with that, there were five in the batt but the lighter shade between the purple and the red isn’t as obvious as the others. I’ll have to go back over my calculations because I was expecting it to be wider than it is, obviously I was limited by the yardage that I had but I’m sure that there should be less space at the edges than there is. This is probably going to sit about for the next two weeks until the school routine kicks in again, I get to admire it every time I walk past the loom and it will still be there waiting for me when I have time for it.

It’s time for me to egg wash my croissants now, another experiment with dough. Photos to follow (but probably not of the first one I made)

This is the first year that we’ve seen snow on D’s birthday. I’d like to think that in years to come we’ll be trying to remember that one freak year where there was snow on the ground because I’d hate for this to be a regular thing. I thought that this was maybe down to the curse of the thrummed hat and that if I finished that then there would be no more snow this year. I’ll let you know how that one works out for me. It’s taken so long to finish because knitting thrums has the same appeal for me as adding beads with a crochet hook, it makes knitting into a stop-start process and is no fun at all. I might have stuck it out if I had thought that I’d look stunning in it but I don’t care how cold it gets I’m never wearing it. This does not matter as it was immediately taken from my hands and adopted. I did try to take another photo showing the flaps up but that resulted in a continuous cry of “coldearscoldearscoldears” so I gave up on that one. It’s not entirely finished, I still have to trim the fluff bits and then bash them with a brush to encourage felting. Should you want to knit one of your very own it’s the Cocoknits fleeced earflap hat except that I knitted mine top down in doubled handspun with a blatant disregard for the stated tension. As an aside – see how much lighter the thrums look than the sweater – they are both from the same bag of fibre.

There was a setback with the cake. I’d planned to make a square cake then cut it and reassemble it into the shape of a creeper. The key element to this was the purchase of green and black ready to roll icing but the only colours I could find were white and pink which made the whole thing a non starter. This required a fast switch to Plan B which I’m calling “Minecraft Inspired”, the translation of which is “bears no relation to that thing that you were aiming at”. It was a chocolate and mint sponge cake and tasted very good even though it didn’t bear much resemblance to grass. We had a major icing fail, the plan was for the three shades of green frosting to emerge randomly from the icing bag but that didn’t happen, if I could turn back time I’d have frosted the top and covered it with the same crumbs as the sides thereby making it a dirt block cake. The good thing that came out of this was that I learned that freezing sponge cake makes it much easier to cut into shape and to frost and that if you bash chocolate coated chocolate chip biscuits they make a beautifully textured coating. The trick with freezing the cake is something I wish I’d known years ago – how could I get to my age without knowing that?

It looks as if the purple gradient yarn will indeed show a gradient once on the loom, this is the wound warp with the weft yarn sitting across the top. It’s been sitting on top of the loom for a couple of days now and it is showing no sign of threading itself so I suppose I’ll have to do it. It’s not made it onto my to do list though so officially it doesn’t exist.

I had hoped to show the bag I made from the not very patterned weaving I was making last week. I’ve washed it, pressed it and then was derailed by spinning and birthday cake planning so that didn’t happen. The thrummed hat is where I last left it two weeks ago, I’m not cold enough or guilty enough to get on with that just now. That leaves us with the Christmas stocking, now at the tedious heel. I’ve knitted this twice before so I knew before I started that the heel is no fun at all. It’s knitted flat so half of it is purled in pattern and some of the beaded rows are worked from the wrong side. The saving grace is that it is only seventy one stitches wide and thirty five rows long so even if I only do a few rows each night I will eventually get it finished. My knitting time is in the evenings in front of the tv so that isn’t a good fit with reading a chart. For anyone who is wondering how I can say that immediately after knitting 8″ of obviously-charted leg without complaint, well there are charts and then there are charts. The leg is a simple small pattern where all I have to do is count my way around, for example one round was 123456-3-3-3 and repeat. It doesn’t need me to look at the chart, just check now and again that the pattern is stacking up right. If I do that with the heel I have to take it back as soon as I get the right side facing me again.

Now onto the spinning, it seems to be ages since I’ve done any. Recently I’ve been making batts that change colour across the width, the set on the left is probably the one with the best photography and it shows the colour changes well (don’t bother looking for that one – it’s sold, packed and posted). You can see that there are three colours in it with some blending where they run together. When I first saw batts that looked like that I thought that they looked lovely but what would you do with them? Well now I know and I’ll share. The batts I used have three colours in four stripes but the colours are closer together, there’s a purple shade, a light lilac, a burgundy and then the light lilac again. What I’m aiming for is something like this but wider seeing as I have a bigger loom now. There’s a possibility that yet again I’ve run off down the path of “so subtle I needn’t have bothered” in which case there may be emergency embellishment ahead.

I tore stripes off the edge of the batt and set them out in order, a purple one, a purple/pink, a pink, a red, a red/pink and a pink. The narrower you make the stripes the less blending you get in each length and so you get better colour separation but I was adopting the “good enough will do” method here. I spun them in the same order that they fell in the batt, made sure that I spun the second bobbin in the same order and then plyed them to get a yarn with the same colour gradient as the original batt. I had four batts (198g) and I got a little under 700 yards of yarn. It would have been good to then show the warp on the loom but you’ll have to call back next week for that. If all goes well I’ll show you the cake I made too, if it turns out to be a plain shop bought one you’ll know that everything went horribly wrong.

My knitting time has been much reduced this week, someone here has a birthday coming up soon and I’ve been spending my evenings doing extensive present research. I could confidently represent my country on my current specialist subject of refilleable pens for the left handed. I have researched rollerballs that run on fountain pen ink, the drying speeds of various inks and the most suitable fountain pen nibs for the left handed underwriter (an underwriter meaning that you have your hand under the script, nothing at all to do with insurance). I didn’t have to research the effect of paper on drying time because when you’re at school you write on what you’re given so paper selection doesn’t come into it. I think I’m done now, decisions have been made and orders placed. The deciding factor in whether junior could successfully use a fountain pen without inking his hand was having him test drive my old fountain pen. It’s been neglected for at least ten years but a quick rinse and fill restored it to perfect working order. You will notice the lack of smudges in his writing which means that I think he will be fine with a fountain pen of his own. It was pronounced to be “less smudgy than a gel pen” which sounds fine to me given that I’m the one that buys gel pens on an all too frequent basis. My timing is spot on seeing that he has homework this week on being ecofriendly, the example of disposable gel pens versus ink balls versus fountain pens is rather more interesting to the twelve year old male than consideration of nappies.

I had fully intended to rip the Victorian Christmas stocking but when I came to take a final photo to document it the camera said that it didn’t look as shabby as I’d thought it did. It was regraded to “meets expectations” and promoted to main project although this may have had something to do with the only alternative knitting being the thrummed hat. The stocking is ok but the two sock yarns I’m using are a little thinner than the yarns I used when I made this before and the knitted fabric is on the thin side of acceptable. The red is a bit too bright and I’m not sold on the beads so overall this is not shaping up to be my most favourite thing ever. It will make an acceptable stocking but I could have done better. I know it doesn’t really matter because the only time anyone gets a mark for knitting is if it’s entered for competition but I know that it’s never going to be the best it could be. The real reason that it doesn’t really matter is that this will be leaving the house and I won’t have to see it again so it won’t have the opportunity to bug me.

I scored better with the socks and scarf from the last post. It has turned cold here and there have been mutterings in the school bus queue about how cold it is, some people are wearing two pairs of socks in an effort to keep some feeling in their toes. Those people wearing hand knitted uniform socks have toasty toes and have been very appreciative of that, so much so that I would immediately have knitted him another pair if the memory of what long feet he has wasn’t so clear in my mind. The blue scarf went off to school, I had a thank you card and a letter come home so full marks there too. I’m less thrilled with the second version, if I’d stuck to the same draft (pattern) as the last one then I think I would have had a better result. This is a more complex pattern but you’ll have to take my word for that because the warp is too busy for you to be able to see the diagonal moving the other way. I thought I might pull off the multicoloured warp by using a plain yarn for the weft but it looks like it is not to be. It still has the chance to magically redeem itself in the wash but I’m not holding my breath. I may have the fallback of making it into a bag but because I failed to write down the length of the warp I’m not altogether sure about that, it may have to end up as a rather plain scarf. Again, it doesn’t really matter because there’s only me that knows what I intended it to look like. I have learned something, produced a useable object, used some yarn from the scrap bag and enjoyed the process. “Failure to meet expectations” isn’t so damning if your expectations were unreasonably high to start with.