Wool For Brains

It may well be that you didn’t learn about entropy at school, not everyone takes to science and there are perfectly valid career paths that don’t need physics as a base. If this is you, you missed out. The first time I heard the phrase “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum” it was a revelation. It perfectly explained why it is that tidy things mess themselves up whereas nothing ever spontaneously tidies itself. I can try and blame entropy for the state of my dining table (which is a complex system as it is also the model building bench, warping board, drawing station and general heap o’stuff) and use thermodynamics to explain why it’s a waste of effort tidying it all up. I am aware that the second law of thermodynamics does not apply to dining tables but I still use it now and again as an excuse because I do feel that tidying up is a pointless exercise. Like dusting, it is a job that doesn’t stay done for long enough to admire it.

I’ve determined by observation that the cause of heaps of mess is Stuff. I’m forever trying to manage Stuff, force it into good behaviour, pack it into drawers, organise it or throw it away. I don’t know whether there are equations that describe the accumulation of Stuff and how much of it you need before it looks a mess but if anyone is planning research into this area I would suggest that they start with the bedroom of a nine year old boy. The piles of Stuff that need the most effort are Beanos, it’s a weekly comic and he keeps every one. I am not going to shame myself with a photo of the pit of doom, instead this is a photo of the first pile of comics being sorted into order. I pile them up, they fall over. I stand them up and wedge them upright, they fall over. I put them in drawers so they can’t fall over, then they take themselves out and leave themselves all over the bedroom. Disorder rules. .

I now have a winning strategy. Each book is twenty comics bound into one item. I can now stack sixty comics without anything falling off and sliding around the floor and there are now only three things to put away rather than sixty. They stand up without misbehaving and the comics are in the right order so the multipart stories follow on. If you have misbehaving Spin Offs or a slithering collection of Interweave Knits this could be a solution for you too. I bought red card but if you buy cereal in big boxes you might manage to bind your magazines without buying anything at all.

I used crochet cotton to sew them together, a pointed kitchen knife to make the holes to sew through and an ordinary darning needle (one with a point rather than a blunt ended sewing up needle). If you can sew a sleeve into a sweater then sewing together a set of magazines is nothing at all. The tricky bit is if the production style changes and the staples don’t all fall in the same place because that limits where you can place the holes for sewing. You stack them up, mark for the holes (you can use a template if you don’t want to mark the covers), open them up one at a time, stab it through to the centre, stab the covers in the same place and sew it all together (Youtube and “coptic bookbinding” will show you what you need to know)

It almost made up for the scratchy alpaca derailing the whole knitting programme for last week.

There is no new knitting, there has been a variety of it for a brief period of time but none that survived. I’ve cast on three different things this week and I ripped them all on the same day that I started them. I made the yarn especially for one project but even that didn’t make it through. The yarn will live another day, it’s not my usual colours but I like it well enough to see it as a hat or mittens.

This also had a false start. The last time I used Wendy Happy as both warp and weft I wasn’t altogether happy with it (groan). I liked the stripes in the warp but not in the weft. With this I’d planned for a solid weft but as Happy doesn’t come in a solid I picked a mercerised cotton 4 ply in the same shade of green. I spent the first three inches convincing myself that it looked fine but it wasn’t. The cotton was the right colour but it was just a bit too thick and it swamped the colour changes in the warp. I still don’t like the stripes but I like them better than the solid. This is going to be another bag, when I warped it I had planned it to be another one strip bag but I’ve since had another idea. Hopefully I’ll be able to split this into four identical pieces for a simple lined bag with warp faced straps. This is dependent on me not coming across a knot in the second ball because otherwise getting a match is going to be tricky.

The sketch is in my new knitty book. I commissioned the covers from the junior art department, they would have been better if I’d glued them to the board and then turned them over to the picture maker, as it was I didn’t want to glue them down in case the colours ran. I really liked the sock gun at the top, I hinted for a sweater cannon but he didn’t like the idea of that one. he numbered the pages for me too, with little socks or balls of yarn around the numbers.

That was my second book, my first one looks better because I took my time over it (I still got the back cover on upside down though). This has lined paper for recording where it all went wrong, plain paper for sketching the sweater you saw on the bus and graph paper for plotting lace and fairisle patterns. I’m working up to fabric covers because I can sew much better than I can glue. The first one was a no-glue production because I used fusible web throughout. It sticks quilting fabric to cardboard very well indeed and I managed not to make a mess of the iron. You can also see my main achievement this week – completion of my tax return.

I finished up all the little socks, I ended up with twelve including two red ones with white toes and cuffs. Once I’d done with them I moved on to little leaves. These are from the Vintage Leaves kit that I got last Christmas, I made a large one shortly after I’d got it and decided that one was quite enough. These are the small ones and they are altogether much more fun than the large ones. The idea is that these will end up on a book cover, once I’ve worked out longstitch binding. The white one was the prototype in some scrap yarn that I’ll dye later.

I have a snivelling cold and it’s half term next week so I might be disappearing for longer than normal. Everyone keep their fingers crossed that I find something interesting to knit in the meantime.