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)

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 major achievements last week were the purchase of football boots, black trousers and white shirts. From that you can deduce that it has been half term for the growing school child. The week’s shopping turned out to be less stressful than my baking, which is usually not the case at all. I made some macarons which would have been better if I’d not explored the other functions on the oven and burnt them. The setting that the manual said was “especially good for baking” appears to really be “especially good for baking much hotter than the normal fan setting”. Apart from that they were not bad for a first attempt especially after they’d stood for three days and absorbed some of the liquid from the filling. I made a peach and blueberry dessert which looked lovely when I saw it on a repeat of Great British Bake Off but which failed to deliver. I lost faith in the recipe when the first layer (of three) overflowed from the two litre dish that the recipe specified. If I was ever making it again I’d halve everything and substitute a basic crumble topping seeing as mine was soggy rather than crumbly (I have a suspicion that there was too much butter in relation to the flour and sugar). I was on safe ground with the pasta, bread and pizza and they vanished so quickly that this is the only photo I have.

I finished the second pair of green and black socks for Daniel proving that you can get two pairs of socks from 100g of black. With a blatant disregard for my eyesight I cast on for a third pair of black and leftovers. The current black yarn comes in 50g balls so one ball will make a pair of socks. I’ve found out that I don’t have enough light at night to count rows or pick up stitches but the rest of the time plain round and round socks don’t need a lot of looking at and I get on well enough.

I took this photo two weeks ago and Ophidian is exactly the same size now.  It turned out to be a non starter because of the yarn. It’s a very slick superwash and I know that it’s not going to hold a block for five minutes so although I like the colour and the beads I have to concede that it’s a waste of time knitting it into anything lacy. I will rip it and put it back into the sock yarn drawer for another day. It’s difficult when you can’t touch what you are buying because not all superwash merino is as slick as this,  I’ve knitted this pattern twice before with sock yarn but that wasn’t the same super slippery sock yarn as I have now.

I had some fun with the carder, I made a couple of batts from natural coloured fibre and some more from wool that I’d dyed. I have the feeling with these that I’m making something from nothing because I take little bits of fibre and make them into a big lump of something (or sometimes into other little bits of fibre).  I did manage to make a significant impact on the bag of wool this week because I looked in it rather than just pulling things from the top. In the bottom was 500g of undyed fibre that belonged in a totally different bag. As if by magic the carding bag immediately became big enough to hold its contents and stopped slithering lumps of silk onto the floor.

I have to go and root through the stash now, I’ve bought a pattern that knits to three stitches to the inch on huge needles and it’s a fair bet that I have no suitable yarn. I suspect that it’s going to be character building seeing as it’s so far away from what I usually knit, I also suspect that I’m going to be holding three strands of yarn together.

I have the BBC weather page permanently in the background, the good news is that for us there’s only light snow in the forecast. Someone had told my son that there would be 10″ falling last night and I tried my best to convince him that it might be true in some places but not here. He wouldn’t listen and was disappointed to open the curtains this morning and find that it was school as usual. Told you so. Even though we’re not knee deep in snow it is still cold and windy. At times like this I think wool is a fantastic resource and the more of it I can cram on before I leave the house the better. If I have to stand idly about while my companion sniffs at lamp posts at least I can be warm while doing it. The weak point in my armour is my gloves, I didn’t knit them and I suspect that they have little or no wool in them because they aren’t very warm. This would normally have me casting on for fingers but my maternal instinct has taken over. The child must be kept warm and wrapped in wool, even though he wanders about in shirt sleeves all year around it doesn’t stop me from trying to wrap him up.

I had always intended to work this sweater from the bottom up. Top down would mean that I need to think about the collar first and I wasn’t ready for that so bottom up was the better option. I kept asking him the occasional  question – do you want a hood? what about a kangaroo pocket? long cuffs with a thumb hole? but I seem to have got it right with the first sketch. All the time I was spinning the yarn I was looking at patterns to see if there was anything else I wanted to incorporate into this sweater. I came across the Cambridge jacket very early on and it was almost exactly what I wanted, it’s got a full length zip and no ribbing at the bottom but that’s not exactly hard to change. That gave me another option in that I could amend that pattern rather than starting off with a blank sheet of paper.

There comes a point when it’s not worth the effort, if you have to modify a pattern too much then you might as well work it up from scratch because it’s just as much work. The clincher was the yarn. The Cambridge jacket is designed for a tension of 19.5 stitches per four inches and my handspun knitted to 20 stitches to four inches. Suddenly it made a lot of sense to make minor amendments to someone else’s pattern especially as it got me out of having to come up with the collar. If my sweater is going to end up looking vaguely like someone else’s design then it might as well be that design I use because I don’t make a point of ripping off other people’s work and I’m not going to start now. It’s going to need some adjustments to the sizing, I’ve already changed the bottom of the body and closed up the front but it’s all minor stuff. I’m already thinking about the sleeves and I’m considering working them down to the cuff. I’ve never worked a sleeve down with short row sleeve cap shaping so that will be something new to look forward to.

The other thing I’m looking forward to is finishing the socks I have on the needles because I really do need new gloves.

This is the result of my first plying session. I took a shortcut with sampling because I found the piece of cardboard with a length of single wrapped around it that I used when I made the yarn for my Celtic Dreams sweater. I made a length of four ply yarn first which is what I thought I wanted seeing as that’s what I used last time but it didn’t speak to me at all and I preferred the three ply version. I didn’t knit the four ply because I knew it was going nowhere but I knitted the three ply to see if it looked like a sweater. It was slightly underplied but even so it looked respectable on a 4mm needle. The bottom of the piece was on a 4.5mm needle and it wasn’t bad for a first guess but it wasn’t right. You are probably thinking that this is a very small swatch to be basing a sweater on and you’d be right but this isn’t the swatch that determines the tension for the sweater, this is the swatch that tells me whether I’m making the right sort of yarn. The next swatch will be bigger. It may be sleeved shaped but it will be bigger.

I did fill six bobbins before I started plying although some were more full than others because I was pretty keen to see the yarn. The last two suffered from my impatience and were rather skimpy and perhaps not entirely full by any reasonable definition. I ended up with two skeins of about 220 yards apiece from about four bobbins of single. There’s a lot of “about” in there but seeing as I don’t know what yardage I want for a sweater I have no pattern for then I can’t see the point in knowing exactly how much I have. My rough guess is that I’ll need a bit under 1200 yards so I know that I have about a third of what I need so I’m not anywhere near the magical point of “enough”. If I fill these six bobbins again and ply everything then I should get another three similar skeins which will take me to the 1,000 yard mark and that’s close enough to be starting with.

I’m planning on having a contrast edging so that’s what I’ll need for the cast on row. Again I have no idea how much I will need but it won’t be a lot so although I bought 100g of the lovely dark wool I’ve only spun 30g of it. This is wool from Wingham Woolwork, its from a flock bred from NZ Halfbred and Romney and comes in two grades and four colours. This is the black which is the normal sheep black known to the rest of the world as brown. It’s been tested on merino boy and deemed to be “not scratchy” so that’s a win. I’d quite like it to be really black but the only fibre I’ve had that was truly black would be too harsh or alpaca so that’s out. My reasoning behind the contrast edge is that if he grows out of the sleeves first then it will be easy to take out the original contrast edge and knit down. The reality is that there will be little to no chance of me keeping any of the original yarn so I’m planning ahead to avoid having to match the original grey. If I need to work the contrast in a different dark shade it won’t matter, I’ll take out the edging on the sleeves and the body, add some length to the sleeves, reknit the body trim and call it good. If the new contrast doesn’t match the old yarn at the neckline it’s far enough away for it not to be too noticeable. It might seem overkill to be planning on extending the life of a sweater that I haven’t started yet but young males who are nearly 13 grow like weeds in the night.

I didn’t finish the socks, I started something else instead. This is the cashmere that I spun before Christmas now dyed in Crunchie colours and on its way to being a Honey cowl. I know that some knitters have fallen down the rabbit hole with this pattern and made one after another but I’m pretty sure that this one is my last. I know that I get three rows of fabric for every four that I knit because of the slip stitch rows but it doesn’t feel like a four to three ratio. It feels more like a two to one. Either I’ve slowed down a lot over Christmas or there’s something mindbending going on here. In some alternate reality I must be turning out piles of these because I find it hard to believe that I can knit for so long to produce so little. When it’s finished (if it ever is) it will be going straight into the gift heap to replace the cowl that was a music teacher gift in 2012.

I had to complain about the lack of daylight didn’t I? My preventative measures of snow tyres and my stockpile of frozen milk, dried yeast and bread flour might be enough to stop a single flake from falling providing I could keep my mouth shut. No, I had to whinge about the lack of light. When those grey clouds have finished unloading snow and the sun comes out (tomorrow, according to the forecast) then it should be very bright indeed.

I’m trundling through the wool for Dan’s sweater, it’s not going as quickly as I thought it should although some days are more productive than others. It took me until the third bobbin to work out why that was and it turned out not to be down to shuffling laundry as I first thought. In the summer I can start spinning as soon as the resident child sets off for the bus which is about 7.55am and I’m usually sat at the wheel when he comes in at 3.40. He probably thinks I spend all day sitting in the window, spinning and drinking tea while watching the dog do the ironing. Sunrise this week is about the 8.15 mark and sunset around 4.10 except that on many days the whereabouts of the sun is a mystery, the gloom slowly brightens to grey and then goes back to gloom again. If the sky is blue I get the chance of at least an hour more spinning time in my day and that’s the difference between struggling to fill one bobbin and getting bored after one and a half. I’ve promised myself that I’ll wait until I’ve filled six bobbins before I start plying, that way I’ll end up with two big skeins of four ply yarn which should get me a long way up the sweater. I still haven’t got a pattern for the sweater (I’m currently pondering the addition of underarm gussets) but then I haven’t got six bobbins of wool or the contrast yarn for the edges so there’s no hurry.

My sock progress has also been much slower than I’d expected. I’ve knitted the heel of this three times, once because it was too pointy (I did more short rows than I needed) and then when I’d reknitted that I found that my perfectly formed heel was in the wrong place. That meant taking out the heel again and the 30 rounds before it to then reknit the 24 round gusset and the mark three heel. I find it harder to place the heel than to place the toe and that’s why I usually work socks cuff downwards. There was less yardage in this yarn so toe up made more sense but I didn’t enjoy it. I get the feeling that it takes longer knitting them that way around, which of course it does if you have to knit three heels in the one sock.

I can tell you’re surprised to see these, there must be a regular reader at the back who just choked on her tea. Yes, they are teatowels and (roll of drums) I’m pleased with them. Cotton, warp faced, 60 epi – no of course I didn’t weave them. I don’t have the eyesight, the skill or enough heddles for that number of ends. I sold some wool and used the money to buy the teatowels which seemed an altogether more painless way of doing things. There are a few left, not many though, so if you want one run over here. I got sick of looking at the teatowel warp on the loom, I’ve been looking at it over Christmas and I can’t face starting it again. I’ve put the cross back in it and chained it up as I took it off the loom, carefully labelled it with the width and sett and what I think is wrong with it (not enough contrast, not stripy enough, too bland) and packed it away. My future self can deal with it some other time, I’m looking forward to weaving a nice wool scarf or three.

I’m making up for the lack of colour in the last post – this time I’ve got all of them. Admittedly there’s only a small bit of yellow but you only need a bit because it does tend to shout. This fetching yellow and green combo came about because they were the first two balls that came to hand, it’s just a bit of test knitting (aka “swatch”) and the colours weren’t important. The yellow was one of the first balls to hand because I hadn’t put it away but I’m not at all sure what it was that I ever got it out for. I looked back through my recent projects and I’m no wiser now.

The yellow would have gone into this circle scarf if it had been in the bag of sock yarn leftovers but as it is I’m relying on the orange to do all the shouting. This seemed like a good idea for tv knitting, a circle with four rows knit, wrap and turn and four rows knit the other way. Repeat until done. It’s different on both sides because the curl of the stockinette/reverse stockinette means that you only see the reverse stockinette on each side in exactly the same way that you tend to see only one face of ribbing. If you look at the front piece the top orange stripe is about an inch down from the edge, the orange stripe on the piece at the back (the inside of the loop) is a different stripe about two inches down and you can’t see the other stripe at all. It’s a neat idea but it means that you have twice as much knitting to do to produce a given depth of fabric. If I’d thought it through before I started then I’d have made it dark on one side and light on the other rather than using the same yarns on both sides of the work. As it was it didn’t have the necessary impact to effort ratio and I stopped as soon as I could.

That’s red, orange and yellow covered, next up is green. I produced these at short notice for Dan to wear while playing outside with the band for the switching on of the lights in town. My original idea of short fingers had to be shelved, I finished them at 10.30 at night and I couldn’t face knitting fingers between then and 9.30 the next morning. Knitting with black in November was just as much fun as you imagine it would be, the new light we bought recently had a good workout. I am happy with them, I’d be happier still if I could have eliminated those lines in the thumb gusset but I was asking too much of the fabric. At that point there are only two rounds in the thumb for the four rounds in the hand because of me slipping the other coloured stitches in the single coloured rounds. I had hoped that my messing about with slipped stitches would be invisible but it wasn’t. I think that the universal reaction will be “Look, Creepers” and not “Look at those dark lines across the thumb” so it’s good.

Next I have blue with a side helping of more green and orange. The white skeins on the far right should have been red but they were in the wrong house when I started dyeing and I’ll have to catch up with them next week. One will be a strong red-red and the other a darker blue-red, that’s the plan anyway. It’s possible that some of the greens may be changing colour, I’m not convinced that the two yellow-greens are yellow enough, my thoughts on this vary according to the lighting. This is most of the yarn from the last post, the yak/silk is still natural but everything else hit the dye pan. The grey is the camel/merino, I’d have to touch them to tell you which of the others are 50% angora and which are 20%. It’s starting to look as if I have a plan for these and indeed I do but I’m still two colours away from starting.

I have indigo and violet too with another dose of blue. This is falkland, dyed for a swap but if it doesn’t fly there then it will be going into shop stock for a while. Ordinarily I’d keep it for me but I’ve done that twice over the last couple of weeks. The thicker yarn is the sample for a hat, the thinner was done to keep me busy while sitting at a craft fair and the small pink was the leftovers plied with something that has been sat on a bobbin for months. It’s falkland fibre that failed the grade for the shop, the blue/brown/grey one was supposed to be man colours of navy, black and a rich reddish brown and it failed by producing an unacceptable blue. I can’t remember now what I thought was wrong with the brown, orange and burgundy fibre, it’s made a lovely coloured yarn despite me thinking that it was a failure.

Today is a lovely sunny day which means it’s time to see how best to fix the warping errors I made last. It’s a good start if you can actually see what it is that you’re supposed to be doing.

I had to wait (and wait, and wait) for my Bohus book to get here, before Amazon had even dispatched it I’d blended and spun the first 100g of test fibre. My first attempt was to see just how much angora was enough. I was doomed when I pulled the angora out of the bag and found that it had felted. Badly. I tried to pull it apart and then used it anyway in the hope that the bunny lumps would ply away. I made a skein of 76/24 falkland/angora in the hope that there would be enough angora in it to give it a halo. It’s ok, it does have a halo of sorts and the bunny bumps did look marginally better once plied. All in all I think I’d prefer it with more of a halo than I got with 20% of angora (I know I started with 24% but there were major lumps of clotted rabbit left on me, the floor and the curtains) and I’d like it thinner and less lumpy.

I thought that my book might come the next day but it didn’t so I made another skein just like the first. To avoid further frustration I threw the rest of the angora in the bin so I couldn’t be tempted into a third skein. I had a moment’s reflection after binning the bunny and looked out the vicuna that I got for Christmas last year. Of all the things I have stashed that would be the most upsetting if it too had felted itself in the bag. I don’t have to worry about that now because I’ve had the fun from it. I love the way that the photo lies to you, with nothing there to provide scale you wouldn’t know that this is a tiny skein of 45 yards/9g. That is not a typo, there is a whole 9g here. I started with 10g but had a snap close to the end when plying and without thinking I threw that little bit in the bin. This is the stuff that makes cashmere look cheap, that 10g cost £8.17, cashmere fibre is £10/100g and plain old wool-from-a-sheep runs around the £2 mark. I spun it straight from the bag with no preparation and it behaved itself really well. I have no idea what I’ll do with 45 yards of vicuna other than pet it but at least now I don’t have to worry about it making itself into expensive felt while my back is turned.

I was then still waiting for the fibre to come in the post, that particular supplier is usually lightening fast but the one time when I needed something in a hurry (ok, so it was “wanted” rather than “needed”) it took a week from order to delivery. I had a root through the stash to see if anything else had turned to felt while I was ignoring it, it all looks to be good because there’s no more angora in there. I came out holding 100g of a yak/silk blend which looked to be perfect in every respect so I spun that too.

With perfect timing the postie brought my fibre just as I wound off the yak. The 50/50 angora merino top was easier to spin than the stuff I’d carded, there was less ending up my nose but it still shed everywhere. I didn’t like spinning the 50/50 camel merino and the colour limits what shades I can dye it so this is certainly the last of that blend. If I had to spin more then I’d start by carding it, it just wasn’t blended enough and I fought with the camel which accounts for there only being 330 yards here rather than the 400 yards I was aiming for. Again the yarn has not been finished, I plan to dye it so I couldn’t see the point of drying a wet skein only to have to dry it again later.

What have we learned this week? In no particular order:

Leaving angora in a bag away from heat and agitation can still make you a lump of felt.
I can produce yarn at 400 yards/100g without much thought.
Carding angora makes me sneeze.
For a fluffy yarn I prefer spinning angora merino to camel merino.
I can spin vicuna.
Undyed yarn makes for pretty boring photographs (although I think I knew that already).

Next time – less learning, more dyeing.

I must admit that recently my sampling programme had turned into more of a fleece collecting activity. The sprawling heap in the front bedroom had spawned from lots of plastic bags all with small amounts of fleece in them. Plastic bags do not stack well, it’s not hard to work out that the lack of friction and weird shape make them poor substitutes for bricks so I don’t know why I kept on trying to build them into a neat pile. Eventually I stopped repeating the same doomed behaviour and tried corralling them in a bag but they escaped whenever I rummaged in the heap for something else. During the period when I was a slave to the todo list the task of “card white wool” was right up there in the top five (along with “tidy wool heap”) until I realised that it was never going to happen until I felt like it and I just crossed it off the list rather than letting it nag me. There was always going to be a day when I felt like it and it turned out to be Saturday.

I gathered up all the bags I could find (which I know isn’t all of them because I can remember some of the breeds that I’m missing), cleaned the carder really well and set to work. As usual with things that I keep putting off it turned out to be a much smaller job than I had anticipated. If I’d opened the bags and seen that some of them were commercial roving then I could have spun them months ago rather than waiting until the carder was really clean. I spun all ten samples on Saturday after carding about half of them. In no particular order these are Navajo Churro, California Variegated Mutant, California Red, Hog Island, East Fresian, Norfolk Horn, Charollais, Clun Forest, Rygja and Targhee. I’m certain that’s what they are even though I spun them all onto the same bobbin because of my rigorous labeling and because I was careful to alternate colours and fine/down/pan scrubber breeds. A bit of purple merino in between each one marked the transition so there was no chance of running two down breeds together. There’s not much Hog Island, I did have more but it was like spinning drier lint and I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for carrying on with it. I understand that one fleece cannot represent a breed but on the basis of this one I hope they taste good.  I split the leftovers into 20g chunks, listed them on Etsy and had them in the post on Monday which made this a very effective tidying up exercise.

I needed the distraction on Saturday because I was doing my best impression of an anxious parent and spinning seemed to be a better outlet than pacing the floor. I am having trouble accepting that my baby is old enough to audition for anything even though he’s shown that he’s old enough to make the decision, old enough to fill in the application form and old enough to knuckle down and practice. It will be nearly Christmas before we find out whether he’s got a place and there aren’t enough samples to see me through to then even if I do manage to find the remaining ones. I’m planning on forgetting all about it with the aid of a new book, I think that a dabble into Bohus knitwear will take my mind off the wait combining as it does the two major time sucks of spinning tiny yarn and knitting it on tiny needles. When I began writing this post I was anticipating being able to show you a photo of the front cover now but although I was expecting it yesterday it’s still not arrived. It’s still providing a distraction though, while I’m muttering about postal delays I’m not calculating the chances of junior getting a place.

The teatowels are woven, washed, pressed, sewn, cut, hemmed and given away. They came out better than I was expecting, while the cloth was wound on the roller the edges went up in an alarming way \____/ and it didn’t bode well. As soon as I cut it off the stripes settled to being straight and it immediately looked better. While it went round in the washer I looked back at my notes to see how many teatowels I thought I should get from the length. I wound a 4.5 yard warp and planned to get four, each woven to 32″ long. The first one is long gone, it flew off to Canada weeks ago so I was hoping to get three towels from the remaining length and that’s what happened. The second one I wove was the same dark green as the first but when I came to start the next one I realised that the light green was really too light to work with the white warp. I could have cut the light out and gone back to the darker thread but stripes promised to be more fun so I kept striping until I’d nearly run out of warp.

All teatowels have now left the building. Although they weren’t as bad as I’d expected they weren’t good enough to give away to anyone other than my mother so I’m still short of the Christmas presents that I’d planned these to be. I’ve dropped the extra bits off the sides and I’ll resley the leftover warp for plain weave. I should be able to run off something simple and striped quickly enough to wrap up for this Christmas. This is assuming that I manage to resist the lure of the eight shaft project with strong vertical stripes that is currently calling me. I know that it would be fun to design, I know it would be better by being that bit wider but I also know that I could get the plain weave ones woven in the time it would take me to rethread. Simple towels now, fancy towels afterwards. It’s too long a slogan for a t shirt, more’s the pity.

Look what the shop bought me this month, lots of coloured string with plenty of potential for stripes. The yarn I already had is at the back, the new yarn is at the front. I’ve had yarn samples and price lists for a year but in the face of so much choice I’ve been unable to pick anything. I get the samples out, choose some colours, then put it all away again. I know that it’s perfectionism creeping in, I can’t settle on colours A and B because C and F might look even better together. Faced with a shade chart I can’t decide what the best combination would be so I end up choosing nothing at all. These came all together, I bought a box of someone else’s leftovers so I didn’t have to dither for months over what colours to choose, those were the colours, take them or leave them. Now that I have a smaller palette to play with I’m having no trouble putting them together in interesting ways.

The shop was very generous buying me the coloured string, I suspect that it has an agenda of its own and it thinks that it will soon be adding teatowels to its inventory. It needs to face reality, I’ve lost track of the number of failed teatowel projects but it’s certainly a number bigger than three so it may be buying me string for a while longer before I produce something that I’m happy with. In the mean time I am repaying it by spinning it these, black Corriedale and grey and white Falkland. This is the first thing I’ve dizzed off the new carder and it worked really well. I’m not sure why I thought it wouldn’t work but seeing as this was for me to spin rather than for sale it didn’t matter if I broke the roving while getting it off the carder. It was fine, it looks lovely and I can’t wait to spin it.