It’s taken me two weeks to get far enough down the to do list to feel happy about frittering my time away sitting and carding wool even though “make batts for shop” was actually on the list (and still is on the list because I haven’t done it. Yet). For anyone who is taking notes, I have a new drum carder. It’s more than a couple of weeks old now but I’ve not been counting it as mine until I’d sold the other one. I was for a brief period a two-carder household but the Ashford is now in its new home where I hope it will be busy and happy. The big advantage of the new one is that the handle doesn’t extend beyond the base which means that I can plonk it in the middle of the table and sit down. At the moment my once-dodgy knee is behaving itself because I’ve given up sandals in favour of sensible lace up supportive shoes and so I have no trouble standing to card. There have been times recently when standing has not been an option and that’s when I made the decision to change carders. This is a Jumbo Classic carder and my Etsy shop has bought it for me. Wasn’t that nice of it? I suspect that Santa will be bringing me the smoothing brush for it in due course (get your heads together dear family members because two would be one too many).

One of the things on my to do list is “tidy wool heap” and that’s still there because I haven’t done it. Yet. This yarn helped a bit in that it moved two things out of the wool heap and into the yarn bins by way of the carder and the wheel. Back in February 2011 I knitted two baby blankets from handspun superwash bfl, one was turquoise and the other slightly greener. I’d dyed three batches of fibre but one was a reject because the colour just kept on running. I know turquoise does do that but this just ran and ran. I decided that I’d dye more for the baby blankets, I’d keep the runny batch for me and either wash the yarn until it ran clear or heat it with acid to try to set the dye. Months passed and for reasons that are lost in time I decided to card the runny turquoise with some jade silk. The batts have sat in a bag ever since and when I dusted off the wheel I decided that they would be the first thing to go through it, if for no other reason than it took a bag off the floor.  Also in the wool heap was a 40g length of superwash merino and shiny nylon that I’d dyed an apple green so I tidied that through the carder with the bfl/silk batts.  I really enjoyed spinning it, I haven’t sat and spun in months, not since I suspected it of causing my dodgy knee (it turned out that the cause was spending the day barefoot rather than spending the day spinning). The funny thing was that when I came to finish the yarn I was expecting the water to flood with blue and it didn’t. I know that I kept this wool because it ran so I can’t explain how it is that the rinse water was crystal clear.

I did flag a bit once the sleeves were joined in, the rows seemed very long and there was a lot of knitting before the first decrease row of the yoke. Now that I’m decreasing merrily towards the neck I’m enjoying this again. I haven’t decided whether this is going to have a collar or not but I can think about that when I get there. I also haven’t decided whether I’m going to use the leftover light yarn together with the bfl/merino/silk/nylon I just made, I think it needs a touch more green in it to work well. I’m not convinced that I want to make another of these, half of the stitches are increases or decreases and there’s not enough meditative (“plodding along”) knitting for me. I would have been happier knitting simple stockinette stripes but then it wouldn’t have looked like I imagined it. If you want to make your stripes bend then you have to work at it, you can’t have plain knitting and chevrons too.

I now have space in my wardrobe (a bag of clothes weighed in for recycling), space in cupboards (unused crockery rehomed via ebay) and space in the dining room (condensed toy storage leading to a reshuffle of furniture). More importantly, I now have space on my to do list. It took all of last week to get the list onto one page. It wasn’t that I was slacking – I did one job and then saw four others that needed doing so although I was busy, busy, busy the list kept getting longer. After a fun packed day on Tuesday I finally gained on it and I now have everything on one page and some empty lines on the bottom. I still haven’t put paint onto walls but I’m getting closer. As you can see I have been fully supported in this by Mr Fluffy who can be seen here closely supervising me in the washing down of paintwork while hogging the only spot of sunlight.

I’ve created some more space in my spinning corner by turning the big pile of fluffy batts into scarves. For the warp for the first one I found a cone of leftover wool that I thought was lively enough to work with the brown yarn – it wasn’t and it produced a scarf that is the right size, suitably soft for going next to a neck but top of the class in dull and boring. I think it can be rescued by crochet sunflowers but at the moment it is too plain to photograph. I went looking for a bag that I knew I had in a safe place somewhere. Once upon a time I bought some twinkly sparkly yarns in browns and creams with the idea of knitting a throw. When I got them home sanity set in and I realised that I didn’t want a throw, didn’t want to knit a throw and didn’t like knitting with multistrand yarn because it’s too splitty. The bag of yarn has been in the wardrobe ever since waiting for its time to shine. I used the multistranded yarn as warp, the brown handspun as weft and I like these scarves much better than the first one. I made three scarves before the sparkle ran out. At that point there were still some batts left unspun, enough to make the weft for another couple of scarves. My options were

a) hunt out more warp yarn and keep on going,
b) pack the remnants back into the wardrobe or
c) throw the rest of the batts in the bin and move on.

I’m not saying which option I went for but I’m done with brown scarves.

There have been a few nights where after a full day of scrubbing things I’ve just been glad to sit down and sit there until it’s time to crawl to bed so there’s nowhere near as much knitting to show as I’d expect in ten days. I did start off intending to make mittens from leftover sock yarn but I wasn’t feeling the love for these, they are on the large side of acceptable and I didn’t like the thumb pattern in this yarn. I stopped as soon as was possible and made them into fingerless mitts. I don’t like fingerless mitts but they’re not for me so what does it matter? I’m still trundling around with the second one, it feels like a chore but I’ve started so I’ll finish. It’s not enough of a chore to make it onto the to do list though, I’m keeping those lines free for proper jobs.

When faced with twenty six rounds of no fun I did what every sensible knitter would do in this position – set that project aside and cast on for something else. The mitts will get finished, I’ll take them as a music school project because when I have nothing else to work on they will get done. The fun knitting is bootees. My excuse for this is that I’ve never knitted any so although I don’t know anyone in need of bootees I feel I can justify these in terms of the experience. It’s a feeble excuse but it’s the only one I have. When I’ve knitted the other one my excuse for a second pair will be that I’ve never knitted them from the sole up.

Next week should be the one where the paint meets the ceiling and hopefully just the ceiling and not the floor, my hair or the dog. By the time I return I should have three fresh looking ceilings, two matching fingerless mittens and possibly a bag of bootees.

I didn’t realise that I had a colour theme this week, not until I saw the photos. It seems as if my subconscious has been choosing yarns with an autumn theme without me really noticing.

First up are the gloves for me. The junior hand model is retiring after this, he’s an inch taller than me now and I’m not convinced that he got these on the right hands. They have everything I want in a glove – a gusset, cuddly wool and no colour changes that give me Frankenstein’s fingers. I don’t like them as much as the handspun merino/camel/silk that I lost but the big advantage of these is that I have two of them so don’t need to keep one hand in a pocket all winter. Knitting the fingers was nowhere as bad as I remember it being last time but I’d forgotten that there would be that many ends to sew in.

As I thought, there was enough yarn left for a pair of child’s mittens. They’re a bit small for adult sized hands but if I’d made them much bigger I’d have run out of yarn. I liked this pattern and I might knit it again (and again and again). For a child’s mitten it has two big advantages, there’s no left and right and the rib accommodates a big range of sizes. These are the spiral rib mittens from “Homespun Handknit” and although they don’t have a gusset (one of my usual requirements for gloves and mittens) they seem to fit very well, probably because of the rib.

I had to fire the junior hand model for sneakily turning into an adult size while I had my back turned but he might be reassigned to photography. This photo was well framed (I cropped my head off), level and in focus. There was a bit of yarn left from the gloves and mittens, it’s gone in the leftover bag that I had out after making this scarf. This is the shorter version, I sometimes make a longer one that will go around the neck in another loop but it’s not that cold that I felt the need. This is all handspun yarn except for the sparkly twinkly one. I added beads to one section but as usual went down the route of “so subtle I needn’t have bothered”. If the yarn had been darker or a different colour it would have worked better but small gold beads on a mid brown ground don’t stand out all that well. I have enough yarn left to make at least one more, maybe two but I’m putting it away for now because I have something more pressing to be doing.

Some time ago I bought two Ryeland fleeces, one was lovely soft crimpy fibre but full of short cuts and rubbish. What I would advise everyone else to do with shabby fleece is to cut their losses, dump it in the bin and save their valuable time for something worthwhile. I don’t always follow my own advice so what I did was spin half into a nice even four ply yarn by picking out every nepp and burr. I thought I’d spun it all but later I found another box full hiding in the garage. I couldn’t face picking over the second half of the fleece so I’ve carded it with some orange and I’m planning to spin it lumps and all. That is so totally alien to me that I suspect that it will be character building, it will certainly teach me to stop buying dodgy fleece. I think this has potential to be weft yarn for some soft and textured scarves, if they are heavily fulled the bumps should stay put rather than pilling out. The second fleece was much coarser, I thought I’d carded it all up and made it into a rug but the blog (which has a better memory than I do) says not. It’s either still lurking in the garage or I showed some sense and binned it.

If I vanish for a couple of weeks you may imagine me happily running that pile of brown through the wheel and then the loom. In reality the likelihood is that I’m tackling the very long to do list that greets me every September. I’ve no excuse for not tackling all those jobs that I’ve been putting off until school starts and because I’ve been putting jobs off I now have a list that reaches to the bottom of the page and includes the redecoration of two rooms. I considered how to split the list into long jobs and short jobs, woolly jobs and boring jobs and was working out how to set a weekly target when I caught myself. That’s just procrastinating, it all needs doing and it doesn’t matter where I start.

I could at a pinch get away with calling this gold, it’s bright and shiny but too yellow to be copper. This was a set of batts that fell out of the shop, no-one wanted them – their loss, my gain. They were bfl and merino, copper angelina and orange tencel so managed to be soft as well as bright and shiny. I spun and plied them while sitting at a craft fair, it’s hasty yarn, woollen, imprecise and quick. Somewhere in the stash bins I have a bright yellow/orange and a pumpkin orange/brown and I’m seeing them all in the same warp with a plain weft. The significance of this particular skein is that it is evidence of spinning – the treadling embargo is over. My dodgy knee had nothing to do with treadling and everything to do with my move into sandals. Once I’d reverted to lace up shoes the knee of pain was no more.

That meant that I could finish the last few inches of the first teatowel. I cut the first one off because I was unsure what the last inch at each edge would look like. There’s a warp chain at each edge that isn’t wound on the back beam but weighted separately. If I get the tension of the chains the same as in the body of the piece then there shouldn’t be any visible difference in the weaving. It looked passable on the loom but I wasn’t entirely convinced, certainly not convinced enough to weave another four tea towels. As it was, it came out well enough on both sides and I can continue with the rest happy in the knowledge that I’m not wasting my time. I know now that I can weight a warp chain and tension it the same as the rest but I’d have to have a good reason to do it again. It’s a faff having to fill two water bottles every time I want to weave and to keep on moving them as the warp winds on and now that I’ve learned the lesson I’m trying to find a good excuse not to continue doing it. It’s made a nice sized teatowel and seeing as I don’t want to lose 2″ off the width I’m stuck with the water bottles until the end of the warp. That may be a while as we’re only half way through the school holidays.

This does look better in its second incarnation, it was the light green that I didn’t like and leaving that out fixed it for me. The light green is also fixed in that it is now olive and brown and back in the bag of sock scraps. From the front it looks like a baby surprise jacket but the back is plain vertical stripes. It’s a DROPS pattern (b20-15) and it’s made in two pieces with sleeve and side seams and a join at centre back. I ended up with the first size, 20″, by using the stitch count for the third size and the lengths for the first size. I have knitted sock yarn before at six stitches per inch and I didn’t like it, I prefer the fabric that results from knitting it at seven stitches per inch. There’s only one thing I don’t like about this pattern and that’s the amount of overlap on the fronts. If I knit it again I’ll stop the increases a few rows earlier which will make the fronts narrower and shorter and then add a few more rows at the bottom to make the fronts the same length as the back. It’s likely that I will knit it again because it eats up left over sock yarn and I could do with more of that.

It turns out that there was a Scouting badge for cheering on the Olympic torch, who knew? It’s the same badge you get if you were a scout (or even Chief Scout) who was actually carrying a torch. Although it’s not my badge (I am resisting the call to uniform) I feel suitably rewarded for writing the absence letter to school, standing in the rain and trekking backwards and forwards four times across a village I’ve never been to before. There would have been less trekking if I’d realised that I was walking along three sides of a square to get to where I wanted to be but then I was unprepared and didn’t have a map (see, totally unfit for the uniform).

There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the fingertip towel, the sett was right, it was exactly the finished measurements given in the pattern (=tiny) and it seemed to be suitably absorbent. I liked the colours together, the lighter warp yarn (the one I’m still not confessing to buying) was lovely and the green was acceptable. As a sample it was fine but one fingertip towel was enough. It was just so small that I couldn’t see a use for it but my mother could and it is now the smallest table runner in the world. The remaining warp had more potential as a dummy warp than as another mini towel so that’s what it is now.

I decided to upscale the fingertip towel into something more functional by using bigger thread and adding a pattern repeat at each side. It was a good idea which I managed to mess up at the last stage through lack of planning. I resleyed from 30epi to 24 epi, tied the new warp onto the old warp, wound the new warp onto the back beam and then added the end pieces. My cunning plan was to weight these sections of warp and skip the beaming altogether mostly in order to see if I could. I have an idea for something that needs a supplemental warp and now seemed to be as good a time as any to see whether I could weight sections of warp and have them weave the same as the warp on the back beam. That seemed to work well enough, at least in the inch that I managed before I spotted my howling error.

I’ve always had a problem with mirror images, I can make sixty four quilt blocks and not have enough for an eight by eight layout because if it’s possible to make one the wrong way round I’ll do it and then go on to make the remaining blocks randomly in clockwise and anticlockwise formats. I can’t see that they are different in the same way that I’m never sure that I’m knitting one mitten for each hand. I made life difficult for myself in that I threaded the fingertip teatowel sitting at the back of the loom and sat at the front to thread the two edge sections. The result is that I very carefully and with much attention to detail threaded according to the directions I’d written out which were the reverse of what they should have been. Instead of having sets of three diamonds all the way across my edges finish with one diamond on the left and five on the right. I keep looking at it but there is no alternative other than to take it out and do it again. Ideally that would mean doing it again but not exactly the same as I did it last time.

I made a scarf that came out right, this is the shetland and silk yarn from last time paired with some handspun from the odd ball box that was the right colour. I warped it before I set off for a craft fair and was done (including twisting the fringe) with two hours to spare. This wasn’t the crisis it might have been because this time I was prepared and I’d taken a ball of sock yarn and some needles just in case I ran out of warp. This is 61″ long and 7 3/4″ wide, I like the way that the slubs of silk jump out of the fabric. I might make another one because I have more of the silk and more of the black shetland and I’m sure that there will be something suitable to pair with it in the bag that keeps on giving.

I knitted a headscarf this week, two balls of alpaca boucle in garter, knitted from both ends with lots of increases along the way and a three needle cast off in the middle. I did seriously consider doing a proper job and grafting the join but then recovered my senses. It’s boucle with enough texture to hide the join. The request was that it be long enough to tie so that the wearer’s hair didn’t get blown around when walking the dog. I made it wide enough to either wrap around the neck or fold back across the head with narrow ends so that it would tie easily. I’m not sure what the bits are sticking up at the back there but seeing as it’s already left the house I can’t investigate further.

I’ve been spinning too, this was a tidying up exercise rather than me looking for something that I really wanted to spin or spinning for a project. The two and a bit braids I started with have been hanging around far too long, their time had come. The yarn hasn’t been finished because I think I’ll dye it and I can’t see the point of wetting it and drying it to then wet it and dry it all over again. The weather continues to be wet and cool and getting things dry (shoes, me, laundry, the dog) has been an issue of late. I’d like it to brighten up now because it’s Fibre East this weekend and I’m hoping that next week will be the start of the 2012 fleece washing season. I’m planning for that, I’ve looked at the list of vendors and I’m working on a shopping list now.

I was expecting to have a nicely hemmed tiny teatowel today but that isn’t happening. When I anticipated that I would get it finished in a week I hadn’t allowed for two Olympic torch processions or foreseen two days lost to a streaming cold. The cold was particularly trying, it was impossible to get under the loom to tie up the treadles because whenever I looked down I thought my face would fall off. I was fit enough to face the world on Friday and to go and stand in the rain to see the torch pass by. Having negotiated for junior to have the day off school he was going even if I had to lay down under a hedge when I got there. It rained, then the sun came out just in time to dry everything off before the torchbearer appeared. I did not have to lay under the hedge but I was in bed before 9pm.

I couldn’t set the loom up to weave due to the likelihood of my face dropping off into the treadles so there was more time for knitting. This is a shop sample, it shows what you could make with the three colour Shetland blend that I’ve been carding. I started with just over 600 yards of yarn which is my default spinning for three ply sock yarn made into a two ply. There was enough left for another few rows but the edging was so mind numbingly boring that I couldn’t bring myself to knit another row. I told myself that the leftovers would come in for something and cast off. It started and ended as a Zetor but I changed to leaves in the middle. It came out just as I thought it would, the colours merge one into another without a hard line and I’m pleased with the result. I know, it’s not often I say that but just for once I got exactly what I wanted. Maybe the transition between the white and grey could have been softer but that would be nit picking of the highest order.

This is Shetland too aklthough I can’t say that it was what I wanted because what I set out to spin was a laceweight silk. I sat down with a bag of silk brick that I’d bought some time ago but it was hard to draft, I had to wrench it apart. That makes for an uneven yarn and a pain in my thumb, both of which were good reasons to pack it away. The reason I bought it rather than dyeing it for myself is that the last one I dyed had spots that were hard and wouldn’t easily pull apart. I thought I’d buy one from another dyer and see how far I was off the mark in terms of the condition of the silk. It appears that my dyeing is no worse than other people’s, there was nothing to chose between them in terms of hard spots. This gave me over 200g of lovely unspinneable silk, I could make silk paper with it but I don’t have that much need for it (although the end of term is coming..new school, new teachers who don’t have silk paper pen holders already)

I found some black Shetland which was genuine black rather than the usual dark brown and carded that with the naughty silk. I spun it worsted with no attempt to take out the silk chunks, this is going to be a weft yarn and the lumps will add interest to plain weave. I now have just over 210 yards of interesting yarn and 30g less silk. More importantly the rest of the silk just escaped from the “useless” category. I have enough of the Shetland to make another skein the same and by then I’ll have woven it to see if it looks like I imagine. If it turns out to be a thing of beauty then I can buy black merino and make as much as I like.

Next time I’ll have hemmed the teatowel and have had time to decide why it is that it’s failed to meet expectations.

Thank you for your comments on the not-a-pirate-at-all monkey, we’re still making them as the sale isn’t until next week. This week’s monkeys have been black and bright as a result of my impulse purchase of a seven-pack of socks. These don’t need clothes because they are drop dead gorgeous, it’s the plain Janes that need a little something to help them along. I think this one might be Kiki but I haven’t set the bio-writer to work yet so it could be something else entirely. There was much less work in this than in the pirate as the total knitting content consisted of one bulky nappy with a tail hole, one little bottle of banana milk and a frilly bonnet with ear slits. I did think about a bib but I thought that the neck fastening on that would conflict with that on the bonnet so the bib didn’t make it off the drawing board. I liked making the bonnet, I could make them all day because it was interesting (changes of direction, short rows) and it finished fast. I tried to make the bottle banana shaped and it sort of worked but I can’t say that it came out the way I imagined it looking. I didn’t lose sleep over that, nor did I feel the need to rip it and start over so perhaps I am softening up as I get older.

It has not all been monkeys, last week I carded a three colour mixture of shetland for me rather than for the shop. I spun it over the weekend and started knitting it slightly before it was what non-knitters might consider to be totally dry. It’s already at the stage of being too big for straight needles although I’m pretending it isn’t because I don’t want to look for a circular needle. At the moment it’s a Zetor but I’ve knitted that twice before and I’ve had enough of the pattern already. I’ve finished with the white section of the yarn, it’s now as grey as it gets and at some point it will change gradually to sheep black. The yarn is mildly entertaining but it’s not zingy enough to offset the mind numbing pattern which will now repeat until I think I’m ready for the border. It might morph into leaves or diamonds (diamonds are big at the moment) or I could of course knit another row while I think about it some more.

I seem to have cast on for a pair of socks. You don’t have to think of something positive to say about these because I know that they are without a doubt the ugliest pair I’ve knitted in a long time, it’s the combination of pink and green that I’m finding particularly unlovely. The flash isn’t doing them any favours but the best lighting conditions for these is probably total darkness. I won’t be looking out for any more Opal Neon, this ball has put me off it. The leftovers will be hitting the dye before they go in the scrap bag, I can’t see me wanting to knit it again in its original colours. They will be hard wearing, prevent blisters and make another pair until washday.

The pile of monkeys on top of the loom is a clue that weaving is at a halt, I sleyed the warp that was left on the loom at 15 ends per inch per layer as opposed to the 12 epi I used for the first piano scarf. Since then it’s just sat there waiting for me to tie on and start. I thought a little incentive was in order so I’ve wound the warp that I’ll tie onto the end of the piano scarf once I’ve finished it (which obviously won’t be until after I’ve started it). I started off with a big pile of random balls of leftovers, there was a bag of blue, a bag of green and then I had a general rummage to see what else I could find that went with those. I’m happy to say that by the time I’d wound the warp there was very little left, by the time I’m done with weft stripes there might be nothing at all to go back in the bag. I still need to start by weaving in black and white but now I can see what’s coming along next. The idea is that I’m so taken with my plans for the blue/green that I overcome my reluctance to weave a second keyboard. Let’s see how that one works out for me.

You’re going to be looking at this for a while, I’m still totally enthralled by it which is good because I have just got to the halfway point on the first one. I’ve set myself a target of an octave a day, which isn’t very much, less than an hour’s weaving time. Some days I do two octaves, some days I do one and a half and some days I don’t put the loom up at all. At the moment there is a clear difference between the leading edge (bottom of the black key) and the trailing edge (top) on the keys but this yarn is oiled on the cone and I know when the wool hits water and blooms the nasty gap will disappear. I can be pretty confident about this because I’ve used the same yarn before for doubleweave and had the same effect on the loom. After washing, the gaps in the weaving will fill up and the white will look white because you’ll not be seeing the black layer through it. I’m not convinced that hot water will do anything at all for my edges but I can hope. In general the less I mess with them the better they get but I can’t help but fiddle.

Knitting is still blah but socks are pretty essential, especially if you have only one pair of hand knit socks. I made a pair for someone we know after she’d noticed that when the band was playing my husband didn’t get cold feet while she was freezing. Once she had her pair of socks she knew the reason why (“and they don’t fall down”). One pair isn’t enough to see you through the week so she asked me for another pair. These are Opal something or other from a Ravelry destash, which seems to be the source of all my sock yarn these days. I like them but my sock drawer is full and her need is greater.

I did also manage a hat this week. It’s Tychus again in a mixture of handspun yarns. One runs green-purple-grey and that was my first attempt at carding a three colour gradient. I wanted to see whether I could diz the batt off in one piece in a reasonable time and whether it spun into the yarn that I thought it would. The other is something that was sold to me as Whitefaced Woodland but wasn’t, it was very soft and wrong for the breed. I can’t sell it so it had to stop home and be play yarn. I need to catch up with some stashbashing this month because I bought a 500g cone of black yarn for the piano scarves and then immediately stopped knitting. The hat weighs 114g and there’s a chance that I’ll weigh in a piano scarf before the end of the month so I might yet end up level.

I’m still playing with colour changes. This yarn is Black Welsh Mountain, Manx Loaghtan and grey falkland. As it doesn’t have white in it that means that it would work with white as a contrast colour. My plan for this (if I had a loom free) would be to weave it in a nice simple log cabin with some white falkland. It’s not all shades of grey this week, I’m having an experiment with superwash and sparkle for socks. The main question was whether I could handle slippery superwash successfully because it wasn’t not going to behave the same way as nice grippy wool-from-sheep, it doesn’t hang together in the same way and I thought that it would be more difficult to diz off in one piece. It appears that I’m up to the job after all as exhibit A proves that I can take it off in one length and I have witnesses to the fact that there was no swearing involved.

I’ve been busy non stop all week but I don’t have a lot to show for it. Well, I do in that I have some sparkling windows, cobweb free ceilings and a few shiny door frames but spring cleaning is not exactly the most exciting subject matter for a blog post. It seems that everything woolly I do have to show is black, white or the colours in between.

I did warp the loom, I had to do it in the end as it was stubbornly refusing to thread itself. You don’t have to be a weaver to spot one of my errors in this picture because the two white threads showing in among the black are so obviously wrong. There’s another mistake – the gap in the middle is down to a crossed pair of threads, that one is more obvious if you peer in from the side. When it’s threaded properly I can weave a layer of black fabric and a separate layer of white which on the face of it doesn’t sound particularly thrilling as a project. In reality it is totally enthralling. Maybe doubleweave gets old after a while but I haven’t done enough of it yet for it to have lost its magic. It looks to be plain black but sometimes I’m weaving with white on the sneaky underneath layer. This bit doesn’t have to be exciting, its future is to be folded inwards and sewn because it’s a hem.

Once the layers start interchanging then the black and white layers resolve themselves into a piano keyboard. I’m working my way down from the top, four keys done and eighty four to go. The plan is that the first piece is a scarf for the piano teacher then I change the sett (knitting equivalent – change to smaller needles) and weave a piece of stiffer fabric that will become part of a cover for the digital piano. I’m not entirely sure how the wool I’m using will behave for the second piece at 15 epi, so far I’ve woven it at 10 and 12 for plain weave but I’ll look at that when the time comes. If I end up weaving it all at 12 epi it’s no big deal although the fabric keyboard will be bigger than the real one and I won’t need all eighty eight keys. The draft is from the December 2011 issue of Handwoven but I’m using different yarn and a different sett.

It’s not all black and white, I also have shades of grey. This is the other rabbit hole I fell down, if I hadn’t have run out of natural coloured wool after the second batch then there would have been no spring cleaning done this week because I would have spent every waking minute fastened to the carder or the wheel. I love these, natural sheep colours of black welsh at one end moving through grey falkland or shetland into white falkland. There’s some overlap between the colours so there’s not a clearly defined change between the three shades. If I had a loom free I would have woven it into a scarf that changed colour across the width and the length but I don’t so it will have to wait. When I made it I could think of so many things to do with the yarn, mittens, a multidirectional scarf or knitted alongside a mustard or red in a simple stranded pattern. That was last week though, this week I’m seeing it with a single colour change along the length, spun fine and knitted into a triangular shawl. The double knit yarn is so last week, so Etsy it is.

The postman has brought me a big batch of naturally coloured wool so between the carder, the wheel, the loom and spring cleaning I have a full couple of weeks ahead. The wool may not be colourful but it’s fun. The cleaning is not so fun but it needs to be done and if I keep slipping a bit in between the fun stuff it doesn’t seem so much of a chore. No, that didn’t sound convincing to me either.

There would have been more things finished if the weather had held out but it’s been a very wet week with no chance of getting a blanket dried between showers. The smell of wet alpaca does nothing for me so I don’t want the blanket touching water until there’s a good chance of getting it dry in the day. Fortunately small baby clothes dry fast and don’t smell.

This was the second one knitted but the first one finished. That’s partly down to the lack of sleeve seams but also because I didn’t have any knitting origami to cope with. I love this beyond reason, it takes one ball of sock yarn (anything beyond the 12-18m size would run you into a second) and a bit of undyed and it’s just so cute. This is Drops 13-18, the original is all in one colour but I saw one on Ravelry that had the yoke in a different colour and I thought that looked more interesting. The coloured yarn is Knit Picks Felici, not in its original colour (red) but with a touch of navy dye. The collar was supposed to have a crochet trim but mine looked like it had been made by someone who hadn’t touched a hook in thirty years so I ripped it in favour of a knitted picot edge. I like it and I’d knit another but next time I’d try harder to get the buttonholes in the right place. I had a few grams of coloured yarn left over after knitting the 12-18m size, not enough to have knitted another repeat on the body so certainly not enough to have knitted the next size up.

This sweater was finished first but spent longer in the bag waiting for sewing up. This is Drops 19-3 made from the green section of the sock leftover bag and yet more of the undyed sock yarn. I’d opted to knit the sleeves flat to avoid the jog on the colour changes so that lead to a bit more work and with it being knitted from odd bits of leftover sock yarn there were quite a few ends to sew in. The thing that really took the time was not the sewing up but working out how to hammer the raglan together. I understood that the band with the buttonholes went on top of the other band but then I seemed to have several options for closing up the gap at the bottom. If you’ve knitted something similar before then it’s probably obvious, if you’re starting from a position of complete ignorance then the instructions don’t help much.

I’ve been busy carding, combing and dyeing, the carding and combing has been spectacularly monochrome and boring but some of the dyeing was pretty. Some wasn’t, I like to leave some white in the fibre because providing it’s in short sections it doesn’t spin to white but to light and it gives tonal variation to the yarn. This is a 70/30 blend of superwash merino and bright trilobal nylon, it would be good for socks because the nylon adds some strength to the merino. The light wasn’t the issue with this, the gold splodges were the unwanted element. I know that yellow dye takes an age to dissolve so I don’t know what I was thinking when I poured the dye on without giving the yellow enough time to do its thing. I don’t have a section in the shop marked “dyer’s accidents” so this one had to stay home. Oh dear, what a shame, never mind.

Weaving is the thing that’s not happening at the moment. I want to weave everything, all at once and weaving doesn’t work that way. You start one thing and then you have to finish it before you start the next unless you’re willing to take the scissors to it. Indecisive knitters can cast on a dozen new projects and rip those that fall by the wayside. If you can’t decide which project to knit first just start all of them. I suspect that the serial nature of weaving is going to be good for me in some character building way but at the moment the loom is sitting empty while I work out what it is that I want to do the most from a shortlist of dozens.