Wool For Brains

I have tried solar dyeing before, sticking the yarn in a jam jar with some dye and acid and leaving it in the greenhouse for a while. I can report that the much worn socks that I used that yarn in are still as colourful as they started out, none of the dye fell off in the wash despite the yarn never being cooked as such. I don’t know whether it would work on a larger scale and the british summer is renowned for being unpredictable (and wet). My larger scale process involves a steamer (Argos £9.79) and a 3kwh solar panel (free). Total cost £9.79. Those of you that don’t look at the husband’s blog (that would be all of you because he doesn’t show you wool) now know what the scaffolding was for.

I don’t think I have a jam jar big enough for 200g of fibre so it’s altogether a different process but the end result is the same. Yes, a 3kwh panel is overkill for running a steamer and that’s not what we got it for but you should know that I can convert just about anything to a textile use. It does have other uses during the day running the kettle, coffee machine, toaster, microwave, fridge, freezer, vacuum, iron and washer. Not all at once of course because it’s only rated at 3.3kwh and the kettle eats power like you wouldn’t believe. There’s something wrong when the steamer cost me more than the panels but that’s because the panels aren’t mine, I didn’t pay to put them up and I don’t have to worry about maintaining them. There’s a grant for microgeneration and the people that own the panels are claiming the grants and getting their money back from that. We’re just providing the roof space for their panels and using what comes down the wire before it goes off to the national grid.

So far it’s a win with the glass roof (at least when it’s not raining which it seems to be doing a lot of the time now) but the jury is still out on the steamer. It clearly works because the dye didn’t fall off in the rinse. My first run had liquid all over the newspaper I’d thoughtfully put it on. I’ve not worked out why it is that the condensate didn’t all run back into the base, I’m guessing that it was because it couldn’t drip back through the centre because it was full of plastic bag rather than vegetable. My second attempt left plenty of clear space around the plastic and that worked much better. I’m not sure yet whether I’d have been better spending an extra £4 for a hotplate because I know what I’m doing with a pan and there’s less chance of leakage.

Since the panels went up we’ve had a day of black cloud and rain and two days of sun and white cloud. On the days with sunny intervals the roof generated enough to power the house for the day. Should we get a day with no cloud (possible but becoming more unlikely given the time of year) then we should be a net daily exporter of power. At the moment I’m spending a lot of my time peeking in the meter cupboard seeing whether the house is running on sunshine or the bought stuff but the novelty should wear off soon. We’re moving towards the season of grey wet miserable days so I suspect that soon the roof will have all on keeping up with the ironing and the kettle but there will be sun again next summer, and the one after that.

Carolyn asked whether the dog had vanished with the shop. He spends most of his day being asleep in various places as befits a sofa dog but in the evenings he comes alive for a spot of wool mangling, spider chasing or playing with squeaky toys. There is a rubber chicken somewhere off to the bottom left of the photo but really that was just an excuse to jump all over Dan and make him squeak. He’s only small but he’s sturdy and 8kg of charging fluffball still packs a punch when he lands in your midriff.

I didn’t go to Woolfest this year, it’s too far for the day and a weekend away was a bit silly when we were away on holiday again six weeks afterwards. The attraction of the event is the people, the inspiration and the shopping opportunities. Well I’m not a people person and would walk past people I “know” on the internet without introducing myself, I can see pretty photos of exciting colourways all over the internet and I’m a boring shopper. I would have bought the same as the last two years, a kilo of superwash bfl and a shetland fleece and that’s not much of a haul for all that travel.

My stay at home haul was much bigger and more exciting than anything I would have bought in person. This involved no travel at all because it came to me in the post in a really big sack the week before Woolfest. It looks like a wall of wool but appearances can be deceptive, the majority of it is silk. There’s camel, cashmere and orlon, a tussah brick, a mulberry brick, silk noil, throwster’s waste, cotton, angora, some mohair and alpaca but no wool (not other than mixed with silk or cashmere). It was a surprise parcel in that I didn’t know what was in it (”mostly exotics”) but as I was only paying the postage it seemed worth the gamble. Some days you just get lucky.

It was all natural colours but I’ve been working on that. The samples I spun as they were, there was under 20g of each so that didn’t take long. The top skein is flax/silk, I can’t think of any use for such a blend and I’m no wiser now that I’ve spun it. The dark one was cashmere/merino/silk, then tussah and 50/50 merino tussah. The dayglo orange is a silk cap (like a hankie but formed into a different shape), the bits at the bottom are silk noil and will make lumps in batts, the sea of green at the top is a tussah silk brick. There was some cotton and flax too, the bulk of the flax has been rehomed but I kept the cotton because I’ve not spun that before. I still haven’t spun it because I can’t think of a use for the yarn and I have more exciting things lined up to spin.

I got the pile under control by making it into smaller piles. All the silk (and there was a lot of silk) went into the newly created silk bag, the protein-but-not-silk went into a bag for dyeing but the odd stuff is still roaming the front bedroom looking for a permanent home. My plan for sorting it out was derailed by having the drive band on the carder break off, I still haven’t got that replaced. That was the same weekend I decided to take out the slack on the stretched stretchy drive band on the spinning wheel. That didn’t go well, I’ve joined one before with no trouble but this one would not fuse. After four failed attempts I was worried that it would be too short to do anything with if I failed again and I went for the desperate measure of sewing it together. It’s not ideal but the first join lasted for seven bobbins of single and three bobbins of plied yarn which in my book is better than not having a working wheel at all.

(You would be correct in deducing that I have no knitting – I’m in week two of recovery from a knitting related injury and I’m hopeful that normal service will resume shortly)

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

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

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

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

It’s the come down from the big grey blob, little bits of knitting that are started and then suddenly done. This is Worme (pronounced Worm-eh and not to be confused with Wormie). Her hair was deemed to be too short but I’m ignoring that, he said the same about mine when I came back from the hairdresser earlier this week. He’s too young to know that the answer to questions on hair is always “It’s lovely dear. It suits you”. I did ask where her hair should finish and he said to the bottom of her eyes and that’s what he got. She seems pleased with it anyway. I forsee that I’ll get a week off and then it will either be accessories for Worme or the creation of Wormant. As far as I can see he looks just like Wormie but with glasses so that should be easy enough.

This is the Phazelia’s mitered baby jacket from last time. It was a fun little knit and I’ve another on the needles (which is about to be sidelined until I’ve knitted some more blue socks). I straightened out the bottom edge which is designed to be pointy with cut outs at the side. This was really simple to do but clearly there’s no chance of me remembering what I did when I get to the same point on the second one and the original will then be far away. I knitted all the stitches remaining after the sleeves, increased at the front edges and continued the increases at the centre back with a double decrease at the centre of each underarm. When it was the right length I knitted to the centre back, decreased the centre stitch away, joined on the other end of the ball of yarn and knitted to the end of the row. Working the two halves at the same time I then switched the increases to decreases, decrease at the start of the row, double decrease at the centre (underarm), decrease at the end of the row. When you run out of stitches you’re done.

I’m not sure that I’d get 6 spi with the sock yarn I regularly use, I think I’d want to be using something a little bit thicker. With a 3.25m needle (US3) I was getting something around 6.5/7 spi and that felt right as a fabric. It meant that this one came out about an inch smaller on the chest than the pattern, in future I’ll either make the second size or adjust the number of stitches according to the tension I get. (I know that this photo looks the same as the other but if you look closely this one does not have the tie and so is the back). The only sewing up is the sleeve seams, despite this all being scraps of sock yarn there were no ends to deal with because I knitted them all in with a back join.

Should I vanish for a while it is because of this. It’s pink and purple and orange and it’s my new favourite thing. Some bits are more purple, some verge on red. I have over 200g of it so I may be some time feeding it to the wheel unless I just spin half now. I’ve decided that I like dyeing silk and that’s good because I seem to have a lot of it piled around at the moment.

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not usually a joiner of things, I’ve never signed up for the Knitting Olympics or the Tour de Fleece. For some reason I was thinking of the latter for this year, just thinking you understand and well maybe dyeing a bit too. I thought I’d spin something plain and lacey and I dyed some Shetland with this in mind. It’s light in colour and not something that I’d usually dye.

This demonstrates why it is that I am not a joiner. I have a basic inability to follow someone else’s timetable. The Tour doesn’t start until the beginning of July but having dyed the wool I didn’t want to wait. I’d have been finished sooner except that I fell off a kerb on Saturday and had a day where I couldn’t treadle. I couldn’t walk either but that’s beside the point. I did consider putting these back through the wheel to add more twist because despite treadling like a deranged hamster running in its wheel there maybe wasn’t quite enough twist. In the end I didn’t do it, the next time my inner spinner suggests this perhaps I’ll listen.

The result is something skinny but not laceweight, it’s my standard three ply sock yarn made as a two ply. There’s just under 700 yards here and although it is exactly what I thought I wanted, light and nearly solid, it still might be hitting a dye bath. The fibre at the top of this post was not something I usually dye because it’s not something I’d normally knit with. It would have been better yarn with more twist in the single but it will do. I’m still not sure whether I’m going to sign up for the Tour de Fleece, I suspect that I’d be better waiting until the last minute.

Thank you for the lovely comments about the little flippy lace thing from last time. I would by now be half way through another but I’m still fully engaged with the big grey blob. This is it posing as big grey briefs, such an appealling thought. It started as a Kerry Blue but I’m just about to change to the border and edging from the Cobweb Crepe shawl in Heirloom Knitting. Once I’ve made that transition then I can stop thinking about it and just knit until it’s big enough. You can expect much whining and gnashing of teeth when it comes to the edging because it’s going to be a test of stamina.

These ought to make an appearance before they hit the sock drawer. This is definitely the last pair in this pattern, I’m bored with it now. The yarn is Zitron Trekking Pro Natura which is 75% wool and 25% bamboo rayon. I liked the colours in this and thought that it would make good summer socks but I don’t think that I’d buy it again (not that I bought this because it was a swapsie). I was picking out tufts of bamboo while I was knitting. I’m probably influenced against it because of the two knots in the second sock. If they’d been in the first sock then I wouldn’t have remembered them but the second sock is still fresh in my mind.

The blog is now fixed and shouldn’t be vanishing any more. There was a sound technical reason for it that went right over my head involving something failing memory tests. I fail mine all of the time so maybe it is catching. Next time could be the return of the big grey blob, teatowels – where I went wrong, or maybe we’ll look at the spindle and two balls of yarn that I’ve just rehomed from Ravelry.

You know what it’s like when you get a song in your head that won’t go away. You find yourself humming it, stop yourself and then five minutes later you are at it again. The song that has been annoying me of late has been “Fade to grey” (Visage 1980) but it’s worse than just a song. The thing that got me humming the song was an idea for dyeing, that came first and it has proved to be as insistent as the tune. I can’t get it out of my head, by the time I’d started dyeing the project while asleep it was time to do something about it

When I have an idea that’s a possible disaster in the making I forage in the sock scraps bags. If it all goes horribly wrong then it’s not as if I’ve wasted anything that I cared about. My original idea was for a shawl that gradually changed colour towards the edge. It’s not that I don’t have any laceweight yarn but I think it’s far better for my sanity to start with something shorter, superwash and thicker. Trial one was with the leftovers from Daniel’s blue zebra socks, there might just be enough yardage in the leftovers for a pair of socks, if not then there will be a stripe near the toe. This is a fade from purple rather than a fade to grey but the idea is broadly right.

What I want is something that is light at one end, dark at the other with a slow and gradual change between them. I don’t want a hard stripe where the colours change, I could get that from knitting with two different coloured yarns. I’m hoping that I end up with a colour change about the right length for a sock, if it does then I know what I did to do it and then I can see whether I can do it again. It would also be nice to know whether I managed to get the two feet the same so before I raid the scrap bag again I need to knit both balls.

Trial two was a full skein of yarn that was in the scrap bag because it had been naughty. It was originally an odd combination of colours (pearl grey, orange and purple) but I’d started a sock with it anyway only to have it spiral horribly. I thought that overdying it in red would reduce the contrast and make the spiral less noticeable but then I decided that its future was as warp and consigned it to the scrap bag. It had a brief reprieve as a guinea pig but I can still see the spirals even though it’s been dyed twice. The base yarn is very thin for sock yarn and I had to drop a needle size and that didn’t make me warm to it either. I got as far as the heel before ripping it and putting it back in the scrap bag. Its future is now in weaving.

The red was a ripper but I like the blue (click to appreciate it bigger). This is probably a Daniel sock, currently it’s a tube and I’ll add an afterthought heel using the other end of the ball of yarn. There will probably be enough to reach the toe without needing a stripe, maybe, possibly. I like the gradual change in colour, if I was being super picky I could have wished for more of the very dark but it has done what I wanted it to do. Whether the other sock is identical remains to be seen.

I’m hoping that this is enough to stop me humming and dreaming about dyeing lace yarn. Time will tell.

There is no lace to show because the postman didn’t bring me the yarn that I need to start it. He is forgiven though because he brought me this thing of beauty. Isn’t it lovely? It’s a leopardwood shuttle that I rehomed from a weaver in Texas via an advert on Ravelry. It is stunningly beautiful and I can’t wait to use it so I can admire it all the more. That won’t be until June as this is a birthday present and I don’t have a bobbin winder yet (I do have a sketch on the back of an envelope and a resident woodworker so I live in hope)

I do have socks though. These have had their minor corrective surgery to fix the pointy heel on the first one. They are 72 stitches increasing with a 12 stitch gusset before the short row heel. They are pretty standard husband socks but the interesting (to me at least) thing about them is the yarn. When I dyed the nine skeins of sock yarn for Ophelia one of them came out light. I didn’t really think about it at the time and put it down to crowding in the dye pot. When I looked at it more closely it couldn’t be that, there are no white patches in the yarn, it’s coloured thoughout but it’s just not saturated colour. It was obvious when I came to knit with it what the answer was. Instead of being wool and nylon like the other eight skeins this one was wool and some variety of cellulose. Only the wool element has taken the dye so it’s only 70% of the depth of colour. I consider myself very lucky, I could have emptied the dye pot to find I was setting out to knit a sweater with five skeins of one shade and four of the other.

These are the other pair of socks, they are new to the blog because they have knitted themselves up rather quickly. The yarn was a cheapy from Knitncaboodle, Schoppel-Wolle Admiral Ombre. It was cheaper than white yarn which was the reason why I bought it. It’s finer than some other sock yarns I’ve knitted, the colours were lovely and there were no knots. The pattern was not what I was aiming for, I should have had some plain rows in between the purl squares but I knitted it anyway. It looks like cables but it isn’t, it’s (K2, K4, K2, P4) for four rows and then (K2, P4, K2, K4) for four rows. The mock cables vanish when it’s on a foot but you get to admire them when you are knitting. I made the leg a bit too short for David so these are for me, the ribbing pulls in enough so they still fit even with the extra four stitches in the round.

The Kissing Koi mittens have been ripped to wool. They were pretty enough but didn’t fit at ten stitches to the inch and I’m not prepared to knit sock yarn at a closer gauge than that. The fix would have been to take a pencil to the patten and lose four stitches from the fish. One day I might feel like it but that day is not now.

I am trying to ignore all requests for knitted toys because it could be a full time job if I knitted everything that I was asked for. I gave in with this, mostly because his timing was so good, he asked for a friend for Snowforbrains (the red one) just after he’d had his results from his music exam. It’s hard to say no in the face of an 80% score for grade 5 euphonium. The purple is alpaca, the white is (Stylecraft) Ethical Twist organic wool and alpaca. I bought this for the white belly of the penguin hot water bottle cover but then used some dodgy handspun instead. It is very nice to knit with, I’d not pay the £8 a ball that some retailers are selling it for but the £4.95 I paid for it at The Wool Baa was much more reasonable. The rest of the ball is destined to be dyed and woven.

Did someone mention weaving? I’m still sewing little bags, at some point I’ll get bored with this style and move on to bigger bags. I feel that I’m getting a grip on the fabric pile, it’s not that I’ve made a huge impression on it but I have a plan and in time the pile of fabric will be a pile of little bags. If I keep on selling them then in time the pile of fabric will turn into a floor loom which is a fine trick if you can manage it.

Next time – hopefully lace, probably with a side order of little bags. I’m not certain when “next time” will be as today is the start of the two week school holiday. It’s going to be difficult to follow yesterday’s programme of entertainment, really how do I follow that? Bowling and 3D cinema just aren’t in the same league as funny cars and monster trucks.

No knitting to show today, next time I should have two pairs of socks to show and maybe some lace as well but today is all about finished objects of a different kind.

The last time we saw this photo was at the end of April last year. At the time I said “This one isn’t in the drawer at all, it’s waiting for me to get the scissors and make it into something, I keep putting it off in case I get it wrong and wreck my precious fabric. Hopefully the next time we see this it will have been transformed, either that or we will not speak of it again”. I certainly didn’t imagine that it would be eleven months for the transformation to take place. This is a pattern that weavers call log cabin. I spent a long while as a quilter and from that perspective log cabin is a totally different beast, this pattern in quilting is rail fence except that the colour placement is all wrong. We will not quibble over names, what it is is something that looks fiendishly difficult but isn’t. It’s the old impact to effort ratio in action again. The brown is Opal sock yarn and the green is blue faced leicester that I dyed with some leftover dye. The yellow wasn’t entirely dissolved and it made a slightly variegated green-yellow green roving.

This was planned from the start for a specific purpose. David bought himself a new laptop and asked for a slip cover to stop it from getting scratched while in his workbag. The critical thing was that the fabric finished up 10″ wide so I could join two pieces at the edges, any smaller and it wouldn’t fit, any bigger and it would be too floppy around the laptop.  I planned it very carefully and ended up with a fabric that was about one inch too narrow. That’s the real reason that it’s been sidelined for so long, there was no chance that the fabric would grow or the laptop shrink but I hoped that given enough time I’d come up with some sort of a solution.

In the time since I put this on one side I’ve cut up and sewn different bits of fabric that I’ve woven and although I’ve a lot to learn I am getting better at it. I’ve got the answer to handles now – cotton fabric over scraps of batting gives a nice firm feel and although the inkle straps were pretty these are an easier solution.  I”m not frightened of cutting into the handwoven stuff any more, it doesn’t start unraveling as soon as you cut into it in the same way as a dropped stitch doesn’t run all by itself. Wool is naturally sticky, if you want it to move then you have to pull it. If you don’t pull it until you’ve got it stabilised then it doesn’t unravel.

What I didn’t realise was that my log cabin fabric had something else wrong with it as well as that missing inch. I’d not beat it evenly over the length of the piece so the squares at the start aren’t the same height as those at the end. If I’d realised this I could have minimised the effect by joining two lengths cut from the same end but because it never occurred to me I did the worst thing I could have done and cut a length from each end. This meant that I was doomed, I had a seam that would never join well. (Remember, I make these mistakes so you don’t have to) There wasn’t enough fabric to cut another length so the dodgy seam has had to stay.

Rather than have an insert of one inch, I thought it would look better to make it wider and have it as more of a feature than an excuse. I made a 2″ (finished) insert for the front and had no inset at the back. This was a big mistake caused by me not wanting to waste the precious handwoven stuff. If it had been ordinary yardage I’d have made my 2″ insert front and back and cut off the excess at the sides. This would have made the sewing really straightforward. As it was I’d now made the front bigger than the back, left myself with a plain back that would wrap over into the flap and caused the non-matching centre back seam. You don’t notice that the fronts don’t match because of the inset whereas the back is rather obvious.

To get the insert on the flap I had to make the flap separately to the back and join it, all work that I could have saved myself if I’d just chopped a bit off the sides. Clearly I still have some way still to travel towards my goal of approaching woven fabric with scissors and the thought of “It’s just yardage”. It does have some inbuilt wonkiness, I lined the pattern up on the flap because the only reason that I offset it in the body was to have the back line up properly. That was before I realised that it wouldn’t line up even with glue and nails. My novel and never to be repeated construction for the flap means that it’s not on quite straight, by then I was happy that I’d found a way to get it on at all and was past caring.

Verdict – it’s fit for purpose, it’s padded well, the Mac fits in it and it’s not going to fall apart. More importantly it’s finished (apart from the purchase of no snag Velcro for the underside of the flap). If I could turn back time I’d run the stripe all the way around and either cut the excess off at the sides or lay a 2″ stripe over a 1″ gap. I still think that the wider stripe was the right decision but I’d not predicted what a mess it would get me into. If I could turn the clock back even further I’d not use a pattern with all those unforgiving lines or even better weave something that was the right width to start with.

This lead to the best line I’ve had in ages, one I will treasure for some time to come. “Mom, can you get your brain out of the bath please?” So that’s where I left it. This was a three man effort, I knitted the under hat, David made the icord (using the super duper icord mill that Santa will be bringing me next week) and my mother sewed the lot together. This is made from the uneven fluffy long draw practise yarn, there’s still some left but there’s less than there was. I wouldn’t have started this without an icord mill, this used something like fifteen yards of icord which would have been exceptionally tedious to knit on needles but took no time at all with the widget. I dyed it after it was all sewn up because I had no idea how much of the yarn it was going to eat and I would rather be left with white yarn than pink yarn.

The idea was simple enough, knit a hat and sew icord on it so that it looked like a brain. What it actually looked like was a frisbee, it needed extreme blocking over a basin to get it back into a hat shape (this was the point where it was lurking in the bath when my son wanted to get in it). Even after that it was floppy around the edges but that was easily cured by round elastic. It’s simple enough, the elasticity in the knitting goes out of the window when it’s sewn to the icord, unless you are fanatical about keeping the shape correct then it’s going to be distorted. In the end it came out looking enough like a brain and it fitted the zombie’s head so I’ll count it as a success.

I had a lovely surprise yesterday, it just goes to show that sometimes the stinky jobs have an unexpected benefit. Now and again the sock yarn drawer in the bed base won’t close properly, I have a quick fix for it which involves sticking my hand in the back and shuffling everything around. Yesterday I did the job right and took the drawer all the way out and off the runners and looked to see what was stopping the drawer from shutting. It wasn’t a mountain of yarn that was back there but it was enough to be exciting. I was really pleased to discover a bag of yarn that I’ve been looking for since I got my loom. I’ve looked in all the places I ever put yarn, I’ve been back through the blog to see if I’ve knitted it up and forgotten about it but I could not trace what had happened to that thousand yards of yarn. At some point it’s been pushed over the back of the drawer and it’s sat there ever since. Even better, back there in those plastic bags was a skein of black alpaca and bfl. I made this for a woven blanket but when I gathered all the skeins together I didn’t have enough and I made the blanket out of something else. I went back over my calculations several times because I had worked out that I would have enough with the ten skeins except that I ended up with only nine skeins. I know now where I went wrong with that one.