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’ve been busy with seasonal activities – wrestling with wrapping paper and too-sticky tape and answering the door to a flock of delivery drivers (the best effort so far has been four in a morning). It’s the time of year when I find it hard to take my husband seriously, if he stands in the doorway from the kitchen and I sit in my usual spot he ends up wearing the antlers from the Rudolph mobile. Whatever he’s saying to me is lost as I giggle. I’ve had the seasonal nightmare, the one where I’m standing with a trolley (fully clothed – it’s not THAT nightmare) in a supermarket buying the Christmas groceries but I have no list. What did I want? Cream? Erm, sprouts? How about jelly? My subconscious thinks it’s time for a shopping list and she’s right. The final one will be a wonder of organisation, sorted by department and written in the order that I walk round the shop. I thought about that and it seemed particularly overplanned even by my standards until I realised that it’s a throwback to an earlier time. I’d forgotten that at one time all my weekly shopping lists were written like that because it was a byproduct of shopping with a preschool reader, he had the skills but not the common sense that comes with experience. If he was ticking things off the list then the shopping had to go in the trolley in the order in which it was written. If I’d written “butter, sugar, eggs, milk” then we couldn’t get the milk while we walked past it to get the butter because we needed the sugar and eggs first. He wasn’t the only fast learner, I soon worked out that it was quicker to rewrite the list than to argue my way around the shop whilst zig zagging about and visiting the same spot multiple times.

Where was I before I went off for a trip down Memory Lane? Ah yes, wool. One of the delivery drivers bought me more angora/merino so I was able to make the fifth orange/red for my hat (or somebody’s hat). The first four shades were carefully dyed one after the other in the same pan with the same two colours of dye but this last one was dyed with a different range of dyes. I thought about waiting until I could use the same dyes but that would have added five days into the process so I settled for any old orange. I’m not sure if I like it, it’s wet in the photo so will dry a little lighter but it is maybe a bit too bright. I’m already planning the next big thing so the hat is already on its way to being history. It’s knitting not surgery, no-one dies if you get it wrong and good enough will do.

Another delivery driver bought me a bag of aromatic wool, I’m so glad it was double bagged because this one was left with my neighbour (I think I managed to collect it before it got warm so I might have got away with not being noticeably weird).  It’s not the best time of year for scouring fleece because I can’t put it outside to get it dry but this was a new breed to tick off my list so I bought it while I saw it. The overnight cold soak was a bit of a problem because there was a hard frost and I started out this morning by having to thaw the two bucket shaped lumps of fleeceberg. I suspect that this wasn’t the most effective soaking process ever but judging by the colour of the water it did some good. I have learned that putting the bucket right up against the wall of the house isn’t enough protection to stop it from freezing solid. I have also learned that down fleece is not always short and crimpy, the Oxford Down is a big sheep and online resources say that it produces the heaviest fleece of the down breeds with long staple light-shrinking wool. Different online resources also say that it has the short and crimpy staple typical of a down breed but what’s in my sink says otherwise.

I had a brief cycle of knit-rip where two hats and a Christmas stocking had a short existence before returning to wool. I had nothing to knit so took refuge in the bag of sock scraps because making something out of nothing always feels so good. I’ve got two small balls of yarn just for the first sock and two larger centre pull balls which I thought would knit both socks. When I started I assumed that there was plenty of the two larger yarns but now I’m not at all sure. I’m not certain enough to knit the first sock to the toe before starting the second, I’ll get them both to the heel and then see if I need to introduce a fifth ball before the others start running out.

There’s a full week left of school before I vanish so I’ll be back with progress on the wool, socks and hat although I might skip the report on tidying up the spare bedroom, cleaning the oven and the other stuff on the list that demonstrates whether I’ve been naughty or nice.

Before I started dyeing the angora blend yarns I looked at the chart in the book and worked out how many rows were knitted with each colour. There are fifteen colours in the chart and I calculated the percentage of each I’d need, used that percentage to split up the yarn and then dyed it. What could possibly go wrong?

I knew it was going to be difficult to tell all of the yarns apart, especially the greens as they were all so close in colour so I labelled them all before I started knitting. The staple is close enough to the yarn for the label to stay put, it’s not going to slip off accidentally.  I wrote down the name I’d given them when I wrote out my dye plan and the colour number that corresponded to on the chart. That was the stage when I realised that I’d dyed a colour too many, it was a bit obvious when I had a ball left over. What I’d failed to consider was that one of the colours in the chart was the body colour for the hat, that didn’t need dyeing at all because it was already in the big ball of camel silk. I thought that this might run me into problems later, the knock on from dyeing one ball of brown too many is that all of the other colours are slightly smaller than they could have been. As I had no way of knowing whether I’d have enough of any colour anyway I decided not to worry about it until I had to.

The hat is the Wild Apple, you can see the start of the apples just appearing on the needles. I’ve knitted the second of the reds, the balls were small to start with and I was convinced that this meant that there wouldn’t be enough for the second round of apples. My scales say that there’s enough of the darker yarn and as the lighter yarn doesn’t appear again there’s the fallback of overdyeing it and using it if I need to. The more pressing problem is that I have two more red/oranges in the bag and three left in the chart. My page of dye calculations confirms that I haven’t lost one, I never dyed it at all. I think this is the follow on from my dyeing the background colour again – I counted the right number of colours but I was a brown too many and an orange short. It’s not the end of the world, the orange I didn’t dye is at the end of the colour range so I don’t have to slot it in between two existing colours but just make it more yellow than the existing orange. The real stumbling block is that I dyed all the yarn I spun and I have no more angora blend to make more.

Why did I not notice this earlier? The chart I’m working from is in false colour, the only true colour shot in the book is a photo of a sweater and it’s too small to be of any use in replicating the colours. Ravelry came to the rescue, there are several stash photos of the skeins in the kit all laid out and they were what I was referring to when I was dyeing. I saw a burgundy-red, a red, an orange-red and an orange in the photo and that’s what I dyed. Once I realised I was a skein short of a hat I went back to the two photos I’d been looking at and even now that I’m really looking at them I can still only see four orange/reds rather than five.

I am checking my tension several times a day so I’m happy that it’s still coming to the size that I wanted and I’ve decided that when and if I run out of a colour I’ll substitute one of the others. When I’m knitting this in the evening all the greens look the same as do most of the blues, even in daylight the differences in colour are very subtle. I have four rounds of knitting before I’m stuck, the last fibre I ordered took a week to get here and so even though these rounds involve knitting with three colours I think it’s safe to say that the hat is going to be sidelined for a while. It looks like it will be back to socks again tonight.

The book I bought but never showed is “Poems of Color”, there’s a lovely section at the front detailing the origins of Bohus knitwear and the key figures in its production. I bought it for the charts at the back of course but that didn’t stop me enjoying the bit at the front as well. There seem to be three routes to knitting Bohus, buy a reproduction kit (truly lovely and probably worth every penny), buy this book and some yarn or forget tradition, go for the “inspired by” and design it yourself. Design it yourself has a lot going for it – the thin ribbons of pattern in Bohus knitting aren’t intended to line up when stacked one on top of the other, you can see that in the piece on the cover of the book if you really look. I don’t work that way, if I’m changing the stitch count I’ll be changing it in pattern and tradition be blowed. If I’m knitting it then there will probably be only two colours in most rows and no long floats. They didn’t do that with Bohus knitwear but then the people doing the designing weren’t the ones doing the knitting and so the designs didn’t compromise for ease of production. The difficulty is that I’ve never put purls into stranded knitting so I don’t know how they break up the pattern, they are going to have a big impact on the way that light falls across the surface so even if there’s only one every lamp post it’s still a big deal. That makes diy Bohusish pattern design off the menu until I’ve actually knitted some but diy yarn design is very much the order of the day. The plan was to go for something that I can easily reproduce and make quickly, knit a tension square and then take it from there, the originals were knitted at 9 spi but I was pretty sure from the start that mine wouldn’t be.

The hat in the book that I bought is upside down to the hat in the kit having the small motif at the brim rather than at the crown. It took me a while to notice this but when I did it was a deal breaker. Aha you say, but knitting looks the same either way up, why not just turn the chart upside down? Interesting fact 1 – colourwork with purl stitches can’t be inverted. When you purl the horizontal bar that you see is the head of the stitch from the previous row so if you turn your pattern upside down and purl in exactly the same place you get a slightly different effect if your knitting is not a solid colour. The yellow is knitted the right way up and the purls act to blur the edges because the working yarn is a different colour to the row below. The green is knitted from the inverted pattern, the purls outline the edges but they don’t shade it in the same way because the working yarn has the same colour as the row before, making a solid coloured stitch.

To get my hat the way that I wanted with the pattern the other way up I’d have to rewrite the chart, moving all the purl stitches. Alternatively I could take the much easier route of leaving the pattern alone and knit the hat the other way up, crown down rather than brim up. This has the added advantage of starting small so that I can measure the tension from the hat itself. I couldn’t see anything wrong with that as a plan so that’s what I did. You will be asking yourself “Why did she not use a circular needle?” and the answer is simply that I didn’t have one. I went on holiday at the weekend (look, reindeer) with the intention of working a tension square prior to doing the number crunching when I got home but instead I seem to have accidentally started a hat. The dpns worked out quite well, I’m getting 8 stitches per inch and I have eight needles so when I have the same number of stitches on each needle as my head size in inches then I can stop increasing and look for that circular needle. Interesting fact 2 – reindeer click when they walk.

Interesting fact 3 – gift cookie recipes that call for a one litre jar will fit in a three quarter litre one if you try hard and pack it down well. This is of interest to me because all my jars are 0.75l and the recipes that I found had stipulated a litre jar. I’d have had to struggle less with the chocolate chips if I’d left out the macadamia nuts but they did all go in. I know next time to clean all the flour off the inside of the glass with a pastry brush before moving on to the next layer because the white streaks I can see in the brown sugar are bugging me. I have more jars so I suspect that there might be more of these under the tree this year, the ideal gift for the junior baker who can never find anything in the kitchen cupboards and dislikes all nuts except macadamia.

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.

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 do not believe in walking trees, talking cows or flying cars. I don’t believe in magic sacks that fill with whatever the holder is thinking of or enchanted bottles of oil from which gallons can be poured without the liquid level dropping. This means that I have to believe that one day I will work my way down through the bag of sock scraps because it is not possible that it is filling itself by magical means. I keep rummaging through it and pulling out scraps of similar colours and knitting them into a baby jacket. A big heap of scraps comes out and a few small balls go back. Each little jacket takes over 120g of yarn which is about the same as the leftovers from four pairs of socks. Intellectually I know that I must be gaining on it but I can’t see any signs of it happening.

This is another 120g of sock scraps. I should say that I don’t knit as many pink socks as it might appear, the various yarns all started off as fairly light colours and went into the same pink dyebath. I have knitted something in this shape before, it was the little jacket that started my current obsession with two piece baby jackets. The last one I made came out of my head but this one is someone else’s design. It’s Ulina, a free pattern in one size. It starts with a lot of stitches and decreases merrily away until you work down the sleeves and cast off at the cuff.

I knitted it more or less as written, I started with a provisional cast on because I knew that I would finish with a brown edging all around the body, the provisional cast on meant that the stitches along the bottom of the back and up the front edges were waiting for me. After I’d knitted an inch or so of the first side I undid the provisional cast on that ran up the back and started knitting the second side outwards from the cast on at the centre back. Knitting both sides at the same time made it easier to keep track of the stripes and that narrow brown stripe was handy as a counting aid.

I did change the collar slightly because I wanted a sloping edge rather than a right angle. One side came out perfectly and the other failed to meet expectations. If I make it again I’ll move the buttonholes so that the first one falls just under the collar rather than in the collar because then I’ll not have the short rows fighting with the buttonhole. There again if I make it again I’ll probably drop the neckline because it’s not easy finding buttonholes under a double chin. My top button doesn’t line up with the others, I should have ripped and reknit but I was done with it by that stage.

I had thought that the next little jacket would be blue but it looks as if there’s enough pink left for at least two more. Whether I fancy knitting two more is another question altogether.

The weather picked up and Thursday afternoon looked as if it was going to be sunny. I had a quick sample, decided that green was the way to go and dyed all of one of the cones of yellow. The more golden one went back into storage, the two greens didn’t play nicely together and I think the other cone might end up as red. I’ve played around with my weaving software to find something that will work with the threading I have now, I thought I wanted something simple but I didn’t like that once I’d done it. This is going to be a three panel blanket and will follow the teatowels onto the loom, I’m planning on a bit of light treadling tomorrow which should see the first one finished and then I can change to a pattern that only needs four treadles and one leg.

I’m still attempting to weave big holes in my stash. This week I opened a bag of clown coloured yarn. I bought it for something specific but the vendor didn’t mention that it was superwash and I hadn’t asked so I ended up with a bag of yarn that was totally unsuitable for the project I had planned for it. I had intended dyeing it but that’s not going to make it any less superwash so I never got as far as that step. There’s now less of it than there was because so far I’ve made four scarves with it.

The first one (on the left of the photo above) is the one I like the least, it uses the same yarn for warp and weft and it’s just too bright and jumpy for my liking. It’s thick, springy and superwash, it will make someone a lovely scarf but I don’t like it. There’s too much going on with those vertical and horizontal colour changes.

I like this one more, it’s got the bright yarn in the warp and a nice boring grey in the weft. The grey dulls the colours in the warp and it doesn’t have the colours jumping about horizontally.

This was what I bought the yarn for originally, I planned to have the colours line up in the warp and weave it warp faced with a fine black weft, full it and sew it into bags. That idea bombed when the yarn turned out to be superwash and incapable of fulling. I learned a lot with this. What I should have done is leave a marker thread on the warping board so that I could match up successive bouts. I didn’t realise that I wouldn’t be able to wind the whole lot at once so I didn’t see the need for a guide thread which meant that once I’d crammed on as much warp as I could, I was done. My cunning plan was to add a plain dark stripe in the middle and at each side to frame the piece and make it wide enough. This would have worked except the ball I pulled out of the leftover bag was only long enough to make a centre stripe. It looked big enough but I had forgotten that I had a double length warp for two scarves so the reasonably sized ball of brown needed to be twice as big. I made two passable children’s scarves, if I was making them for adults I’d want them to be either wider or longer.

I’m beginning to think that if I stick with it I might succeed in pruning the stash. I’m starting to be able to see where I’ve been although it didn’t help that the clown yarn was never in the stash boxes to begin with. I’ve found some really lovely yarn while I’ve been poking through the boxes, if I weed out those things I don’t love I should have more chance of finding and using the others.

This is Captain Jack Gibbon, master of the Black Banana. That’s as far as I got with his bio before passing that job over to the junior team because my role on this production is that of knitter, not writer. He is sporting a tricorn hat in aran bfl from the leftover pile, slightly fulled as it came out too big, with trim from the bag of sock leftovers. His jacket is handspun Hebridean (all the best sailors are wearing it this season), the naturally black fleece had sunbaked tips and I dyed the yarn green just to see what happened.  I had imagined that I’d weave with it but as it turned out when held double it was just the job for a seafarer’s jacket and also an eye patch. He has a hint of a lace cuffed shirt under the jacket, I was also going to make a lace cravat but he didn’t need it and I’d had enough by then. I did originally imagine him with a cutlass but when it came down to it I couldn’t think of a way to make it work in wool so I ditched that too.

Why am I messing around with sock monkeys? It was an idea for a fund raiser for the charity that my son’s school is supporting, normal sock monkeys are fine at the pocket money level but dressed ones potentially raise more money. I started with the intention of knitting a hat and a scarf but for some reason I decided to make a three cornered hat and then one thing led to another. It remains to be seen whether Captain Jack will sell, I hope he does because I have ideas for Robin Hood, an athlete, Ludwig Van Beetgibbon and a ballet dancer. According to his bio he is not a pirate at all but a merchant sailor so he probably didn’t need the cutlass anyway. His favourite colour is blood red purple and his hobbies are looting and pillaging stamp collecting and embroidery. I knew it was a good idea getting the junior team to do the bio (which also happens to have the care instructions and composition on the back). The senior team (aka my mother) is in charge of stuffing and assembly so I just get the fun bit of knitting.

My more serious knitting was another sample of the brown and orange combo that’s plaguing me at the moment. I drew another little picture and as that didn’t get it out of my system I cast on for a miniature version. I still can’t say whether I’m cured or smitten, only time and sleeves will tell. I’ve got a pair of socks somewhere but they’ve been thrown aside in my pursuit of the brown and orange. The hem may be coming off, I should have started with a provisional cast on because I couldn’t decide what it was I really wanted. At least now I have a clearer idea of what I don’t want.

I was certainly smitten with these, especially after I’d worked out how much wool went happily in a box. The first set I made was somewhat of a box-buster, after that one I got the hang of portion control.  It was the week when the handle on the carder went round and round, all day long (yes, just like the wheels on the bus).

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.