Wool For Brains

My plan was that you wouldn’t notice that I was away because the blog was left home alone to update itself in my absence. This worked faultlessly but seeing as the router went into a terminal sulk hours after we left on holiday no-one could see the blog, updated or not. I couldn’t see it anyway because there are still areas of the country where you can’t get a mobile signal (not on any of three networks) and that’s where we were. (If you are marvelling at the accommodation I should add that it wasn’t all ours, it has been divided into four.) Some of us learned how to read a tide table and had a demonstration on why it is important to know which way the tide is running. Get it wrong and it’s worse than just getting your feet wet because there’s no beach left at high tide and no way of getting up the cliffs. This is why there are tide tables posted here, there and everywhere except this is not effective if you don’t know how to read one. We met one lady who got it exactly wrong and thought that the height (larger figure in metres = high tide) was the amount of beach you could see.

This was the state of my holiday knitting at the end of the week, I’d planned to put beads on the lace except they hadn’t come by the time that I left. That means that I now have 40g of turquoise beads to add to the 40g of red beads that I put aside the other week. The socks still aren’t finished, they only need the toes grafting but I haven’t got to that yet. I could blame the mountain of laundry that I’ve been working on since getting home but that is clearly not an explanation as I managed to find time to block the lace.

This is Merope in some sort of cashmere/silk from the back of the drawer. I overdyed it but I think that it originally came in robin’s egg blue with big patches of undyed yarn (yes, it was cheap, that was why I bought it). It’s the same yarn as I used for the little flippy thing and I had no idea how much of it I had left. I made the small size (27″ by 58″) because I was worried about running out of yarn but I suspect that I had enough to make the larger size. I made life hard for myself by leaving the second chart at home, giving myself a choice between putting it aside or working from the written instructions. It took me a day to ponder it but the written instuctions saw me through to the end. I didn’t like it though and grumbled my way through each line but I can do it if I have to

I haven’t sewn the ends in, I know that I’ll not wear it so it has a future as a gift or a swap item. I’ve learned from experience that if I leave the yarn tails hanging it means that I can be certain that it’s not been worn and then there can be no confusion at some future date. (Modelling services again provided by Helga the hanger, it beats trying to get the junior photographer to photograph the things that I want him to)

I just have one more holiday photo to show, there’s no sense of scale on this so I could pretend it’s a fossil of huge proportions but it’s really small enough to cover with the tip of my index finger. It’s still a fossil though, even if it is tiny.

These are all over 80″ long and between 11 and 14″ wide. Together they weigh over 700g so in the last two weeks I’ve used a pile of yarn roughly the size of seven balls of sock yarn. It’s not a lot but it was enough. The big bag of wool is still full but now it’s full of the stuff that was previously in little bags all over the floor. The spare bedroom looks so much better now that I can see the floor again. I’m right at the start of another long piece, that one should see the last of the pink/violet yarns and then I can ram the leftovers in the big black bag and ignore it for another few months. You can see that the end is in sight, this was the last of the three pieces that I made and the weft here alternates two yarns, one thick and one thin. I like the effect even though I was driven to it because I didn’t have enough of either yarn.

There were two silk braids but the one on the left is presumably stuck in a big pile of post at an airport waiting for a plane. My edges are still pants but I enjoyed making them and watching the colours change. The darker silk is the yarn that was formerly Iris, there is still a lot of it left but much less than there was. I think the next couple will have the light pink as the main colour because that’s the one that I now have the most of. I know that it’s making no real impression on leftover yarn but I’m enjoying something that was previously stuck in a bag so it is still a positive move. I’m enjoying it so much that I’ve spun some more silk so I can make braids in colours other than pinks. That makes no sense at all seeing as what I’m supposed to be doing is using up not making more.

There was also knitting, the Diamond Fantasy is now at the stage where the rows seem awfully long. I have been knitting two repeats a day but now I’ve dropped down to one (ten rows). It’s very close to being finished, or rather being close to the icord bind off that goes on forever. I’ve knitted this before and I remember how long it took me last time.

The reason I’ve had time to sit and weave despite it being school holidays is that this holiday turned out to be Airfix fortnight. I sit at one side of the dining table weaving while Dan sits at the other side building Spitfires. At the start of the holidays I was needed for getting the tops off the enamel paints and opening the childproof cap on the varnish. Through the week my workload dropped to being the colour consultant and wing pusher innerer and then by the end of the second week I was redundant. (The photo was taken by the model builder who doesn’t see past the planes at the front. Please try to follow his lead and ignore the general clutter, Easter eggs and dog treats)

Sewing can’t be done on the dining table so this is the only new bag I have to show. This one will be going in the post tomorrow so with the fabric that I wove that probably puts my use of fabric on minus eleven this week. I’m not even pretending that I can catch that up next week but sooner or later I will do.

When it comes to buying a piece of gammon to cook at Christmas there are three things on my mind. The first consideration is that I don’t like turkey overmuch, the second is that I have to be able to lift it and the third is that it has to fit in my big pan. This year the two constraints went out of the window, I’ve got a bigger pan and I don’t have to lift it because when I was at the hospital yesterday (ETA – routine visit) I promised solemnly not to attempt any heavy lifting. Cooking the turkey isn’t going to be a problem tomorrow because we’ve got a smallish turkey crown, handling the full gammon pan today is going to be a husband job. The pan on the left is an early Christmas present, my previous very large pan that I used for dyeing has sprung a leak and this will be its replacement once I’ve done with the gammon.

I do have knitting (in reality it’s more in focus and not quite that colour), these are the sleeves and as I’ve already done the back and fronts as one piece up to the divide this should be finished next week. The braid is a potential bag handle, I’m not sold on it as it’s narrower than I’d planned (except of course I didn’t plan, I just set off with it) and as a result there might need to be a plan B at some stage. I can’t give much thought to any of this as at the moment as all my thinking is directed to the one list that rules them all, the one that culminates in twelve items of food ending up on the table tomorrow, all cooked, all at the same time.

I was very surprised when Daniel came downstairs on Monday because he’d searched for the Christmas sweater that he’d rescued earlier in the year. I couldn’t believe that he’d even remembered that he’d got it, never mind that he’d taken the time to look for it. I still plan on turning it into Christmas stockings when he’s grown out of it, looking at it he might get another year out of it at most.

Just in case you’ve ever wondered what happens if you leave a wet skein of yarn hanging outside overnight at -5C I can report that it freezes hard enough to stand up by itself. The top of the skein was as floppy as you would expect because it had dried enough not to freeze, the bottom was another story. It was frozen stiff enough to stand up when I held it at the bottom. This is the yarn from the batts in this post, there’s 440 yards-ish, I have the yardage written down somewhere on a gift tag.

Merry Christmas to one and all, to those who keep different holidays then I hope you have a lovely weekend. I’m off now to calculate the cooking time on the gammon and start it off on its bath. See you on the other side.

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

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

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

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

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

Depending on when you are reading this, the blog will be/has been down for some essential maintenance. Don’t ask me what it is/was, I just type the words in and he who knows these things does all the rest. I don’t need to know how stuff works, I married an IT specialist after all. I do understand that moving the knitting books on the bottom shelf can cause the internet to vanish, there’s a socket just behind the shelf and it’s very easy to knock the plug out with inappropriate usage of “Victorian Lace Today”.

It’s been the last week of the school holidays (back to school tomorrow, Tuesday) and I’ve been rushed off my feet doing nothing. I suppose there was those three half days looking after spare children and those three days where I felt really ill (fortunately not the same days as I had spare children) so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the week has slipped away. I can’t seem to get a grip on what I did manage to do (I haven’t been well you know) so instead of trying to get my brain into gear I’ll take the easy route and give you the non-Knitter’s viewpoint on my life taken from one of his school workbooks.

(Click thumbnail for bigger photo)

M

um is amazing

You would be jealous if she was not yours

• ????? ??????? ?????? 10 ??? ?????

My mum knits

Usually she knits socks

My mum makes good toast

Knitty, knitty, knitty is my mum

N

ever does she not makes me socks

I go to woolshops with her

To 9 years old to further on

She will always be my mum

He’s a keeper isn’t he? Luckily for him I remembered this when I had to rip half a sock back. I checked with him after the first stripe and after the second and all was well so it was a bit of a shock the next morning when I found I’d spent the evening doing it all wrong. Twelve row stripes were too big, what he really wanted was one row stripes. I do so enjoy cutting yarn up into little balls for no good reason, I will no doubt enjoy sewing in all those ends that I didn’t need to have. It does look huge but it fits him so now I just need to make another the same.

I’ll be back when I’ve restored the house to its usual low level of tidiness, after six weeks holiday it looks rather lived in and there isn’t a flat surface that isn’t covered in books/wool/lego/artwork/pens/paper. I feel I ought to do something about it if for no other reason than to make more space for me to put my clutter on.

You have to have a certain perspective to see this as an improvement. Personally I thought it was a fantastic piece of work because after it was installed I could go to bed. This is usually where I sit to spin, my chair would be in front of the wooden window and the wheel in front of the glass window. Spinning is off for the moment due to lack of light and my total inability to find a different spot in the house for the wheel. The woodwork has been further improved by the art department being let loose on it, the idea was that instead of looking at it and shuddering we looked at it and smiled. That worked then. These are Worms, not just any old worms but the Worms from Worms:World Party, Worms: Open Warfare and various other games. We have Worms with jetpacks, Worms with TNT, Worms blowing up houses and Worms drowning in the sea. The artwork will be staying until next week because our extensive social calendar this week (dentist, 3D special agent guinea pigs and a lunch engagement) has meant that we can’t be measured for new glass until Friday. I shall miss it when it’s gone but some more light would be nice.

This is Wormy, he should probably be Wormy II if we were being picky. At the moment we are in the grip of Worms, I have sheets and sheets of paper covered in Worm drawings, Worms at the cinema, Worms at school, a Worms theme park. The common thing is that they all end up with TNT and big explosions. A quick search failed to turn up the Worm that I knitted him the last time that Worms were big. I decided that it was faster and less painful to knit another than to search for the original in the Beano pit that is the bedroom of a nine year old. I’d like to say that I followed the same pattern as before but it is more true to say that I made it up in the same way as before with the same yarn.

This looks very like the last photo of the new and improved dog blanket except that it isn’t. If we are playing spot the difference then this has white yarn as the scrap header and the thin yellow stripe is at the other side. This is the third of four strips for the blanket, there will be more than enough warp for the fourth and I think there will be enough weft. I haven’t actually checked that four pieces is enough to cover the back of the settee, if it isn’t I’ll come up with something because by then I will be well and truly committed to a finish. Weaving is much faster than knitting, I timed it today and at double knitting thicknesses I can weave an inch in a minute. Over longer lengths it is slower than that, the shuttle needs filling and the woven fabric has to be wound on to the front roller. It does explain how I can warp the loom one morning and have a 57″ piece of fabric by the next day. You would expect weaving to be making major inroads into my stash, I’m expecting that too but as yet there is no evidence to support this.

It’s too early for the before and after shot on the dog blanket, realistically I’m two weeks away from that (four days to weave it, ten days to ignore the making up and then an hour to sew it together and make the fringe). This is the “before” shot, this shows why the blanket needs to cover the back of the settee as well as the bit he sleeps on. I have the “before” for the door too, you can just see the bag with all the warp yarn in it down there at the left corner of the door. The whole interior pane came down with one crash while we were giving statements. The glazier knocked the outside pane out later. None of our neighbours heard any glass break but two of them told the police that they’d heard a funny noise about 3am. The moral of this story is to never attempt to saw your way into a house, always smash the glass.

This is the start of the second piece of the fabric for the throw for the small settee (also known as the dog’s settee). The pink stuff is there to make it all settle down at the start, I’ll take that out after I’ve washed it. With this piece the stripes are less prominent, there isn’t very much left of the yellow and green/gold and I want them to make it through to the fourth piece so they are very strictly rationed. I’m starting to have some concerns about the huge cone of yarn I got for the weft, I’m using it doubled and it is either just going to be enough or just not enough. I’m ignoring that until I can’t ignore it any more and then I’ll come up with some sort of solution.

The yarn for the second strip had an unpromising start, it was all in this bag along with 4oz of cashmere (top left) and the bag was in its usual place at the side of the wheel next to the big patio windows where there is plenty of light. That should be “where there was plenty of light”, there’s less now because one of the windows is boarded up, the blue twinkle in the bag is window glass. I shook all the yarn out and it looks to be fine, I didn’t run across any glass when I was warping and there’s no way that I was going to throw it out if there was a chance of using it. The cashmere fibre was double bagged so I can be sure that it is sliver free.

The window was deposited in the bag (and over a surprisingly large part of the floor) when a concrete pot of geraniums was swung into it just after 12.30 on Saturday morning. The dog rose to the occasion and put his full 8 kilos behind a volley of barking, he then had to do the Lassie routine of running back and forwards to the broken window until I woke up enough to realise that it was very drafty, there was an unusual cracking sound and there was a four foot hole in the window. In my defence I would say that I was half asleep, I hadn’t put the light on and the tv was still there so I hadn’t realised that we’d been burgled. I got my rear in gear in time to get to the front door to see the Mini being backed off the drive. It would have been good for him to have then spat out the burglar’s finger (I’d have settled for a finger although other body parts would have done just as well) but I’m glad that he didn’t get himself a good kicking and a big vet’s bill. He did his best for a sofa dog, he doesn’t have the right equipment for tackling burglars (height, weight, big teeth, fearsome expression) but he can certainly bark. Not only is he getting a handspun handwoven blanket, I cooked him a sausage and I let him play with the squeaky toy until he was half crazed with excitement. It could have been worse, the only thing that was taken was the car key, and then the car of course, but at least we didn’t need to spend the weekend organising new locks and getting all the bank cards replaced. No one was hurt, the window was boarded up before the rain came in and sweeping up glass is just so relaxing.

Needless to say I am playing with wool a lot at the moment, there will be more posts this week.

I’m sure that you were expecting a finished sweater today, I certainly was, but there was a slight setback last week. I made the accidental discovery that one sleeve was two pattern repeats wider than the other. It could have been worse, I could have reached the cuff and sewn it up before deciding that there was something odd going on, as it was I only had to rip out 9″ or so.

This was a more successful project, it finished up quickly, didn’t need any ripping and the pattern was well written and easy to follow. This was a family project (although the dog was not a deal of help if I’m being truthful) on a lovely sunny Sunday morning. It was very windy in the night and it has not fallen down or blown away so providing that those leaves at the top continue to grow then I think this can be counted as a success.

The wigwam kit had two varieties of willow, the brown canes are the uprights and they go in first. (The sand is not a requirement, it used to live in the sand pit a long time ago and we never got around to getting rid of it). The kit came with full instructions, a piece of willow for spacing the canes and two bits of willow and a piece of string for marking out the circle. If it had included tea bags and milk then it would have been as complete a kit as I could dream up.

You tie the uprights together near the top and then start with the green canes. They weave in and out of the uprights, for a wigwam you would leave the front opening open all the way to the top but I was after something a bit more enclosed and den like so the first cane made a U turn when it got to the opening but all the others went across it. The final shape reminds me very much of the Gherkin. It’s certainly got more shape to it than the straight up and down of a wigwam and I’d like to say that this was planned from the start but the reality is that we just got lucky.

The kit came with stretch tubing that you cut into short lengths (an appropriate use of child labour) and use to tie the canes together. We didn’t use that much of it because once we’d started the weaving the whole thing suddenly started to become very solid. Once it’s rooted I think it will stand up to being leaned on and thumped into which is good because that’s what it’s probably going to get.

It is an ideal size for a small boy and a small dog. Hopefully over the next few weeks the canes will sprout leaves and the structure will soften. I like it just the way it is but really you need a bit more privacy for a hideout.

This is my settee but this is not my knitting (or my comic either). The luminous green item is going to turn into a hat in about 4″. Daniel has asked to be taught to knit more than once but this time it clicked and he knows what he is doing. He can now pick up stitches that he has dropped, I’m told that it’s easy, you just poke the needles back in them. As of this week I have been allowed to add a couple of rows after he’s gone to bed but it’s mostly his own work. He has stuck at it and is now measuring it every other row to see if it’s long enough. I know just how he feels with that. Last night he found out that his father knows how to purl so he’s desperate to do that next.

Ghost Town: The Movie move The not green item is David’s scarf. It is actually much longer than this, it’s in two parts as we (I) removed a section that was a poor (but expensive) yarn choice. At some point I’ll show off and join the two bits back together because there are still some things that only I can do. Both of them are reaching the end of their projects and I’ll be interested to see what they line up next. Daniel wants to make socks but I think that this might be a bit ambitious for a second project unless he sets out to make the puppy a Christmas stocking. The advantages are that you only need one of them, you can make it with big wool on a circular needle and you can add an afterthought heel without fussing about the fit. David may be intending to retire from knitting as he’s now proved that he can do it (including casting on and purling).

Demolition Man rip Where is my knitting?  - well the armhole is closer than it was but I spent my knitting time dyeing fibre even though I can’t spin at the moment. It’s not fully dry yet so it will lighten a little but this is 200g of wool, mohair and alpaca which should make for a good hard wearing sock yarn at some future time when I can put the wheel up.

It’s been a long process planned well in advance. The softening up process started two years ago, the guinea pigs were the first over the barricades and they’ve been good at converting the family to the joys of pet ownership although they are a bit excessive with the morning greetings. I took my time and the husband caved in much earlier than I thought he would so I got my decision in principle – we could have a dog. The next step was what sort? We had thought that we would get a rescued dog (a recycled one as Dan was want to call it) but having kept my eye on local shelters for a year I wasn’t so sure. I wanted something small and daft and totally not fierce and that’s not the sort of dog that turns up at the local shelter. About 12 months ago I decided what we were going to want was a cocker spaniel and set about making sure that everyone else thought that too. Look, that’s a lovely dog isn’t it? Oh, I think it’s a spaniel. Look at that dog there, bounding along, I wonder what sort of dog it is? Oh, it’s a spaniel is it? I was almost there, we’d actually got the paper open at cocker spaniel breeders when my long term planning jumped the tracks.

This is Pebble and he is very definitely not a spaniel, not even close. Just at that moment when we were about to phone local spaniel breeders the two boys were let out unaccompanied for a few hours and were seduced by a pair of Shih Tzu’s. When they came back spaniels were off the list for ever, what we wanted more than anything else was a small Dougal. I had to admit defeat, I tried explaining that what we would be getting was a high maintenance couch potato but it was a lost cause. This is not the sort of dog that is going to run alongside a bicycle or spend its days chasing a frisbee, I doubt that he’ll be much of a digger either. He is small, daft and not fierce so he meets the specification although not in the way I’d planned.